What's new on the farm:
We are full-on in harvest mode at the farm.
Every day, half of the crew drives out to the yards to harvest full boxes of honey off the hives, and replace them with empty boxes.
Meanwhile, the other half is in our "honey house", which is where we extract honey from the boxes.
Boxes from the day before are sitting in a heat room that maintains the temperature of the boxes the same as the inside of a hive (about 37 degrees!)
This keeps the honey from thickening inside the frames before extraction.
To extract the honey, the frames are taken out of the boxes one at a time.
The surface of the frames are usually covered with a thin layer of beeswax that seals the honey inside.
We use a cleverly named tool called a scratcher to scratch open this layer of beeswax.
The frames are then loaded into our extracting machine, which is essentially a large centrifuge that spins the frames so that the honey flows out of the frames and is collected into a large sump tank.
(Kind of like a giant salad spinner!)
The honey that goes into the sump tank still has tons of beeswax that has also come off during the spinning process.
Since beeswax is lighter than honey, the two begin to separate with the beeswax rising to the top and honey sinking to the bottom.
The honey then gets pumped out to a holding tank that we let settle for a day to further separate the wax and honey.
From there, the honey gets barreled and then stored for packaging later on!
