The first fruits of our labor

Our honey flowing from the extractor

Twelve weeks. Twelve long weeks.
That’s how long we had to wait before we could taste the first honey from our first beehive.

I’d like to say the wait was a Zen-like lesson in patience. Or that it was filled with joyful anticipation. But it was neither. The wait was long, excruciating at times, and downright stressful. At every twist and turn – every spike in temperature, every hive inspection, every rainstorm, every application of our neighbor’s oil-based paint, every moment it seemed – we worried. Were we doing it right? Were our bees, who with each passing day felt more like our children (I know, I know.), happy? What about the queen? As the hive flourished, we relied on blind faith that she was in there somewhere, but to this day, we have yet to lay eyes on her

On August 22nd, 2010, a day we won’t soon forget, the wait ended, and we harvested our first-ever honey. And it was, I say with obvious bias, the best honey I have ever tasted – much sweeter than the delicious honey we’d been buying all summer from Kress Apiary in Burns Harbor, Indiana. More astonishing than the intense sweetness was the color of our honey. Every sample of Chicago urban honey that we’d seen was extremely light in color, like straw. Our honey was a golden amber color. For what seemed like the millionth time, we considered the life of our bees. Where did they fly to? What flowers did they find just a few miles from our home?

We had five full frames from the eight-frame honey super ready for harvest. The uncapped honey in the remaining three frames and the eight frames in the second super would be left to nourish our bees over the long Chicago winter. We looked at the 20+ gallon extractor rented from the Chicago Honey Coop and wondered if it was even worth the bother. What we had on those five frames looked like just enough to stick to the sides of the extractor and never trickle down to the spout at the bottom. To our surprise, our five modest frames contained over three quarts of honey. As it turned out, the extractor was worth the bother after all.

The whole process from pulling the frames to bottling honey and clean up took an hour and a half. And when it was over, we stood by the window inside watching with pride as our bees devoured the remaining dregs of honey on the equipment, just as we’d seen in countless You Tube videos. We were full – like our amber jars of honey – so satisfied that we had what it took after all. I felt a Sally Field moment welling up in me, “We did it! We really did it!”

Curious to learn more about our extraction process? The photos posted at SweetHiveChicago.com tell the rest of the story.

By: Bobbi Marstellar