Honey Harvest Completed ... School starts on Wednesday!

This week we began and finished our honey harvest.  It takes a day to set up everything in the honey house (aka our garage) ... a good cleaning, lots of newspaper and then our assembly line of equipment.
It took two days working in the afternoons to harvest our honey after taking off supers in the mornings ... I only took honey off 8 hives and we extracted a little over 30 gallons of honey (a little less than half of what we got last year ... too much rain!).  We left up the equipment so our teaching colleague, Catherine and her husband could bring out her supers for extraction (pict below with Sue Neal helping with the decapping).  Today was cleanup day.

Still a lot of swallowtails ... some are beginning to show some wear with parts of the wings missing.  Below a spicebush male and below, that a Eastern Tiger male.  The bee balm is about finished blooming but we still have lots of coneflowers.  Ironweed and goldenrod are starting to bloom in our fields.

School for students starts on Wednesday and teachers report on Tuesday.  I am ready to get back in that routine.  This year we have an A/B block schedule.  All classes will last for the entire year but, not meet everyday.  I am looking forward to having AP Biology the entire year.  Teaching it in a Spring semester has been difficult since students miss so many classes in the Spring.