Harvesting Honey

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Hi. I’m Jake. In this video we’re going to be talking about harvesting honey. Typically you would harvest honey in June, after the summer heat has caused the wildflowers to stop blooming. OK, let’s get started.

First thing I want to do is put on my veil, because the bees can get a little bit excited here when we’re taking their honey. They bring in more than what they need for the winter, and that’s what we’ll be harvesting today.

We’ll want to give them some smoke. OK, what I’m going to do here is I’m going to check for the empty bars here. When I tap on these bars, they sound pretty solid. I want to find the last bar in the hive. Now these back here sound a little bit more hollow, so there’s probably a very small or no comb on this one.

When the bees bring in the nectar from the field, it’s typically somewhere between 70% and 80% moisture. And they store it in the cells here. And as they’re putting it in the cells, they’re also fanning their wings over this surface of the cells. And at the entrance of the hive, this dehydrates the honey down to 17% moisture.

After they’ve dehydrated the honey down to 17% moisture, they put a thin wax capping over each cell. This is kind of like the lid on a canning jar. It’s just their way of storing it.

This is very important to note. This honey down here is not all the way dehydrated. And if I harvest that, what will happen is it will ferment. So the way I know it’s ready to be harvested is when at least 3/4 of the comb has these caps on each cell.

So I’m looking for honey that’s ready to be harvested. Here we go. We’ve got a comb here that’s ready to be harvested. See, the majority of this here it’s all capped off. We’ve got a few cells over here, but that really won’t hurt the honey.

When harvesting honey out of the top of our hive, it’s very simple. All you need is a bowl and a cloth to cover the combs, a knife for cutting the combs off the bars, and a brush to brush the bees off the combs.

OK, we’re ready to get started here. I’m going to brush these bees back into the hive. They get a little excited at this time, so we’ll want to give them a little smoke.

OK, now we want to cut the comb off of the bar and into the bowl. One of the most important things to do is remember that the bees are going to build another comb on this bar here. So we’ve got to leave them a little bit of comb. That’ll tell them where to build their next comb. We’re going to cut it off here right into the bowl.

We’ll give that back to the bees to start building another comb. And if we don’t cover it up, they’ll start to come back to this comb to take the honey back to the hive. Let’s see if we’ve got any more to harvest here. Let’s give them a little smoke. They get a little excited when you start brushing them.

Now one of the things we’ve got to remember is that honey is the bees’ food. And they’ve stored this up so that they can make it through the winter. They brought in much more than they needed, so that’s why we were able to take some of this.

So we don’t want to take too much. We’ll leave them some. On an average year, I leave them about three combs, three full combs of honey. We’ve got some more comb to take.

This particular honey came from sunflowers and bee balm. It’s a flower. The ranchers call it horsemint, but we call it bee balm because it brings in so much nectar.

The other thing we want to watch out for is we don’t want to take any combs that have any of the young bees in them. We want just pure honey. This is another good comb. We’ll leave them that one.

And here is their brood nest. So we can’t take any more honey off of this one. There’s the young bees going through the metamorphosis. And they’ve encircled it with honey. This is what they’ll feed these young larvae as they’re maturing.

Typically your bees will have their brood nest here in the front. A brood nest is where the bees go through their metamorphosis. That’s where the queen typically is. She lays her eggs in the comb and they hatch out. The bees feed them the honey and the pollen.

Bees typically have 10 to 15 combs of brood. And then after that, that’s where they begin to store their honey. So I know that back here, that’s where the honey is going to be. I’ve been managing this hive through the year. And I’ve been watching them store up all their honey back here. So back here is where I’m going to take out the honey.

Your average top bar hive is going to produce anywhere from three to five gallons. That’s a very good productive year. In Texas, our years can vary greatly, last year being very dry and this year being a little wetter. We had a lot more rain so we have a lot more flowers blooming. The more flowers we have, the more nectar, the more honey.

Throughout the year we’re going to be managing the hive in order to provide them with whatever they need to bring in this honey. If they need more space, we’ll increase the size of the colony by moving this divider board back here.

We’ll move the divider board back to give them more space or decrease it in the wintertime. But one of the big things we need to watch for while managing our hive is for crooked combs, especially when they start bringing in lots of honey.

They get excited, and so they draw out the combs thick on once side. See this bulge here? They built the comb a little bit thicker right here. What that does is it causes the comb adjacent to it to be built crooked also.

See how it’s crooked here? That’s where the other comb was getting wider. So an important thing to do is to straighten that out. They’ll fix up all the damage I’ve done here. And put it back in.

Bees always build their combs an inch and 3/8 from center to center apart. And so therefore, by correcting this crooked comb here, it’s going to make the bee space between the combs a little too tight. So they’ll correct that bulge. They’ll eat away the wax and make this comb that was thick thin again.

OK, let’s go extract the honey. Here we’ve got our extracting equipment. Extracting honey from the top bar hive is very simple. All you need for extracting equipment is a potato masher, some cheese cloth, and any bucket will do. I like this bucket here because it’s got a spigot on the bottom of it. And after I’ve extracted the honey, I can pour the honey right into a jar.

We’ll take this cheesecloth and we’ll stretch it over the top of the bucket. I double it up so it’s a little stronger. And take a piece of wire and secure it real good. The honey’s heavy, so the cheese cloth can easily fall out of there. That’s not a very nice situation.

OK, it’s optional to do this inside, but you’ll definitely want to do it a good ways from the hive. The bees worked very hard all year to get this honey stored in the hive, and they’re not going to give it up very easily.

So here I am. I’m securing this wire real tight. That’s the first thing I’ll do. And then the second thing I’m going to do here is I’m going to start mashing this comb up. That liberates the honey out of these cells.

You want to really mash it up real good. You probably already have your extracting equipment. If you make mashed potatoes, you will. So you’ll want mash this comb up until it’s basically like a crumble.

Now we’ll take this whole honey mixture and we’ll pour it into this bucket here. The cheese cloth acts as a strainer, keeping the comb and the wax on the top and the honey will go down to the bottom.

That’s the nice thing about the top bar hive here, is that all your equipment is just very simple. You don’t need a lot of it. Mmm, smells good.

Now you’ll let it sit for about a half hour. And all the honey will drain down to the bottom. And it’ll be ready to bottle and eat. The wax that’s left in the top of the cheese cloth can be used for candles, soaps, lip balms. Around the family farm, we find uses for it almost anywhere.

Now that the honey is strained through the cheesecloth here, we’re ready to bottle it up, and can put it in jars or whatever we want.

Honey will last indefinitely, unless you eat it. Here recently, they’ve taken honey out of the pharaoh’s tombs in Egypt and it was still good. Honey naturally crystallizes, but that’s not a problem. All you have to do is put it in hot water and it’ll re-liquefy.

Keep your honey at about room temperature. Keep it in the house somewhere. But this is ready and good to go.