Honey!

For entertainment purposes, the following is this year's sting count for the family...

Mommy - 7
Clay -   4
Daddy - 2
Adam - 1
Ben - 1
Brad - 1

Not too bad considering we have tens of thousands of bees on our property!  And with the exception of one of Clay's stings, we've only gotten stung while back at the hives, doing inspections.  We can be right next door on the swing set minding our own business, and the bees don't bother us. 

After our hive swarmed we needed the original hive to make another queen.  They can't do that without eggs in their cells, and there weren't any eggs because the queen left in the swarm and she's the only one who lays eggs.  So i transferred a frame from another hive with eggs in the cells and pulled out a full frame from the queenless hive, to make room for the egg filled frame.  (i'm sure that made no sense)  I cut off the capping (bees cap the cells with wax after the honey gets to the right humidity/consistency) and set the frame in a big bucket and let the honey drip out.  This is what we got from that! 

It was an exciting morning.  And the shiny that you see on this frame below is honey, so once it's extracted the proper way we will get much more honey just from this one frame.  i am anxious to see how much honey we get total.  i think i said before we won't get a huge amount, because we started from scratch and the bees had to make all their own comb.  Now next year we will reuse these frames and the comb is already drawn out.  They can get right down to honey producing. 
The dark areas are just cells where there once was brood; baby bees that hatched.  It darkens the cells for whatever reason!

A selfie in our bee suits:

Clay is really trying to figure out how he can eat that apple:

The original hive did requeen so all 3 hives have a queen now, i think.  Our hive that swarmed in July might not make it through the winter, they probably won't have enough honey stored up for themselves and they will likely starve.  But we'll see!  I'm having fun with beekeeping.  I'm anxious to 'harvest' in 2 weeks.  We're borrowing an extractor and 2 other families are joining us with frames from their hives.  There will be many an angry bee that night!