Our Love for Bees
We love bees! They are our pollinators and produce our prized honey. As beekeepers, we want to do our part to save the bees of North America and keep them thriving.
To promote this thriving environment, we set up bee watering systems, treat our hives for mites, and give transient bees a home by capturing wild bee swarms.
When it comes time to extract honey from the hives, there are mistakes that can be made that will damage their fragile habitat. We want to share what we’ve learned so you don’t make the same mistakes.
Not only are bees hard workers here on the farm, but they’re also fascinating creatures. We love to watch them busy at work collecting pollen and nectar.
What Is Honey Extraction
Extracting honey is removing it from the hive frames by uncapping the honeycomb cells and putting the frames into an extractor. The extractor spins, and the honey is drawn out of the combs using centrifugal force.
The honey drains down into a reservoir until you filter it. Using the honey uncapper and an electric honey extractor, we harvested nearly 30 pounds of golden liquid honey from one hive!
Best Method for Extracting Honey
Scraping the frames of honey with a spatula destroys all of the bee’s hard work. There’s also the crush and strain method of extracting honey, where the honeycomb is removed from the frames and crushed to get the honey out.
In both methods, the bees build a house yearly, and the beekeeper comes in and destroys their homes.
We did our research and found a great tool called a honey uncapper. It’s like a paint roller with spikes that poke holes in the wax cappings of every cell filled with honey. Rather than destroying the whole cell, it just uncaps the cell.
The bees will then come in and add more honey and recap it for their food supply for the winter. They don’t have to rebuild the whole thing.
When to Extract Honey
Harvest honey when most cells have white wax caps and the honey is no longer visible. Check your hives often so that you can harvest them as soon as they’re ready.
Extraction time will usually be anytime from July through September. The more patient you are, the more honey you’ll get.
If you are harvesting honey too early, you won’t get the total amount available that year. If you harvest too late, you run the risk of freezing temperatures. Additionally, you may take too much of the honey and not leave enough for the bee colony to get through the winter.
Supplies Needed
- Honey Frames – Our hive holds eight frames.
- Honeycomb Uncapper – A beehive uncapping roller makes it easy to uncap the honeycomb cells with minimal damage to the honeycomb. You could also use an uncapping knife to slice the wax cap off.
- Electric Honey Extractor – You can purchase honey extractors that hold from two frames up to eight frames at a time. Honey extractors used to be hand crank, so the electric ones are a time saver.
- Five Gallon Bucket – Make sure your bucket is food grade. Pro-Tip: We installed a honey gate toward the bottom of our bucket to make it easier to fill jars. You can also purchase five-gallon buckets with a lid and an already-installed honey gate.
- Clean Jars and Lids – Pint or half-pint-sized jars are best for honey.
Extracting Honey Step-by-Step
- When harvesting honey from the hives, remove all honeycomb frames.
- While holding the side of the frame, run a honey uncapper up and down the honeycomb as well as side to side multiple times to uncap all the combs.
- Run the uncapper on both sides of the honeycomb frames.
- Now that you’ve uncapped the honey, place the frames into the extractor.
- Uncap the second frame and add it to the extractor.
- Turn the extractor on slowly at first.
- After a couple of minutes, turn the extractor up faster.
- Run the extractor for 7-10 minutes.
- Turn off the extractor.
- While removing frames, look to see if most of the cells are empty of honey.
- Flip the frames so the other side faces out, and repeat.
- Again, start it off slowly.
- Speed it up and run it for 7-10 minutes more.
- Continue with the rest of the frames.
- Using the honey gate on the extractor, drain the honey into a food-grade five-gallon bucket.
- Honey should be filtered well. We use a cloth filter that sits inside the bucket and two very fine screen filters that sit on top of the bucket.
- Open the honey gate on the extractor and let the honey drain through the filtering system. Don’t worry if you see dark spots or bits of honeycomb. It will all be filtered out.
- Let the honey sit for a bit for all the air bubbles to settle.
- Drain the honey into your jars using the honey gate on the five-gallon bucket. Pro-Tip: It’s essential to return your frames to the hive within 24 hours unless you freeze them. Otherwise, you run the risk of pests getting into the honey or the honey crystallizing.
Did you ever think extracting honey from your beehives would be so easy?
