-Posted by Isaac

He had white horses and ladies by the score...

This week we honor the exploits of our five year old, soon-to-be pro soccer player. Bridger finished up the season last Saturday and for a stage worthy moment, stood alone at the awards banquet on Sunday. Although they don't give MVP awards at this age, with an incredible four or five goals kicked per game, we all knew who the likely MVP candidate would've been. (Six or seven goals per game if you ask him about it...)

And we spent the week grooming him for a life of stardom. Coming from simple and lowly beekeeping roots, he needs to adjust to a faster pace and be ready to roll when those big contracts and endorsements come in. An international soccer star is surrounded by beautiful women, drives fast cars,

takes exotic vacations, dines on the finest foods,

and acquires wealth beyond anything his beekeeper father could possibly imagine.

My only hope is that someday he looks back and remembers the little people who once got him to soccer practice.

Little people like his lowly beekeeping dad, still out scraping lids.

Well... I fibbed... that's not lowly Isaac scraping that lid. I had some help this week from the not lowly, but lovely Deedra Testa.

Deedra has a Honeyrun bee yard on her property and sometimes likes to help when I'm there.

It always makes for good conversation, and this time it really did speed things up. I'm still full swing into the fall harvest and it's been a tiny bit slower this year because of an added task. I thought I would see how much beeswax I could garner just from scraping all the lids and top bars. 

It's not like I didn't have to scrape the wax anyway. It's just that now I'm taking the time to collect it-- a little experiment that adds several minutes to each yard. I want to see how much wax it actually amounts to after I'm through with all the hives.

I'll usually fill two of these plastic containers per day.

And so far, so good. With only six yards left, we have rendered three large cakes. I'm guessing about thirty or forty pounds. 

So there you go, About 550 hives' worth of scrapings. Is it worth the added time? (Maybe ten to twenty extra minutes every yard.) I think so. That's a lot of candles.