The harvest is usually the culmination/high point of any crop. With vegetables, fruits, grains, etc, the harvest often comes at one time; but the bees gather honey whenever they can. So then the issue is: when do you decide to harvest honey? Most folks harvest at the end of the “honey flow”, which varies depending on where you are. We are in the middle of the mid-west (northern Missouri) and our honey flow is usually mid May to end of July – mid August (depending on rainfall & weather). We normally harvest at the end of August. By that time, they will hopefully have capped most of the honey and it still gives them plenty of time to bring in fall honey for their winter stores.
There are 2 distinct parts to the honey harvest: getting the honey from the beehives and to extract the honey from the frames in the boxes. How do we get the bees out of the boxes of honey? We use a commercial product called Bee Go which is basically a bee repellent: it is smelly and unpleasant so the bees try to get away from it. We apply it to a cloth inside of a lid which we put on the hive. The bees go down in the hive allowing us to examine the frames to make sure we are taking honey and not brood. (Using bee go is the one thing we do which is not allowed in organic production. I choose to do it because of the various methods I have tried it feels the most humane to the bees – fewer bees get wounded or crushed than other ways I have tried)
How do you know how much honey to take? We generally take all the honey that is capped – above the bottom 2 boxes in each hive. Currently, each hive has a deep brood box on the bottom and a super on top of that. We leave them those 2 boxes – they contain a mixture of brood, pollen, & honey. Some hives have brood in the third box as well and so leave that as well. In the end, it’s an intuitive process – and my 30 years of experience. We want as much honey as they can spare – but always to leave them enough for them to eat through the winter. After the harvest, they keep gathering nectar: some years they gather a lot, and other years, not very much. We want each hive to have 2 or 3 boxes full of honey and pollen.
Now to the honey house where we extract the honey from the combs: when the bees have dried the honey enough so that it will store, they “cap” the little cells that contain the honey. The cap is very thin wax that the bees make to seal the honey from the air. To get the honey out, we have to take off this wax. We use an electric knife to cut the cappings from the comb. The photo shows one of our members, Apple, cutting the capping from the comb. Then the frames are placed in the “extractor” – a centrifuge. It is the shiny (stainless steel) round object in the lower right. This one holds 20 frames: it spins them in a circle so that the honey is flung out against the sides, runs down and we take it out of the bottom through a valve and pour it in a 55 gallon barrel. From here we bottle it in 1 lb and 3 lb (quart) jars.
WAIT! the best part of all is to munch on the wax and honey as we are uncapping it – it is SCRUMPTIOUS!
thank you beezzzzz
