The honey is in for the season, and it was far short of a bumper crop. Grant pulled off seven partially filled supers last week, and took a few hours to spin out roughly 100 pounds of honey. It's a far cry from last year when he struggled in October and November spinning out over 700 pounds from 23 very cold supers. There's always next year.
Harvesting honey starts in the early summer. When the nectar flow begins, Grant places the supers, the smaller boxes seen on stacks of hives, to collect the surplus honey from the hard working bees. During out best year in Kalispell, the bees filled a super - about 30 pounds of honey - in a single day. Keep in mind, this is an 1/8 of a teaspoon at a time. One hive produced 270 pounds during the summer. That's a lot of bee spit.
The bees dehydrate the honey to approximately 16% moisture level, then will cap it with a thin layer of beeswax. This end product will keep almost indefinitely. In the late summer or fall, once most of the honey is capped, Grant removes the supers. and blows the bees off with the Shop Vac. Any stragglers are sucked up at home so they don't end up in the honey.
When he brings the supers home, he scrapes the cappings off of the top of the honey to allow it to flow with a fork like tool. Some people use a heated knife to remove the capping from the frames, but we've found this takes away much of the honey, too. (The cappings wax will be fed back to the bees, and they'll clean up every bit of honey mixed in with it.)
The honey extractor is a long stainless steel tub with a motor that rapidly spins the inside arms. Grant places four frames vertically in the extractor, turns on the motor and hangs on. The honey is forced out of the frames and drains to the bottom. Once one side of the frames is clean, Grant turns them over and does the other side. Obviously, the process goes much smoother when it's warm outside, which is was this year making a short crop spin out even faster.
As the extractor fills, he pours the honey into five gallon buckets. There's still a considerable amount of beeswax and some bee parts in the honey so he'll filter it through cheesecloth before selling any. The "wet" supers - the ones that are recently drained of honey - are put back on the hives for a few days for the bees to clean up. They'll move any drops of honey left in the frames down to the main hives to add to their winter stores. We leave them 30 pounds of honey to make it through the winter, and keep an eye on them in case they need extra early in the spring... just before everything starts again.
