"Stealing" honey....

 After our first- entirely uneventful- year of being beekeepers, the time has come to gather the honey.

We ended up with 2 hives in our yard.  If you want more background on the hives....look back into the spring of this year on what I wrote back then.

The wild hive was very vigorous and the entire hive is packed full of comb, brood, and capped honey.

The bought hive struggled a little, had to be re-queened, and will probably need supplemental feeding through the winter.  We did not plan to take any comb from that hive.

Cory and I discussed, and had to come to a compromise on how much honey to take from the wild hive.  Maybe I'm being retarded, but I feel like I'm literally STEALING from them.  They worked so hard for the honey.....and we're just breaking in, smoking them into a stupor, and stealing from their house.

We decided on 4 combs this time.  We plan to come back and re-evaluate next month to see how they are recovering from our raid.  :)

 Amazing, fragile comb.  Built perfectly.

So now we know that 4 combs yields about 8 pounds of honey and about 20 oz of bees wax.  Sticky process, but interesting.  :)  After this year of having such quiet and generous neighbors (I'm talking about the bees)...we're excited to have more hives next year.