We’ve had bees on our property for over a decade, and currently have two hives. In good seasons, each hive can produce over 80 pounds of excess honey (healthy bee colonies harvest and store more honey than they consume). I filter, package, and sell this honey locally; customers report that it’s great at managing allergy symptoms!
This is the equipment I use, counterclockwise from upper left:
- A stainless steel bowl
- An uncapping knife, to cut the wax caps off the honeycomb
- A honey extractor
- A solar oven
Pictured underneath the equipment are boxes from a beehive — a short box, on the left, called a honey super, and a taller box on the right, which is typically called a deep. These are filled with removable wooden frames that the bees build honeycomb inside. This honeycomb can contain eggs, larvae, pollen, nectar, honey, or nothing.
In beekeeping, the honey is typically only collected from the honey supers. The queen bee, which is slightly larger than the other bees, is excluded from the honey super with a special barrier that is large enough to let worker bees through but too narrow for the queen to pass through. The queen is typically confined to the deep section(s) of the hive, so eggs can’t be laid in the honey supers.
Pictured above left is a frame full of honey. A special knife is used to cut the beeswax caps off each cell in the honeycomb. The beeswax is collected and harvested — it has tons of uses — and the honey in each cell is then free to flow out.
The frame with uncapped honeycomb is then put into the honey extractor. This extractor can hold two frames at once, and when the hand crank is cranked, the frames spin around inside the extractor, flinging the honey out of the honeycomb and onto the inner wall of the extractor. After spinning the frames for several minutes, they’re removed, flipped over, and the process of cutting the caps and spinning out the honey is repeated for the other side.
A fully loaded frame holds several pounds of honey depending on the size of the frame and how completely the bees have filled it.
The honey can be removed by opening a valve on the bottom of the extractor. I strained it through a colander to filter out any bits of beeswax, propolis, or other remnants, and collected the filtered honey in a bucket below.
The last step is to bottle the honey and enjoy it!