Our First Honey Harvest

Final Product

Our first honey harvest occurred in late September 2013.  We harvested 15 frames of nearly 100% capped cells mainly from Jamaica, Orla, and Katherine's hives and also found one or two frames in several of the other hives. By far, most of the capped honey was very dark, composed of a mixture of nectar from goldenrod and knotweed in our area, that the bees harvested starting in late August.


We set-up our rented extractor early on Sunday, October 6th and cranked up the heat in our sunspace as high as it would go. (Helps to keep the honey flowing.) Then we started to cut off the wax cappings on the frames with a hot knife - a very messy process. You catch the cappings in a large plastic container and try really hard not to get honey and wax all over everything.

Once you have removed most of the wax from both sides of the frame, you place 3 of them in the extractor (we had an electric one) and slowly the extractor spins the frames and the honey comes off by centrifugal force.  The honey drips down the sides of the extractor and runs into the spigot at the bottom.  It then seeps through two filters, fine and finer, and, voila! the honey is ready to be bottled. 

We had purchased several different sizes and types of jars for our honey, since it was our first time and we didn't really know what the heck we  were doing.  We ended up with 35 lbs. of incredibly tasty, rich, dark fall honey - an early Christmas present to us from the bees!

Melting off cappings

Collection bin

Nearly 100% capped

Extractor

The yield