An early harvest

A hive that was started from a package this spring was getting too tall to work alone so I decided an early harvest was in order. Normally I would wait until September to harvest honey. There are two popular methods for getting honey out of a bee hive, one is to put a chemical into the hive that drives the bees down and away from the smell. Another method is to use a blower to blow the bees out of the boxes you want to take. I used a leaf blower to do this in the past and it does work but I wasn't happy with the results, the bees were upset.

My method for getting the honey out of the hive is to remove it one frame at a time. I then shake the frame about three times over the entrance of the hive which removes about 95% of the bees when done correctly. It also doesn't seem to upset them at all! I then use a brush to quickly brush off the few remaining bees. This also doesn't upset them when done correctly. At first I used the brush to slowly push the bees off of the honey, this got them quite upset. A quick flick with the brush though and they don't seem to mind.

I removed nine frames this way, leaving the tenth frame because the honey wasn't completely capped. Bees know to cap the honey cell when the honey has less than 15%-20% water in it, depending mainly on humidity. The reason they cap the cell with wax is to keep the honey dry, the bees remove so much water from the nectar when turning it into honey that it will actually draw moisture out of the air! A capped honey cell is airtight so the honey stays dry enough that no bacteria or fungus can grow in it. That is the reason why honey will keep forever, as long as it is kept in a sealed container.

In a commercial honey operation they will harvest any honey/nectar, even when the nectar isn't cured into honey yet. They put the honey into a "hot house" to evaporate off the water until it is under 20% moisture content and then they extract and bottle it. Smaller honey producers will instead choose not to harvest a frame of honey until it is at least 70% capped. Since I plan to enter this honey in the state fair I decided to only harvest fully capped honey to keep the moisture low. I also plan to avoid heating the honey because that also degrades the quality of the honey.

These nine frames are now sitting on a counter, if I wasn't going to harvest the honey from them yet I would put them in a freezer to make sure any wax moth eggs that are hiding on the wood frames didn't have a chance to hatch. Once I separate the honey from the wax I should end up with 40-50 lbs of honey.