Sweetland

So, here are the elementary tools of the honey-robbing trade: white jacket and veil (bees are less threatened by the color white than darker colors), gloves, a bee brush (in yellow) for brushing the insects off the frames you will see later, the smoker (bees are somewhat sedated by the presence of smoke), and other odd gadgets.

Not a terribly bad idea to suit-up first.  You can't see them here, but I'm wearing some pretty thick gloves, too.  When I got to messing with the bees a few minutes later, one of them crawled up the inside of the suit and spent a few panicked minutes buzzing around the inside of the veil.  It never stung my face, but I think it was scared, nonetheless.  Where did it think it had been imprisoned?

You can barely see it in this picture, but the hive is composed of two large boxes on bottom and one small box on top.  Today we will be robbing honey from the top small box.  The lower two will be left alone.  They contain new bees and honey they are storing up for the winter.

Here we've pulled out one frame full of honey from the top small box.  The bees are in the process of capping with a white skin of wax all the cells full of honey.  The uncapped cells contain honey, too.

We are simply cutting out comb with a knife.  The comb will be placed into a sieve and squeezed, letting honey drip through and into a jar.

It's unfiltered and specked with waxy comb.  Pretty good stuff, this simple harvest of a sweetland.