Extracting honey from a freshly capped frame.

Earlier this evening I witnessed my first honey extraction and it was pretty cool. We have three beehives in work and tonight me and a couple of my fellow bee club members removed eight frames from one of the hives and extracted the honey.

Below is a video of a partially filled and capped frame being removed from the hive.

Here is a picture of one of the full frames we removed and extracted honey from.

Before you can get the honey out of the frame you have to remove the wax capping the bees cover the honey cells with. Historically this has been done with a sharp knife but the advent of the hot air gun has made the job a lot easier and far less sticky !!!

Check out this video of the wax being heated up using the low heat setting on the hot air gun. It was quite therapeutic watching the wax melt away and the honey start oozing out !!

Once we had removed the capping, four of the frames were placed in the honey spinning machine (there is probably a proper name for it but you know what I mean). The frames are placed against each side of the cage to keep the weight balanced before the wheel is turned and the honey is forced out of the frames by centrifugal force.

The frames are spun slowly at first before being placed the other way around and the direction of rotation reversed to extract honey from both sides of the frame.

Here's a photo looking down into the cage and frames. You can see the honey at the bottom

Once all the honey had been extracted it was time to put the honey through a couple of sieves to catch any wax. I liked this bit the best as it was the first time I was able to taste the honey properly.

As the honey fell through the sieve it made some nice patterns I thought.

I wish you could taste it, it was delicious.

Thanks for reading

Jim