Honey Extraction

This article takes you through my experience with collecting honey from a local hive. Detailing how the project started, my experience with it and the surprising transferable skills and knowledge gained. 

Key Summary

• Honey needs to have between 17-20% water for it to be the right taste and consistency

• Bees wax seals off each of the hexagonal compartments, don't scrape too deep when removing or you'll loose honey

• Each hive will need to keep 20kg of honey for the winter periods

• Bees create bees wax, honey, royal jelly, propolis, bee bread, bee pollen and venom - we use them all in different ways.

How the project started  

Bee's are super interesting creatures and as humans we could definitely learn a thing or two from them when it comes to resource management and community effectiveness.

There are 3 main types of bee in a hive which all provide a specific function, allowing the community to survive.

Each hive has it's own personality which is dictated by the queen bees behaviour. As beekeepers it's important to only take the excess honey, as the hive will still need to use the honey as their own food supply to survive the winter months.

You might notice that the lifespan of the 3 types of bee vary quite significantly.

Worker bees have the largest range. During the summer months their collective lifespan plummets as they have to leave the hive more frequently to gather pollen, therefore exposing themselves to more risk. During the winter months they can survive much longer, with less physiological strains on their bodies and decreased external risks as they stay longer in the relative safety of the hive.

The hive works on a very efficient, community first structure. which can come at a steep cost. Each Autumn poor Drone bees are evicted from the hive as their reproductive use within the colony is no longer needed.

Did you know a bee will make 1 teaspoon of honey throughout it's lifetime!

You might have also noticed that the stingers of the Queen and workers differ in shape. The barbed nature of the worker bees mean that when they sting a mammal they will die instantly whereas the queens barbless stinger means she can survive that form of defence.

My Experience

A family friend of ours and local beekeeper/ honey provider, Annabel Lewis offered to show my brother Mark and myself how she extracts honey from the hive. For this project the hive was already 'Bee-less' so the golden good stuff was all ready for us to start extracting!

To start with we needed to remove the wooden frame in which the honey was stored. to do this you need to gently prize open each frame using a J-type hive tool and carefully lift out the frame, which supports the honeycomb structure where the bees store their honey.

The Frames need to have both sides filled with honey for us to start collecting, luckily for us most of Annabel's bees had been hard at work and we had lots of frames to choose from!

Bee's store the honey in each hexagonal cell and then seal it off with beeswax to stop the honey from escaping.

To extract honey we need to gently remove the beeswax cap so that we can go on to collect and store it.

You could use a knife or an uncapping tool' as shown in the images above, which has long prongs you can prise it off with.

It's a very therapeutic process and the gooey honey stays mostly in it's cell when you uncap the opposite side of the frame.

Once uncapped you can move the frames to the centrifuge, this piece of equipment will spin the honey at fast speeds using the centrifugal force and gravity to lightly spray the honey to the side of the container and allow it to drip down and pool at the bottom.

It's important at this stage to ensure the frames are balanced as without an equal weight distribution the machine can rock quite a bit.

Once spun and you can see that most of the honey has been removed from the frame you can un-tap the bottom of the centrifuge and allow the raw honey to run out.

This is then poured into a bucket which contains 3 filters, this will remove some of the beeswax, pollen and even the occasional bee leg that might got caught up in the honey mixture.

The taste and consistency will change depending on the type of bee and the predominant pollen collected. This batch tasted incredible.

Once filtered it's ready to be jared and sold!

Since finishing the project I have a new appreciation for bees and really want to continue to learn more. There are plenty of courses, books and online resources that take you through both the technicalities of beekeeping but also give deep insight into the way in which they live.

Special thanks to:

Annabell Lewis: Backwell's very own Queen Bee, for both her time in teaching me and my brother more about honey extraction but also her ongoing work as chair of the bee society and her work with the Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA UK) in monitoring the insects and wider threats such as the African hornet, distinguishable by it's red legs) an invasive species that threatens our already declining number of bees.