Last weekend we embarked on the sticky adventure of harvesting honey from our bee hives. Here in Montana, our season is short so when we first got our bees this spring we weren’t sure if we’d even have enough honey to harvest this fall. Luckily we are blessed to live in an area where there are a couple hundred acres of alfalfa growing and our bees loved it! Our bees produced enough honey this year that we were able to leave them 100lbs of honey in the beehives to eat through the long cold winter and harvest some for ourselves.
Since this was our first year, it was quite the learning experience for us! We bought a bee escape (like this one) and put it in the inner cover about a week before we planned to harvest honey (around here everyone usually harvests their fall honey in the first few weeks of September). This thing is a one way device so when the bees travel down into the box below they cannot come back up to the box where the honey filled frames are. This is supposed to make it easier to remove the honey filled frames. It didn’t work perfect, but it helped. There were still some bees in the upper super but not as many as the week before.
To remove the rest of the bees, my husband used one of these brushes and brushed them off. He had the four wheeler and cart with him and had a large plastic tub with a tight fitting lid. As he brushed the bees off the honey filled frames, he put the frames in the plastic tub and put the lid on. Once he had all the frames from the upper super, he drove the four wheeler back to the shop and took the frames inside. There were a few angry bees that followed but they left after a little while.
To extract the honey from the frames, we bought an extractor. We did a bunch of research and ultimately settled on this one (you can find it here). We liked this one since it was stainless steel and not super expensive (we bought it on sale). The only downside is this extractor does not have a built in filter. We bought some 5 gallon food grade buckets and a 600 micron strainer (like this one) that fits down in the top of a 5 gallon bucket. This thing worked amazing!
We used a honey rake (like this one) to scrape the beeswax caps off the honeycomb. We also tried using a heat gun. The heat gun method quickly melted the beeswax caps off the honeycomb but once the frames were in the extractor some of the beeswax solidified and we ended up having to scrape some of these frames anyway. Ultimately we ended up just using the honey rake and this worked the best.
Once the beeswax caps were scraped off the honeycomb, we put them two at a time in the extractor. Our extractor has a hand crank on the side and Little A just loved being able to help by cranking the handle! It was so fun to watch through the clear top of the extractor as honey was flung out of the frames by centrifical force. The honey pooled in the bottom of the extractor while we worked our way through all the frames.
We had a few frames where there was some brood in the middle of the frames and the outer edges were filled with honey. We were quite surprised when bees started hatching out from the middle of the frames while we were extracting honey! These bees ended up gorging themselves on honey inside the extractor and then got so honey covered they died. Thank goodness we have a really good strainer!!
Once we finished extracting honey from all the frames, we took the extractor into our kitchen. We sat the extractor on the edge of the counter with the bottom honey gate facing out. We put a stool underneath, sat a food grade five gallon bucket on top of the stool and put the strainer in the bucket. Then my husband opened the honey gate. It was so exciting to see all that homegrown golden honey pour out! At one point when my husband and I had our backs turned, Little A walked up with a little cup and stuck it under the spout to scoop herself a whole cupful of honey! Needless to say our little three year old was a sticky mess (she even had honey in her hair!)
The honey was filled with bits of beeswax and a few dead bees.The filter did an amazing job filtering it all out. Once all the honey was out of the extractor, we put a lid on the bucket with the strainer still intact and let it sit until the next morning. This allowed all the last bits of honey to drain out. Since there was mostly just beeswax left in the filter, we bagged it up. When we have more time, we’ll be rendering our own beeswax from it (here’s our tutorial if you missed it!)
Once the honey was strained into the 5 gallon bucket, we put some into small glass jars to be given as gifts. We also put some honey in glass quart size canning jars since it is easier for us to use those in the kitchen than a five gallon bucket.
My husband loaded up all the frames and the extractor in the four wheeler cart. He drove it out to the beehives, unhitched the cart and let the bees feast on the leftovers. The bees did a pretty amazing job cleaning the honey out of the extractor! The frames we will use again next year.
We weighed our five gallon bucket of honey and were thrilled to discover we had harvested 27 pounds of honey!! Considering we didn’t expect to harvest any this year, that is pretty amazing. We know some other first year beekeepers who weren’t able to harvest anything so we are especailly grateful. Interestingly all this honey came from just one of our hives. Throughout the last few months, my husband noticed that one of our two beehives always seemed to be stronger than the other one. The one we didn’t harvest any honey from had about 100 pounds of honey in it for the bees to eat this winter. Now we’re just hoping both our sets of bees make it through the winter!
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Yay for honey! This year is my hubby’s first year with bees. One hive seems to be collapsing, but the other is going REALLY strong! (We also live near lots of alfalfa, plus many other crops or orchards.) We will harvest in the spring and I can’t wait!!
That’s so interesting that you also have one hive much stronger than the other. We’re baffled as to why that is happening and only time will tell if the weaker hive will strengthen or even make it through the winter for that matter!
I have been wanting to try this, but haven’t convinced the family yet. We have/had a wild hive near us but haven’t seen them this year which worries me. The past couple years we couldn’t leave the kitchen door open in the morning cos the kitchen would fill up with honey bees. And they didn’t want to go back out the door. Oh, no! They wanted to leave by the window! So we had to open the window (which had no screen, thanks be) and let them out. But they didn’t visit this spring and summer altho I saw plenty of bees and wasps in my garden. But we’re pretty isolated, in that our fields are small and scattered among woodlands. Very hilly. No other crop producers nearer than two miles or so. Our crops are all non-GMO and we don’t spray pest or herbicides. I wasn’t about to let them kill off the wild grapes etc. So it would be a healthy area for the bees. We have several fields in clover and other grass hay as well as corn, wheat and soybeans. We have to special order those, but since they’re cheaper I don’t get a complaint from the ‘boss’. Anyway, I loved reading all thru your journey so far and I’m determined to start mine in the spring. Thanks so much!
Wow, what an experience with those wild honey bees! On one hand it would be pretty amazing to see a hive in the wild but on the other hand having them all come into the kitchen sounds like a big mess đŸ™‚
You’re a real deep thnerik. Thanks for sharing.
One of our favorite days of the year on our farm is honey collection day!
Wow, that is a lot of honey and it looks delicious! Thanks for sharing at the HomeAcre Hop be sure to come back and share another đŸ™‚
Do you think it is necessary to harvest the honey? I am quite terrified of bees, wasps, hornets et all. I really want to support the honey bee population, but I already know I will freak out when they swarm at me. We are going to try setting up a honey bee/butterfly garden, but we are also discussing maybe getting a hive for the back of our ten acres. How often would we need to check on them or mess with them? I would love some honey, but could we only get some like every couple of years or something?
Shana. This is a really good question. I am at the end of my second year of beekeeping. Became a certified South Carolina beekeeper this year. You do not need to harvest the honey from your bees if you are frightened of them. There are a couple of things that you need to be aware of that as a beekeeper it is your responsibility to the bees and other beekeepers in your area (diseases, pests, varroa mites…). I am a hands on beekeeper with four hives and find that I don’t need to be in my hives but maybe 1 1/2 – 2 hours per week. As far as getting honey every couple of years? No reason why you couldn’t. The primary thing about honey you need to remember is that it is bee food, and that depending on the part of the country you live in, you need to leave them enough to make it through the winter and into the spring until things start blooming again. Here in South Carolina, we are able to leave less in our hives than say Annie does up there in Victor. Our winter is just a wink between warm/hot/hotter/hot/warm. My wife was not particularly pleased when I announced that I was going to take a beekeeping class given by the beekeepers association in our county. She is allergic to bee stings. But over the course of the last two years has gotten to where she will assist me in the bee yard. She is not crazy about handling a frame full of bees, but will shine a light or hand me a tool when I need it. I would urge you to take a course in beekeeping to get a better idea of what is involved. Just because you take a course does not require you to immediately get bees, if you did at all. Ask the beekeepers association for a mentor, and a good one who is willing to be a teacher, not just someone to stand by and watch. My mentor offered us one of his hives for the first year to see if the whole idea would fit us. If not, we would only be out the cost of a jacket and some tools. We split that hive mid-summer and took our first hive through the winter, and now as I said, have four. Stings? Yes, you will eventually get some. In almost two years I’ve been stung four times. Each as a result of my doing something stupid and making them angry. A good jacket/suit, veil, and gloves will protect you. Take the class. You will find that they are amazing creatures that are an integral part of our agriculture and absolutely necessary for food production. Thanks all for letting me ramble on. Regards to all. Don, Spring Lake Apiary – South Carolina
>>one of our two beehives always seemed to be stronger than the other one<<
sometimes a colony steals from another, specially if they are located too Close together.