Finally! Our first honey extraction! There is a brief video of the whole process at the bottom of this post.
The first step we took in preparing to harvest our honey was to get a honey extractor. Since Brandon and I are members of the
Beekeepers' Guild of San Mateo, we were able to borrow an extractor and a few other tools from them.
Next, we had to get all of the bees out of the honey supers so that we could take the honey away. I got two triangle escape boards from
Brushy Mountain Bee Farm. The escape board goes between the brood boxes and the honey supers - the bees can move down into the brood boxes, but then they can't figure out how to get back up into the honey supers. On Friday afternoon, we put bee escapes on both hives. Here is a picture of the escape board on the Thistle hive (the bees go down through the hole and can't come back up):
We had two honey supers above the bee escapes on each hive (the un-painted wood that you see is the escape board):
On Saturday afternoon, we came back to the hives to take the honey away. We probably should have put the escape boards on 48 hours in advance, but we only managed to get them on 24 hours in advance. Despite that, there were very few bees in the top of the Thistle hive, maybe 20 bees on each frame - so we just brushed them off and took the honey. There were many more bees in the Mint hive - but they had a lot more uncapped honey. I was reading the
Honey Handbook that Dad and Pauline got me for my birthday the night before, and it said not to take uncapped honey unless you had a way to measure the water content, otherwise the honey may ferment. I ended up leaving a lot of the honey on the hive because one or both sides had quite a lot of uncapped honey. Overall, out of the 40 frames that I was hoping to harvest, we were only able to harvest 9.
Now for the fun part! Extracting the honey from the frames. First we used a heated knife to scrape off the cappings (the bees seal the honey, so we open it up). We cut the cappings over a special bucket that has an upper tray and spigot in the bottom, the cappings stay in the top tray while the honey drips down below. When we're all done, we get a little extra honey out of the bucket. Then we put the frame into an extractor, which is a centrifuge to spin the honey out of the comb. Here is our whole operation, complete with Brandon spinning frames in the extractor:
The whole cutting and spinning process took a little getting used to. First of all, we probably destroyed a ton of comb just trying to uncap the frames - I think we were trying to cut too fast or the knife wasn't hot enough. Then, the frames we didn't destroy in the uncapping process, we finished off in the spinning process. The honey was so heavy that when we were spinning one side of the frames, the honey on the inside caused the frame to collapse towards the outside. We probably should have spun slowly on one side, then switched to the other side to keep the comb from collapsing.
After spinning the frames, we open the spigot at the bottom of the extractor. The honey drips down through a coarse filter and a fine filter (the fine filter is only 200 microns, so this process takes the whole night):
Once we've filtered out all the little wax particles, we ended up with about 1/3 of a 5 gallon bucket of nice clear honey. I had bought a few different sizes of honey bottle, here is me filling up a 3 pound bottle (I look kind of like a crazy person because I turned just long enough to snap a picture, I am trying not to spill honey everywhere - which did happen a few times throughout the bottling process):
Overall, we got 22 pounds of honey (two small bottles are not pictured here), which is pretty good for the number of frames we harvested. Since this is the first year, and these are brand new bees - this is about 1/4 of the amount of honey we expect to harvest next year. Here are all of the bottles we got this time (the small ones are 1/2 pound jars, the large ones are 3 pound jars):
Now we just need a name for our honey and a label :)
And here is the video, as promised:
