IN THE BEE YARD PULLING HONEY
Do this for a few days and see how much fun beekeeping really is! It's mid August and the temperature is soaring to triple digits - the innocent looking supers in previous months pictures now weigh 50 to 70 pounds and the bees aren't happy about parting with the surplus honey they've spent the last two months gathering.

The pictures above show the process of separating the bees from their honey. It starts with a liquid chemical commonly called "Bee Go", an aromatic substance that will make your eyes water and used to drive the bees off the frames. The original stuff would also gag you with its vomit like smell - the improved version is more nose friendly now. It is sold under the trade name of Honey Robber or Bee Go and others.

The fume board has a fabric pad on the inside which is doused with a small amount of the Bee Go and placed on the hive. Shown in the first picture (fig 1) it has a black top on the other side to absorb heat from the sun which helps volatilize the chemical (fig 2). Bee Go doesn't work well in cool weather, so the heat is a necessary ingredient for the pulling operation.

After about five minutes on a good hot day, the bees are moving down in the hive and out the hive entrance to escape the fumes. No, it doesn't affect them in any permanent way. The top super on the stack , being the last one added, is usually only partially filled at this time of year and is set aside while the other more full ones are removed. More often than not, the top one gets placed back on the hive for the bees to continue filling. You can see these on the ground in the last picture (fig 4).

STUCK TOGETHER BEE BOXES
Nothing is easy about this operation, especially getting the boxes pried apart. The supers are literally glued together with bees wax and propolus so thoroughly that the entire stack of boxes could be lifted by by the top box. Just getting the hive tool in between them is a major operation as can be seen in the first two pictures below. Once the boxes are parted, the frames above and below must also be pried apart as seen in the third picture (fig 7). Only after the box and frames are separate can the super finally be picked up and toted over to the truck (fig 8).

OFF TO THE HONEY HOUSE
Honey by the ton - the end of the day with the load stacked on the truck ready for the trip home to the honey house where the honey will be extracted. The supers on this load weighed just over 11,000 pounds - that's not all honey because it includes the weight of the boxes, frames and pallets- but it's still Tons of Honey!

Pulling honey is messy - it drips from most every super pulled and by the end of the day every one and every thing is honey coated. On the truck, the mess is somewhat contained by stacking the supers on special drip pallets. The drip pallets are made with a solid bottom and raised edge board on which the boxes are stacked. This allows the dripping honey to pool on top of the pallet rather than run elsewhere.