... in which my beekeeping dreams come true!

Jake bought me a beekeeping book for Christmas in 2006, and I'd been dreaming and scheming about them for a long time before that. I finally got started when my incredibly wonderful lady friends gifted me a starter hive for my 30th birthday. Below are pictures of me setting up our first hive last spring and (so proudly!) holding our small honey harvest from last fall.

The bees did better than we thought they would last year, and luckily made it through the long winter. We should have tried to split the colony in the spring, but didn't have the right kinds of boxes to add at the right times, and were afraid they'd swarm. After a phone consultation with a woman in my beekeeping club on Thursday night, we suited up and ventured out yesterday afternoon, a little nervously, with a multi-step plan that involved taking apart and reassembling the entire hive, and sweeping bees around with a paintbrush in a time-sensitive search for the queen before adding a queen excluder and another deep. We pulled it off without a hitch! Except for one sting to Jake's cheek and one to his foot.

We devised a homemade honey extractor with a paint mixer attachment for a cordless drill, some fencing wire, and a 50 gallon barrel.

We scraped out the honey and strained it.

It was messy, everything is sticky, but we have honey! Oh, do we have honey.

While I was sitting in my day-long trigonometry class yesterday, I entertained myself by making this label for our honey jars. I'm calling this harvest "garden variety" because the bees have been busy all spring and the first half of summer by buzzing over to pollinate their next door neighbor, our vegetable garden.

The bees are doing great... we're expecting another 2 gallons or so of wildflower honey at summer's end. Sweet! Literally.