Honey Harvesting, or Why You Should Thank a Bee Keeper
For this past weekend's adventure, I headed east to Newark, OH with my equally adventuresome brother to partake in some honey extracting. Out in God's Country, in a garage heated up to 90 or so degrees by a wood-burning stove, I met the incredibly informative and entertaining Aaron Kirkingburg and his assorted family members. Aside from an extensive knowledge of hunting, fishing, and trapping, Aaron's been keeping bees since he was a kid, and was happy to show this wanna-be homesteader what goes into a honey harvest. For the record, it's a lot of work, and the amount of honey collected is entirely dependent on the weather, other natural elements (predators, parasites), and the temperament of the bees themselves. The whole art of beekeeping is another story entirely, so I'm just going to focus on the process used to extract the honey from the honeycombs. When my brother and I arrived at the Kirkingburg farm, Aaron had already star...