Honey Harvest

Within the last year or two, my villagers have transitioned from honey hunting and other traditional bee keeping techniques into professional bee keepers.  Recently our local bee expert came up to help harvest the honey and let me be his personal assistant.  It was a lot of fun, except we were expected to eat some of the honey from each of the hives we harvested from.  I'm not a huge honey fan on the best of days and this experience didn't change that, but I did discover that I prefer honey still mixed with the comb.  Try it sometime if you get the chance.

The bee master (also boss of the local branch of Agriculture Development Bank and yoga instructor) smoking out the bees.

I didn't think the smoker worked so great, considering all the bees I had to brush off the combs as I prepared them for harvest and all the bodies I had to fish out of the honey, but apparently it worked OK after all.

Teaching a local woman how to harvest honey

Typically, you want the combs to hang straight in the frames.  Our species of bees, however, seems to like building on the diagonal.

Having to cut each frame out  was a sticky messy process that left the ground scattered with drops of honey and dead bees.

That's about 5kg of honey there.