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Honey Day
September 20, 2008
Our second week at Calvary Baptist Church (Memorial Weekend), Mandi overheard a conversation that a new friend was having with a man about bees/honey/extracting. I butted into the conversation and therefore met Jon DeMond, who has bees as a hobby and sells some honey on the side. He said that when he extracted the honey he would let us know too and we could help!
Cale especially looked forward to it all summer. We almost thought Mr. DeMond had forgotten, but finally....Honey Day was on the calendar!
Mark was curious, but not as enthused as I was. Likewise Malachi was not as enthused, which worked out since Jon only had 1 and 1/2 suits for our family to wear.
So Cale and I, Mandi, got to don the suits and pretend to be bee keepers for a day! Look at that grin on his face! He is SO excited! I only got the 1/2 suit....but I was fine with that. |
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He had 2 hives that Cale smoked to calm the bees and take the supers off of them.
It was so cool to be seeing it live! Cale loved it. I was so proud of him, he wasn't scared at all!
For the first hive, the supers were pretty bee free. But the second one, the bees were still too thick on them all, so Jon had to individually remove the frames inside and brush off the bees. They didn't quite like that part, but none of us got stung. Those supers are really heavy! I couldn't carry them.
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Jon and Nathan were the strong ones, so they would wheelbarrow the supers up to the truck. It was hard work. Hmmm, I'm thinking, tractor would have been nice, with a trailer attached. :-) We drove the supers back to Jon's garage to do the extracting. While we could, we left the garage open, but eventually the neighborhood bees sniffed us out and got too many friends and we had to close up the garage and work in the darker, warmer area. Once the door was closed we even used the shop vac to vacuum up the bees! |
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Cale was such a good worker! He'd pull frames........................ and take them to Jon to remove the caps |
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He even got to comb out some of the caps that the melter thingy (official term I'm sure) didn't get. |
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We had so much fun and it was so fascinating. Cale did some taste tests of course of the different kinds of honey on the comb, and this was his conclusion:
"The black one tastes like honey and has a sweetness in your throat. (Where there had been a brood)
The lighter one had a sweet blow.
The second light area had two sweet blows and a sweetness in your throat."
What a description for an 8 year old, eh?
Cosette said this about the day, "I ate the honey and it was very good. I liked it very much."
We had a lot of fun and are very grateful for Jon and his wife for letting us come and have this experience. We learned so much! It was fun. And...
We even got a jar of liquid gold at the end of it all!
It is so amazing how God made bees and honey. The only food that we can't synthesize and make somehow on our own! Wow!
Psalm 119 97-104
Oh, how I love your law!
I meditate on it all day long.
Your commands make me wiser than my enemies,
for they are ever with me.
I have more insight than all my teachers,
for I meditate on your statutes.
I have more understanding than the elders,
for I obey your precepts.
I have kept my feet from every evil path
so that I might obey your word.
I have not departed from your laws,
for you yourself have taught me.
How sweet are your words to my taste,
sweeter than honey to my mouth!
I gain understanding from your precepts;
therefore I hate every wrong path.