Honey with Jody

My bee friend, Jody, was sweet enough to invite Bridger and I to help "take off the honey."  She and her husband Blake, had come up a couple of days ago and had taken out the boxes with the slates in them.  We met her at a place bee store in Ogden that has a commercial kitchen that you can rent to take off your honey.  We showed up at 8:00.  Jody and Blake got there around 6:30.  The process was so interesting to watch.  We learned so much!!!  You take a hot knife and carefully slice the hard outermost layer off of the honeycomb.  It looks like a plastic.  This frees up the honey that his hidden underneath it and is in the honeycomb.  You have to be careful not to damage the honeycomb because you want to reuse the slats to help the bees out.  Then you put the slat in a honey spinner.  It fits about 20ish.  Then it spins the slats and drains the honey off.  Then you strain the honey as it comes out of the spinner to get because gold honey.  It was amazing to us how Jody utilized every aspect to get the maximum amount of honey.  We had a waste basket that I thought she would just throw away (it had the hard layer that we burned off).  She said that she strains it for 5 days to get every last drop of honey out of it.  Then she takes the waxy substance and uses it to make lotion and lip balm.  She and Blake were so sweet with Bridger and I.  I felt like we were in the way because the kitchen was tiny.  But they said that we helped them a lot.  Seeing the process, made me appreciate honey!! One bee makes 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey it's entire life.  Jody sent us home with 8 jars of honey!  I was hoping to get one.  We were so excited with how much we got!  Jody said that "our" bees produced the most this summer compared to her other bee boxes.  It was a really dry and hot summer so that decreases production.  Her other bees only made half of what they normally do. Our honey was the lightest honey.  Matt was worried that the bees would bother us but we never knew they were even there in the back of our yard.  It was a win win for us and Jody.