Bittersweet...

   We recently discovered that our bees died. It's very sad and we are not sure exactly why, although we have some good guesses. We were trying out a top bar style hive that we think might have needed to be smaller and or better insulated to keep the bees more protected from the cold ( and more importantly here in the Pacific N.W. ) the bee murdering damp.
   The upswing however, is that we were able to collect all the honey that they had produced last summer and fall. So with the assistance of our bee keeping mentor Michael ( my step-father) my Mom and Ruby of course, we cracked into the hive to invesigate and harvest the comb. Opening the hive is always an adventure and even though these bees were dead it was still fascinating to look at the comb they had produced. The picture directly below is of the unfilled comb.
   Each bar of the top bar hive is a potential place for the bees to make comb. Some they fill with honey which is food for baby bees and nourishment for winter time. We took out all the comb that had honey in it, cut off the comb from the bar and loaded it into our lauder tun ( a beer making device which sounds fancy but is really just a 5 gallon bucket with holes drilled into it on top of a 6 gallon bucket with a spigot in it ).

A piece of comb filled with really dark honey.

The cocktail muddler. One of the many tools we repurposed for honey production. Who needs fancy equipment? 

After we squished the comb with the muddler we put the lauder tun into our downstairs bathroom with a space heater. We turned the heater on high and let the honey drip into the bottom bucket. This took a couple of days and some minor attention but it worked for the most part. I then spent a balmy morning ( a perfect task for a cold winter day ) squeezing honey out of comb with the help of a finely meshed grain bag. I ladled the waxless honey into quart mason jars and voila, 7 quarts of premium Georgetown honey!

We filled one jar with the honey/comb mixture aka Chunky Honey or Hunky before straining and now I wish we had done more. It is excellent on toast!

I put a little bit of comb into each jar before filling as well, one 'cause it's pretty that way and two 'cause it tastes good.

 Ruby the Helper Dog.

Cleaning up took the longest but Ruby helped me and now we have some excellent honey with a really nice rich flavor. I have been eating it everyday and using it as part of a cure for Ruby's cough and can't wait to try again this year to have a viable top bar hive on our little urban homestead.