Honey Harvest-part 2

Once we got the supers home, the process of extracting the honey starts. Firstly you have to remove the cappings in order to release the honey. There are many ways you can do this but we find using a fork is the best, you have to angle the prongs just under the surface and work your way across the whole frame, then once one side is done you flip it over and do the other. The day being hot meant the honey flowed easily so we had to work fast to not loose too much honey from the frames.

Starting uncapping the frame from the bottom corner. We use baking trays to catch the cappings and the runaway honey

One side of a frame completely uncapped ready for extraction

This honey is much darker and thicker, this is from oil seed rape, known as rape honey it solidifies quickly in the hive, due to the weather it hasn't solidified but the difference is clear from the honey above

There is a distinct lack of pictures of the next part of the process due to the fact the uncapping stage is the stickiest and messiest part- there is no way of avoiding it. The frames are put into a tangential extractor and spun- this process means the honey is flung from the cells into the tank. The honey runs down the side and collects in the bottom. Once this is done the honey is poured from the tap into a honey collection bucket, it goes through two sieves to make sure there are no cappings in the final product.

Honey extractor- center with sieves and honey buckets to the side
photo from Thorne

The honey is then left to sit in the honey tank to settle, there will be natural separation of pollen from the honey which can sit at the top of the jars. We had to bottle some quickly without giving it this opportunity due to our honey tank being too small and we had to make room!

Honey Harvest part 3 will show the bottling process.