All year, in the back of our minds, it's “how are the bees coming along?” and “Will there be a honey harvest?” Because first you keep them (and hope they don't fly off or die) and then you check the honey (and hope there's enough for them and us).
And they did so well this year, we got new ones as well, and we had the harvest!
My dear husband Phil, the Chief, is guest posting to tell you how it all went. We tried to be as specific as possible, so that you could picture it all in your minds. There are many places on the interwebs you could go to get info about bees. But I know you all like to hear us say it anyway.
With no further eloquence, here's Phil!
On the beekeeping calendar, the happiest day of the year is harvesting day, when we bring in the season’s crop of honey. Would you like to walk through it with me?
The process begins a few days before the actual harvest day. But to help you understand, I’ll need to take you back much further.
My bees live in two brood boxes, where for most of the season the queen lays and the workers work, packing in pollen and honey. Once I’m confident that they have enough food stored for the winter, I add another box, called a super, in which they will collect surplus honey—just for us! [The blue ones on the left are supers ~ L]
The bees build their comb in the super, then gradually fill the comb with nectar. When that nectar is fully converted to honey—after the bees have reduced the moisture content to perfection—they cap the cells with a thin layer of wax. And when I see frames full of capped comb, I know it’s harvest time.
A few days before I plan to harvest, I put an escape board under the super. This ingenious device is probably my favorite piece of beekeeping equipment. It’s a board with a hole in the middle, and a simple maze underneath. When a bee goes down through the hole, she’ll run into a wall. If she turns to the left, she’ll go back to the super; if she turns right, she’ll go down into the brood box.
But here’s the thing:
When honey bees encounter an obstacle, they always turn to the right!
So within a day or two, most of the bees have left the super, clearing it out and making it ready to harvest.
On harvest day, I pull the super off the hive. It’s heavy! When I first put it on top of the brood boxes, full of empty frames, it weighed just a few pounds. Now it’s probably more than 50 pounds. That’s a good sign. After carefully brushing off the frames to remove the few remaining bees, I bring them indoors, and we’re ready to harvest.
We prefer to harvest in the evening, for a couple of reasons. First, when the sun goes down the bees go to bed, so they aren’t attracted by the smell. (We’ve tried harvesting in the daytime, but it’s unnerving to have bees constantly pinging off the screen windows, attracted by the powerful smell of the honey.)
Second, it’s a great time to have a few friends over, to enjoy the occasion and help crank the extractor.
The extractor is basically a centrifuge. Once the wax cappings are sliced off the frames, we whirl them around in the extractor. The honey is thrown to the sides, collects at the bottom, and then is drained out and strained. This year, because we were harvesting on an unusually cool evening, Auntie Leila thought to wrap the extractor in an electric blanket, to warm things up and make the honey flow a bit faster. Did it make a difference? I’m not sure. [I also got out the blow dryer to pump warm air in the extractor. Don't know if it helped. ~ L]
It’s a long, laborious process. (That’s one reason why it’s nice to have different people taking turns, cranking away.)
A friend once observed that Mother Nature provides us with many different sources of sugar, but one way or another, we have to work for it. We spin and spin and spin and spin, check the frames, turn them around, and spin some more. It’s a messy, sticky business, too; you won’t want to wear your silk scarf. But licking the honey off your fingers isn’t exactly a hardship!
And when we finally open the tap (called a “honey gate”), and the elixir begins to flow out into the bottling bucket, it’s a beautiful moment.
This year’s product was a rich, very dark honey. Once we hit our stride, it just kept flowing. By the time we were finished there would be well over 3 gallons, or 40 pounds of the precious stuff.
We don’t sell our honey—we’re not in this for the money [I'd be happy to sell but so far we don't get enough! ~ L] —but we should have enough to last us until the next harvest (and certainly enough to last until spring, when we’ll be harvesting our maple syrup), even after setting aside jars for family and friends.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. After the honey has been spun off the frames, it still needs to be strained, to separate out the bits of wax and pollen. We use two sieves, one finer than the other. Then Auntie Leila takes the waxy sediment caught in the filters, as well as what we've scraped off the frames, and after any remaining honey has dripped off, boils it down. (While she’s doing this, the entire house is suffused with a subtle, inviting smell of honey and wax.)
This produces two products: a disk of pure beeswax (pictured here still wet from the bowl), which we’ll mix with oil and use for polishing furniture and cutting boards; and a bowl of watery honey, which she’ll reduce and use for cooking. Finally, we use boiling water to clean out the extractor and bottling bucket. That water, too, is added to the pot to reduce.
There’s one more step in the clean-up process. All those frames, once thick with capped honey, are now sad sheets of torn-up wax with stubborn drops of honey still clinging to the cells. Fortunately I have recruited some volunteers to help clean them up. About 50,000 volunteers, in fact: the bees themselves. I put the ravaged frames back on top of the hive. The bees will eat the honey, clean up the wax, and within a day or two the frames will be ready to store for the winter and put back on the hive for next year’s harvest.
Dorothy says
This is awesome! Will eventually refer to this when we decide to tackle beekeeping!
diane says
Goodness gracious, but those bees are efficient! Not a single drop of waste in the entire process. So very cool the way God designed all this – the bees happily work away to give us pretty flowers and grasses, plus the sweet honey (and polish, and candles…) in a perfect system.
Katie says
Really interesting, thank you for sharing!
Laura Jeanne says
This is really neat, thank you for explaining this. I’d love to get some bees, and this makes me want to even more. I’m sure that honey is delicious and loaded with healthful properties.
priest's wife @byzcathwife says
yummy! It is very dark- mostly sunflower? My husband just brought 10 kilos of honey back from Romania (2 different- acacia and polyflower) My father-in-law have 150 hives with only my mother-in-law and brother-in-law to help…. I am sure that you can appreciate the work that goes through with that!
Phil says
There could be some sunflower; I’ve seen sunflower pollen in the hive. But I don’t think that’s the main ingredient. Goldenrod, for sure; I don’t know what else. There’s all sorts of forage within easy distance.
Anne Marie says
Have you seen this: http://www.honeyflow.com/?
Carolyn says
Yummy! Is it honey made from buckwheat?
Phil says
No, not buckwheat. I’ve never seen that around here.
Jill Farris says
So nice to hear from the man of the family!
We had bees many years ago and I was too intimidated by them to fully appreciate them. This post makes me want to become a bee-keeper in my old age.
I had an adopted gramma many years ago who used bees to treat her arthritis (recommended by a medical doctor at the time!). She would sit outside the hive and wait for a bee to land on her, slap it so it would sting her and, thus, receive whatever it was that greatly reduced the pain of her arthritis. I believe she did this twice a week.
Her husband told her she could only slap a bee on its way out of the hive. One coming IN would have its little pollen sacks filled and (heaven forbid) she should kill THAT bee!).
Ona says
Thanks for this great piece! So interesting to see how it’s done.
Kristi says
This is fascinating! It looks delicious! Shared this with my kids. Thank you.
Katherine says
Ha! You should have said, “here is the eloquent Phil” (after all, he writes for a living and he has to keep up with your standards). An enjoyable post. If we didn’t have chickens and goats and a large garden and orchard, it might tempt me to start beekeeping. Our non-paid help keeps growing and leaving, leaving more work for the two permanent members of the homestead. So there is a moratorium on new projects.
Leila says
Katherine, it’s a reference to one of my top five favorite movies ever, The Quiet Man! “Without further eloquence!”
But yes. 🙂
AND — your garden and orchard will be so much better with bees!!! THINK OF IT!!! THE POLLINATION!!!
(On the other hand, chickens eat bees but shhhh)
Kimberlee says
This is so interesting. I sometimes see pictures of harvesting on blogs but without the explaining. Thank you for sharing the wonderful process. The rich dark honey looks fantastic.
Mona says
Very interesting! Thank you for all the photos and information. What will the poor bees do for honey over the winter? Or do they hibernate?
Leila says
Oh Mona don’t worry! We “keep” bees! That means we make sure they have enough for themselves. We just take the extra. In the winter they make a little ball of the colony and stay in place, in motion, emerging to pee (yes!) and to drag out any bees that die. They don’t hibernate, but they do dial everything down. Their winter honey needs to be near them — they won’t leave that little ball they make, even to eat. We have had bees starve because they were too cold and the food was too far 🙁
But usually they make it — they made it this last winter, which was very hard and very cold. I think that the copious amounts of fluffy snow really helped insulate them.
NY Mom says
Thanks so much for this tutorial! It’s helpful and inspiring to actually see how this is done. We ALMOST got bees last year, but had to delay it for other things that required our attention. We just got chickens, though, and did not realize they eat bees. Hmm. Perhaps planting flowerbeds to attract them in a different direction…?
I hate tension in the animal world, even if it’s only between lowly chickens and bees.
Mary says
How wonderful to hear the Chief wax (ha) eloquent on this topic. A question for Auntie Leila, though…what are your favorite applications for this delicious nectar (aside, I am assuming, from the towering glasses of iced tea found in many of your photos?)
Christine says
Do you find bees family friendly? We are considering it and my first grader is interested, do you think he could take part?
Can the hives be in a wooded area?
phil says
Most children are fascinated by bees, once they’re introduced. But some are too frightened to enjoy them– or become frightened after the first sting. It’s hard to predict.
But no, a wooded area would not be good. Bees like warm sunshine, especially in the morning. If it gets very hot where you live, they’ll want afternoon shade, too; for us in New England, that’s not a problem.
Valerie says
This whole honey (and wax) harvesting is fascinating! I can really appreciate the cost for each jar of honey, now that I see what a process it involves. We used to purchase our honey from a local family, before they retired. Now the best place to buy honey is at our local Farmer’s Market, which sets up shop every Saturday morning. Liquid gold!
Molly R says
Can you elaborate about boiling down the honey from cleaning out the extractor? I harvested honey this year for the first time, and the honey clinging to surfaces just killed me, I felt like I was wasting it. But I didn’t know how to make the most of it. Sounds like you do, though, and I’d appreciate your advice!
athena says
I adore dark honey. Where my father keeps bees in North Carolina, the early season honey is dark and is from locust trees and tulip poplar trees. Later in the season it’s very light and is from Sourwood trees. On the market, it is the light honey that customers want and will pay extra for Sourwood, which is fine with me since I get to have the dark honey!
Wonderful tutorial! I just love honey bees, and beekeepers too are simply the best folks. I recently had a swarm on my car in a parking lot, and I tracked down a beekeeper (previously unknown to me) to come and collect the swarm, and it was just like meeting a friend, not a stranger, because of the bond of people who love bees. Anyway she had a box with an empty frame or two that she held up next to the car, and the bees turned as one and went peacefully right into the box without smoking, she popped a lid on and it was that simple. Really remarkable to me, seeing God’s hand that way.