Honey Harvest

Another honey harvest! This time my happy helpers were Russell, Emily and Jordan.

Emily and Jordan took some fantastic pictures and video of the whole process, take a look over on their blog: the answer is always pork.

The main goal for this harvest was to prepare for Maker Faire and the San Mateo County Fair. I'll be selling honey at both events, so I want to make sure I have enough bottled. 

For the County Fair, I'll also need to prepare some honey to show and be judged. I harvested honey in two batches so that I could try to get the "prettiest honey" for the fair. I think that the newly capped honey will probably show the best since the honey will be judged on its clarity (among other qualities), and the Spring honey typically crystallizes less. I personally believe that the older honey (possibly still left from the fall) has a more delicious flavor, a little bit spicy even, but I think it could be graded down because of the quick crystallization.

I set aside a few different samples to see which one looks prettiest when I have to submit them in a few weeks. Check out my science experiment below:

I think all of them look the same right now, but we'll see if they change in the next few weeks. I've had fall honey crystallize as quickly as within a month, I've heard this is because of the higher pollen content in Farmers Market quality honey. I've also heard there are some methods for reducing, that's where my experiment comes in.

I divided the honey into two major categories:

1. New Comb: the category that I qualified as "New Comb" was comb with bright white cappings. I believe that the bees capped this honey less than a month before harvesting.
2. Old Comb: the category that I qualified as "Old Comb" was comb with darker cappings or darker honey. There is nothing wrong with this honey, in fact, I prefer the taste of this honey, but due to the types of pollen in this honey, it tends to granulate more quickly.

Within each category, I had 3 sub-categories:

1. Normal: the "Normal" honey, I just extracted and put in the jar. That's it. This is exactly how I sell it when it is bottled.
2. Microwaved: the "Microwaved" honey, I microwaved for 30 seconds at a time until it just started to bubble at the top (approximately 180 degrees Fahrenheit). I never heat the honey I sell, but my Mum claims that microwaving my honey keeps it nice and clear. Heating it also eliminates natural enzymes and counts as "altering" the honey, which is why I never heat the honey I sold. I figure if you'd like to heat it, you can microwave it just like I did here :)
3. Frozen: the "Frozen" honey is honey that I bottled as normal, then popped in my freezer. I've heard that this reduces the likelihood that the honey will crystallize. I think this also counts as "altering" the honey, so I don't freeze my sold honey either. Again, I'm just kind of curious which of these methods might actually work.

I'll post again with the results.

All in all, we were able to harvest about 28 pounds of honey this time (roughly 8.5 pounds of newly capped honey, and 19.5 of comb of the older comb). 11.5 pounds went to Russell for brewing, 12 pounds went to my fair honey experiment, and I bottled the rest (only 4.5 extra pounds).

I think that the drought has been taking its toll on our harvests... year to date, we're at 51 pounds of harvested honey. That's significantly less than what I was estimating, I usually assume about 100 pounds per hive, that would be 300 pounds total in the season. I feel like I should be able to get at least 50 more pounds this year, but that is still only a third of what I was expecting.