I hope next time you can avoid any stings...

Good luck with the rest of the procedure!

But that honey looks fabulous, and I'm glad you're taking care of nature instead of destroying it.

I hear Mason bees are easy to keep. Is that true, do you know?

They are basically solitary, and don't produce honey. The big upsides are that they are native Californian's, they are order of magnitude better pollinators then honey bees, plus they don't have stingers!

Go for it!

Although I love honey, my primary focus would be caring for threatened species. Plus I garden a lot.

I would guess there is a local variant. The best place for info would be a local "bee society". Most focus on honey bees, but there will be a true Bee-Person with an interest and knowledge of the native bees in just about any club.

do virtually every agrarian pursuit by the moon and are xenophobic and anti-science to boot. Wish me luck.

Shouldn't be a problem in Maine.

Wish I could be in Maine - Calais, up close to the Canadian border - but the sad fact is that I'm marooned in a part of the MidWest that shares the same gardening zone, 5, as southern Maine. Because I'm not likely to last more than another 30-40 years at best! I also tend to wonder if Mason bees will naturalize. I know that nobody else around here would take care of them, and the town does have an awful number of abandoned and rotting houses that aren't worth fixing. That and the many for sale signs tell me the place is dying off, though it might finally hit bottom and settle down to a stable population of around 7-900 or so. But these people are not the sort to be concerned about caring for the environment. They just don't.

You, Ally, or you and Ally, could use method #2 or #3 on this guide-

http://www.rurallink.com.sb/SchoolNet/courses/beekeeping1.0/ways_to_extract_harvest_honey.html

I am starting to think that getting stung was the easy part..

Then you won't get stung. The frames should come out whole and then placed in a centrifuge.

Years ago I traveled to Tucson to buy a hive of Italian honey bees. We had to arrive early in the AM,and the seller had duct taped the supers together. After the ninety mile trip home, the bees were audibly riled up. While transfering the hive to a wheelbarrow, the tape split, the supers came apart, and thousands of angry bees escaped. I could run faster than my friend, only stung twice, he got it about 35 times, mostly in the back.
We eventually got the hive placed in a thick grove of mesquite (yummy mesquite honey).

What really riled them up (besides the robbery) was the jostling trying to pry up the joined frames. At one point I tapped a frame absentmindedly and the whole hive just rumbled in rage.

I have opened the hive before to inspect, and put in hive beetle traps. Previously the ladies were able to contain themselves. This time, not so much.

Bucket, wide mesh screen and warmth.

Open the cells, put chunks on the screen and let the honey drain into the bucket.

Temperature under 80F and honey takes forever to flow. If you don't have a warm room, try a heat lamp.

Just place an open tray of the cappings and comb outside, stirring the mess once or twice to lose all the honey; the bees will do the work and cycle it straight back into the hive.

Before I threw together a solar wax extractor, I used to place the cruddy wax in a paper paint filter on a coffee can and place in a low oven (wax melts between 145 and 160 degrees). A very small amount of honey does go through the melting process, but it sinks like a sludge to the bottom of the melted wax, so pour pure wax into a mold, being sure the honey stays in the can. Plastic yogurt containers made fine molds.

I will look for a conical sieve and try this method. The lamp uses a 60 watt bulb so the heat should be low enough to make the honey flow without melting the wax.

Plenty of wiggle room

/on edit/ Heating honey above 120F or about will start destroying the enzymes which pretty much turns it into sugar water.

This is the milk house on our farm. That's my Dad. He was fascinated by the honey bees while they were there. So when they abandoned the hive, we decided to take a look. Notice my Mother's coleslaw bowl behind Dad. She was not happy.

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We didn't know how to get the honey out of there either. After several people telling me I had to build or buy an extractor of some kind, I got a solution from a resourceful friend who told me how they did it when he was a boy growing up in Bulgaria. It's very simple if you're patient.

Just put a fine wire mesh strainer over a bowl on your kitchen counter, and squeeze the honey out of the combs over it with your hands. Drop the broken pieces of honey comb into the strainer and let them drain down into the bowl. It takes a long time! I did a little bit each night for three nights, and then let it just slowly drain down. Honey will not "go bad". So don't worry about leaving it on the counter. For me it took about 10 days. After the first sieve was done, I ran the honey through another finer sieve one more time to put it in jars. This removes some of the finer particles of wax and debris.

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There will still be some very fine particles that will settle to the bottom of the jars if you let them sit for a few months. There was also a bit of honey left on the remaining mass of wax I had. My cousin put this in a container, and let it drain off to the bottom. She intends to use the wax to make some soap I think.

All DIY with just the stuff we had.

While the bees were still there, the colony split and a local beekeeper came and caught the swarm. It was a lot of fun, but that's another story.

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I went to our local kitchen supply store "Sur la Table", those rat bastards wanted $142 AND change for a medium sized stainless steel conical sieve. Not happening!

I am trying the lamp (heat), and gravity (breaking up comb in a cheap smaller strainer) methods together. I just hope the bees don't enter through the kitty entrance to reclaim their honey while we try to get our take jarred.

You're doing it the same low-tech way I did, but it works just fine. It's also a lot of fun for kids to watch the process and progress. I wasn't going to spend all of that money either. I made one small mistake when I thought I could get one last very fine sieve by using cheese cloth, but the honey just clogged it up and sat there.

It's easier to just jar it, and after about 1 or 2 months the remaining particles will form a small sediment on the bottom. I was pulling spoonfuls off for my tea before it completely settled though. That sort of thing doesn't bother me. That pile yielded about 1.5 gallon, and all of my friends got a small jar for Christmas this past year.

http://www.webstaurantstore.com/search/china-cap-strainer.html

A china cap is a conical strainer. Webstaurant.com is a great place to get hard to find kitchen stuff at great prices. Hard to spell tho, lol.

I thought there were 60 million guys and 1 or 2 ladies per hive?

The only male bees are drones, which make up only a small percentage of the population during peak season. I have not seen a drone in my hive since November or so.

A drone's only role in bee society is mating with the queen, which a queen only does once in her life time. During winter, or any time food supplies are low, the workers will drive out or kill the drones because in hard times they are just dead weight.

sounds like a great name for a burlesque dancer.*


















* I have nothing of merit to add to this conversation other than that observation.

Hi denbot,

I use plastic frames in my hives and I found the gravity method of honey extraction mentioned here very effective. This is what I do: I remove the plastic frames from the super (wearing a full body bee suit, I'm a wimp!) . i stretch a piece of tulle, which is s meshlike material, over a bucket and secure it with big rubber bands. I then take a spatula and scrape the comb off onto the tulle. I leave it sit awhile until the honey has drained through the mesh and into the bucket. You can help this along by squeezing the comb. Yep, your hands get sticky!
@irishayes: i don't think you buy mason bees. You put up a mason bee home, which I bet you can look online to see how to make, and hope they move in. Like setting up a bat house, or birdhouse.