My most excellent beekeeping assistant!

This weekend, our friend inari came to visit...

We've known her since she was an itty-bitty cutie-pie. Many moons ago, when Gordon was a freshly-minted lawyer, he worked with Inari's Dad in Toronto. We've stayed friends ever since, through our moves to Nova Scotia, British Columbia, Quebec and back to Ontario. Six years ago, we all serendipitously ended up living within an hour of each other again, and Inari is now a lovely young woman. She says we can stop calling her "our friends' daughter" and just call her "our friend." Which we will do, with pleasure.

It was a treat having Inari here for the whole weekend. She kept offering to do chores, so I finally let her wash some dishes and clean up the kitchen. Then I made her eat some home-made chocolate chip ice cream. I think we need to have her back in September when it's time to shovel out the chicken coop.

Last night we hauled out our telescope and I gave her a little tour of the universe. We looked at a few galaxies: Andromeda, Whirlpool, Bodes (M81) and the Cigar Galaxy (M82.) I really wanted to show her some planets, but they had all gone to bed or weren't up yet! We did look at some pretty star clusters. I really appreciated Inari's enthusiasm for what she was seeing. She'd never looked at a galaxy before and was suitably impressed.

Today she moved onto beekeeping...

I LOVE those red boots. Ya know, there aren't many people who look that good in a beesuit.

I think she's a beekeeping superhero. May I add that this woman is UNAFRAID of bees!

A girl, a dog, and her smoker. All ready to help me to take frames of honey from the hives (well, actually, Tristan is ready to lick spilled honey off the garage floor...)

Gordon gave us  a hand too.

There's nothing about this photo I don't love. Two of my favourite people and one really gorgeous frame of capped honey.

I showed Inari how to uncap the honey over my cappings tank. The wax caps on the cells are scraped off and fall into the tank to drain.The result? Pure yummy-osity. Some say that the honey from the cappings is the sweetest.

(Ignore the mess in our garage and focus on my charming assistant!)

Once the frame is uncapped, it's ready to go into the extractor.  I have a Maxant radial extractor that spins the honey out of both sides of the frame at once. Today we harvested about 100 lbs of luscious honey. 

I sent Inari home with a kilogram of honey for her efforts. She can come back to visit anytime!

And yes, I know I promised cat pics. THey're coming. :)