Summer Bee Keeping Activities Part 4 - Wildflower Honey Harvest

Our bees have been busy this summer making delicious Summer Wildflower Honey! This is one of the most exciting parts of bee keeping when we get to harvest and taste the honey.

Photo - The House of the Rising Sun bee hive stacked high with extra boxes filled with honey and lots of bees!

A standard Langstroth1 bee hive set up includes two "deep" brood boxes where the bees build their nest and store honey and pollen for the hive. Any boxes placed above the two "deep" boxes is for surplus honey. These boxes are called "honey supers" or "shallows". They are typically shorter boxes in height, and can hold up to 25-30 pounds of honey.

Photos: A peak at some of our bee hives with a variety of box assortments. Any hive with three boxes or more means the bees are at work producing surplus honey.

To harvest the honey, we go though each "honey super" box and pull any fully capped honey frames. The bees cap the honey with a thin layer of wax to keep any moisture out. After shaking the bees off (yes we literally shake and brush the bees off of each frame... the bees just fly back into their hive), the frames are then taken to our garage for the honey extracting process (far, far away from any bees!). Below are a few highlight videos from the Summer Wildflower Harvest.

Video 1 - Uncapping the wax from the honey frame. This is done using a heated uncapping knife. You can see in this video one side of the frame that still has the wax capping, and the other side that was just uncapped using the heated knife, with honey ready to harvest.

Video 2 - The uncapped frames are then placed in our electric honey harvester that spins around, pulling the honey out from the frames. It fits up to 18 frames and takes around 20-30 minutes for the spinner to completely pull out all the honey from the frames. Afterward, the frames can be placed right back into the hives where the bees will start filling them with more honey!

Video 3 - The honey pours out of the honey gate into a food grade bucket while the harvester is spinning. One 5 gallon bucket holds up to 60 pounds of honey. We bottle our jars directly from the buckets (raw, unfiltered honey) using the honey gate that is installed on each bucket.

In total, we were blessed enough to harvest 55 pounds of raw Summer Wildflower Honey. Thank You Jesus! And we are anticipating more honey in the next month or so from the fall wildflowers that are already starting to sprout up. Stay tuned for a post about that soon.

If you're interested to read more details about the honey harvesting process, you can check out our previous post from the Spring that goes into more details.

Also, we are planning an exclusive honey tasting event later this month, where you can come try both our Spring and Summer Wildflower Honey! Make sure to follow us on Facebook or Instagram for updates (@gatheringtablefarms).

Blessings,

Jeff

1 - A Langstroth hive is named after Reverend Lorenzo Langstroth who in the 1850's invented the now standard bee hive box most commonly used in modern day bee keeping. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langstroth_hive