Extracting Honey From Bee Hives

My wife and I have different priorities when it comes to gardening. She loves planting the seeds, perhaps raising the plants indoors until the danger of frost is passed. I prefer the harvesting, the gathering of the produce, delighting in the end product. With our bee hives, though, she and I both agree that harvesting the honey is the cat's meow.

Our bees make honey in the spring and summer, and they store it in their hives as a food supply for the rest of the year. When we harvest the honey, we don't take every drop. We leave some of the spring honey for the bees, and we leave any other honey they produce over the summer.

Some beekeepers will take all the honey and then feed the bees sugar water throughout the year. My wife, a
certified beekeeper, believes it is healthier for the bees if they eat honey instead.

The process of extracting honey from the hives is interesting.

First of all, the bees are not happy at all that their honey has been removed, so you can't do the extraction outside because the bees will try to reclaim all the honey.

Second, the extraction needs to be done in a clean environment. You don't want the honey contaminated with dirt, dust, or anything of that nature.

We do the extraction in our kitchen. We carefully sweep and mop the floor, and dust everything that collects dust, to make the room as clean as possible.

Each hive contains multiple frames. A frame is a wooden rectangular structure on which the bees make the honey comb.

The bees fill the comb with honey, and then they put a capping over the filled cells. The capping is made of wax.

The basic process of extracting the honey includes using a hot knife to cut the capping off the frames (each frame needs the capping cut off on each of the two sides); putting two frames at a time into the extractor, which is a spinner that forces the honey out of the honey comb cells; as the honey accumulates in the bottom of the extractor, the extractor needs to be emptied frequently into a bucket with a filter, and that honey goes through the filter and drips into a second bucket.

Then, when that second bucket is full, it can be emptied into your honey jars. We put some in quart jars and then in additional smaller jars or bottles.

And now for more detail on the extraction steps.

When we carry the hive boxes into the house, invariably there are a few bees that tag along for the ride. We usually have one or two kids assigned to the task of finding and removing bees from the house.

As we cut the capping from the frame, we let the capping fall into a large tub. The capping itself contains a lot of honey, and we want to collect that honey as well. The large tub has a filter in the bottom of it.

After two frames are ready, we put them into the extractor. The frames stand upright, on end. We start spinning slowly, allowing some of the honey to come out of the comb before we spin fast. If you spin too fast while all the weight of the honey is in the frame, the comb will bulge out to one side and may even break away from the frame.

Increase speed to a fairly quick clip when you sense that enough honey has come out of the frames, and spin for two or three minutes. Then allow the extractor to slow down to a stop; invert the frames so that you spin the honey out of the other side, and start spinning again.

Allow the extractor to stop, remove the frames (you can put them back in the hive box), and get two more frames and repeat the process.

Last summer, we harvested the honey in mid May, end of May, and mid June. This past weekend (near the end of May) we assumed the honey would be ready.

It turns out that a little honey was ready, but there were a lot of cells that were not capped. We gathered what we could (perhaps five quarts of honey) and we will come back in two or three weeks and see if there's more ready. Last year we collected almost twenty gallons!

This honey is absolutely delicious. We're still learning how to cook with honey, using it instead of sugar.

A nice side benefit of local honey is that it can potentially reduce pollen related allergies. We have a friend who swears up and down that this honey is responsible for his allergies all but going away.