Honey Harvest

We collected our honey in late July - we had a total of 9 full frames from two different hives. Both honey and brood cells are capped, but the capped honey has a waxier, shiny look and the capped brood has a papery, dull look to it. We looked for frames that were full of the waxier capped honey.

Lots of beekeepers use a super on the top of their brood box with a queen excluder in between. The excluder keeps the queen from entering the super which means she won't be able to lay any eggs in the super - keeping it for honey only. Our hives were set up with two brood boxes and no super, so we had to look for frames that had the least amount of brood. Typically, the brood is towards the centre-bottom of the box so the frames that are closer to the outside of the box were full of honey. 

It's important to only take what is surplus honey for the hive. The honey they are producing is meant to keep them through the winter. They will continue to produce honey and it's ok to take this surplus, but you need to make sure they will have enough food source to over winter successfully. Lots of beekeepers that sell their honey may prioritize harvesting honey and then supplementing their bee's food source with sugar water. I would prefer they have the more nutritious honey for their food. One thing I learned is if you are anticipating a cold winter the bees will actually require less honey since they will be less active, if it's a warmer winter they will be more active and will require greater energy. 

Also, if you do harvest honey it's a good idea to keep some to be able to feed to the bees if they need it. Instead of feeding sugar water you could feed the bees some of their own honey which would be more nutritious (and less processed.) If you are collecting from multiple hives, be sure to label since you should feed the bees only honey from their own hive. 

The Harvest

We pulled out each frame to see how much honey it had, we took frames that had about 95% capped honey. If you decide to take that frame, make sure you brush off (with a bee brush or a soft brush) the bees on the frame back into the hive. We then put each frame into a large plastic tote with a lid to keep the bees off of it and also any wasps that may be interested in the honey. When we brought them inside, we made sure we didn't have the windows open since we would most likely get some panicked bees concerned we were robbing. 

To start we scrapped all of the wax off of the frame with a uncapping scratcher. We put all the wax into an old ice cream pale to make lip balm with later. We were sure to do this work over some baking trays to collects any sticky drips. 

Once the wax was scraped off we placed the frames inside a honey extractor. The extractor holds two frames at a time - you insert them vertically and then close the lid. A hand crank causes the frames to spin quickly and the centrifugal force pulls out the honey from the frame and flows down to the bottom of the extractor. There is a valve at the bottom that can be opened and allows the honey to flow out into a container.

We transfered our honey to a collection of glass jars and we had tons! 

Afterwards we returned the empty frames back to the hive to be filled again by the busy bees. 

The two hives we harvested from were only 2 km away and look at the colour difference! The one on the left is from the Strathcona community garden and the one on the right was from the Mt. Pleasant neighbourhood.