A Sour Dilemma With A Sweet Solution

Looking in the hives today and the split hasn't started blossoming yet.  So I thought I'd look into the first hive to see if they were making any honey.  Well, the honey super was FULL!  I looked in the shed and all I had were 8-frame boxes, which are two frames short of the 10-frame hive.  Just my luck!  Well, after giving the matter some thought, I figured the best thing I could do would be to pull a frame to harvest, and give them an empty frame to give them something to do until I could order some more 10-frame boxes and frames.

Here's the frame I pulled:

I didn't have time to look for my bee books to figure out how to get this into a jar.  Luckily, I had seen a youtube video last week about a person scraping the comb into a strainer and into a jar.  I didn't have much equipment in the house.  My wife does a lot of canning, so I borrowed some of her equipment (which worked out very well) and gave it a shot.  I used a spatula to scrape off the comb into a tea strainer type deal, which caught the comb and big stuff.  Then I used a layer of cheese cloth to get the finer stuff out.

I got a quart from the main flow from the comb. And I left it draining overnight into a pint jar which will probably be nearly filled by the morning.

Here's the quart:

I'm excited!  My first honey and it tastes great!  It's not the optimum way to do things, and I have ordered some more boxes and frames.  But it's a start and hopefully more to come!