Summer Honey Harvest 2012

Posted on July 22, 2012, 7:10 pm by Chris

This weekend I decided to harvest the honey supers on the Blue/Purple and Purple/White hive.

The bees haven't been bringing in any appreciable amount of new nectar in the last two weeks, so I decided now is as good a time as any to extract.

My dad brought our home-made extractor over to my house, and a few hours of pulling frames, decapping them and putting them through the extractor, we were ready to filter the honey.

 

One thing I wanted to try was chunk honey. This spring I used pure wax foundation in one of my supers so that I could make chunk honey.

Below you can see 4 jars and cut honey comb into them.

 Then later, once the honey had a chance to settle and the air bubbles floated to the top, I filled the jars the rest of the way with extracted honey.

 

Here's a side view of the jar where you can see the side profile of the honey comb.

 

Here's a quart jar of pure summer honey next to a jar of chunk comb.

 

Oh I almost forgot, before we bottled the honey, we put the 5.75 gallons of honey on a scale that read 76 lbs. 

Combined with this spring's honey harvest (3.75 gallons/48 lbs), we harvested a total of 9.5 gallons, or 124 lbs of honey from the backyard hives so far this year.



Comments For This Post: (3) | Post Your Comments! Hide The Comment Form
Mark Martin says...
Date:   July 23, 2012, 11:20 am

Very nice!  The cut comb sure does look great.  So, do you freeze all the frames before bottling because of wax moth eggs?  I seem to read conflicting reports of some people doing it and others not.  Maybe it has something to do with how the honey is extracted or if it is filtered or not?


Chris (Show Me The Honey) says...
Date:   July 23, 2012, 8:21 pm

I love the way it looks too. I'm not sure I want to open and use these jars, maybe just display them!

I use a couple of paint strainers that fit onto the top of the 5 gallon bucket to strain the honey before I bottle it to catch wax and "other particles".

When I did the chunk honey in the jar, I cut it fresh from the frame and right into the jar. Beekeeper Linda says on her blog that she does the same for chunk honey, and then freezes the jar once filled with liquid extracted honey, just in-case.

After reading about her technique, I decided to try it. I figure it's easier to find a couple of small jar-like-spaces in the freezer here and there than a whole frame at a time.

I don't know if freezing chunk honey submerged in liquid extracted honey is required, but it can't hurt.


Al Hildreth says...
Date:   August 2, 2012, 5:24 am

In the honeybee classes I have taken, one part talks about cut comb.  As long as all the comb is covered with honey, any wax moth eggs that may hatch are immediately killed from the honey.  They mentioned the acidity of the honey along with liquid that drowns then.

Of course, I am paranoid about wax moth larvae hatching in the small air space at the top, so I believe in freezing for 24 hours.  So I agree with freezing.




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