Honey!!!

Yesterday I extracted my 2016 honey crop.  Friends and neighbors, John and Brenda came along and helped.  They are new to bee keeping and wanted to experience the extraction process.  I was very happy for the help.

My girls were very busy this summer, which led to 87 pounds of honey for us to use throughout the coming year.  The extraction process is quite interesting.  Thankfully, Jim and Jenine Miller open their honey house to fellow bee keepers and lend their expertise and equipment.  They are both so knowledgeable about everything honey bee!  John, Brenda and I learned so much, in addition to having a great time, and coming home with a whole bunch of honey!

When we arrived at Miller's Homestead Honey, we loaded the honey supers in to the hot room.  This room is heated to 100 degrees to ensure that the honey is warm enough to flow.  We leave the boxes in this room for 30 minutes.

One box, at a time, we take the boxes out and Jim runs them through the hot knife capper.  This machine cuts the wax caps off the honey comb cells.  The bees seal each cell to keep the honey from running out in the hive.  The cap wax is the light color that you can see on the frame that is about to go through the machine.

You can see that the white caps are removed.

Sometime you have to run a scraping tool over the frames to make sure all the cells have been released of the wax cap.

Capped frames go in to these holding bins, nine frames per bin.

This is the wax that comes off the frames.  Jenine uses this wax to make all kinds of cool bees wax items that she sell in local markets.

This is Jenine loading frames in to the extractor.  

The extractor holds 18 frames.

Once the frames are loaded, the lid goes on and the motor turns on and the frames begin to spin.  Centrifugal force brings the honey out of the cells.

As the frames are spinning, honey is draining out of the bottom of the extractor.

We take a tiny sample and check the moisture content of the honey with this device.  

I can't remember what my number was, but it was good!  You look through the end that is black, and you see a scale that indicates the moisture level.

 

The next test is to determine the color of the honey with this scale.  It looks like a paint chip wheel!  We had Brenda determine the color because she is the best at color!!

The honey is double strained once it comes out of the extractor. There is a fair amount of wax left in the honey, which is strained out with this process.  

Beautiful honey, in a five gallon bucket, ready to go home.