Helping to harvest honey from my brother's bees.

Several years ago my brother picked up a new hobby as a bee-keeper when he ordered a box of 50,000 bees. Now years later and with multiple hives in his backyard, each year it becomes a fun event to help harvest the honey. This can happen at the end of the season, however sometimes weeks later. Once removed from the hive, the full frames of honeycomb can be kept for quite a long time before being processed; one of the lesser known facts of honey is that it is known as the only food to never spoil.

To jar the honey is a quite simple but generally messy process. As the cells in the comb become full inside the hive, the worker bees will apply a wax cap to each cell, sealing in their precious gold. To begin the extraction the first step is to remove this wax cap, either with heat or a sharp knife.