Several HUG employees, friends and family showed up on Saturday to assist and/or observe the honey extraction.  There were plenty of job,s and Jim and Karlene were more than happy to provide instruction on what needed to be done. Many helping hands made short work of the process from scraping beeswax, to removing the caps, swapping buckets, filtering honey, and washing and filling jars.  It was guaranteed you would get sticky at some point...if nothing else from sneaking a taste.  

 Quinn pulled the full frames and scraped the beeswax off the edges.

The frame made its way to the big bin where Karlene  used a hot knife to melt and cut away the wax caps on the comb while Jim peeked over her shoulder. 

 The wax and some honey dropped into the bin. The honey drained through the false bottom and the wax was left to dry. 

 On Saturday, Stef's folks got involved in preparing the frames for the extractor.  John took over the hot knife and Pam used a small hand-held rake to scrape open the cells that the knife couldn't reach.

The full frames were loaded into the extractor.  Care was taken to make sure the load was balanced so when it started spinning we didn't encounter problems. 

Friday night featured a good sized group of helpers as well.

Ray, Jim, Barb and Bob prepared the frames for extraction

Justin  looked on while Scott carefully poured the honey into the sieve and Lorna  removed the wax

Jim - a.k.a. the extractor pilot.

Nolita took a peek at the guts of the extractor. 

Honey extraction requires the use of long tools...Brady posed with the "super spatula," which was used to scrape the remaining honey out of the extractor. 

Several 5-gallon buckets were ready for filling. 

Not all honey is the same...ranging from light to dark and very mild flavor to that with a little bite.  The lightest  colored jar contains honey made from basswood. The darkest contains wildflower honey and the middle jar is a mixture of the two.

Everyone enjoyed honey sundaes before cleaning up. (Brady thought it particularly funny to have bee-barf on his ice cream.)