Today I got to harvest my first jar of honey!  The Sweet Jaimes have really packed on a lot of honey in the past two weeks with the blackberry honey flow.  One of the frames of honey was super over-built and bubbled and wonky and wouldn’t fit right in the hive, and was causing them to mess up the frame next to it, too.  So I pulled out that frame and cut off the strangely-built chunk, and then put the frame back in the hive.  Hopefully the bees will clean up the mess and re-cap (or move) the honey.  I rearranged frames so they have straighter edges to follow.

The beeswax chunks I removed I crushed in a strainer and the raw honey dripped into the jar below.  Almost a cup for us humans to taste!

They don’t have enough honey yet to plan to take any for our use this year, so it’s possible this might be the only jar we get.  The bees need to keep 50-70 pounds of honey per hive to eat throughout the winter, so we only get to harvest the extra.  Right now the Jaimes are probably close to enough to meet that goal!  The Shuras are quite a bit behind.  We’ll see what the summer holds…