Harvesting Honey

This is how we go about harvesting honey

We order The bees here in Minnesota and then drive to the place to pick him up.

When you receive your bees they will come in a package of 10,000. You will open up the top and remove the tin can that has their food for traveling in them

Your queen will come in her own box in the package of bees. This way the bees that are in the package have time to get acquainted with the queen. If they don't have proper time to get acquainted they will kill the queen.

You first remove two frames from the hive normally there's 10 frames to a box. Then you will take the box that the queen is in and place it in between a couple of the frames. Before you put the queen in you remove the cork that's in the bottom of her box and there will be a piece of candy in there that will take them roughly 3 days to eat. Then the queen can move about the hive.

I wear a full tiveck painters suit to keep the bees off my body. You also where they helmet with the netting on it to keep them off your head and so you can see what you're doing

This is what happens when you're not wearing your safety equipment

These are just some of the formations they make in the hive

Here's some photos of what the bees do throughout the summer. When it gets real hot out they go outside of the hive and fan their wings to try to cool down the inside of the hive

This is called a queen extractor. This keeps the queen down in the lower boxes so she doesn't go lay eggs up where you want to harvest your honey from. The worker bees can fit through this rack but the queen is too large to do that.

You remove the frames out of the top box that's full of the honey. Bring them into the house please be sure you shut the door quickly so no bees can follow you in.

Once you bring the frames and then you take a heated knife and slice along the top of the honeycomb to get to the honey

This is a stainless steel drum that you can put four frames in and it spins around as you crank the handle. The inertia of this motion flings the honey out inside the drum and then comes out of valve on the bottom

This is a messy process but it's very worth it when you're all done

We was an old cast-iron sausage stuffer to squeeze the honeycomb and get every drop of honey that we can.

The end result is just some pure honey. It's what I do for fun and to help mother Earth out. It's a fun thing to do.