Part 2 Spring Bee Keeping Activities - The First Honey Harvest of the Year

With wildflowers and trees in full bloom, spring is prime time for making honey in our area. Our bees have been busy at work in Clovis, and it is fun to reap the benefits of their labor with delicious pure honey!

But you may be wondering… how do you get the honey out of the honey comb? That’s what this post is about - to show up close how we harvest our honey.

Fun fact: One hive of bees can produce anywhere from 25-60 pounds (or more!) of honey. That's a lot of honey! However, there any many factors involved to how much honey one hive can produce - strength of the hive (number of bees); if the hive is established (first year hive or older); the number of flowers available.

Photo: Here is the Honey Extractor that we use. This spring we harvested close to 150 pounds of honey in our first batch! That's almost as much honey as we harvested in the entire year last year.

After we bring in the frames from the bee hives (see Spring Bee Keeping Activities Part 1), the first step is "uncapping" the wax off of the honey comb so that the frames can be placed into the Honey Extractor.

You can purchase "Uncapping Tanks", but we use the simplest and cheapest method using mostly extra materials that we have laying around. Uncapping Tanks can cost $150 or more. Our make-shift set-up costs $1.25, including some extra bee boxes and bee keeping materials that we have sitting around! You can see in the picture below the electric heated knife that really helps cut off the wax cappings quickly and as clean as possible.

Photo: First, we place an aluminum baking pan into an extra bee hive box.

Photo: Next, we place an extra Queen Excluder over the box to capture the wax as any honey from cutting off the wax cappings drips into the pan below. This extra honey can be poured into the bucket later with the rest of the honey.

Photo: Lastly, a second hive box and wooden stick (I used an extra entrance reducer) is placed over the queen excluder to give space to uncap the honey comb frame using the heated knife.

Once we uncap the wax, what remains is the raw honey inside the frames. Delicious! The frames are placed in the honey extractor which "extracts" the honey from the frames by spinning around at high speeds. The honey is thrown to the walls inside the extractor and drips down. You can watch the extractor at work in the video below.

Photo: Uncapped frames are placed in the honey extractor.

Our honey is raw, meaning unfiltered. Once the honey is poured into a 5 gallon food-grade bucket, we let it sit overnight before bottling. This allows large chunks of wax to float to the surface, so that we can skim off any excess wax. What remains is pure, natural, raw honey!

Enjoy!

Blessings, Jeff