Extracting Honey with Roy

August 16, 2011

I met Roy, a local hobby beekeeper during a recent garden tour on our property.  He was interested in our bees and mentioned that if I wanted to learn about extracting honey that he would be willing to assist me.  At that time I thought that my own extractor would get here in time and wouldn't need his assistance.  However, it turned out that my extractor would not arrive until September and I called him up to throw myself upon his mercy.  Roy was only too happy to help.  Roy is retired and has turned his little bee hobby into a growing business.  He started with one hive and now has 16...most of the hives are in Aylmer on his brother's property but he has four hives here in London in his own yard.  He is starting to sell his honey and other products.

We chose a sunny day to do the extraction and I took part of the day off work.  It was a beautiful day and Roy was sitting waiting for me ready to go.  He had brought his own smoker, a blower, some boxes to put the frames into for transport and his bee suit. We were strangers with only beekeeping in common and we were going to spend an entire day together.  A daunting proposition.

We went into the beeyard and chatted a bit about how we wanted to work and then started.  

Getting ready

We decided to start with Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons and as it turned out, queen of honey production too as it turned out!  Roy had a battery driven blower that he wanted to use to blow off the bees from the frames.  Roy quickly realized that my bees are very gentle and didn't need blowing.  After the first frame we both switched to brushes and brushed all the bees off.  Roy used a natural bristle paint brush and I used a natural bristle drafting brush. Both worked.  

First fully capped frame

In Hippolyta we found 14 frames of fully capped honey available for the taking.  After brushing off each frame we placed it in a box with a lid so that the bees wouldn't try to go back to it.  The bees were great while we worked on Hippolyta and Roy and I worked really well together.

We finished Hippolyta and then moved the boxes full of frames to Roy's truck.  We then opened up Queen Elizabeth I.  She had 10 frames of capped honey and we went through the same procedure with her.  Generally the bees were uninterested in what we were doing but one found a weak point between Roy's glove and sleeve and stung him through the cloth.  This was the only sting of the day.  Sweat was pouring down our faces and fogging our glasses but I found it rather comforting to share these difficulties with a fellow beekeeper.  We finished Elizabeth and got out of our suits to share a welcome glass of lemonade on our deck.  I showed off my gorgeous food grade buckets that I bought  here in London.  Bill had installed honey gates bought on-line from dancing bee apiaries.  Roy was suitably impressed...and envious!

Gorgeous honey buckets

Loading up the boxes at the truck.

The whole process of taking all the frames from the hives and clearing them of bees took us about 1 1/2 hours.  Roy headed home and we had a bit of lunch and then I went to Roy's house with buckets for honey and wax.  The next step in the process would be extracting the honey from each frame.  Roy has an extractor that can handle two frames at a time.  It is a hand turned extractor.  Roy is lucky to have an extra kitchen in which to do his honey work in.  It has a fridge, stove, lots of room and most importantly, a double sink to clean up in...honey is a sticky business.

Two frame extractor with bucket and strainers

Before we can extract the honey we must take the wax off of the cells.

Education moment (yawn):  Foraging bees bring nectar back to the hive and give it to house bees who change it from complex sugars to simple sugars by adding invertase to it.  The house bees put this changed substance into the wax cells.  The nectar is about 80% moisture when it arrives and needs to be ventilated to a moisture content of about 17-18% before it is considered honey.  The bees do this by whirring their wings...from outside the hive as well as inside it...that's where the buzzing comes from.  They are constantly ventilating to either warm up the hive or cool it down to 30 degrees.  Once the honey is the right moisture content, the house bees cap the cell with a thin layer of wax.  After a frame of honey has about 80% capped cells on it, it is ready to extract.  If a frame has too many uncapped cells in it, the honey will be too full of moisture and will ferment.  

Back to our extracting adventure!  The wax on the cells can be taken off in a number of ways.  Roy is a creative beekeeper and accidentally discovered that he could melt the wax with a heat gun.  It is extremely slick.  We took off the wax on one side each of two frames and put them into the extractor which is really a large centrifuge with a geared turning handle on top.

Melting the cappings

One side completely melted

Melted wax with honey and debris

Cappings from the cells

The frames go into two baskets in the extractor.  A few spins of the handle and the frames come out.  The other side is melted and back into the extractor it goes.  We then inspected the frames to see if all cells were emptied.  Any cells that were still capped we opened with the capping scratcher and then it all got spun again, once each side.  It is a time consuming  process.  The opening of the cells with the scratcher gives us some wax from each frame and we scraped that into a pot. Once all the frames were done, we ended up with a bunch of wax scrapings ready to melt.  Roy melted it down so that the wax would separate from the honey and the debris and I could take it home to melt it down once again.  I was excited about the beeswax since I know that the ladies in the wardrobe at work would be able to use it to strengthen their threads and also to keep the thread from tangling.  I am not particularly interested in crafts but the idea of the beeswax having a practical purpose is appealing to me.

Honey flowing from extractor through 2 strainers into bucket

72 lbs!!!

Frame going into extractor

We extracted 72 lbs of honey from the frames!  Each of my beautiful buckets was 1/2 full of incredible golden honey.  24 frames with 3 lbs of honey on each one...the math that I was told to expect was indeed correct.  After the lengthy clean up, I headed out with the precious honey and the empty frames.  I was at Roy's for about 3 1/2 hours including a little tour of his beeyard.  As soon as I got home I gave the empty frames back to the bees.  I know that they will set to work immediately to clean out the wax cells and repair any that I wrecked to make them totally pristine.  Then the foragers will start to fill them again with nectar.  There are still some weeks of summer left for honey production.  There may even be another harvest in September...eeek....as long as I leave about 60-80 lbs in the hive for over-wintering.


Of course, the first thing Bill and I did was taste our honey and then pull our first bottle of 100% pure honey made by urban bees.  It has a flavour of sage! Probably from that patch of sage in my garden I talked about earlier.  We are very proud and here are pictures of Bill pulling that first bottle and a picture of our beautiful first bottle of honey.

After the bottling I decided to melt the bit of wax that we collected.  I  put it into egg cups to make small chunks of beeswax for the wardrobe to use.  The wax smells sweet like honey and has a lovely warm yellow colour.  It's almost good enough to eat!


So that is the extracting adventure.  I learned so much and loved being with another beekeeper while I worked.   All in all, it was a lovely day and extremely fulfilling.  Now for the bottling, labeling and best of all, eating!  Yummmmm.