Our First Honey Extraction

Saturday was a big day for us.  We planned to extract our honey for the first time as beekeepers.  We met in the morning, smoked the openings to the four hives and went through each box, only pulling out frames that were completed capped.  When the nectar has turned to honey, the bees cap the cells.  Pulling honey from only capped comb ensures that your honey has the correct percentage moisture.

We have queen excluders on top of the two deep brood boxes on each hive.  This keeps the queen from moving up and laying eggs in the medium frames.  Those medium frames are exclusively honey.  That's good.  We went through each and every frame.  When our inspection was complete, out of nine medium supers, five of them were 100% (or very close to it) capped honey.  We will leave the remaining four there.  By the fall we'll likely pull honey again.

The photo below shows the five mediums full of honey in the back of the truck.  Bees don't want you to take their honey.  In order to evacuate the boxes of bees, you use a fume board.  That's the board with the t-shirt stapled to it.  Once you have your boxes of honey, you spray the fume board with some "bee repellant" made with 100% natural ingredients as we don't want chemicals in our honey.  The bees leave the frames and you put a top on the boxes.  This means your frames are mostly empty of bees.

The boxes of honey is HEAVY!  I'm estimating around 50 pounds per box.  We stacked those up in the honey house.  We're using his equipment this first year rather than purchasing all that you need to extract honey.

I almost feel sorry for the ladies that made all this honey.  (Except they stung me, so my sympathy level is lacking a bit.)  They followed the boxes 5 miles and were trying to clean up some of the honey we spilled.  They did a lot of work to make that.

Here's a look down into the box.  You can see the 'bee space' between the frames.  The bees have drawn out all the comb and capped it.  

Here is an up close shot of a frame of capped honey.  That is all wax that covers each cell of honey.

Using a heated knife, we cut the cappings off, exposing the honey beneath it.  Once you do that, the frames can be placed in an extractor and be spun.

This photo zooms in on a frame of honey that has been uncapped.  It is now ready for the extractor.

The frames are loaded into the extractor.  This extractor holds 6 frames.

The extractor uses centrifugal force to remove the honey from the frames.  You hand-crank the extractor as you would in an old-fashioned ice cream maker.  As you spin, the honey flies out of the frames against the inside of the drum and then drains down the sides to the bottom.

This frame shows an empty frame once the honey has been spun out of it.  The comb remains.  We'll put that back out with the bees and they will clean that up.  In the fall, we hope to pull again when the flow of goldenrod ends.

While we work, we eat.  Fresh honey and honey comb.  So delicious!  We eat until our stomachs hurt.

We open the honey gate at the bottom of the extractor and honey (and wax/comb) flows out.  It is run through several screens to remove the wax.  It then flows into 5 gallon buckets where we collect it for bottling later.

Here is part of the honey harvest that we got from our first honey extraction!

Tomorrow we'll show you how much we got and look at some other by-products from our first honey pull.  It was a long day with a lot of work, but the benefits were, well... SWEET!