Hey guys, just last week I harvested my first batch of honey for the year! It is a long process, but I will try to share it with you. The first thing I had to do was get the honey off of the hives. To do that I removed the lid and the inner cover and replaced them with fume boards and then used smoke (under the boards) to get the bees to go down to the bottom of the hive. After I did this to chase as many bees out of the boxes that I could, I used a leaf blower to blow the rest of the bees out. Once the boxes were bee free I loaded onto the back of my truck and took them to the honey house on my mentor’s property on the Putnam County/Defiance County Line.
Once I got there the process began to remove the honey from the combs and put into buckets for later packaging. The extraction process starts by cutting off the wax capping on both sides of every frame. To do this, I use was is called a hot knife (an electric knife that has an internal heater to allow it to slice through and melt the wax cappings like butter). I then placed the frames into the extractor. The extractor holds 20 frames at a time. Once switched on, the extractor spins the frames causing the honey to be flung out to the sides. It then drains to the bottom. Once there was enough honey in the extractor I open the valve at the bottom and drain the honey out into a straining bucket. This allows me to strain any bits of bee, wax, or any other debris that was inside the honey.
Once clean the honey was drained from the strainer and placed into 5 gallon buckets I loaded up my vehicle for home. I took the empty honey supers back to my hives in my bee yard and hopefully they will be full again in a few weeks for a second harvest. Once home I packaged up some of the new honey for several honey orders and delivered them! Overall the entire process took 4+ hours, but it was all worth it in the end because I ended up with almost 200 lbs. of honey to bring home!
