Honey, oh honey! one of the many reasons i started keeping bees is because i was hoping they would gift me with excess honey. i was using a lot of honey to make mead, medicine, and jam and spending a lot of money on local honey already so I figured I might as well keep my own bees. where I live a hive needs about 60 pounds of honey to make it through winter so we just hope they produce more than that to share with us in late summer or early fall. our friend Jim has an amazing honey house with all the equipment you could ever need or want for honey extraction. we feel really lucky to be in Jim’s good graces because every year he allows us to come over and extract bucket loads of honey using his gear and he even helps us do it! i take my honey home in big 5 gallon buckets and Jim loans me a vintage homemade galvanized container with a spigot. the container has a sealed reservoir for hot water that helps warm the honey just enough to let it flow thru that spigot and into my jars. What a way to mark the turning of the season! We love it!