Hand-Extracting Honey

Our bees produced enough honey this past year to hopefully feed them through the winter. This was our first year with them so we expected it to go this way :)

However ... a woman at the bee meeting asked if we would like to extract some honey for her and said she would give us half. I got on youtube and saw a video right away about using two five-gallon buckets and a five-gallon bucket paint strainer -- it looked super easy, so we went to Lowe's immediately and got a few new buckets (didn't feel like cleaning out nasty old ones) and the strainer (found in the paint department; they also have a 1-gallon size, which seems like it would be great for cheese making).

At home we took the cleanest old bucket we had and sawed off the bottom half of it. The half-bucket sits quite nicely right on top of the whole bucket, and this offers elevation for the strainer so it does not get in to the honey that's dripping down. It got a little heavy, so we used binder clips and clothes pins to help it stay in place.

(the pictures were not very good ... sorry! I might look and see later if Brianna has better ones on her camera as all of these are from my phone)

So, the process was:

1) Scrape the caps off the comb. Our handy "Back to Basics" book suggested using two large knives kept warm in a bowl of hot water. Wipe the knife dry before using it!

Corban scraping the caps off with a warm knife.

2) Scrape the honey and comb off the frame. We have a baker's scraper that worked perfectly for this!!! Also, it really helped that 5 of the 6 frames had a plastic base. The other one was not as easy to scrape off.

Baker's scraper :)

3) Squish the honey out of the comb as best as you can. The guy in the video I watched did this by hand. We actually forgot to do this step so we are going to do it later with what is left after straining it.

4) Pour the scraped and squished honey and comb into the prepared net/strainer.

Binder clips and clothes pin help hold it in place.

  5) Pour the strained honey in to jars.

YUM!

We are so thankful for the free honey!! This was pretty easy work ... and we learned a lot too. In all we got a gallon or so of honey off of 6 smaller frames; the woman only wanted a small jar but we gave her a quart.

Now we are hoping our bees produce enough honey for us to have some next year. We lost one hive because of pesticides :( :( but the other one seems really strong. We are hoping they make it through the winter and all the dangers it can bring.