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Saturday, June 22, 2013

Honey Harvest Part 2


I thought we were going to wait until today to extract the honey.  We got everything all set up (that takes a while) and Phil said “lets get started”.  I’m glad we did because we had some problems to work out like the motor on the extractor not working.  Everything went very smooth after Phil got the motor working.  We worked until about 11 (I think) last night and decided to finish it this morning.  Extracting didn't take to long this morning, the cleanup seemed to take forever!
We extracted about 34 frames of honey.  I left a lot of the frames to do later in the year.  There was a lot of uncapped  (not quite ready) honey that will be ready to harvest in the fall. 


When I pull the frames of honey from the hive I put them in a hive box and bring them to the garage.  Everything is cleaned and covered with these blue hospital tarps.  This keeps the garage clean as well as keeping the honey clean.

This is the inside of the extractor.  We put 4 frames of honey in and turn it on.  It spins fast and the honey is thrown out into the stainless steel drum

and out of the drum into a bucket with a filter on top.

There are dead bees, pieces of comb etc in the extracted honey.  The three filters on top of the bucket filter all of that debris out.

Phil is holding down the extractor.

This is a full frame of capped honey

I am using the scraper to pull the wax back and expose the honey


I found this extractor at an auction several years ago.  The only person bidding against me was a drunk guy.  He was telling me how much money he has and he was going to get it no matter what the cost (they are expensive brand new).  He was so drunk he didn't realize we were bidding on the extractor and I got it for $65.  I felt like buying that guy a beer.   LOL

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