Taking Honey From The Hive With A Honey Extractor

The most exciting part of the bee’s year, for the apiarist, is the harvest. When a new colony has been established, the beekeeper must usually wait a year for the first harvest so there’s no need to invest in expensive equipment like a honey extractor yet! A colony that has been introduced to a new hive has to build up the colony’s strength in its new environment. This means that the colony only produces enough honey to survive the first season. If the beekeeper takes that honey, the bees may not have enough to make it through the first winter. The second winter is a different story.

In many parts of the United States there are two main flows of plant nectar. When flowers bloom in the spring, bees are out collecting nectar. That’s the first flow and it usually goes right through July. The second flow is in the fall, beginning in September and ends abruptly with the first hard frost. It’s possible to collect honey after both flows but most beekeepers wait until fall.
A healthy and established hive can produce from 30-60 pounds of honey per year! The best day to harvest this honey is a sunny day where there’s little wind. First the beekeeper must drive the bees away from the hive. This can be done in several ways. A few puffs of smoke from a smoker will calm the bees and move them down in the hive.

Another way to keep the bees out of the way is to use an escape board. This will allow the bees to move down into the hive but not up. Escape boards are installed underneath the super that the beekeeper is planning on removing. The beekeeper needs to do this a day ahead so that the bees have time to move down in the hive.

Other keepers use a chemical such as Bee Go or Bee Robber that smells just awful. The bees, responding to the bad odour, are driven out of the super. The chemical is put on a special board called an acid board, or a fume pad, and placed under the cover.

A bee blower can also be used to blow the bees away from the super.
The beekeeper will have set up his “honey house” and made it ready for the honey extraction. It will be a clean room that’s well screened so that bees can’t come back for their honey. There will be lots of plastic down so that the beekeeper doesn’t get honey everywhere.

The beekeeper then takes a wheelbarrow to the hive and pulls the frames of honey and takes it back to the honey house where he extracts the honey using a honey extractor.

The combs are cut with a hot knife and set into the honey extractor. The honey extractor, using centrifugal force, separates the honey from the comb. The extracted honey is strained through cheesecloth or nylon and collected in a clean, five gallon bucket. It’s then allowed to sit for a while so that any other impurities can rise to the top. When the honey is pure and clean it can be poured into honey containers.

Finally all the messy equipment and the honey house can be cleaned with hot soap and water and the harvest is done for the year.

By: Nancy Ketner

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Nancy Ketner has been fascinated by bees for as long as she can remember. She started BeekeeperCentral.com as a free resource for others who wish to explore Beekeeping as a hobby. For more information on how to use a honey extractor come to Beekeepercentral.com and sign up to a FREE mini e-course in Bees and Bee Craft. Do come on over to BeekeeperCentral.com to get your FREE mini Beekeeping Course in Bees and Bee Craft.