All the Buzz at Honey B Farm: Honey Extraction 2019

For the last week or so we have been busy extracting honey for the year. We ended up with about the same as last year - about 300 lbs - but we had hoped for more since we have 8 hives this year. However, the summer was very wet, very windy, and also cool. This affected the bees' activity. This year's honey is excellent in taste though!! This 2019 honey has more clover in it, less basswood, and probably less wildflower such as birdsfoot trefoil . It still has a bit of tang to it, but is sweeter and thicker. The 2 acres of yellow sweet clover we planted definitely had an influence on this year's honey. We have already sold quite a bit of it at last week's Farmer's Market. We have about 200 lbs of it left to bottle up.
Here are some photos of this year's processing. Harold rigged up a sort of motor for the extractor this year, so we wouldn't have to crank by hand. That sure helped us old folks a lot!

We had family from Oklahoma and Texas to help us this year. In this photo Harold's brother in law Tom is helping to take the full frames of capped comb out of the hive boxes and Harold is cutting off the wax cappings.

Sometimes the bees do strange things! On this frame of honey, the bees must have had just a little bit more "bee space" and so they filled it out with burr comb. This makes cutting off the wax capping a little more difficult.

This is what Harold rigged up as a motor for the extractor. He took a part from an old snowblower, a gear reduction unit, and added some rods and a couple of Timpken bearings to the handle shaft. The gear reduction unit was a 10 to 1 gear reduction so Harold could use his DeWalt variable speed drill as the motor.

This is how the drill and gear reducer worked as a motor to spin the extractor. Assisting Harold in this photo is his sister Becky and sister Skip's friend Reggie.

When the honey is spun out quite a bit of it accumulates in the bottom of the extractor. We filter out the wax and bee parts through a 600 micron filter, into a bucket.

All the cutting and spinning and filtering took us several days. My kitchen was a disaster for quite some time.

Harold's sisters Skip and Becky watch as Harold uses the drill to get the extractor running.

We had nine honey boxes to work with. Each box holds 9 frames of honey. It took a while to work with 81 frames! We have wax galore after this process. We filter out all the wax cappings, and I use that honey for cooking with. Then we render the remaining wax and sell it in blocks. Harold is using a hot knife to cut off the wax.