Honey Harvest

Our former home, Sunwise Co-op, is blessed with about four beehives. When I lived there, we had two. Then we managed to capture a neighborhood swarm, which led to some PR issues that I won't go into here. And now I think there are 4 hives, one of which lives in a beebox we put together ourselves.

Yesterday we harvested the honey, a process that I have always enjoyed.

Here Betta is lighting some dried sage in the smoker. The smoke is used to calm the bees down while we're working with them.



Here two of the hives have had their lids and top supers taken off so that we can steal their honey. The bees are crawling all over the top of the hives, wondering what's happened to their home.

Once we get the supers inside, the frames are taken out and gently warmed in the oven (the oven is not turned on... the heat from the pilot light is enough). This helps the honey flow more freely, which speeds up the harvesting process.

We gently scraped off of the honeycomb on one side of two frames, and insert them into the hand cranked centrifuge.






Neil scrapes the caps off of the frames, and Clyde (the dog) watches honey drain out of the centrifuge.

Two frames go into the centrifuge at a time. The honey is flung out of the comb and drips down the side of the centrifuge. Once in a while, we open up the spigot, and let the honey drip through a fine mesh strainer to catch any last bits of wax. Then we poured the filtered honey straight into jars.

We ended up with 8 gallons of honey. Eight gallons of honey. Neil and I got to take home one gallon for ourselves. That's quite a bit for two people and a dog. I have some recipes up my sleeve, but I can't wait to come up with more uses for all this honey.

Thank you Sunwise! For some backstory on Sunwise bee culture and some beautiful up close photos taken by a truly fearless photographer, please go to microecos.