Honey Extracting

I thought I'd show you what I've been up to lately, and what a beekeeper does to extract honey from a beehive.

It starts in the bee yard (apiary). I have eleven hives and I go through them to see if the frames are full of honey and capped. See the frame I am holding in my hand? When I take it out of the hive, it is covered with honeybees. I gently shake it so most of the bees fall off. Then I take a special brush, made for bees, and lightly brush the frame to get the rest of the bees off of the frame. I do not want to hurt the bees during this process.

Then I put the frame in an empty hive box, and cover it, so the bees cannot make their way back to the frame.

These frames are very heavy when there are 9 or 10 of them in a box. So I usually recruit my husband to help carry them to my potting shed, where I have a little extracting station set up. I stand the frame on end on this board, and take a knife and gently shave off the cappings. They drop in this plastic bin which has holes in the bottom of it. The honey from the cappings drain through to the bin on bottom. I try to not waste a drop of honey as this is a lot of work for the bees and for me!

This is a close up of a frame that I shaved part of the cappings, so you can see what it looks like. The bottom half still has cappings on it, the top does not. Every now and then a beekeeper has to put some cappings in her mouth and chew on it. YUM!

After I shave off the cappings on both sides of the frames, I put them in this machine called an extractor.

Here is a close up inside the extractor.

Then I spin the extractor until one side of the frames are empty. I turn the frames around and spin the other side until they are empty.

The honey will start flowing into another bucket, with a spigot, that has three filters in it. The filters get all of the cappings, dead bees, larvae, 'stuff', that most people do not want in their honey.

Then the pure honey starts flowing from the filtered bucket and I bottle it up. I'm a hobby beekeeper so this is not a big business. It is however, a LOT of work and very time consuming! I do not use chemicals on my hives, and I will not let my bees go hungry. So I never take all of the honey from a hive.

Viola' we have Honey!

Cindy

PS - The Granny Bees (the stitchery group I'm in) is working on another project that I'm excited about. I'll show you some of it later.