We have honey!

But first, something completely unrelated. It rained one evening and Ruby wanted to go outside and play in it (this photo is from early October sometime). Don't ask me why she is wearing no clothes. But, she was worried she would get cold so she requested her winter hat. Um, aren't there more serious issues here than a cold head? Ha!

It was time to harvest our honey so Jason could get treating his bees for Nosema (you have to take the honey out first b/c you don't want it contaminated). Here he is scraping the capped cells with a spoon. You don't really want honey from cells that don't have a beeswax cap on it, because the percent of water is off and it could spoil (I think that's what Jason said). In this picture the capped stuff is white.

Then he put it into a jar:

...and let the kids eat what remained on the frame....

Then he set up a filter system like this. We put it in our closet with a space heater (one of those safe kinds, don't worry) so the honey would flow more easily. This separated the honey from the wax. In all we got about half a gallon, which we're fine with because it was only our first year with the bees. Pretty fun!