We learned some things while harvesting our first batch of honey. Foremost, we learned that a wire strainer is simply not fine enough to keep chunks of bee parts and wax from getting into the honey. This is not problematic, per se, but it’s not entirely aesthetic, so I searched around for what others have done (as this is in the category of “not a new problem”), and came up with, of all things, nylon stockings as a filtering medium.
Kristi went off to the store, bought a pair of knee-highs, and we re-filtered the honey. It worked a lot better! We have a bunch of crystal-clear honey, and another small jar of honey that had crud in it small enough to make it through one layer of stocking material. I let that settle a little, and scraped the floating wax bits off the top, good as new (plus yummy PB&H sando!).
We’re ready to harvest more of our crop, we could use a few more things (like a bottom-spigoted bucket). But generally speaking, I think we have a pretty good solution for honey-gathering at this point.
Bring on the golden yumminess.