Honey Extraction 2017

This weekend we pulled the honey supers off our hives and began to extract honey from the frames.  We spent Saturday and today spinning out frames in the extractor, and we will finish tomorrow.   It has been a good honey year, and we will probably end up with about 350 lbs or so of honey.   This year's honey has a lot of basswood blossoms in it, and so it is a light, fruity tasting honey.  Some of the boxes have a more clover tasting honey, and we will mix a little of each to get a good blended honey with a little bit of every taste! We pulled the honey supers a little early this year so as to give the bees more time to make honey for themselves from the wildflowers that are still here.   We will no longer be sending our bees to California for the winter, but will attempt to winter them here.  The bees will need a good winter store of food for themselves, and we will use thick hive boxes that Harold has built for winterizing the bees.  Sturdy boxes and a heater/thermostat should insure that the bees will make it through the winter right in our own back yard.  Winterizing the bees here will be less stressful for the bees (no travel), and will help to cut down on bee diseases from other beekeeper's hives out in California.   We do not care for sending hives out for almond pollination, we just want good honey.  We have not been successful at winterizing bees in past years, but since Harold has designed and built very thick, insulated hives, we should be successful this year.
     Here are some photos of the process.

First the wax is cut off from the frame of honey with a hot knife (we keep the knife in hot boiling water).  The bees put a wax capping over honey that is 'ready'. 

Here is a hive with 9 full frames of capped honey.  The bees have actually attempted to store and cap off honey in between the spaces of the frames!

A close up of a fully capped frame.  A full frame like this of honey weighs approximately 5 lbs.   So a box of honey weighs about 40-45 lbs. 

Harold is turning the crank on the extractor.  We set up the honey process right in my kitchen (I have a very large kitchen!).  This year Harold built new support legs for the extractor out of strong thick metal to replace the flimsy ones that originally came with the extractor.   Next year we hope to motorize the extractor - we're getting too old to crank this out by hand for the required 5 minutes!

Honey coming out into the filter and bucket.

You end up with a lot of wax cappings mixed with honey.  We strain out the wax and separate the honey from the cappings.  The honey is filtered again, and the wax is melted and put into blocks to be sold. 

We have three buckets with honey gates to make bottling easier.  Additional honey is stored in plain buckets.  All the buckets are of food grade plastic.

The inside of the extractor.  It will fit 18 frames, but we only spin 9 at a time by hand.  The frames of honey are spun out by centrifugal force.

You can see the honey at the bottom of the extractor.

Harold is transferring more wax cappings into a large bin for later filtering.  We have 5 more boxes of frames to work with tomorrow. 

When we are finished for the evening, we cover everything to keep out dust and moisture.

Finished boxes are stacked up and ready to go out into the metal building we store them in.

At the end of the day, we relax with some popcorn (homegrown, of course!) and a game of Scrabble!

A batch of bottled honey from Honey B Farm!!