Honey harvesting happens about twice a year and it is when we remove the honey stores from the beehives (boxes called honey supers) and remove the honey for bottling and, eventually, selling. There are three big reasons why I think honey extraction is one of the best things in the world:
1) The Smell
Since we are still a small apiary and don't have our own building for our honey operations, we extract in our house. So, imagine spending all day long with the smell of warm honey and beeswax wafting through your home, accompanied by scents of warm baking bread. It's awesome. If you don't really know what fresh beeswax really smells like, let me just say this: the scent of your Burt's Bees lip balm doesn't even hold a candle to it.
2) Fresh honey all day
You can imagine that if we are sitting around giant vats full of honey, smelling it in the whole house and watching it pour in streams of literal liquid gold from one container to another, obviously we're gonna have to taste it. My mom baked fresh apple bread today and we would take honey by the (clean!) spoonful and smother it over everything: the apple bread, our lunch, or just straight into our mouths. On honey days everything you eat is sweet!
3) Friends and family all day
Although honey harvesting is loads of fun, it's a lot--a LOT-- of work. It takes a lot of people and all of the day. But that means that it's a perfect time to have your whole family gather around for a nice day together. Occasionally on honey days we will invite friends over to help us and my dad's beekeeping mentor, Bill the Bee Man, gives an incredible presentation on the lives of bees. I learn something new every time. Today, however, it was just me, my family, and the French Extension of our family.
For these reasons I honestly wish each and every one of you could actually have been here to harvest honey with us, but for now, I'll just write about it and show you the sights. One day, hopefully, I can find a way to send you all the smells.
Harvesting Honey 101
The honey supers are removed from the hives when they are full, using one of a few methods to safely evacuate the bees from the boxes. Honey supers are only one part of a bee hive, and so removing the supers does not render the bees homeless. My dad had removed the honey supers a day or two before, so this morning we were ready to begin the harvesting process!
The first step in honey extraction is to uncap the honey. When bees fill the little hexagonal cells in their hive with honey, they seal them off with a wax capping. This capping keeps out moisture and bacteria to preserve the honey. Honey kept in its capped cells can literally last forever: the capped honey found in Egyptian tombs is still perfectly edible today!
To uncap the honey, we use a heated, dull knife called an uncapping knife. This knife smoothly removes only the capping and leaves the rest of the cell to be reused by the bees. The perfect racks to uncap would be ones where the capping is built up past the frame of the rack, so it is sticking out and the knife can cut it off in one quick sweep.
Above would be the perfect rack to uncap. See how all the cappings seem to roll right off? We actually stopped everything when we saw this one and made my dad uncap it as we took pictures.
Gorgeous, gorgeous honey.
If we come across a rack that can't be totally uncapped with the knife, we use a small pick to pry off patches that are still capped. This method is not as good as the uncapping knife because it takes much longer and can tear up the honey cells that the bees worked so hard to build.
My dad uncapping with a pick. See how the rack looks so much messier?
The uncapping takes place in a special box called....an uncapping box. The lingo is pretty straightforward in the bee business. The wax and honey drippings are kept in the box until the end of the day.
Once we have six racks uncapped on both sides, they are ready to go into the extractor.
The extractor is a big monster of a machine that removes the honey from the racks using centripetal force. The racks are placed in the holder on the inside of the extractor, which spins by turning the crank on the top of the machine. The force of the spinning slings the honey from the racks in droplets to the wall of the extractor, where it drips down to the bottom. The spinning also makes the house smell like heaven.
The spinning is super fast. You wouldn't want to stick your hand in this mean machine.
See the drops of honey flying from the rack? There is so much force from the spinning that some of the honey atomizes and would coat the room if it weren't for the cover on the extractor.
The process of uncapping and extracting goes on until you've collected a nice pool of honey at the bottom of the extractor. Then, it's time to filter the honey.
Honey is considered raw if it is not heated over 130 degrees Fahrenheit. But raw honey can be either filtered by straining through mesh materials, or it can be completely unfiltered, leaving small granules and pollen. You can usually tell if your raw honey has been filtered by its clarity. A milky-colored honey is honey in its most original form, while clear, glassy honey has been filtered at least once. Our family prefers to filter it in three stages to produce and nice and clear raw honey.
The Spout Master 
From the spout at the base of the extractor, the honey is poured into a large filter to sift out the excess wax and other rough debris. Under the big filter is a fine cloth, and once the honey goes through the fine filter it is poured into an even tighter filter, where all the tiny particles are filtered out. From the last filter it drips into a clean five-gallon bucket.
We repeat this process all day until we have extracted honey from all of the supers. The racks will go from being stuffed full of honey to being spun clean.
Farmer's Daughter and Big Mackintosh giving the empty racks one last go to get out every drop of honey.
Once the racks are all clean, we will scoop up the cappings from the capping box and put them in a special netted bag. This bag can be put into the extractor like a regular honey rack and we will clean the honey off of the wax cappings so we can use the wax for candles, cosmetics, and the like. The excess honey in the capping box will also be filtered for bottling. The cool part in honey harvesting is that nothing goes to waste.
With the honey all extracted and filtered, we are ready to bottle our honey. Using a special lid with a spout for the five-gallon bucket, we can pour the honey and funnel it into honey jars. In the lid of the honey jars is an adhesive seal, which seals off the jar once the lid is screwed on.
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| Today we also had the opportunity to package some honeycomb to sell as a novelty item |
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| Stealing a spoonful of honey for a spot of tea |
One of the best parts about extracting honey is the cleanup. With tools and big pieces of machinery covered in honey, it would seem like the cleanup would be long and agonizing, right?
Wrong!
The way you clean used extraction equipment is really simple. Once you are done, you place the tools outside and let the bees do the rest. Within minutes there will be busy bees all over the equipment, licking the honey and taking it back to their hives. Despite it being a rainy afternoon, within and hour of putting out he bee supplies our front porch was swarming with bees!
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| See his little red tongue??? |
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