We were so excited. After a year and a half of beekeeping, we were finally gearing up for our first honey extraction. We’d checked the hives and assessed the colonies to be sure we could take a little at this point before winter. We’d borrowed or purchased all of the equipment needed (there is more to the process than we had anticipated, so lots of little pieces and parts were required). We were ready. We could taste the honey.

The evening before extraction day, you go into the hives, isolating the frames of honey that you’ll be extracting from. Using a special one-way cover, you put the honey frames on top of the hives, which allows the bees in those frames to go back down into the hive without being able to come back into the honey frames. The hope is that by the next day most of the bees have left the honey frames, so that when you take the frames, you don’t have a lot of hungry followers.

So there we are, the evening before, ready to go. Bee suits on, smokers fired up, and then we looked at our big hive. The one we expected tons of honey from. There wasn’t any activity coming from the front. Not a great sign. There are always bees coming and going. Instead of bees moving in and out, there were a huge number of dead bees in front of the hive. Nervous now, we lifted the top box off, and it weighed nothing. It should have been close to 70 pounds of pure liquid gold. There was zero. As we looked further, we realized we’d been robbed. Bees from other hives in the area had stripped this hive completely clean. We were left with no honey, no bees, no hive.

It was a total gut punch. This hive has had its ups and downs, and a few weeks before they had been in the process of re-queening, which obviously hadn’t worked. Without a queen, the bees had either starved or absconded, and robber bees had taken everything that had been there.

With less excitement, we inspected our other two hives, which are smaller and have always been a little slower to build, but we were able to find about nine frames of honey that we could harvest, so we went about the process of separating those frames from the hives and left them for the night.

The next day, we had a successful extraction! We took the frames out, brushed any bees off, and ran the frames around the house into a waiting box. We managed to get the honey frames away with very few bees following us. Then we set up in our garage and began the process of getting the honey out. In the end, we got about two and a half gallons of absolutely delicious honey. Not enough to sell at the Nursery just yet, but we’re making plans for a bigger, better spring harvest.

And in the end, we definitely learned some things: bees are miraculous, honey is magical, and life outside doesn’t hand out guarantees. You win some, you lose some, and along the way there are great lessons if you’re paying attention. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, you even get a jar of sunshine to show for it.