The Honey Harvest 2026 (Part Three)

Tonight, we'll finish up with the Honey Harvest.  We'll show you a few more posts a little later to show how we test the honey for moisture content and how what we do when we have "wet" honey.  We'll also show you how we render the beeswax, make honey water, and finally, the honey bottling process. 

Without further adieu, here are the honey production figures for 2026:

First, it's good to know that a gallon of honey weighs 12 pounds.  Another rule of thumb is that a medium box of honey will yield between 3 and 4 gallons of honey.  Each frame in a medium box yields about 4 pounds of honey.  We use only medium boxes for our honey supers.  Lifting and stacking deep boxes is too heavy and too much work for our liking.  They say beekeepers all have bad backs!  Our brood boxes are deep boxes, but we're not lifting and stacking those and even if we would, they are not as heavy as boxes filled with honey.

The afternoon of July 25, 2026 we pulled honey.  We ended up with 6 medium boxes.  Once extracted and collected in 5 gallon buckets, we weighed the 5 full buckets of honey:

55.7 lbs
53.1 lbs
51.8 lbs
53.7 lbs

214.3 pounds total

203.3 pounds (once weight of buckets were netted out)

   4.75 pounds (from bottom of uncapping tank)

208 pounds grand total of honey

Since there are 12 pounds to a gallon, we harvested 17.33 gallons of honey!

• To compare prior years, our first year with bees (2024), we harvested 13.5 gallons of honey
• Our second year (2025) we produced 20.39 gallons in the spring and 4.75 gallons in the fall.
• This year (2026), we produced 17.33 gallons of honey.

We will likely pull honey again in the fall this year.  What a sweet harvest!