This summer we were able to pull a bit of honey off of one of the hives. One of the hives had about three honey supers on it this year in total. By the middle of July we were able to pull of just under two of the supers with full frames of honey. It is always amazing to see how much work that they can do over the period of a few months. The bees were able to build all of the comb in all three boxes and had just over half of them filled and capped ready for harvest. This means that they were able to build 30 frames of beeswax between the beginning of June and the middle of July, plus collect all the nectar, the pollen, and raise more bees.
Once we had the honey off of the hive the next step is to remove the honey from the cells. There are a lot of ways to do this. For me starting out the simplest and most inexpensive is called crush and strain. That means I remove the beeswax and honey as one, then I crush it to break the honey from the cells, then strain the honey from the wax. This requires nothing other than a sharp knife or spatula and a strainer.
It lets me easily and cheaply harvest the honey, but does require that the bees have to recreate the wax each year. There are reasons that this is a good thing since it means that new wax is built and likely has less contaminants than wax that has existed in the hive for years. The downside is that you are likely to harvest less honey since the bees have to rebuild. For now I actually am going to stick with this.
The other cool thing that I tried this year was to do cut comb honey. This when you take the honey comb and cut 4 inch squares out of it. The honey stays in the wax cells and you can simply use a knife or spoon to scoop some out onto toast, or place it on some cheese and crackers. It is quite tasty and you don't even notice the wax.
This year we had 12 cuts of comb and 30 jars of honey. So it was quite a nice little harvest for the second summer of beekeeping. My hope is to see what the fall will bring and if we can get a little more honey from the hives.
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