From Hive to Jar

I would like to begin today's blog entry by thanking everyone who has supported us here on Gael Glen Farm over the past weeks, months and years by purchasing our produce.  From first time buyers to our weekly repeat customers, we really appreciate you taking the time to buy our local wildflower honey and our free range, happy hen eggs.  We know how easy it is to just pick things up at the grocery store, so your loyalty and support really means a lot to us.  We love farming and producing fresh, wholesome food and half the fun is sharing it with our colleagues, friends, neighbours and family.  Thanks again for supporting our small family farm and please know that we really appreciate your business.

Our 2014 wildflower honey has been selling like hot cakes.  As such, we thought you might be interested to know how we get our honey out of the bee hives and on to the table where we stir it into our tea, spread it on our toast or use it in a myriad of other creative ways.

The honey extraction process begins just after Labour Day by placing an escape board on the hive between the honey supers (where the honey is stored) and the brood boxes (where the baby bees are raised).  The escape board allows bees to descend from the honey supers into the brood boxes but not to go back up again.  The idea is to get as many bees as possible out of the honey supers before we remove them from the hive.  This way we are not swarmed by angry bees when we try to take away the frames full of honey.  An escape board is placed on a hive in the late afternoon and it usually takes two days for most of the bees to leave the honey supers.  It helps when the nights are cold because this gives the bees an incentive to descend in order to keep warm by huddling together with the other bees in the brood boxes.  An escape board should not be left on a hive for longer than two days because then you risk the bees figuring out how to weave their way back through the maze and return to the honey supers.  Bees are smart creatures!

This is the bottom of the escape board.  It is a maze that does not allow
bees to return to the honey supers.

After all of the honey supers are removed from the hives, we begin extracting honey from the comb.  This is done first by removing the layer of wax the bees use to seal the honey into the comb - this is called uncapping.  These cappings are where most of the beeswax that we harvest comes from.

We cut the cappings off with a serrated knife.

These cappings are left to drain and then the wax is melted down
and the honey is filtered and stored.

After all the honey comb in the frames is uncapped, we place the frames in our 12 frame honey extractor.  We are so lucky to have this extractor on loan from a very generous farmer friend who had it gifted to him when he already had one.  This special piece of equipment makes harvesting the honey infinitely easier and we are so appreciative to be able to use it.

After the extractor is full of uncapped frames, we turn it on and it spins all of the honey out of the comb.

The honey then drips down the sides of the extractor and pours through the spout, through a filter and into the bucket we have placed at the bottom.  Check out the short video below of our first pour of the season.

We then transfer the honey into re-usable mason jars, label them and store them in the deep freeze.  Freezing raw honey is the best way to preserve it.

Our 250mL and 500mL jars.

We also cream some of our honey as well as harvest cut comb honey.  However, both of these are subjects for future posts.  Harvesting honey is a sticky but sweet endeavour.