How do you get honey out of a hive, exactly?

Checking out my reflection in the fountain of youth (a.k.a. a barrel of fresh honey)

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 is 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 and is collected into a large sump tank (kind of like a giant salad spinner!).

The honey in the sump tank still has bits of beeswax from the spinning process. Since beeswax is lighter than honey, it rises to the top while honey sinks to the bottom. The honey is then pumped to a holding tank to settle for a day, further separating wax from honey. Finally, it is barreled and stored for packaging later on!

If you'd like to see a quick video of this yourself, check out our Instagram post here!

Honey Lime Fruit Salad

We hosted our staff barbecue this past week and I had to include some fresh fruit to balance all of the potato salad and burgers!

Ingredients:

• 2 tbsp honey
• Zest from 2 limes
• Juice of 2 limes
• 1/4 cup chopped mint
• 1/2 watermelon, cut up
• 2 cups strawberries, chopped
• 2 cups cherries, pitted
• Blueberries (as desired)

Toss all the fruit with the honey-lime dressing to combine everything together.