What to do with Dripping Honey Frames after Harvest

After the harvest, I let the bees clean up the mess. When I've done crush and strain, the frames are all drippy with the remains of the honey. I harvested six frames, so I took them out to the bee yard in the five frame nuc that I used to carry them into the house. (See the sixth frame riding on the top of the box!)

I had an empty 8 frame box waiting for me. I had left two frames on the hive because they were not fully capped.


Here's a closer view of the honey comb left after cutting the comb off of the frame. First the bees will clean up the dripping honey, storing it in comb they are currently filling. Then the bees will use this remnant of comb as a starter strip to build new wax in the frame, if they are so inclined.

Here the box is filled with six drippy frames and there is space for the two frames left on the hive. I put those two back in their spots and put the super back on the hive. Because I sometimes get a super of honey around the Fourth of July (who knows where they get the nectar??), I put the box under the inner cover and will check it again when I'm back from vacation.


Below is my harvest from these six frames. I also bottled four queenline jars for potential honey contest entries and gave my daughter and grandson who helped with the harvest each a queenline jar. Those six jars are not in this picture. So from six frames of honey I harvested 18.3 pounds of honey.



Ordinarily I don't use such a variety of jars for harvest, but this year the harvest looks meager. From a "bird in the hand" point of view, I wanted to make the most of this super, so I bottled some large bottles for family, some smaller bottles for gifts and those two cute "Muth" bottles just for fun.

They are topped with a cork and have embossed in the glass: "8 ounces pure honey" with a bee skep and bees flying all around. My friend, Julia, told me about these so I ordered a box to see how I'd like them.

First Honey Harvest of 2009

Here is my daughter Valerie with the first jar of honey harvested in 2009!

Today I harvested for the first time in 2009. I had two excellent honey helpers, my daughter Valerie and my grandson Dylan. We first cut the capped honey off of the frame and let the pieces drop into the prepared pan.


Then Valerie and Dylan crushed the honey comb with their pestles.

My job was to take the honey-laden silicon mat and scrape as much honey as I could off of it and into the filter bucket.

Dylan helped with that as well. We then put the filter buckets out in the Hotlanta weather to encourage the honey to filter through. They each took home a jar of their honey harvest.


To see a more detailed view of crush and strain, visit my video on crush and strain honey harvest.

Help with the Harvest

Over the weekend, my young friend Andrew, who is very interested in the possibility of keeping bees at his house, came over to help me harvest honey. My 2 year old grandson, Dylan, was also there.

We all worked on the harvest and took so many pictures that I've put together a slideshow:



Click on the slideshow to see the pictures full-sized.

Four Ways to Harvest Honey without an Extractor

Last Wednesday I was part of a panel on ways to harvest honey. I talked about harvesting without an extractor. Below is the slideshow of slides I used for my part of this. Each type of harvest has been more extensively talked about on this blog previously and most can be found in the video/slideshow bar on the side.

Here are my slides illustrating four ways to harvest honey without an extractor:



Click on the slideshow to see captions for each picture.

I have detailed slide shows and videos on all of these ways on the sidebar on the right.

Crush and Strain Honey Harvest
Cut Comb Honey
Chunk Honey
Jar to Jar several links: one, two, three

It's the Little Things.....

At Young Harris Beekeeping Institute this year, I heard two different people talk about making splits in the summer to disrupt the varroa mite life cycle and to take care of your bees. One of the problems for me with using nucs to make splits is that the nuc I own is a deep (as most nucs are) and I am trying to move to all medium boxes.

The vendor at Young Harris, Brushy Mountain, offers a medium nuc that comes with two boxes. I ordered two at the meeting. I have to confess that when they arrived, the nucs looked like doll houses for bees. I've left them unbuilt for a couple of months.

Yesterday I needed to harvest some honey for a panel that I am going to participate in at the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers' meeting tonight. As I thought about bringing in the honey and thought about how heavy a full super (medium) is, I remembered the bee doll houses.


I built two of the boxes right away. BTW, the medium nuc is a two box nuc, each a five frame 6 5/8" depth.



What a joy it was to carry the honey frames into the house in these small boxes - so much lighter. The boxes are designed for five frames and if I were doing it really correctly, I would have placed a space holder fifth frame in each of the boxes since I was harvesting an 8 frame super. However, it's only a few steps from my hives to my back door, so I brought the light, light (comparatively) boxes in one at a time.



Although I plan to use the medium nucs I bought to make splits, I will also be using them for honey harvest carrying going forward!

Color Combo Honey

Note: (Google has been having some problems with uploading images. These images are small but at least they uploaded. If you click on the image, you can see the photo much bigger).

Last year most of the supers I harvested had honey of a consistent color. An early super would have light colored honey on all 10 frames. A super filled in July would have very dark rich-tasting honey, possibly from sumac and catalpa.

I took off some frames from the hives over the weekend and discovered that the frames from Melissa had two colors of honey in the same frame - both light and dark. In the picture below, I've outlined the honey on the outside of the frame that is very dark and the honey in the center is quite light.

In this picture if you look at the uncrushed comb, you can see the very dark honey on the edges and at the top of the picture and the top of the uncrushed comb, you can see the very light honey

Even when I crushed the comb, you can still see the pool of light honey up against the pool of dark honey. I'm not sure if this is atypical and will let you know when I hear from the forum question I will post.


Post Script: One of the posters on Beesource suggested that this represents a switch in nectar source. The picture of the full comb is on a frame sitting upside down. The light honey was stored first (at the top and center of the frame). We are now moving into the season where I get dark, rich, delicious (to me) honey. So the honey more recently loaded into this frame was probably from the dark honey sources (sumac, catalpa).

Cut comb Lessons Learned from Last Year

Last year I cut comb, drained it, boxed it, froze the honey in the boxes, thawed it and found that honey oozed out around the edges of the comb as it thawed.

This year I cut it; drained it; put the draining rack and honey into the freezer overnight; removed the draining rack and honey from the freezer and thawed them; and THEN boxed it. This year's honey doesn't have liquid honey oozing out the bottom.

Below you can see the difference in 2008 honey on the left and 2007 honey on the right.

Here are six dry packed boxes of cut comb honey. The honey is earlier honey than last year and is lighter. Last year I made cut comb from the dark honey made by my bees in July.

Here's a close-up of the ooze from last year's thaw post the overnight in the freezer.

Here are my last two boxes from 2007 stacked up against the lighter boxed honey from 2008. You can really see the difference.

Beekeeping is all about learning new things every year.

Today's Honey Harvest with a Special Helper

I've read that if a mouse lives in a beehive (as mice often have the propensity to do over the winter) and if the mouse dies, the bees are likely to encase the mouse in propolis. I have in my own hives found small hive beetles encased in propolis near the edge of the frames.

Imagine the gross surprise when I pull these gorgeous frames of honey from Mellona and there between two frames, the bees have encased a roach egg with wax. It literally was bridging the space between two frames.

I cut out the piece containing the roach egg and ground it up in the garbage disposal! I did crush and strain on the rest of the frame in case there were any hidden eggs of any type elsewhere in the frame.


Some of the honey in this super was so well-capped that it begged to become cut comb honey, so that's what I did with it.

Last year I allowed the cut honey to drain, boxed it and then put the boxes in the freezer. When I thawed the boxes, there was more bleeding of honey in the now-boxed honey. I wanted to prevent the post-freezing honey drain into the packaging. So these squares of honey will be frozen overnight, allowed to thaw and drain into the pan below, and THEN I'll box the cut combs.

My favorite part of the honey harvest today was that I had my enthusiastic grandson to help me with this super. If you're interested you can click on the slideshow below and see all of his and my adventures with the honey.

Second Super Harvested This Season

Collecting honey from the beehives was a challenge because since I unexpectedly have eight (8) hives (!!!!!) I don't have any extra medium boxes.

When I take off a super from a hive, I shake each frame to free it of bees and put the bee-free frame into an empty super to take inside. When the super is filled, I carry in the frames to harvest. Because I have NO empty boxes, I didn't know how I was going to clear out the super from Mellona today. Looking in my bee equipment in the basement, I found this box from a bee order that was just the right size to hold honey-laden frames. It saved the day!



Mellona makes gorgeous honey - this hive produced lovely honey last year and this year is no exception. The frames from this super were perfectly capped frames of honey - what great bees grow up in this hive.

The frame below is sitting on top of a queen excluder because I am about to make cut comb honey with this lovely comb and the queen excluder is the best drain rack there is. The wires are close enough together to avoid causing damage to the comb.



When I cut the honey comb off of the frames I stacked the dripping frames in an extra honey bucket. The small amount of honey that drained off into this bucket will be unfiltered. I don't want to mix it with my beautiful filtered honey so I will save it to be fed back to the bees. The opaque looking sheet is my flexible cutting board from the crush and strain I did today. (Note: less than 8 ounces of honey drained into this bucket and I put it in a small bottle to give to the bees, when needed)

After I had harvested all 10 frames from this super, I put the dripping leftovers into my only empty medium super (the one I took off of Mellona to harvest these). I put the medium box with the dripping frames on the new swarm hive (whoops, need a name for this one!) The bees there will have the advantage of the dripping honey since I am not feeding them and they can use the frames to build new comb and work hard.



I believe I'll call the new hive Hyron² since it is a swarm hive and is exponentially vigorous compared to the original Hyron.

Harvest of the Huge Honeycomb

Below you can see a slice of the huge honeycomb from the double-wide comb. It was too fat to go into a cut comb box and frankly, wasn't pretty enough with its over-fat side of honey.


I saved one segment and put it in a wide-mouthed jar to make chunk honey with it.

Looking at the entire length of this comb, you can see that the bees coped in part with the width by making a second midrib. If you look at the lower part of the comb, you can see at the left edge and second midrib that goes approximately to the center of the comb length.
I guess this was to give the overfull area more strength.

Here's a closer view of the beginning of the second midrib. I crushed and strained this honey - first of the season. I haven't bottled it yet. It's still in the straining bucket waiting for me to have time this weekend.

Giant Honeycomb in foundationless frames

In Bermuda I had noticed a huge honeycomb and knew I had to take it out of the hive today. The bees had taken advantage of the foundationless frame and it looked to me as if they had built comb hooking it to two side-by-side frames.

Instead what they did was to build one huge honey comb attached to the first frame and fattened through the second frame. The comb was not attached except in one place at the top to the second frame. Here's the comb hanging on my frame rack on the outside of Bermuda. At the lower right you can see the broken comb at the top where they had attached to the second frame.



The other side of the comb was beautifully capped honey - I wish it had looked like this on the other side. I could have boxed it for cut comb honey. Looking like it does, I can crush and strain or cut it for chunk honey in a wide mouthed jar. I'll probably do the chunk honey so I can remember what this huge comb looked like as I enjoy the honey.



Here's a side view and you can now easily see how the comb was expanded under the second frame but not attaching to it.


There's another comb in this same box with the same configuration (two frames with one very fat honeycomb), but they hadn't capped it enough to take it off of the hive. I'll fill the empty spaces in this box with frames WITH foundation to get these bees back on track.

How to Deal With your Neighbors When you Start Keeping Bees

One of the questions most new beekeepers ask is, "How do I deal with my neighbors?"

There's not an easy answer. Many beekeepers try to keep their beekeeping endeavors as unobtrusive as possible. I wasn't eager to invite anyone's opinion about my beekeeping. I did research it and found that since the bee is the state insect of Georgia, bees are allowed to "bee" anywhere in Atlanta.

Atlanta is a hilly city. I live in a particularly hilly neighborhood. When you enter my neighborhood (which is a U-shaped set of three streets) you become aware of the hills. One of the legs of the U goes downhill all the way to the street that makes the bottom of the U. Then you turn left to drive toward my house which begins the ascent of a hill. My house is at the peak of the hill and you go uphill on my driveway to get to my carport.

My bees are on the deck behind my house at the level of the main floor. Like many houses in Atlanta, my house is built into the hill, so it is a ranch but has a daylight basement on the back side. So the deck is about 14 feet high above the backyard, although it is at the level of my ranch house on the street side.

My neighbor on one side is steeply downhill from me. My neighbor on the other side is also on a slight downhill, and her deck is probably about 10 feet lower than mine.

Consequently I had my bees for two bee seasons without my neighbors having any idea.

I do wonder what they thought when they smelled smoke on the weekends. But I don't know them very well since I'm at work all day and nobody asked me about the smoky smell. And I was always having large bee labeled boxes of materials from Dadant and Betterbee or other bee companies delivered to my carport where they sat, available for viewing by anyone, until I came home from work.

This year after the honey harvest was over, I decided to give the neighbors on either side of my house a jar of my bees' delicious honey. Susan, my neighbor on the not-so-low side, was thrilled and talked to me all about what she knew about the healthful benefits of honey. She volunteered the other day that my honey was the best honey she had ever tasted. Below you can see the view from Susan's property line. Even in winter you can barely see the white of the hives on the deck and wouldn't know what they were to identify them. If you click on the picture you can see the whole thing.



My neighbor, Eric, on the other side, steeply downhill, has a baby - who was at the time about 8 months old. I gave the two of them a jar of honey when I saw them walking the baby. He seemed pleased, but not too excited to find out there were bees in the neighborhood. His wife said, "Honey's poisonous for babies, you know." I saw Eric, the father, a few weeks later and asked him how they liked the honey. "Oh, we haven't tried it yet," he said and looked uncomfortable.

So I would say that the news that I have bees was met with mixed reviews by my immediate neighbors. I did get a note from Libba, the president of the neighborhood garden club inviting me to come to a meeting (since I'm at work and they meet in the daytime, I haven't been in years). At the end of the note she wrote, "I'd like to taste your honey, Honey!" That let me know that my beekeeping has become a subject of neighborhood conversation.

I have recently seen Libba and given her a jar of the honey.

My deck serves to keep my bees' flight paths above my neighbors' yards. The other way that bees intrude into people's lives is by finding a water source on the neighbor's property. It's important to provide your bees a water source so they won't seek water at your neighbor's swimming pool or bird bath. I have provided my bees a water source, but they prefer nasty water out of the gutters on my house. The nearest house with a swimming pool is about 1/4 mile away.



Many beekeepers encourage telling your neighbors and sharing honey with them.

I don't think it's something you can make a blanket decision about doing. I was glad when I told my neighbors that I could say, "Oh, I've had these bees for two years." If the bees were new, people could have complained that the bees had bothered them ever since I got them, but nobody could claim that since the bees have been quiet as mice and my closest neighbors did not even know they were living on my deck.

The nice part of telling the neighbors is that I felt comfortable to store my boxes and supers in the carport during the winter without worrying about it. In the spring I may even fly the bee flag that I bought in the mountains.

Honey vs. Apple Butter

On the bee forums on the Internet (Beemaster, Beesource) the general belief is that it is less messy to extract honey than to do crush and strain. Every beekeeper has a different opinion about everything beekeeping, so here's mine.

I did extracting at the Folk School in a beekeeping class I took, and it was incredibly messy. When we were finished, there were so many items to clean, not to mention the floor, table tops, etc. When I use crush and strain to harvest honey, I put cardboard under everything and the clean-up is minimal....the filters, the bucket, the pan into which I cut the comb, the pestle, the knife, and the rubber spatula. I do mop the floor but I don't experience honey everywhere.

Yesterday I made apple butter - 16 pints, but one broke in the water bath. I do this every year from the delicious apples I buy in the N Georgia mountains. I have never had such a messy experience. Apple butter is everywhere in my kitchen. And I've washed pots and pans, wiped the counters, cleaned the stovetop. What a mess and this morning I still have to clean the stovetop yet again because I was too tired to do it before I went to bed!

The apple butter is delicious, but so, so, so much messier a process than any day of harvesting honey.

Bermuda Bees in the Rain

My Bermuda beehive loves to beard. Every evening they gather on the porch. This hive has plenty of ventilation. There's an open screened bottom board, a slatted rack, the top is propped open and the top two supers are full of empty frames from honey harvest that they are cleaning up. So there's lots of room. But still every night they are hanging out. I think it's the hive culture. This is my only hive that made it through the winter and they behaved like this last year, too.

Finally in Atlanta we are having our typical summer weather. It's extremely hot in the day time and then gets really muggy toward the end of the day, followed by a thunderstorm. The Smithsonian magazine ran a very funny article on visiting Atlanta in the summer just this month. So after months of drought, finally we are having our thunderstorm evenings and this was one. Above you can see the Bermuda bees on the left, just hanging out in the summer heat.

In the above picture, the rain has started and the bees are beating a retreat. You can see the raindrops on the camera lens.

They so want to be outdoors that they are barely inside the hive as rain puddles on their favorite hangout porch! I wonder if they'll go back out when the rain stops, since there's no sun at 9:30 PM to dry up the puddles.

Feeding Frenzy in the Front Yard

Yesterday I harvested cut comb honey. When I finished with a frame I put it in a medium super sitting on a piece of cardboard. This morning I put the filled super back on the hive for the bees to clean up. I put the cardboard in the front yard (the hives are in the back yard). Look at the bees taking the honey back!

The next morning, here's how the cardboard looked. They obviously worked hard to get that honey back!