Mmmmmm….honey. Honey on biscuits, honey in tea, honey as a sugar substitute, honey for mead, honey…sorry, y’all, I got distracted there.
Let’s be honest, most people keep bees for the honey. It is a wonderful alternative to using sugar and has the benefit of combating allergies when you eat raw, local honey, plus it’s delicious! Today I want to tell you about the two ways we have extracted it so far.
Last Fall, when Matt brought home our free (ahem, doomed) hive, we inadvertently had to extract honey on the fly. I spent hours manually squishing the comb with my hands to squeeze the honey from the wax, then strained it through a kitchen strainer, and then through cheesecloth to get any bee bodies and wax out of the final product. There were honey coated pots, pans, bowls, spoons, you name it, all over my kitchen. This honey was a super dark with almost a molasses-smoked grains flavor (like a burnt Cheerio). I was not a huge fan, but some people really liked it.
For this Summer’s extraction we were more prepared. Matt watched the hives and performed regular inspections to see when the honey flow would be at its peak. You want the frames to be thick with wax/honey and capped before harvesting. We use a queen excluder on our second deep super to prevent the queen from coming up into the medium super. This way she does not lay eggs and no brood hatches in the portion we want to harvest (we leave the two deep supers for the bees to eat and never harvest from those).
You can purchase the needed equipment for harvesting the honey at various price points. If you do this, you may want to see about renting it out to other beekeepers in your area to make some money back, or you might wish to see if anyone locally has them to rent, to keep costs down. We were lucky enough to borrow equipment from a neighbor for a very reasonable fee (and a promise to clean it really well).
(I always recommend purchasing locally, but have linked to items on Amazon for easy reference. Please note these are affiliate links, if you purchase from one of these links I may receive a small commission to support our beekeeping and homesteading, at no additional charge to you.)
Honey Harvesting Equipment:
- Uncapping Knife (they do make electric “hot” knives, but that is a personal choice – we used a plain non-heated one)
- Uncapping Fork
- Extractor
- Screens or Sieves
- 5-gallon buckets with spouts (I recommend having 2-3 of these)
- Optional, but we liked: Capping Slicer Frame Rest
- Containers for the honey
Start by cutting the caps off the frames with a capping knife, then pluck through any that you missed with an uncapping fork. I preferred using the fork for most of the uncapping because it didn’t feel like as much honey was being wasted. Our neighbor had a little frame rest that you could put on the bucket top when you sliced off the caps. This was helpful because your caps fall into the bucket and you had both hands to work with because the frame sat nicely in the holder. I chose to use a screen insert in the bucket with this rest on top, that way the capping wax would sit on the filter and the honey would seep through to the bucket below. Made for easy clean up.
Once you have the caps off the frames, place them in the extractor. This worked best with two of us, one to spin the handle and one to hold the base of the extractor to prevent it from wobbling all over the place. We did the extraction in our kitchen/dining area because its about 100 degrees in the shade in July in Texas, but wherever you choose make sure you are away from your bees – they will look for their honey and annoy you while you try to extract.
Once the frames were spun completely, we opened the spout on the extractor and let the freshly extracted honey run out through a medium strainer on top of a clean 5 gallon bucket. It is really up to you how many times you filter and what fineness of screen you use. Some people do it through a larger strainer/sieve first then through a medium or fine filter, we just did it through the medium one before putting in jars.
After the honey strained through the filter we placed the bucket of lightly filtered honey on the counter and filled clean jars using the bucket’s spout. We placed the frames that were now just slightly sticky comb back in the super and returned it to the hive for the bees to clean up and rebuild on. Doing this allows them to make minor repairs to the comb and they can start filling it with honey again, rather than having to rebuild from scratch.
We were able to extract approximately 16 pounds of honey from one medium super this year – we were so happy and hope to be able to get more next year to sell a bit.
Do you have any tips or tricks you recommend for extracting? Is there something you have a question about that I didn’t cover?