A Slightly Early Honey Harvest
We normally expect to harvest honey sometime in August, but the bees moved that schedule up this year!
They have been bringing in so much nectar that they were filling the available comb faster than they could build new wax—and the queen was running out of places to lay eggs. A strong nectar flow is a good thing, but the bees still need open cells for storing nectar and raising brood. When they start running out of room, we have to make a choice: add more space or remove honey that is ready to harvest. We decided to harvest.
There is a little prep work involved before we start pulling frames. We go through the hive, find the fullest honey frames, and stack them in the order we plan to remove them. We make sure the frames don’t contain any brood and that the honey is mostly capped, which tells us the moisture level is low enough for harvesting.
The bees generally keep their brood lower in the hive and store surplus honey in the boxes above, called honey supers. They fill the little wax cells with nectar and fan it with their wings to remove the excess moisture. If we harvest honey while it still contains too much moisture, it can ferment in storage—essentially making mead! We definitely do not want to discover that after filling a whole batch of jars. Once the honey is ready, the bees seal each cell beneath a thin layer of white wax.
When it was time to collect the honey, we gently brushed the bees away from each frame and placed the full frames into separate boxes. On our farm, each full honey box can weigh up to 40 pounds! We moved those heavy boxes back to our workspace, where we began the extraction process by removing the wax caps one frame at a time.
The frames then went into the extractor, which spins them quickly enough to throw the honey out of the comb. Each round of frames takes about five to ten minutes to fully process. After emptying the comb, we returned the boxes to the hives so the bees could clean up the wax, make any needed repairs, and start filling it with nectar again.
To finish the honey extraction process, we sieve the honey to remove bits of wax and it drops into special buckets that we use during the jar-filling process. Freshly extracted honey contains a lot of tiny air bubbles from the spinning and straining. Letting it rest gives those bubbles—and any remaining bits of wax—time to rise to the top before we bottle it.
We ended up with approximately five gallons from this first harvest! An average year for beehives is about 5 gallons of honey, less in rainy years, and more in drought years. We're about halfway there! The bees still have plenty of time to keep collecting, so we expect to do one final harvest around the middle of August before we start the winterization process. I can’t believe we’re already thinking about the end of the season!
We get asked about our honey extraction process all the time: when we do it, how we know which frames are ready, and how much honey each hive can produce. It’s quite a process, and the bees don’t always appreciate seeing us walk away with their honey! But we’re careful about what we take and make sure the hives are left with plenty of food for winter. Let me know what questions you have, I'd love to hear them!