It happens every August – honey extraction! After babying the bees, feeding, monitoring, re-queening, splitting, and just plain worrying about them, now is the moment of truth.  How much honey did they deposit in the combs for me to rob from them? I won’t leave you in suspense – I extracted 55 pounds from my one remaining hive.

I started out with 2 hives this season, one tanked and the other one hummed along – not boiling over with bees but – steady, eddy. So, it is always an anti-climax when we finally remove and extract – kind of like Christmas – lots of build up and anticipation, and then it is over very quickly and we are mopping up the mess.

Removal of the Supers, Sans Bees of Course!

First job is removal of the top boxes or supers with the excess honey that I want. I open them up and smoke the bees to get them to head down into the hive and put on a lid covered with Fisher-Bee-Quick. No, I didn’t make that up. It is a liquid in a spray bottle that smells like almond oil that you spray on the lid with a cardboard insert to saturate with this fragrant oil.  Evidently, bees hate the smell and will try to put as much space as they can from the odor.

I remove the outer and inner cover of the hive and place the lid with the Fisher-Bee-Quick insert on top, and start using my propane torch on top to heat the entire lid to a high temp that will dissipate the almond odor throughout the entire hive. Note that the lid is covered on the outside with tin which will not burn. The whole point of this exercise is to get the  bees off the supers so I can steal their honey.  I have tried a blower (they get mad), brushing them off with a bee brush (too slow), and a special escape board which once the bees go out, they can’t come back in (way too slow). The spray works like a charm.  It just takes about 10 minutes for the bees to react and leave.

After heating the lid thoroughly, I remove the lid and peak in.  Bees have scampered! There are a few stragglers, but that is good enough for me and I load the entire super box into a wheelbarrow nearby.  It easily weighs at least 50 pounds which is a good sign – lots of honey! I cover the super up with a piece of canvas as I don’t want any stray bees to come and investigate. After taking the super to the honey staging area and off loading it on a tarp, I go back for the second box.  After both boxes are sitting on the tarp, we are ready to remove each frame and place in the extractor to spin.

Extraction

After removing each frame from the hive, my helper (husband), takes a heated electric knife and slices off the wax cappings to reveal the honey deposited into each cell.

The wax cappings are very tasty and we dive right in and start snacking.  We grab a dollop of honey comb that is dripping with honey and start chewing.  We suck out all the honey and spit out the wax. Luscious!

After uncapping, each frame is placed into the extractor on a rack and we turn on the motor and it starts to spin.  The extractor is kind of like a washer machine.  If everything is balanced and even, the extractor runs fine.   If one frame has lots of honey, and one doesn’t, then the whole extractor wobbles and I have to lean on it to steady it up so it spins evenly. After spinning for about 10 minutes, I stop the extractor and we turn all the frames over.  Each side has to be extracted fully to get as much honey as we can possibly get out of each frame. The extractor, as it spins, flings the warm honey to the sides of the extractor and it slides down to the bottom and accumulates.

While we are extracting and grabbing gobs of dripping honeycomb, the bees are flying like crazy around us.  There is no way to get rid of all of them before extracting, and they drive my husband wacky, and he keeps swatting at them.  I just tell him to take it easy, that the bees aren’t aggressive and are just looking for a way to get back to their hive. But he is on edge.

Once the honey is all extracted, I take the frames and set them up in front of the hives so the bees can wring every last drop of honey from them. The bees once they discover the free honey go crazy and zing around the yard.  Good thing that my dog is oblivious and I have no friends over! We set up the extractor and all the tools in front of the hives also so the bees can finish cleaning. The wax cappings are set out along with everything else for the bees to clean, and then I take the wax in to process in preparation for making beeswax soap and candles.

The Aftermath

Everything is left outside for the bees to clean, and they take any honey that we missed back to their hive.  The bees have to have enough honey stores to last them through the winter, so I made sure that there were frames of honey left in the hive that we didn’t tap.  Plus, the bees have some time before it gets chilly to store some more honey, and I will start to feed them in late October for insurance that they do make it through the winter.

Bottling

The next step, after the honey has settled in the large food grade bucket for a day or two, is to bottle.  I sterilize my containers in the dishwasher, an assortment that I have collected over the years, and start filling them up. I have small 12 ounce plastic bee skep ones and 16 ounce plastic ones that I fill for selling and gifts.  For home use, I just use large glass jars and fill them up with 5 pounds of honey. We can go through about 30 to 35 pounds of honey during the year. We are a honey loving group!  Bottling can take me a week as I don’t do it all in one sitting.

We finished the extracting thoroughly sticky and tired but no one got stung!  I looked at the honey color, and since the bees forage from a variety of flowers, I call it wildflower honey and some years it is darker than others.  I would say this year it is darker than usual.

I clean the wax by boiling it in my crock pot with water in preparation for making soap and candles.  But that is another post……… Stay tuned.

Related Articles

• Proud Of My Honey (romancingthebee.com)
• Stolen Sweetness – Taking honey from the hive (asonomagarden.wordpress.com)
• Beekeepers extract honey from combs in Chesapeake (hamptonroads.com)
• We are in the honey………honey! (lilsuburbanhomestead.wordpress.com)
• How Sweet It is (countryroads.typepad.com)
• You Won’t Believe What Happens When You Put Bees Under a Glass Lid (techeblog.com)
• Stop #7: The honey of Mieli Thun @ Vigo di Ton (Trento) (delizieitineranti.wordpress.com)
• Doing The Split (romancingthebee.com)
• Preventing “Bee On Bee” Crime – The Robbing Situation (romancingthebee.com)
• Beekeeping Basics: Show Me the Honey (apartmenttherapy.com)