A Honey of a Harvest

A year ago I wrote about extracting honey from the hives at the college with my friend Hugh. In July we did it again, with a few more helpers including my niece Crys from Aurora, Colorado. I will say that Crys spent more time sitting in the shade than she did playing with the bees, but she was there and was a good sport! The best part of the day was that, after everything was cleaned up, we got to take the extractor and some tools home with us for our own harvest!

Our two beautiful hives of honey bees were ready to be robbed. We were just days away from our first harvest and we were ready. We had all the tools we needed and we had all the people power we wanted, two of us and the dog.

4-frame extractor

bucket with gate and lid

 

uncapping tray

On Friday we put the bee confuser on the hives. It is really called a bee escape board and it allows the bees to leave the honey frames but they can't get back in. The fewer bees in the honey frames when we take them off, the fewer bees in the house, in the honey and in my hair. I have vivid memories of my Dad taking honey frames and using a brush to push the bees away. He did his extracting in the cellar of our house with bees flying everywhere and yes, they did manage to get into the house on a regular basis.

We put the honey supers into big plastic containers with covers and brought them to the side yard. We brushed away any straggling bees and brought the frames into the sun room. Using a heated knife, we scraped the cappings off the frames and collected that wax and honey in the capping bucket. Once we had 4 frames open, we put them into the extractor for spinning. The extractor is a centrifuge which is spun by hand. The honey comes flying out of the frames and collects on the bottom.

Jim and the hot knife uncapping the frames

We had a total of 16 frames from the two hives. In 3 hours we had uncapped, extracted and filters 48 pounds of pure beautiful honey. Of course, the entire room was sticky and we were sticky but we were really excited about our first harvest.

We let the honey sit for a day in the bucket and then we put it into .5 pound and 1 pound jars, ready to sell or gift. We are very proud of ourselves for keeping a hive alive through the winter, managing a second hive and getting both hives in shape to produce. We are very proud of our bees too!

Buddy & Jim bottling

beautiful wildflower honey

We are selling it locally. If you are interested in buying some McBees Bergen County Wildflower Honey. please send me an email or a message. We aren't shipping it anywhere because that doesn't make sense to us. so here is our label, created by DeepCereal.