Honey

Since January 2018, my father and I take care of 4 bee nests in our property in Saint-Didier.

We took good care of them and could collect in mid-August some excellent honey 🙂

An important tool is the smoker, to (try!) keep bees calm and divert their attention when we open the hives. It is a cold smoke, not harmful to the bees.

In the above white frames (upper part of the hive), bees keep their honey, while the lower part (below picture) is for bee brood.

After collecting all the frames, we keep some food for our bees (since we steal their honey!), therefore we leave them some honey and add in an upper part (in the brown plastic in below picture) some syrup. We will add more in following weeks so they can have enough food for winter and early spring.

Once the frames all collected, we run away hoping bees will not follow us 🙂

Once at home, we cut the wax cover on the frames so the honey falls into a bucket.

Additionally, we place the frames into a centrifuge extractor, so all the honey is out of the frames.

The honey is poured at the bottom to our bucket.

And from our bucket to our glass jars…

And from our glass jars to the ramequin of our lucky guests !