How to Harvest Honey

How should you go about harvesting your honey? This is a question that anyone with bees will ask and it’s an important one. You need to be careful about gathering honey from your hive because they will work hard to defend what is theirs. If you are too aggressive with them you could actually hurt your bees or they could hurt you.

You want to walk up to your hive from behind so that your bees don’t see you coming. You then want to make sure that you smoke the entrance of the hive. Once you have done this you are ready to open the top of the hive and smoke again at the top of the hive. Take off the inner cover (it may stick as your bees likely will seal it for protection).

Make sure that you carefully remove bees from the frames that you’re going to remove. You can use a soft bee brush which will help you brush the bees away without hurting them. Next, pull out your frames and replace them with empty frames ready for your bees to fill.

Put the lid back onto your hive and make sure you cover it back with your rock. This will prepare the hive for your bees when they wake up from the smoke. You’ll also be ready to pull the honey from your frames. You’ll need an uncapping knife or a fork to pull the wax seals off the honeycomb on your frame. Make sure you do this on both sides.

An extractor will pull the honey out of your frames and into a drum where it will be squeezed through cheesecloth so that you don’t have to worry about getting wax or dirt in your honey. That’s when you’ll be ready to use your honey for other purposes.