It is not over until the fat bee sings

Trying to bottle all the honey, I had my bucket resting on a 2 *4 to tilt the bucket...you guessed it the bucket slipped and covered my lege with a good quart of honey. What an appropriate way to end year one.

Fires, Stings, Sugar, Two labs, and Pollen yeilds a fourty three pounds of bee vomit part II

Failed to include the link to the web photo album:

https://picasaweb.google.com/earlfporter/Beekeeper?authkey=Gv1sRgCInj1-DN_vXvkQE#

There are a few bonus pictures from the Preakness (my friend Ricky Bobby took these) and a picture of the carport. Carport is awaiting final inspection on Thursday.

Finally remember if you are stung by a bee - red wine takes the pain away ; and benedryl takes away the swelling


Goodbye
Beekeeper Earl

Fires, Stings, Sugar, Two labs, and Pollen yeilds a fourty three pounds of bee vomit

After 17 months, it is time to shut down the bee blog. The blog was the established to capture the first year as a beekeeper. Now that the honey has been bottled year one is over. What a fun year it has been - I hope you have enjoyed the year as much as I have. Thanks to my new friend NJEB and John the Bee Mentor - I kept hive 2.0 alive and captured some honey.

I hope you have enjoyed reading erh bee blog - I have enjoyed my first year as a backyard beekeeper. The honey was filtered three times before it was bottled. I will distribute honey this week.

This link is the year in pictures with a heavy emphasis on this weekends harvest.

Enjoy
Beekeeper

Finished!

Extracted thirty-five pounds of honey (approximately 3 1/2 gallons). honey is a dark amber color. Likely left the frames a little wet, but since I am not a commercial beekeeper, I am finew giving the bees the frames that are a little wet. The amazing thing is how fast the bees clean the harvestng equipment and wet frames. The bees should have everything cleaned up in about 9 hours. Depending on what we do later I might start bottling honey tonight.

Pictures of the harvest will be published later.

The Harvest has begun

I have extracted one medium super. A manual extractor is simliar to a hand crank homemade ice cream machine- you just sit and crank. I am extracting honey on my screened porch - it is amazing how many bees are at the screen. They want their honey back!

Everyone is Looking Forward to the Honey Harvest

I picked up the extraction equipment this afternoon. After setting up the equipment and bringing the supers over, I decided to take a break and went inside. When I came back out the supers were surrounded by bears. The bears were devouring honey, enjoying happy hour, laughing at the beekeeper and talking politics and sports. Totally amazing sight to see all these velveteen bears - eating , drinking and yucking it up. The oldest bear (Ted) offered me a seat, a glass of wine and asked me to join in the honey gorging and bear talk.

We had a wonderful time - we talked Tour De France, NFL and NBA lockouts, and Politics. We even had a few bees join us.

It is unanimous the bears, bees and the beekeeper all want to see Andy Schleck win the TDF. We also agree that Fabian Cansellara is going to crush people in the time trials (after all he is the reigning time trial champ). The bears told me I should eat one of those "special" spainish steaks and have the "special" whiskey prior to racing Beach to battleship in October. These are the lame excuses that both both Alberto and Floyd have used after testing positive. We all laughed at how ridiculous the excuses have gotten for failed drug test.

Regarding the NFL and NBA lockouts - a few bears are interested in seeing the NFL get a deal. However the majority didn't care if they get a deal or not. We all had a hearty laugh when someone said that the NFL is a pay cut for some of the players coming from SEC schools , UNC or Ohio State. Universally we agreed that we won't notice the NBA lockout - but for the sake of our friend Bobcat Doug we want the issues resolved and a deal.

Once we were deep into the bottle the topic turned to politics . I made the mistake of using the word circus when I described the brewing fiasco in DC. The bears didn't appreciate me using the "C" word - bad memories of relatives wearing hats while dressed in overalls, bouncing balls and stale popcorn. They also said it was insulting to compare "C" bears to the payso's from both parties on Capital Hill and in the White House.

With that the bee's said they had to go, and wished us well with the extraction efforts. They said they will stop by Saturday as they are curious how many pounds of honey they produced. They also thanked me for leaving the deep supers for them to eat.

Enjoy the 4th of July!