Honey!

My bees seem to be mostly avoiding doing much with the honey supers, and the last few days way too many of them were hanging about outside the hive for my liking, so I went in today and replaced a frame of capped honey from the edge of the deep box with a frame of drawn but empty comb in the center. Hopefully if my queen was getting honeybound and running out of places to lay, this will help. There are a few frames with worker brood on them, so I'm not overly worried, but still. Anyway, that means I ended up with a frame of capped honey (on plastic foundation) in the kitchen, and now I have honey. Now mind you, I don't really have any equipment for collecting honey, so I've got a frame dripping over a tupperware box and a bunch of mashed up comb dripping through a strainer.

It's very pale and sweet and a little floral -- clover, maybe, and I've got about 4 cups of it, very barely strained. I'll throw the emptied sticky frame in the yard tomorrow --rumor has it the bees should scavenge that up.

And I seem to have gotten at least a bit of my bee Zen going, and/or have finally found a successful style of coverage for bee raiding. No stings.

I'm very happy. And sugar crashing. I hope the bees go work the supers soon, but if this is all the honey I get this summer, I'll still be happy.