Bottling the Summer 2026 Honey Harvest

It was high time we get the honey out of the five gallon buckets and into jars as we're out of the 2025 summer and fall crop of honey.  The summer 2026 crop yielded 17.8 gallons of honey that we've stored in 5 gallon buckets.  We dehumidified it down to 18.5% moisture and now its ready to bottle.  We sterilized all the jars and arranged the empty jars on the island along with lids and began pouring.  You can click the arrow below to watch the video of the smooth, sweet honey coming out of the honey gate and into the jars.

We bottled the honey in 3 separate batches.  I liked the red tinge of the honey in this photo as the morning sun is shining in through the kitchen window.

As we are bottling and going from jar to jar, sometimes honey gets on the side of the jars so they must be wiped down with a dishrag with warm, soapy water on it.  No one likes getting a sticky jar of honey.  We found an online label service called VistaPrint a couple of years ago and designed some labels that we affix to all the jar lids.

Here is an up close photo of the labels that we put on each jar of honey.

In all we got 152 jars of honey ready to sell.  Last year our bees yielded 170 jars.  We attribute the lower production to a big rain event we got right smack dab in the middle of the "flow" when the Chinese Tallow trees were flowering.  This really messed things up, but we're not complaining.  In fact, if we sell all of our honey, this year (our third year as beekeepers) will be the year we get out of the red and into the black.  Beekeeping is an expensive hobby!

Last year's crop crystallized during the winter months.  This year we hope to mitigate that by storing all of our honey in our new "hot box" that was given to us by someone going out of the honey-selling business.  It's an old refrigerator fitted with a couple of light bulbs and a thermostat that helps keep the honey at a temperature high enough that it never crystallizes and low enough that the beneficial enzymes in the raw honey are not damaged.

We've already sold 36 jars and have a stockpile of honey inventory for our customers.  We're mostly on the honor-system where our loyal customers come and get jars of honey out of the garage and leave money in the box to pay for it.  We'll likely harvest honey again this fall.  The fall crop is a fraction of the summer crop.  We like to leave some honey for the bees to eat over the winter though.  It is the bees' honey, after-all.  We erected our Honey for Sale sign by the road.  We'll leave it up until we run out.

The summer 2026 honey crop is all done!

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!

The Honey Harvest - 2026 (Part Two)

We still have honey that's dripping off of the cappings, so we won't have final numbers on the total number of pounds/gallons of honey for another day.  Our plans were to purchase a "Honey House," essentially an outdoor shed to store all the honeybee equipment in and to do the extracting in.  We decided to hold off for another year.

As it turns out, the garage is a fine place to do the job.  I'll show you the setup.  After bringing in the wagon with all the honey supers in it, we take the frames out of each box and use the knife to uncap the frames.  You can see the white uncapping tank on the table in the center.  The extractor is just to the right of the uncapping table.  Food-grade buckets with filters are positioned underneath the honey gates of both the uncapping tank and the extractor.

It gets quite warm in the garage.  Therefore, we have fans blowing on us.  The space beneath the doors and the garage doors were sealed up and it worked.  There might have been a total of six bees that got inside the garage during the extraction process.

As we spun the frames in the extractor to remove all the honey, we placed the empty frames back in the boxes.  I brought them out and stacked them criss-cross on a bench near the hives.  Bees are opportunistic, hard working creatures.  They will go through each frame, picking it clean of honey.  They'll bring that honey back to the hives

We generally leave the boxes like this out for around three days.  By that time the bees have salvaged all the honey.  We'll take the cleaned frames and put them in the freezer.  We want to make sure that any insect that might have laid eggs in the frames will be killed by sub-zero temperatures.  

In the spring, we'll put the honey supers with these frames back on the hives.  Bees expend a lot of energy making wax to draw out honeycomb.  If you put these frames out that have drawn comb on them already, the bees use their energy to make HONEY, not wax.  Re-using frames with drawn comb gives the bees a head start and I think that translates into a better honey harvest.

When we stack the boxes by the hive, it doesn't take the bees long to find it.  The begin, in earnest, to cover the boxes, and get all the honey to bring back to the hive.  You can hear a loud buzzing when you walk outside.  Those bees are working to get their honey back!  Click on the arrow below to watch the honeybees fly around as they discover the honey remaining on the frames and work to bring it back.

We'll be back with the third segment of this Summer Honey Series in a day or two.

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.

It's Almost Time

As we inch toward August, pulling honey from our six hives has been on the calendar, but we just haven't gotten the job done.  We'll try to get the honey pulled this weekend, but let's see how it goes.  Over near the purple hull pea patch, I planted a row of zinnias for the beauty, but also for the bees.  Zinnias are the easiest thing to grow.  In fact, they may grow easier than weeds!  As I look at the multi-colored blooms of the zinnias, I see that they are not disappointing to attract the honeybees.

Honestly, I used to not plant any flowers at all, choosing to grow things that we can eat.  I still do that, but I may have softened up regarding planting flowers.  I'm going to save all the seeds from the zinnias and plant a whole bunch of them next year as they produce both nectar and pollen that honeybees are attracted to.

I'm going to show you two of the six boxes of bees that we have.  As summertime temperatures mount, bees congregate on the outside of the bee boxes.  It's all about the heat.  Fewer bees inside the box means lower temperature inside the hive.  Just look at all the bees outside the box:

This photo just zooms in a little closer so that you can see the number of bees we're talking about:

Same thing on this hive.  You'll note that on the bottom there are two deep boxes.  This is where the brood is.  I have a queen excluder to keep the queen within the two deep boxes.  On top of the queen excluder are three honey supers.

In the next few days when we pull honey, we'll go through every single frame in the honey supers and pull out capped honey.  From this capped honey we'll extract our spring honey.  We'll show you the entire process once we get going.

The Flow Is ON!

For about the first five decades of my life, I loathed Chinese Tallow Trees.  We also call them Chicken Trees.  Why did I hate them?  Because they are truly an invasive species.  If not kept in check, they will turn a lovely pasture into a scrub brush forest before your very eyes.  They encroach on the borders and outside levees of rice fields, suddenly turning a 50 acre field into a 47 acre field.  Birds eat their seeds and then sit on fence rows.  As a result of the bird poop propagation, Chinese tallow trees sprout up along these fence rows and before you know it, they've grown through the fence.  These trees require constant clearing, hauling, and burning - non-stop labor.  I wished we could eradicate them, make them as extinct as the dodo bird.

But then something changed.  When we began beekeeping, my intense hatred for the Chicken tree evolved into vehement dislike.  This spring I actually dug up two chicken tree seedlings growing in our flower beds and replanted them along the fence row bordering our neighbors in the back.  Tricia could not believe it.  Had someone abducted her husband and replaced him with an imposter?

As it turns out, the Chinese tallow tree is the primary producer of nectar in our area.  It makes fantastic honey!  The honeybees just love it.  Each year at this time, the tallow trees tassel and flower.  The bees are on it like white on rice and bring loads of nectar back to the hives.  When I walked out to the bee boxes today there was SO much activity!  Here is a shot of the Chinese tallow trees in bloom:

The flow is on!  I wanted to see if the honeybees had found it yet.  Within seconds, my question was answered.  Bees were all over the place, moving from one flower to the next.  They were moving so fast, it was hard to get a photo:

Now that the flow is on, we'll have to be diligent in making sure that we're adding honey supers on top so that the bees don't run out of room.  That means we'll be donning the bee suits once a week, opening up the boxes and checking to see if we need to add supers on top.  We have a little over a month until we're extracting honey.  Hopefully, we'll have another good honey harvest.  We're a land flowing with milk AND honey afterall.

Warming it Up!

Our heat pump just doesn't do the job in winter.  I'm not a fan.  It just doesn't do an adequate job of keeping the house warm.  We've kind of thrown in the towel and keep roaring fires going in our fireplace as we sit in front of it each night.  Our nightly routine while warming in front of the fire is watching "All Creatures Great and Small" and then playing Solitaire together.  I think we have one more cold snap this weekend and then it looks to be more balmy for at least the next week.

We're not the only thing that's cold.  Our honey is too!  Raw honey will crystallize in the winter.  Although a nuisance, it's the way you know you're getting the good stuff.  We have case after case of honey that has all crystallized.  Just like this!:

Many people just put it in the microwave and nuke it, but don't do that!  You'll cook all the good stuff out of it.  You want to gradually warm it, but never let it get more than 104 degrees Fahrenheit or you'll destroy the nutrients, enzymes and health benefits you naturally get from raw local honey.  Some people will put it on the dash of their vehicle in the sun to liquify it, some have built solar heat boxes to liquify it.

We've come up with an idea that works for us.  We use our egg incubator to gently warm the honey.  The issue we dealt with is that the incubator has warming coils on top but not at the bottom.  This resulted in the honey liquifying on top but not on the bottom.  To solve this, we placed a bread proofing heating pad on the bottom.  Now the honey is getting heated from top to bottom and we're monitoring the temperature that's on a thermostat to ensure we never get the honey too hot.

Let's peek in the incubator to see how things are going.  Compare the first photo above with this one.  You can see that the honey in the incubator is about three quarters of the way toward becoming liquid again.

As we sell the honey, we rotate crystallized jars of honey from the box and into the incubator so that the honey goes from the solid state to a liquid one.

For the Bees, From the Bees

We're just coming out of 20 degree weather with more chilly stuff to come, but it did get up to 50 degrees today.  When the sun came out, the honeybees came out of their hives and gathered at the water trough to drink water.  I know it's early yet, but in just a few weeks, it will be time to set out swarm traps to catch wild swarms and also split our hives.  It's hard to imagine, but it won't be long until the bees become very active.  

Many people are feeding their bees now.  They take a bunch of sugar and mix with water in 5 gallon buckets.  The bees come and drink the sugar water and take it back to the hive.  So the bees don't drown in the bucket, folks put a bunch of pine straw in the bucket so that the bees can land on the pine straw and drink without falling in the sugary syrup water.  The idea of feeding the bees like this is to stimulate the queen.  When the queen sees worker bees coming into the hive with (fake) nectar, she is tricked into believing that the flow is on.  If she believes the flow (production of nectar) is on, she begins to lay eggs in abundance so there will be workers to bring in nectar and pollen.  This "jump starts" the hive.  This way, once actual flowers are blooming, the hive is up and running with lots of workers ready to go and theoretically, more honey will be produced.  Makes sense.

We like to be more natural.  Week after next, we'll begin feeding, but with honey that came off of their hives.  When we pull honey, we render down the beeswax in a crock pot.  Once the wax is separated, you're left with a lot of honey mixed with water.  We bag this up and freeze it.  We have several gallon bags of it in the deep freeze.  We will thaw this out, pouring it into a pan and set it out for the bees to feast on.  We'll show photos or a video of this.  It's something to see.  They'll bring their own honey back to the hive to feast on and the queen will do her thing and lay eggs in preparation for spring.  

So the honey water is for the bees.  Let's talk about something from the bees.  With the beeswax cappings we got in the honey extraction process, we heat it in a crockpot with water.  That's how we got the honey water discussed above.  With the beeswax, we plan on making candles.  Tricia tried her hand at making lip balm:

Our inaugural lip balm production was mainly for personal use and for Christmas gifts.  We plan on making more to sell alongside our honey.  The lip balm is a combination of beeswax, coconut oil, castor oil and eucalyptus and orange essential oils.  It came out great!  When we make another batch, we'll show you the process.

Bring Something Made With Honey

At our last monthly meeting of the Bayou Beekeepers Club, we were asked to bring something made with honey for the club to enjoy.  We met tonight and had our normal meet and greet from 6pm to 7pm.  We meet at Green's Cafe.  Tricia and I enjoyed a homemade burger on a jalapeno bun topped with grilled onions and pepper jack cheese.  We talked with other club members and then the meeting began with the Pledge of Allegiance and a prayer.

We talked about what you should be doing right now with your bees, namely purchasing equipment and boxes to prepare for the spring when we'll be making splits.  An open question and answer period then goes on.  We have very new beekeepers and very old ones, too.  When all the questions are answered, there is a "show and tell" time where members bring equipment and demonstrate its usage.  Finally, there were door prizes given.

Before the meeting was adjourned, peoples' attention was turned to a table of goodies that beekeepers brought that was "something made with honey."  Of course we had to try a little bit of everything and recipes were handed out.  We feasted on a variety of homemade treats, including caramel, honey bars, cinnamon rolls, bit-o-honey, pecan pie with honey, berry tarts with honey, granola and BAKLAVA!

Baklava was Tricia's contribution.  Baklava uses phyllo dough.  In a buttered baking pan, you layer 10 sheets of phyllo dough, brushing melted butter on each sheet.  On the tenth sheet you sprinkle a combination of chopped pecans, toasted coconut, brown sugar and allspice. 

 Then you repeat the process.  On the tenth sheet, you put another layer of the pecan mixture.

For a third time you layer 10 sheets of phyllo dough, brushing with melted butter.  Yes, it is a rich dish.

You preheat the oven to 350 and then cut the pastry into diamond shapes with a very sharp knife.

The baklava goes into the oven for 45 minutes and then is taken out and allowed to cool.

But you're not done.  In a saucepan, you combine 1 cup sugar, 1/2 cup water, and 1/4 cup honey and bring to a boil.  Simmer for 5 minutes.  Tricia adds the honey AFTER it stops boiling to retain the nutrition in the honey.  

Then we drizzle the sweet mixture over the baklava.

Cover and allow to sit for 24 hours while the baklava soaks up all the sweet goodness.

Then it's time to eat!  I wish I would've taken a better quality photo that would show the flaky, delicate layers with the pecan/coconut/spice mixture saturated with the honey glaze.

After sampling a little bit of everyone's "something made with honey" dessert, we left the meeting very satisfied.  We fellowshipped with friends, learned about honeybees, and engorged ourselves on products made by the incredible honeybee.

A Postscript on the Bees

A few final notes following the pulling of fall honey from our hives.  We had mentioned a while back about small hive beetles and the damage that they can do in a hive.  If you have a strong colony, the bees will do a good job of fighting them off.  The guard bees run them out of the frames.  We help the bees out a little bit.  We learned a trick from our bee club that is doing the trick.

Swiffer sheets.  Yep, you heard me right.  Those sheets that you put on a dust mop to clean your kitchen floors have a dual purpose.  They will catch and kill small hive beetles.  We put a sheet on the top of the frames. The bees run the small hive beetles out of the hive and up to the top.  When they run across the Swiffer sheets, their little feet get caught in the microfibers and they are stuck together like velcro.  They end up dying.  Look at all the small hive beetle carcasses on the Swiffer sheets!: 

Tricia began rendering the beeswax from the cappings from our fall honey pull.  It only consisted of 21 frames, but we still save every bit we can.  Tricia puts all the cappings along with some water into a crock pot and lets it all liquefy.  This is then poured through a muslin cloth that acts as a filter.  We do this process twice to get a lot of impurities out of the beeswax.  It looks like a brick of gold.

We're saving all this beeswax for candle-making and making lip balm.  We are getting quite an inventory of beeswax and there are so many uses for it.

Once the beeswax has been filtered and removed from the crock pot, what remains is some honey that was trapped in the wax.  That honey, however, is mixed with water.  We tend to feed all this back to the bees.  In very early spring, we'll pull this out of the freeze and feed the bees.

So many uses of all the by products in honeycomb.  Not much goes to waste.