The First Parish Bee Team spent the summer doing what beekeepers do: supporting the bees that support our ecosystem. One of the summer’s highlights was our July honey harvest.
Early in the season, we split two of our three hives, giving us five hives to tend through the summer. If they remain strong, we’ll prepare all five for the winter, but we may also combine smaller hives to give them more strength for the winter months.
To help us keep our hives straight for record-keeping and conversation, we have named them alphabetically: Azalea, Buttercup, Clover, Daisy, and Evergreen. In July, we extracted about 23 pounds of honey from Daisy. Working in the First Parish kitchen, we used a borrowed honey extractor, which spins the honey frames, applying centrifugal force to throw the honey out of the small cells of wax honeycomb. Little drop by little drop, the honey collects and combines and eventually pours out of the gated opening at the bottom of the extractor. A double sieve strains out any bits of wax or other impurities.
We will sell our honey to the First Parish community after church sometime this fall. All our profits go back into supporting the hives.