Mine is the last birthday celebrated for the year in our house.  Kay always takes the girls downtown and lets them each pick something out for me.  Each gift was so thoughtful; Sam (with joint effort from Skylor) knowing I love sunflowers picked this picture.  Jill found a willow tree statue of a person holding a dog.  She picked this one because she "knows how much I love Max".  And Miki choose a magnet that reads "Mom  The recipe of a loving family came from you".  Life is great!

 

 

And it just keeps getting sweeter.  This fall Kay harvested his first batch of honey.  Notice his only protection is the hat... he's learned his lesson. 

 

smoking out the bees

 He endured 8 stings from his bees, and he's probably lucky that was all.

 

clearing the bees with the air compressor

 

Apparently bees don't like you stealing their honey, and if you plan to do so you need a little bit of protection.  Maybe Kay didn't watch enough Winnie the Pooh growing up.

 

 

He used the air compressor to blow the bees off of the frames, and then he'd put them into the wheel barrel to bring into the house.

 

 

There were thousands of bees, and somehow a few of them managed to get inside of his hood.  At one point he came running into the house trying to get away, but he wasn't fast enough.  A few of them followed him in, and they were ticked!  I've never seen such angry bees.  We did manage to swat them with the fly swatter, and Kay was the only one to get stung.

 

 

Bees are smart.  They knew where their honey was and they were following it.  It took a little more effort to get the frames into the house than I thought it would.  But we did it, and Kay started the process of extracting the honey off of the frames.  Jill was intrigued with the whole process.

 

Eventually all of the honey was extracted and cleaned.  When the process was finished we ended up with 25 lbs of honey, and it is delicious.  Not too bad for the first year.  Next year Kay will be getting a beekeepers suit for his birthday.