Yesterday we removed the honey supers from the bee hives. Our good friend Nancy helped us remove the honey supers and inspect the hives. So great to have such great help. Thanks Nancy!
Once we removed them from the hives we stored the full frames in storage totes.This keeps the bees away from the honey so we can process it in the garage without being hassled. We removed a total of 56 frames full of honey.
Today we extracted honey from some of the frames, 13 frames total.
We still have 2 more FULL totes of honey-filled frames.
We use a centrifugal honey extractor that can spin 4 frames at a time. Is works like a clothes dryer and spins the honey out of the frames and then we simply open the drain spigot and it flows out. We run the honey through a 2-stage screen to remove all wax pieces and debris.
We learned that using a small heater helps the honey flow faster and it filters better.
We collected about 2.5 gallons of honey so far, from about 1/4 of our honey frames. Should be a good year for honey!
Lastly we are separating the remaining honey from the wax cappings so we can use the bees wax for other uses; lip balm, candles, salve, etc.
We are looking forward to doing more honey extraction, and the best part will be bottling it up. Seeing all that golden honey ready to use makes it all worth it!
How about you? Who else loves honey? Have any of you worked with bees or harvested honey? Any tips or suggestions, we are still new and learning and welcome any suggestions to improve our practices.
Hope you are all enjoying your summer.
From the farm,
Michael and Karen
Looks like a successful year for you. Can you discuss how you know the amount to leave for the bees to survive? Will they continue to produce honey until hibernation? Thanks.
Hi Dee, we do an inspection a week or two prior to removing the honey supers from the hive. We take a look and see how much honey the bees already have in the lower two supers. A general rule of thumb for our climate is 80-90 pounds of honey. So as long as we see roughly 10 frames of honey in the bottom 2 supers, they should have plenty and we can take both honey supers off. Our bees have done great this year and had plenty of honey already!
I do bee-lieve you have enough to give your sister a jar or two. LOL! Good job Espalins. You will definitely be enjoying the fruits of your labor.
Of course, anytime!
Wow! It looks like you have the honey thing working really good now! Congrats on that. I love me some honey!
I need to get over to the land of mild and honey and buy some of both!
We have plenty. The goats are slowing down, but still doing well. Stop by anytime!
that was supposed to be land of milk and honey….I’ll be by soon!
Hi Karen and Michael! This is Kimberly from KimRidge Farm (it’s been sold though).
Your honey harvest is so impressive! Congratulations on your success! I’ve always been very ambivalent about bee keeping. And I am so happy to see how well you are doing. Good job!
Out of curiosity, approximately how many pounds of honey comes out of 56 frames in your neck of the woods?
Hope everything is well!
Hi Kimberly, Very good to hear from you.
We bottled over 50 quarts of honey, and at roughly 3lbs/quart, our total would be north of 150lbs of honey for the season.
It is definitely a lot of work, and not really cheap to get started. But now that we have the gear and a pretty good process for filtering and bottling the honey, it is totally worth it.
Hope all is well with you and your family!
Michael