Harvest Time

I was like a  little girl this morning, excited to finally harvest some honey! The OV hive had 4 full frames of honey but I left 2 additional frames that were only 1/2 capped and there were more partial frames not yet capped. We may get a second harvest this fall but I will probably leave these frames for the bees to feed on over the winter.

After reading various how-tos, I came up with my own, home-grown system: I covered the bottom of a nuc box with two layers of aluminum foil and used the inner cover (with the hole covered with tape) as a lid. This made it easy to hold and transport the frames while keeping the robbers out. I pulled one frame at a time and simply brushed away the bees while walking away from the hive.

Since there were only 4 frames to extract, we worked on the back deck as I had been lead to believe that extracting honey can be a mess. In reality, things went quite smooth. I used a serrated-edge bread knife to cut away the cappings and did this over a cookie sheet that has a lip on it, commonly known as a jelly roll pan. The husband spun the frames and we were both amazed at how easily warm honey spins out of the cells.

Once the honey was extracted we covered it, along with a strainer full of cappings, and left them both out in the sun to allow the heat of the afternoon to aid the honey in draining and straining.

The honey was strained through a fine strainer into a storage bucket and it will sit tonight to get most of the air bubbles out before filling it into jars. The honey looked light on the frames so we were surprised with the dark golden color of the extracted honey.

And the smell is out of this world! The scent is pure honey and the taste is so much sweeter but not sickingly sweet. Too bad there is precious little as I'd love to share some with everyone who has supported our adventure! A medium sized frame weighs about 4.5 lbs each when full of honey and these four frames produced about a gallon of extracted honey.