“It’s the most wonderful time of the year!”

One of our new hives this year took off early and gave us 8 full frames of honey. By far, 2019 was our best honey harvest, both in terms of quantity and quality!

A Labor of Love: Harvesting Honey

The extraction process takes a full day regardless if there are two frames or 20. Here’s a trip down the 2019 process

Equipment

In addition to sterilized buckets and tools, a pail of warm water, here are a couple key tools required for honey extraction:

Uncapping fork versus the hot knife. There’s always pros and cons for each tool, but lets get down to the basics: I prefer the uncapping fork for two key reasons: (1) the hot knife has the potential to burn the honey, no matter how careful you are moderating the heat. Trust me, just a little burnt honey impacts the flavor of the overall batch. (2) Using the uncapping fork gets right to the area that needs to be uncapped and extracted.

Extractor. Because we have a small operation, I have a manual hand-crank extractor. Four frames are the most I can spin at once and each set takes about 10 minutes to spin.

Straining. I use a Stainless Steel Double Sieve. ‘nuf said.

Tarps. Honey extraction is messy. Tarps make cleanup easier!

Wild Sprout Honey Extraction 2019 — Wild Sprout Honey Manual Extraction

Double Sieve — Double sieve makes honey processing easier

Quality

It’s important to validate the moisture so that it’s safe for bottling. The most difficult thing about testing the humidity level is just taking the picture