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.

Bee Escapes

Today I put the Bee Escapes on to prepare for the harvest this weekend. I've really gotten this process down now, putting the escapes on 3 or 4 days before gives plenty of time for the bees to drain out of the honey supers so that taking the frames for harvesting is a very speedy process. I haven't had any issues with pests moving in during that time.

Honey Harvest and Splits!

Today we had some folks come over to help us harvest honey! We were only able to snag 11 full frames, but the yield was fantastic: 23 pounds of honey! I was expecting to get about 40 frames harvested, but with all of the recent activity we weren't able to take quite as much as expected. 

Here is the result - pretty dark since we mostly harvested honey that had been in the hive through winter, you can see that there is some spring honey towards the bottom of the jar (it's much lighter):

Here is happy helper, Cara, uncapping some fresh spring honey:

Thistle (purple hive) recently swarmed, so the honey supers were mostly emptied. We got about 4 good frames of honey harvested from Thistle.

Mint (green hive) didn't yield quite as much honey because there was a lot of brood mixed into they honey supers. I haven't been using queen excluders, and it hasn't really been a problem until now. I put a queen excluder on both Thistle and Mint. We got 6 good frames from Mint. Here is happy helper, Evan, taking a look at one of the frames we found in the supers in Mint (you can see that the center is filled with brood, the edges have beautiful capped honey from spring):

On the bright side of having a lot of brood in the supers: we got to see some baby bees hatching! This was definitely a highlight for folks (she is in the middle of the picture, just starting to chew through the wax capping of her cell):

Buttercup (yellow hive) didn't have an escape board on it (one of the boards that drains the bees from the honey supers and had similar issues with brood mixed in with the honey. I took 1 frame of honey from them but then left them the rest.

I figured that Buttercup had the highest likelihood of swarming at this point (having come from a swarm last year and coming out of the winter as one of the stronger, well-balanced hives). So I attempted to do a split. I took frames with eggs, pollen, nectar, honey, larvae, and capped brood and transferred them into a fourth hive (about 5 frames total). There were no queen cells, so I hope that the bees will be able to select an egg to raise into an emergency queen, we'll see in the next 16 days or so what happens (it takes a queen 16 days to hatch from the day it was laid). Here is happy helper, Wyatt, helping select frames to put into the new hive:

Honey Harvest, Fall Cleanup, and Robbing

We had an excellent honey harvest over the weekend! We had some friends come down to help us out, the "purple" hive was getting quite tall. It's hard to even call it the purple hive anymore since I've had to scavenge boxes from the other hives just to keep up with their honey production!

Overall we harvested about 20 frames of honey, which turned out to be 44 pounds. I bottled 60 jars of honey (6oz each) leaving roughly 20 pounds to a friend of mine to brew mead (which has been turning out very well!).

I also took this opportunity to do a bit of fall cleanup. I have had quite a bit of crystallized honey hanging around in some of my frames since last season. The bees don't seem to have touched it over the summer, and I can't get it out of the comb to harvest it. So I knocked out several of the crystallized honey frames (below):

I also cleared out some of the "wild comb" from the new yellow hive. They've got a bunch of odd looking frames because I gathered the colony from a fence, cutting out pieces of comb and putting it into frames. The yellow hive seems to not have enough nectar coming in, because they cleaned out those combs and have left them empty. I'm taking the opportunity to knock out their strange pattern, I'll melt down the wax to use it later:

Since the yellow hive seems to be eating up all of their honey stores already, I put a full medium super of honey on their hive. Unfortunately I didn't seal up the top of the hive properly... So the stronger green and purple hives immediately went into attack mode and started robbing the honey from them. Luckily I my mistake within an hour and was able to close the hive and put an entrance reducer on (so that the yellow hive could defend their home a little better). Hopefully I caught this robbing soon enough, but there were definitely dead bees all around the hive. I hope I didn't kill my already struggling hive...

Harvest Preparation

After my poor experience using "Honey Bandit" during the last honey harvest, I decided to prepare for my next honey harvest using the bee escapes. The downside of using the bee escapes is that you have to put them on the hive a few days before harvesting. Luckily my little brother was in town to help me out:

I also wanted to check in on the yellow hive to see that they were getting settled in. I wasn't sure that the queen actually survived the move from the fence into the hive. Since the hive is so small, we actually found her on a frame! Isn't she pretty:

The queen made it, but the yellow hive is desperately low on honey and nectar. Since I caught them late in the season when less is blooming, they've had less of a chance to gather food. They probably need most of the worker bees to keep the brood warm and tend to the queen, leaving few bees to forage... I'll have to give them some honey from one of the other hives to try to boost their strength before winter.

Honey Harvest

Today we did another honey harvest, with some brand new honey helpers! Special thanks to Shawn, Amanda, Laura and Eirik (and of course thanks to returning helper, Brandon, mandated to help because he is marrying the beekeeper).

We harvested 27 frames this time, split into two batches. The first batch was new spring honey (about 22 pounds collected). The second batch was honey that has been in the hive since the fall (I'm still waiting on the filtering, so no final weight). I tried to divide up this honey because the fall honey crystalizes so quickly. Brandon and I really want to get some nice clear spring honey to use as wedding favors, so that 22 pounds is going straight in to some adorable glass jars. The fall honey we'll either sell/gift/brew or use ourselves.

Here is the honey extraction team in action:

With the new extractor, we can spin the frames much faster. Since this is a radial extractor, there is less of a  risk of destroying the comb by spinning too fast. In a tangential extractor, you risk the honey on the inside of the frame pushing through the middle of the frame - destroying the comb on it's way. However the extractor can get really wobbly when we spin faster, but luckily the legs have holes drilled in the bottom so that you can bolt it down. So some of the men folk ventured to the hardware store to find a solution:

They were pretty close to solving the problem - but the screws that they got didn't quite work out. We'll probably grab some bolts before we try to harvest again.

Winter Honey Harvest

So in an attempt to salvage something from the failed Mint hive, I decided I'd try to harvest their capped honey. It's always sooooooooo hot when we harvest honey, so I was thinking it would be a lot more comfortable to harvest when it was a bit cooler. Oh man, this turned out to be a terrible idea.

I thought it would hit 70 over the weekend, but it was only 60. The honey was way too cold to flow freely out of the comb, so we had a very tiny heater aimed at the extractor trying to coax it out. Here is an in progress shot with happy helper, Brandon (fiance's are mandated to help with all terrible ideas):

It took forever to get the honey out of the frames, and once we did, filtering was a several day process:

All in all, we extracted about twenty two pounds of honey - about 44 small (8oz) bottles, or 22 larger (16oz) bottles. Rather than bottling in this cold weather, we decided to wait until it was warmer. I also want to see how this honey holds up, a lot of the honey in the hive was crystalized, so I don't want to go through the work of bottling this if it is just going to solidify and be a pain to use.

Second Honey Harvest

For our second honey harvest, we enlisted some happy helpers (Thanks Cliff, Emma, and Russel!) It was a good thing too, since we were harvesting 40 medium frames of honey on a weeknight. Here is happy helper, Emma, holding a full frame of honey:

Here are Russel and Emma decapping some frames:

I think this process may have convinced me to get an extractor of my own for next year, just so that I can have it when I need it. I wasn't really expecting to need to harvest a second time, so the extractor that I borrow from the Beekeepers' Guild of San Mateo County was booked every weekend. Overall we got about 7 gallons of honey, the process took pretty much all night, even with the 5 of us working on it. We also got a lot of wax from the cappings and burr comb:

Honey Harvest

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: