Labor Day was Honey Day! It’s our busiest day of the year – the day we extract all our honey from the comb. We spent the warm days leading up to Honey Day pulling honey supers (white boxes full of comb) from the hives. On Sunday we set-up our extracting equipment up in the kitchen we rented near our home. On Monday we plugged in the hot-plane (a contraption we use to peel cappings wax from the honeycomb), turned on the extractor (a spinning machine that pulls honey from the comb using centrifugal force) and set about extracting honey.
Honey Day is a fun day but it’s a lot of work. My dad and his wife flew out from Maine to give us a hand. We invited a bunch of friends to help out too. People arrived in shifts and set to work, scraping frames, putting them in the extractor, filling and labeling honey jars. My favorite part of the day is how warm and friendly it feels. Everyone working together to collect and organize the beautiful products made by the bees – beeswax, honey and propolis. Honey Day is also the day I get my year’s supply of beeswax for encaustic painting. It’s the pristine, new cappings wax that we peel from the comb that makes the most transparent, versatile encaustic paint.
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