Busy Bee

I have had these as drafts for a while, so now I am just trying to play catch up!

This past summer was a busy one for my family and I. I work 3 days a week and 1 farmers market a month. Working for a garden and having my own garden at home has kept me on my toes.
At my work we have 7 bee hives for the garden.

I have been assisting and working with the bees for a year now. We harvested the honey from their frames last month and have finally got it all bottled up. We got about 12 gallons of honey out of our 7 hives. 4 of the hives were brand new this spring, so it was a pretty good harvest. The process for extracting the honey is amazing. Well lets be honest, bees are AMAZING little creatures. It is an amazing feeling to be all dressed up in a bee suit and with your hands in the hive having bees flying all around your head. The sound is unbelievable. Once we got all of the bees off the frames, we took them inside and began the honey harvest process. For those that do not know much about how honey is made, the bees make comb on a frame that is about 14"x10" or so and then mix nectar and pollen together to make the honey. Once the cell is filled, they use wax to cap the comb to seal in the honey.
In order to get the caps off the honey, we used an electric hot knife to cut off all of the caps. If the cell is not uncapped, the honey will not flow out. We then spin them to get the honey out. The honey passes through 2 screens to get all of the bee parts and wax out of the honey. The honey is collected in 5 gallon buckets and then left for a week or two to let the wax and honey separate. Wax will rise to the top and form a crust on the top leaving all the honey underneath. Once it separates, it is ready to bottle.

The main reason I am explaining this process to you is because I wanted to show you how you can use all of the capped wax that was cut off with the hot knife, instead of just throwing it away. It is a fairly time consuming process, but so worth it in the end.
I brought home all of the capped wax in a garbage bag. I would say it weighed a good 7lbs. When I got home I pulled out my crock pot and put it on the lowest setting. I put all of the wax, honey and cut off comb into the pot.

It only took about 3 hours to melt it all. (Disclaimer: When you heat up the honey it makes it very thick) I then put it into a metal bowl and let it sit. It sat for about a week (although it didn't need that long) before I started to harvest it. It looked like it was a solid piece of wax.

The bowl was pretty heavy, but once I cracked the wax to get to the good stuff, it was only about 1/2" of wax and the rest of the bowl was all honey!

I then scraped off all of the honey off of the wax.  There were still small pieces of wax left in the honey so I then put it through 2 strainers to get all of the wax out.  Now I learned the hard way, use crappy cheap strainers because the little pieces of wax are pretty much impossible to get out.  I just threw mine away when I was done.
        I did not have any empty honey bears available, so I just used some of my Ball jars. 
        Then I wanted to make the wax into an easier form, so I melted it all in my double boiler and stored them in more Ball jars.

Here is the wax cooling in the jars

The finished product

It was very time consuming, but worth every minute!  

For Christmas last year, I was given 3 supers and 30 frames!  So now let the beekeeping really begin, except this time I get to do it all by myself!  Im so excited!