Honey : Harvesting Time!

By Mr. KYC | Beekeeper Diary | 18 May 2025

Hello fellow Cryptids!

With only one hive that survived the winter, the plan was to harvest some spring honey to finance one or two colonies by summer. But the plan change because there are no colonies to buy. Everyone accused a lot of losses like I said in my earlier post.

So the new plan is to take only half of the honey and let the bees multiply so that I'll have 3 to 5 healthy colonies before winter.

I took my time to harvest 7 frames out of 9 without using a smoker. When you use smoke, it stresses the bees, they think there is a fire, and so they begin to take honey into their stomach to flee (so you lose 1-2 kg). The smoke might also slightly perfume the honey. To be honest, I never used my smoker those last 10 years. If you're gentle and not afraid, most of the time the bees are just buzzing around. Sometimes it's just not a good day to mess with them... Smoke or not. And maybe you get stung, but the venom is a gift that you learn to like. Very healthy!

The most delicate part is to use a big brush to gently remove the bees from the honey frame without causing panic and attack. There is a fence that you can install 24 hours earlier to prevent the bees from returning to the upper hive where the honey is. So you don't need to manually brush them off. But it is not as fun.

Then you have two choice, use your hand to press the honey out of the wax frame or use an extractor. Never use heat because above 70° you lose the good stuff (that's why you must wait 5 minutes before putting honey in your hot tea...).

I use an extractor so I can reuse the wax frame and the bees don't need to rebuild it. You just need to use the crank to rotate 3 frames and make centrifugal force eject the honey from the wax. You just need to open the wax seal before like this :