Last weekend we were busy moving bees in Michigan and picking up our last 2 loads of honey. Yeah, no stings.
The truck is loaded with bees that we are taking to the holding yard. As the day warmed up the bees really started flying as you can see in the picture below.

This weekend was the ISBA fall meeting. The Pres of the club asked me to make a nice gift basket for donation..so this is what it looked like. These are available for sale or they can be designed with the products you want and the price you would like to spend.

Festivals are finally over. Working 7 days a week is killing me. Not to mention the very long hours. We have been starting at 7 a.m. and ending around 11 p.m. But the busy fall season is coming to an end. I have a full batch of Lavender Rose Petal Honey Soap that is now ready for sale.

Kenny's Club Working for the IBA

Indiana State Fair and Kenny's Club

I spent some time at the State Fair, so I will share some pics. This was Kenny's Bee Club working our fabulous booth at the State Fair. Lots of participation this year. One of my favorite things of the IBA booth is to see all of the different labels, that come from our members all over Indiana. Our members also make all kinds of products that are made from honey and or bees wax. So much personality shows through in the packaging. And a special THANKS to all of those volunteers that bring their warm friendly smiles. A big thanks for all the help!

More pics of the Honey Barn

Yeah, the temp has already dropped 25 + degrees...It is working.



I am adding some more pictures of the honey barn. Which shows more pics of the equipment that we use. Also in the last couple of weeks when the heat was almost unbearable, the honey house temp was out of control. Temperatures were reaching 106-112 degrees. Uhggg! So we talked to a couple of local heating and cooling people in Huntington. We went with a Bryant heating and cooling system. Which is supposed to pull bacteria from the air and help with the high humidity. With the humidity being so high we were concerned about moisture in the honey. Wet honey is not good, we check the moisture content on all our honey coming in the door, similar to the farmer who checks his soy beans, wheat, corn and etc. So now $$$$ later and the humidity being controlled we have more comfortable employees and dry honey. So hopefully we chose the right system. We sure did appreciate the speed at which Huntington Heating and Cooling worked. We had several estimates from several local places on Thursday and 2 days later on Saturday our system was installed....AMAZING...I will keep anyone who is interested, posted on its efficiency, pros and cons. We had LP Gas heating our old honey room.

Going from left to right, the frames of honey are loaded onto the conveyor and then through the uncapper, and they are then placed in the holding area or put into the extractor to the far right which then spins the honey filled frames at a very high speed(centrifugal force)causing the honey to be pulled from the combs. Once it has been pulled from the combs it then drains to the white tube that you see in the bottom center of the extractor. It then goes into the tank where the wax particles will float on the top and the honey left on the bottom will then be pumped into the big holding tank that is shown in picture above. Then the honey is ready to be put in barrels as shown to the right.

Please feel free to leave any comments or questions.

First Load of Honey

Here are some pictures of honey supers on the truck, first harvest. The honey is a little bit lighter in color than last years, and it is delicious. Any of you who stop by the shop look for the lighter colored honey, that is the first crop of 2010. Trucks of honey were brought in by Jeremy Lutter of Blueberry Acres and DeVon Howald of Majenica Creek Honey Farm.

DeVon is running the forklift to move stacks of fresh, delicious honey in to the barn. There are also a few unwanted bees that came in with the honey. You can see them flying around the stacks of honey supers. In the last picture you see our part of our extracting crew. Val to the left and Sadye, lead extractor on the right. They do a fantastic job.

Getting the Honey Tank In Place

Cement blocks were stacked under the tank to extend the legs. The tank needs to be high enough to fit a 55 gallon drum under it so that honey may be drained. Sorry the pics are in reverse order. Again Jeremy Lutter or Blueberry Acres helping DeVon get the honey room settup a few weekends ago. Thanks Jeremy for all of your hard work.

Some how my last blog did not all get saved, so this is a continuation of yesterdays. This is the old milk tank that we recycled to a honey tank. Jeremy Lutter of Blueberry Acres (They grow the best blueberries ever) is helping DeVon get the Honey Room setup. He is running his Blueberry Swinger. It was a snug fit through the door. They had to change from the Blueberry to the Bobcat to get it in the first 2 doors. Notice 3rd pic down there is a different piece of equipment bringing it through the door. The little forklift inside the building is what they had to use to get the tank up high enough to put it on the cement blocks. See next blog.

Once the floor was done we put the honey tank in. This tank has been recycled....it came from a milking house, but it works perfect for honey. However it has short squatty legs. This will not work for the beekeeper. We need to be able to get honey out by pumping it into barrels. So, a barrel will need to fit under the spigot. We used cement block to elevate the tank.

New Honey House/Barn

I realize it has been forever since I updated this post. So it will take me a few days to get everyone updated. It has been exhausting around here, with all the construction, honey extraction time and the State Fair to name just a few. Our honey room in our barn has come a long way. The shell of this lean too on the back of the barn was actually at a construction site, it was to be torn down. My husband took it down piece by piece and brought it home and reconstructed it and added it to the back side of our barn. It has been used for storage, until now. It has been transformed into our new honey house/barn. Here are some pics. The first pic shows the hallway leading to the washroom, with triple sinks to the right in this photo. We have just recently put a frig in also. Staff can bring their lunches, and of course honey sweet green tea is provided along with pink lemonade. The next photo shows the wash room. I am extremely excited about this. No more sticky feet coming through the house to use the bathroom.YEAH!!!! The sink is located just behind the door and then there is a shower for those who want to shower before they go home. Again, YEAHHHHHHHHHH!!! No more sticky bodies in the house. The next photo you notice a drain in the middle of the room to wash all honey that may drip to the floor, got to love the easy clean up. A hose also attaches to the wall with hot an cold H2O. It is so shiny. It doesn't look like anyone should be aloud in here. It will get sticky soon enough. Please leave comments and questions. I will be happy to answer them.

This past Friday was a busy work day. We have the best workers ever. However they made a huge disaster of the front yard. I think they used every nook and cranny of the entire front yard. We are all finished selling nucs. Nucs are starter hives. We sell starter hives in the spring to those wanting to get started into keeping bees. That season is done. Now for the cleanup and preparation of storing these boxes until next year. Nuc boxes are like a mini hive. This is where the honeybees stay waiting to be placed into their new home. However, when the honeybees are started in these nucs, they start working and drawing out the wax foundations, thus drawn out combs. We reuse these combs. Now every nuc box needs to be torn apart and pull the drawn out combs out of the nuc boxes so that they will not be destroyed by wax moths. We will take the drawn out combs and put them in honey supers, (recycling). The bees love this, they only have to work half as hard, if the combs are already drawn out.