The honey has been bottled!

We had a long rewarding weekend straining and bottling honey.   Ramona spent two very long days preparing the house for the process.  Mom came up from Oklahoma to help (it was very fun to have her on hand), we evicted the cats and went to work.  A day later, to allow the air bubbles to rise to the surface, we bottled almost 60 lbs of honey.  This stuff tastes great!  I'm sure it tastes even sweeter due to the fact that it was prepared by my own bees.  It takes a little less than an hour and a half to process 18 medium depth frames (roughly two supers or 50 lbs), but it takes about 48 hours of labor to prepare and clean up.

I sent 4 frames of honey back to the bees because it contained the very, very nasty smart weed honey.  You can smell the smart weed on the capped frames.  Next year we hope to have an even larger load of honey to process if the clover field produces as intended, we'll see.  First thing's first though, we need to make sure our four existing colonies make it through winter.