The Honey Harvest - July 2026 (Part One)

It was time.  Past time, actually, to harvest 2026 honey.  We had pulled fall honey in October.  We sold out of all of our July 2025 honey and were now selling the fall honey and were almost out of that.  Time to see what our honeybees had produced.  We woke up and got all the goats milked and cow milked and then got everything set up in our garage to extract honey.

We lit the smoker and began on the last hive on the left.  To pull honey, you open the boxes and go through each frame.  You are looking for frames of capped honey.  Uncapped honey is still nectar.  You don't want to pull this as the moisture content is too high.  In reality, not all frames will be 100% capped.  In that case, the rule of thumb taught to us by the bee club is to go ahead and harvest if the frame is 80% capped.

It is a process of going through each frame, separating frames to harvest versus frames to put back on the hive to harvest later - maybe this fall.  A thing to remember is "this is the bees' honey."  They use it to feed on.  They are sharing their honey with you.  Of course, we want a good harvest, though!  In going through the hives, even though it was VERY hot, the bees were surprisingly mild mannered.

We shook and brushed the bees off of the frames of capped honey and stacked in a wagon.  Then we moved to the patio and blew the remainder of the bees off with a leaf blower.  We don't have a honey house.  We use the garage to do the honey extracting.  I wheeled the wagon with 6 medium boxes of honey into the garage.  I had all cracks in the doors and windows sealed up to keep the bees out.  They are protective of their honey and will seek it out.

Here is a decent example of a capped frame of honey.  When the honey has reached it's desired peak, the bees seal it behind a capping of wax.

This close-up photo is a great example of capped honey.  There is a coating of wax that protects the sweet honey lying just beneath the cap.  To harvest the honey, the cap must be removed.  More on that in a minute...

This photo shows a good example of capped honey as well as uncapped nectar.  As soon as the nectar is dehydrated, the bees will cap those cells as well.

A serrated bread knife is used to cut the outer wax cap off of the frame.  This exposes the sweet honey lying beneath the cap.  Russ, our oldest son, has perfected the craft of uncapping honey.

Tricia uncaps as well.

On some frames, the wax isn't built out enough.  When this happens, the knife doesn't remove the wax cap.  Another tool is used to puncture the wax cap that wasn't broken with the initial knife cut.  This entire process takes place above an uncapping tank that captures the wax.  (We'll use that.  In later posts we'll show that process.)  Honey drains from the wax into a reservoir below.

Here is what a frame of honey looks like that has been uncapped.

Here are four uncapped medium frames of honey ready to go into the extractor.  These are stacked inside the extractor.

The extractor spins the frames at a high rate of speed.  Centrifugal force causes the honey to be pulled out of the frames.  As it spins, the honey is withdrawn from the frame and the honey hits the sides of the extractor cylinder and drains to a reservoir beneath.  The extractor that was given to us is powered by electricity.  It takes about 10 minutes to extract the honey from the frames.  Once the frames have been spun, the cells in the frame that were once heavy and filled with honey are virtually empty.

The drum gradually fills and must be emptied into food grade 5 gallon buckets through the honey gate.  It goes through a series of filters to remove any bees, fibers, wax and other things that might be in the honey.

Back to the uncapping tank.  As the wax cap is cut off and opened up, he wax collects on top of the uncapping tank.  Honey that is mixed with the wax gradually drains into the reservoir beneath.  The wax will be later rendered and we'll use the beeswax to wax the foundation on new frames as well as to make lip balm, candles and bread bags.  Nothing goes to waste!

You can see that there are marked lines on the tank below.  Just from uncapping, we have 5 gallons of honey in the uncapping tank, just from the uncapping.

This honey is poured through a filter and into a food grade 5 gallon bucket situated below.

Tomorrow, we'll talk more about the harvest.  How much did we get?  How does it compare to last year's harvest?  We'll answer those questions and more.

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!

Inspecting The Hives

We have two hives in the side yard.  One of them we call the Jeff Davis hive since we caught the swarm in our backyard here in Jefferson Davis Parish.  The other hive which sits just to the north of the Jeff Davis hive, we call the Allen Parish hive since we caught that swarm out at the farm in Oberlin (Allen Parish).  For a long while we were opening up the boxes several times a week, checking out the growth and health of the colonies.  This hobby is kind of addicting.  Once it gets cold, you are not supposed to open the boxes as the bees work real hard to regulate the temperature in the hives.

The drought this summer was hard on the bees and then a few weeks ago, we had temperatures that plummeting into the low 20's.  We figured it best that we get into the hives and inspect things with a seasoned veteran of beekeeping - our friend.  Tricia invited him over and he brought his smoker and got into both boxes.  Here is what we learned:  The queen moved up vertically rather than horizontally.  That means that she filled up the foundation frames toward the center of the box, but the frames on the outside had not been filled out yet.

Both queens appear to be very strong, though, laying lots of eggs in beautiful patterns.  More on that in a minute.  With spring coming and lots of nectar and pollen soon to be available, we look for both hives to really thrive.  We'll pull honey in July, if all goes according to plan.

The queens in each box are laying lots of eggs and they are in all stages of growth.  In the photo below, the bottom center portion that looks like the sun is capped brood.  These capped brood worker bees take 6 days to hatch.  Just on this one frame, that's a lot of new babies.  The hives are about to explode with activity.  The rainbow portion above the capped brood are eggs that have been laid.  The egg stage lasts for 3 days and then it becomes a larvae.  Those cells will then be capped and will hatch out.  The upper left and right corners are capped honey.

The very bottom of the frame are some cells that are bigger than the cells in which the worker bees' eggs are laid.  These cells are drone cells.  The drones are males.  The males do two things:  They eat and they breed with the queens.  During winter time, the bees don't like the drones eating, so they kill them.  It is a brutal, woman-dominated society.  The drones fly up to the "drone zone" which is approximately 300 feet in the air and meet up with queens and get romantic.  The appearance of drone cells tell you that spring is on the way and love will be in the air.

This frame has a bit more capped honey on the top and both corners.  Honey is heavy.  

This frame is almost completely capped honey.  The comb is capped with wax.

While in both the Jeff Davis and Allen boxes, the queens in each were located.  If you look to the end of the finger, you can see one of the queens.  Here body is a little longer and redder and she has a black, shiny dot on her back.

Since the queens were located in both of the deeps, we added another deep on top to allow for growth and put a queen excluder between the second deep and the super on top of it.  That will keep the queen from going up.  The brood that hatches out of the top will mature and the bees will clean out those cells and fill the supers with honey.  (That's the plan, anyway.)

The bricks on top of the boxes tell a story.  If they are laid long ways like they are, it means that we have seen evidence of a laying queen.  In the next month, we'll be setting swarm traps in the yard AND we'll also attempt to make a split out of each box.  

What that means is you remove a frame of brood, a frame of pollen and honey and put it in another box.  The bees will immediately determine that there is not a queen in the box and will "make a queen."  Once she hatches, makes her virgin flight and is bred in the drone zone, she'll return to begin laying.  At that point the split is successful and you've taken one box of bees and turned them into two.  We can't wait to try it out.  We've successfully caught swarms, but have never made a split.  We'll report back when we try it.