Aside from the obvious gardening gains one can have due to the active pollination practices of the honey bee, when colonies are properly managed, honey is in the offing a couple of times a year.

Here in Northwestern Pennsylvania, I am in my fourth year of apiary management. In this article, I will share through explanation and photographic images, how simple it is to harvest honey.

Honey bees make more honey than they need for winter survival and at peak nectar flows in your geographic area, honey may be taken off in fairly large quantities. But how to get the honey from hive to honey bear jar?

First, some simple equipment:

I use small scale equipment, including a hand cranked stainless steel extractor. There are many styles and sizes out there, you can see this equipment at www.betterbee.com, or www.dadant.com . Next an uncapping knife, or fork (I used a fork in this demonstration). Then a tank with filters to put the honey into once you spin it out of the frames. And last, honey bears or jars to put the extracted, strained and settled honey into. You’ll also want to do something with the wax caps you remove from the comb to release the honey.

I prefer to take capped frames of honey from the hives on cooler days so when I uncap the comb, the honey moves relatively slow and is easier to control. No matter what you do, there will be plenty of sticky stuff to clean up.

On my hives, I put several supers (extra bodies with frames in them) on to collect the honey from the bees. I also put a queen excluder on below these added supers as this prevents the queen from laying eggs in the frames I want to collect honey from. The smaller worker bees travel through the excluders easily to fill the comb cells with honey.

I know when the honey in the frames is ready for harvest, when the cells are capped as shown in the photo. This capping is the honey bee method of preserving their stores for winter or lean months ahead. If the cells are full of honey, but not yet capped, then it needs to dehydrate more before it’s ready for long term storage or harvesting.

I remove the comb of capped honey in the frames… I use pierco plastic frames and that’s what’s shown in the photos. When I remove the full frames, I replace them with drawn comb in frames I already have handy from the last harvest so the bees can go straight to work filling those cells. I never remove the comb completely, as it uses up lots of honey bee resources to replace drawn out comb. The only wax I remove is the cap wax and this I set aside for use as candles or bee wax healing balms a friend makes for me in exchange for extra wax. Some people make candles or other crafts, but on the scale I manage bees, you wouldn’t get too many candles out of it.

Once I have removed the frames from the hives, I take them into a room that can be closed off from the bees… otherwise the bees would follow the honey smell and attempt to recover their losses.

In this closed off room, I have my hand cranked stainless honey spinner. My spinner has a basket that only holds two frames of honey at a time. After uncapping the honey comb in the frames, I put the frame and all into the spinner basket. By turning the hand crank, I get enough centrifugal force going that the honey completely spins out of the comb/cells. Then I have to stop the basket and turn the frames around, spinning out only one side at a time. Then I remove the empty comb still on the frames and set them aside and will later use them to replace frames full of honey when next I harvest from the hive.

I spin out honey from frame after frame until the honey is so deep in the bottom of the stainless tank, that I can’t turn the basket freely…

At this time, I set my plastic holding tank beneath the spigot of the stainless tank. On top of my plastic bucket, I have two basic filters, one course and one fine. The honey pours from the spinner tank through both filters and into the plastic holding tank. This will also serve as my storage tank until I pour from that into my final smaller containers. I leave the honey in the plastic tank/bucket for several days, even weeks to allow the bubbles to rise to the surface, leaving clear light warm golden honey below.

I leave my honey in this raw condition, no further heating or processing of any kind. Bits of wax caps and other debris are trapped by the basic filters shown. Some true raw honey enthusiasts don’t even use the fine filter I show here, as they want bits of pollen and materials they consider valuable when trying to reduce allergies by eating basic raw honey. Honey with particles in it will crystallize fairly quickly and will require heating to re-melt the honey to its liquid state.

How much honey did I get in one afternoon and from only two hives? Over 75 pounds!

Want to improve relations with your friends and neighbors? Give them free range eggs and wild flower honey! I can personally never keep up with demand. Keep bees, benefit fruits and vegetables with great pollination and then benefit personally by harvesting honey, it truly is a simple process and requires very few pieces of equipment.

Curious about RAW honey and potential health benefits it may contain? You may want to visit this site and let the learning begin:

http://www.reallyrawhoney.com/healthfacts.php (I do not personally endorse nor validate any claims made regarding RAW honey as a miracle cure)