Honey Harvest Day

Our first honey harvest day was Saturday, June 18, 2022. We began earlier this week checking the hives to move the honey to one box and separate the brood (baby bees). On Saturday we collected the frames with honey and made our way to extract the honey. It was hot but we did it.

Our Bee guy had all the equipment set up and I got to help in this process. Let me just say how grateful I am to be able to have a bee guy mentor me. He's awesome!

First we had to cut off the capped honey before we put it into the centrifuge. This was a very satisfying process. The capped wax dropped into a bin for further honey to drain and the wax to be collected.

The main comb with honey goes in the centrifuge and is emptied. After the process is done we put the empty comb back in the hive for the bees to clean and refill the combs.

The centrifuge is very cool. It spins the combs and the honey pours out the bottom. The honey then goes through a double sieve. This process is brilliant. After this the honey is bottled and ready to eat. Yes, I totally licked my fingers during this process and in between washing my hands. Every drop was precious to me.

We had one hive and we were able to get half a five gallon bucket full of honey. Not all our frames were full of honey so it's possible next time we would get more. It will be enough to provide for my family this year. I am very grateful for our bee guy who has been mentoring me and teaching me. We are so grateful to be able to harvest honey from our own bees on our own homestead. I can now officially say I am a beekeeper. This was a lot of work but the good kind that is very rewarding. I look forward to many more years of beekeeping and learning more and more.

The goal next year is to be able to have honey to sell from our homestead. We are going to do a small project with some of our honey this year and make some honey sticks to be able to share with others. I'll let you know when those are available. Should be a fun project to do with the kids and I'll share pictures of the process.