Honey Harvest

Today I went to a honey harvesting class. The weather cooperated; it was a beautiful 75 degrees and sunny. The class was hosted at the home of a lady who has had her hive just under a year, so it was her first harvest. Our Bee Guy came out to show us the ins and outs of harvesting, and it was really nifty.

First, the lady's yard was really, really awesome. It was a fairly small city lot on a great corner, but she had it so completely tidy and filled with everything fun I could have spent all day exploring it. She had a great little sitting area next to her detached garage...


And a really fantastic chicken coop, with a large walk-in door in the "run" area as well as a regular people-sized door for the roosting/nest box area.


She also had some lovely espaliered apple trees out front, and some sweet plums, and several birdfeeders, a fountain, and a sweet cat that kept wandering around looking for attention until I think it had too close an encounter with a bee. Oops.

Our Bee Dude started off by talking to us about harvesting honey in general. He recommends harvesting when the weather turns warm in the spring, about the same time as all the plants begin to blossom, so the bees will be able to gather enough food to sustain themselves after you rob them of their stores.


At that point, he showed us his harvesting "equipment" and we had a general discussion of harvesting honey. He uses a long, flexible, serrated bread knife to separate the combs from the sides of the hives (and from one another if necessary). He has a pair of tongs for picking up any dropped comb bits out of the hive, and a potato masher for squashing up the comb for filtering. He also has a 5 in 1 drywall tool which he uses as a prybar to open up the tops of the hives and to pry apart the bars, which the bees glue down with propolis. His last tool is a large, soft paintbrush, used for brushing the bees off the extracted combs and off the sides of the hive when replacing the bars.



As for getting the honey out of the comb, he cuts apart and crushes the comb, then uses a combination of buckets with wire hardware cloth and then wire window screening as strainers, to allow the honey to drip through. I don't think there is a lot of equipment out there right now meant for harvesting top-bar style honeycomb; comb frames from Langstroth hives are fitted into a spinner, which centrifuges out the honey quite handily. The frames are then cleaned and replaced in the hive. With top bar hives, the entire comb is cut free. The bonus is that you get to keep and use the wax after you've strained out the honey. The problem is that you have to separate the honey from the wax!

Some of the folks in the crowd suggested using a cheese-press to squish the honey out of the comb, and I suspect that would be a good solution. A couple of other folks suggested hanging up a conical food-grade strainer, as one might use for jams or jellies or preserves, and letting that drip. One person said that wire window mesh didn't work for her, but I don't think she knew to spray the screening with water prior to beginning, as this helps break the surface tension and allows the honey to drip through more effectively. Even our main Bee Dude says his honey extraction is a work in progress, and we should all experiment to come up with efficient ways to extract it. One of the women said she got 100 ounces of honey out of one hive this spring, and about 30 of that was due to pressing the wax after she'd let the honey drip out as much as possible.

When Bee Dude opened the hive, first he removed the top. The bees hadn't sealed it down with propolis, so it was a fairly straightforward operation. Then he used his prybar to loosen a couple of the rearmost bars and remove them. They had been sealed down, but several had no comb at all, and one had only a little tiny portion of comb on it. He set four or five of them down on the grass, and then moved the one with the little starter comb to the back so he could work on the next ones up.



In theory, he should have been able to loosen the bar, then slide the knife down along the side to remove the anchor points where they attach 3 or 4 inches down the sides, and then pull the entire comb out. Well, not so much on this hive. It wasn't leveled when it was erected, and the bars were the old style with a thin "strip" down the middle instead of a completely triangular cross-section, so the comb wasn't straight. It had crossed over and welded to the neighboring combs on each side, and it was messy and ugly to cut it apart. He had to slide the knife between each pair of combs, and in doing so he ended up opening up much of the capped honey, spilling honey into the hive and coating (and thus killing) many bees.

In the end, he only removed two full bars of honey before deciding the hive had had enough poking for the day, and he told the owner he'd come back out to finish the job and help her put in the new type of bars and level out the hive.



He worked completely without protective equipment, and most of us were only a few feet from the hive. It was interesting to see the mood of the hive. At one point, when he removed the first full comb, they became a little agitated and the tone of the buzzing grew a little louder and the cloud of flying bees got a little bigger. It calmed down again after a few minutes. Our Bee Dude only got stung once, when sure enough one flew up his pantleg. Ouchie. But he had his hands in the hive, sometimes covered in honey, and he brushed the bees off the comb without upsetting them too much. Once the combs were cleared, he cut them from the bar (okay, one broke away and fell into the hive; he declared this about the biggest harvest disaster situation we could experience, and that we were probably lucky to be seeing it even though he didn't feel so lucky to be dealing with it!) Once the combs were in the bucket, he used the knife to cut open all the cells, and squashed it good with a potato masher, then let it filter through the mesh on the straining buckets.

One of the combs had cells filled with dark pollen, which he cut away separately. He suggested that if we encounter that, we could remove the pollen from the cells and use it as a nutritional supplement rather like flax seed is used. It sells for a lot of money at Farmers' markets, and is supposed to be good for allergies, especially when it's local pollen. I don't know much beyond that about, though I'm sure I'll learn soon!

He let all of us taste some of the honey as we were harvesting it. It was almost molasses-like, much richer and darker tasting than I'm used to from commercial honey, and even a lot richer than the raw honey I've been eating lately. I broke off a little piece of comb and chewed on that, and the wax was almost pure white once I'd chewed out all the honey; because it's not reused, it has less of the propolis and layers of older wax that make commerical beeswax yellowy. Neat!

So, now it's time to wait for the swarms. I asked Bee Dude (whose name is Will Dart, incidentally) how many people he had on his swarm list, and he said about 20. Some of the folks had reserved "farmed" bees at the local bee store, but they're all out for the season, so I'm just hoping to be able to get one of the swarms when they come available sometime in the next 4-6 weeks, as the weather warms. Then I hope for the best after I pour the little buggers into my nice, sturdy hive and wait!