We Harvest Honey When It's Warm For A Reason

"I am the most incurably lazy devil that ever stood in shoe leather." - Sherlock Holmes

The picture shows the stand I built for my honey extractor, so that I could fit the 5 gallon bucket under the bung hole.

I used a 4x4 that was actually only 3.5" tall. On top of that I used some scarp 1x4 material to make it a total of 4 1/4" tall. I attached all of this to a scarp piece of 3/4" plywood I had in the shop that was 28"x36".

I pre-drilled the bolt holes and used heavy 1/4" wood screws to secure the extractor to the stand. It worked very well and reduced the wobble of the extractor by about 75%.

Now that is all of the How-To part of my blog... what follows is my struggle to get the led out of my ass. Feel free to stop reading here.

Maybe I'm just old... Maybe I'm just out of shape... Maybe I'm just lazy... I really don't know. However, Saturday I was so exhausted that I could hardly move. By Sunday, I felt fine and I was able to finish the work I started on Tuesday.

That's right Tuesday. As I said in the last blog, it was late Tuesday night before I got all of the supers in the house. So I had planned to extract them Wednesday. The trouble was, that I left the honey under the A/C all night and it became so thick, it wouldn't come out of the wax. So I placed a heater on it Wednesday.

Of course I work out of town on Thursdays and Fridays so those days were out.

Saturday I was so lethargic that I felt like I hadn't slept in days. I had stayed up the night before till midnight but I slept in till 9am - so that didn't seem like the problem. I also crashed my diet Friday by eating a family size bag of M&M's... DON'T JUDGE ME, YOU DON'T KNOW ME! Anyway, Saturday might have been a sugar crash. Whatever the reason, I didn't do anything productive that day either.

That brings us to Sunday. Now I had the heater going (which worked great). I also had the extractor spinning and with the new stand, it was spinning about 20 frames an hour. I also had the washer going in the adjacent room since I had gotten honey on my beekeeping jacket.

So as I was finishing up at 7:30pm, my wife came home from work and I kissed her. I'm so in love with her, that I saw a flash of light. I kissed her again, and again there was a spark. She felt it too... or at least saw it.

"Did you see that?" she exclaimed. "Was that the refrigerator?"

It was. The old wiring in my house couldn't take all the appliances... or maybe the little fan next to the sink had gotten wet while I was doing the dishes (I'm a big multi-task'er)... whatever the reason, the outlet blew.. Thankfully there was no fire - I checked on it all night and hardly slept but no fire. So the outlet will need to be replaced - add it to my list of things I need to fix.

Well, it took most of the afternoon but I got all 5 boxes of honey extracted and came out with about 12 gallons of honey - 16 gallons total so far this season. I say about, because the sieves hang down in the bucket so that I can only fill them to about 4.5 gallons full.

So that's my story... weather has me down until the weekend, so until then, best wishes faithful readers.