Last week was the highlight of every beekeeper’s year: harvesting honey. It’s always an exciting time, when you get to see how well your bees have performed during the past season. For us it’s about mid-August, usually during the Iowa State Fair.

Just a few years ago I can recall the first time I extracted honey from those precious combs. My new bee friend invited me to see how an extractor works and she had baked a pan of cornbread. We worked in her breezeway all afternoon, the bees buzzing curiously outside the screens.

When I extracted in our garage a couple years later, our neighbors joined us. The girls loved to taste the honey from the capping tub. They were like little bear cubs, sticking their fingers into the gooey goodness, so I just gave them spoons!

This year our son, his wife and their three children joined in the party. The grandchildren were full of questions. How do you get the honey out?  Where are the bees? Why does the honey come out the bottom? When can I have a taste?

They took turns turning the handle on the spinner and opening the gate to release the golden bounty. It turns out that our daughter-in-law loved to work the heated knife, slowly peeling off all the wax caps. Our son worked the filters and all I had to do was manage the process.

By the time we’re done, we are all one sticky mess. But oh, the satisfaction! This year we got five big buckets of honey that in a few weeks will be bottled for gifts and sale to friends.

The season’s tasks are far from done. Already I’m looking ahead to all the bags of sugar I’ll need to make syrup for feeding the bees, scraping supers for storage, and getting everything else ready for winter.  And speaking of colder weather, will our bees survive the winter …

And so it goes. A beekeeper’s work is never done.