Honey harvest
Despite having FIVE active hives, we weren’t actually expecting to be able to take away any honey this year. Three of those hives are first-year colonies - two rescued from swarms, and one a purchased package. You typically give new colonies one year to build out their comb (hexagonal wax) a bit, and any honey they produce is typically just left for them to consume throughout the upcoming winter. We fed these three for most of the summer and will continue in the fall until their hives are full of plenty of resources for their use, giving them the best chance of making it through winter and early spring.
Of our two second-year colonies, one (the allegedly “strong” one) never could figure out how to build out capped honey in their third box (the honey “super”.) I resisted feeding them, and they were busy, lots of activity all summer long. They just never made any extra honey! I’ll find out in a few weeks when we move the hives if they actually have enough of their own honey stored away in their lower two boxes to make it through winter.
The other second-year hive (the “underdog” one) was never even supposed to make it through last winter, so of course I didn’t have any expectations for honey from it. And yet it did produce about 15 frames’ worth!
So all of the beautiful honey we harvested this week came from that weak little underdog colony. Good job, Girls!
Beekeeping is dirty work! I had Steve Gorilla tape up some cracks in my rubber beekeeping boots before we pulled the honey frames for harvest. So lovely! I do not take a lot of risks these days around the bees, so I always suit up fully no matter how hot it might be.
The harvest process works like this: You use only frames that are at least 75% capped. Bees "cap" (cover with wax) honey cells that are ready to go. Capped honey will literally last forever. I believe they found some in Egyptian tombs, and it was still good. Juicy honey cells that aren't capped aren't quite honey yet. The bees still need to work on drying uncapped honey cells out, so we wouldn't want to try to harvest what is in any of those yet.
The first step in the harvest process is uncapping both sides of each frame. We have this handy little yellow frame holder that fits snugly over a five gallon bucket to steady each frame as we uncap it. And yes, it is as messy and sticky as it looks!
We use a heated knife to uncap the honey cells. This is the least disruptive method, because the uncapping knife is just wide enough that it can rest on either side of the frame and just kind of graze the top layer of the capped honey. You want to leave as much of the honey (and waxed hexes) as possible when removing the caps. It's actually quite cathartic when you get that perfect cut that just "rolls" off the frame, as Montana is doing below. She really enjoyed this step!
Some of the honey frames are lighter in color, some darker. Part of this is due to the color of the background foundation (e.g. black vs. yellow). Some if it just because the comb (wax hexes) is older/re-used from prior years. This is a totally fine practice, because it saves the bees from having to do all of that work all over again every single year. I think there are guidelines on how many active years of use you are supposed to have before you actually toss out a frame. On some of these we might be getting a little close, though it's more important to rotate out if there is disease (which we do not have). But in retrospect I should have come up with some kind of marking mechanism to date my frames so I wasn't guessing.
Up-close view of the beautiful uncapped honey just waiting to be harvested.
Now comes the really fun part - get those arm muscles ready - it's time for the extractor!
Our extractor is a manual crank style (you can buy fancier ones that are electric, which I can really appreciate if you are doing a lot.) You can see how sticky everything gets - this photo was taken post-extraction, pre-cleaning.
Inside the extractor is a rotating basket - ours holds 2 frames at a time. (Again, you can get larger ones that hold more.) You set a frame in each half, close the lid, and crank away! Thanks to centrifugal force, the honey spins out of the uncapped cells and basically splats along the inside of the extractor. Thanks to gravitational force, the splatted honey works its way down to the bottom, pretty much immediately. It helps that the day we were extracting was quite warm, so the honey thins out and collects on the bottom of the extractor quite easily.
At the bottom of the extractor is a spigot which allows the freshly-spun honey to drip into a double-layer of filter baskets. This helps remove all of those little specks of wax that you can see here. Then we bring the filtered honey inside for bottling.
We learned the hard way years ago to always do bottling over a sink. Several notable honey-gone-wild experiences have occurred. We use a special spigot called a "honey gate" that rotates open/closed (held tightly if needed by a wingnut/bolt.) By the end of this morning's bottling, Steve had his spigot process timing pretty much down pat.
Look at that gorgeous, dark honey! What a haul. I used a refractometer to measure the moisture content of our honey. Honey is safe when it is under 18% moisture content; at 18% it isn't quite "baked" and it runs the risk of fermenting. Typical bottled honey is 16%. Ours clocked in at about 14.5% - that means it is even thicker and richer than normal. And we can attest - this stuff tastes TERRIFIC!
