As you all know there are several times a year when I harvest honey from the hives, this is typically May, June and July - but what do I actually do?
I've been asked this a few times now so I thought I'd show you.
It all starts with me going to the forest and inspecting the hives, when the honey layers are full and capped (sealed) then I'll bring the entire honey layers home - and this is where the work really starts.
Once I've got the frame out of the honey layer I need to remove the sealing layer of wax, the bees seal the honey cells when the honey is ready to use.
You can see from the picture below that this is a manual process:
The thing on the left is a really, really sharp fork and it's used to dig into the wax and remove the cappings (you can see other removed cappings in the bottom of the box).
Once I've removed the cappings from the layer and it all looks like the bottom half of the frame I then load it into the centrifuge, as shown below:
I'll continue to decap the frames until I've got enough to fill the centrifuge and then I'll let the centrifuge do its thing.
The new centrifuge is electric (my previous one was hand cranked).
Once the centrifuge has been spinning for a while I'll have a big pool of honey in the base of the centrifuge and so it's time to filter it.
As you can see from the image I'm taking the honey from the centrifuge (which is stainless steel) and then putting it through two filters (ones inside the other) - this corresponds to rough and fine filtering. A lot of bee keepers don't double filter I just find it's a good idea to ensure the highest possible quality of final product.
It's perhaps worth noting that the only thing that will pass through the fine filter is pollen.
After its been filtered it goes into the stainless steel bucket (under the filters) and from there into the maturer (which is shown below).
Once the honey is in the maturer it stays there for about 4 days, this then allows any pollen that made it through the filters to rise to the surface where I skim it off (although some people have been asking me to leave it in as it has a very high health benefit).
From here it goes into jars and then it goes to you.
And that's how the honey goes from the hive to your house, I hope you've enjoyed reading this.
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