sadly sweet

Last week we confirmed what we were beginning to fear: that our hive of bees had not make it through the winter.  When we opened it up we found two dead balls of bees in separate parts of the hive.  We called up the folks we bought the bees from, just to see if they had any ideas.  They thought it was likely that the bees separated from their big massive ball during a warm spell and then a quick cold snap found them unable to get back into one large mass big enough to keep them all warm.  We may never really know what happened.  It's sad and hard not to feel like we made mistakes, as beginner beekeepers, that brought on their demise.  It's been some consolation talking to other more seasoned keepers who have also lost hives this winter.  It's been a rough go for bees these past few years. We're determined to try again.

There was still lots of honey in the hive, so we decided that at least that would not go to waste.  We'd harvest what we could and leave the rest for this year's new crop of bees to clean up and put to use.  We use a kind of top bar hive which allows the bees to build their own combs, which means we can't pull nice neat frames from the hive for easy extraction.  Instead the comb ends up in large pieces which we then crush and strain.  We don't heat the honey (except near the wood stove) so it remains in its truest, healthiest raw form.

Our staining/draining system has plenty of room for improvement (when we discovered the honey we quickly read up on how to harvest it and made due with tools from around the house).

 Left over wax we'll give back to the bees for cleaning

In the end we yielded 6 quarts of beautiful, tasty honey.  Our thanks go out to those busy creatures for all this sweetness, with many hopes that we can sustain a hive in the years to come.