There are a zillion articles and videos online demonstrating techniques for uncapping, extracting, and bottling honey. These are important skills for a new beekeeper to learn, but they often don’t address the process itself. So that’s what I’ll try to do here. Bear in mind this process will vary from beekeeper-to-beekeeper, based on the number of hives, space available, and frankly the amount of money they’re willing to sink into their operation. For reference, I maintain about 20 hives and bottle about 1,000 pounds of honey. Despite being a hobby beekeeper, I like to try and turn a little profit each year, so I’ve avoided expensive tools in order to try and meet that goal. Admittedly, every year I gripe about needing a bigger extractor, but every year I seem to get by with my cheap little two-framer.
A couple jars of chunk honey—one filled and one empty
When we built our house several years ago, I purposefully designed part of the basement with the honey harvest in mind. On one end, I left an 11-by-28 foot space (308 sq ft) in bare concrete with a floor drain. For 11 months of the year, this makes for a tidy utility area, where we don’t have to worry about an unexpected leak from our washer or water heater. But for one month a year, it becomes my honey house.
This deep freeze is dedicated to beekeeping use, and holds seven full honey supers at a time
The chart above (full resolution) shows my setup once I’ve transformed the space for honey operations. It looks complicated, because it kinda is. Now, if you’re just taking a few frames for personal consumption or for gifting to friends and neighbors, this is overkill and unnecessary. For you, crush -and-strain on the kitchen table might be more appropriate. But once you’re trying to safely, cleanly, efficiently extract several hundred or a few thousand pounds of honey, the kitchen table will feel inadequate (and may upset the people you live with).
In the diagram you can see I’ve got frames moving to-and-from various stations. All of them ultimately find their way into a honey jar, but some have different paths depending on various factors.
Here are the steps that correspond to the diagram, in broad strokes:
1 - Seven medium honey supers are pulled from hives and placed in deep freeze for at least three days. This ensures there are no hive beetle or wax moth issues.
1.1 - If the tent is full and you need to put another batch in the freezer, the supers move to holding position with fan blowing into their top. As I’ve discussed in the past, honey is hygroscopic so you don’t want it sitting there absorbing humidity before it gets bottled.
2 - Supers move into warming tent for at least a couple days. Extraction is far easier and more efficient when frames are warm.
2.1 - Frames with uncapped cells are segregated while pulling frames for extraction.
2.2 - Frames with uncapped cells need to be extracted separately to ensure they are sufficiently dry. If they are not, they are fed back to the bees.
2.3 - Lightly colored frames of honey are segregated in order to offer both dark and light honey to customers. If most of this year’s honey is light, then this would be used to segregate darkly colored frames.
2.4 - Color-segregated honey moves back into tent to warm prior to extraction.
2.5 - Foundationless/comb honey is segregated to avoid accidentally putting it into the extractor. It’s important to write “comb” or “foundationless” on these frames before you put them into hives for easy spotting. (Skip to step 6.1 for these frames.)
3 - Frames are uncapped with the pin roller. Uncap them as well as possible the first time to avoid repeatedly having to move them in and out of the extractor.
4 - Frames are moved into the extractor, spun on each side, examined for capped cells, uncapped again if necessary, re-spun if necessary, and then placed into the Hive Butler for moving outside.
5 - After every 10 frames, honey in the extractor is emptied into a holding bucket.
6 - Once all available frames are extracted or all honey buckets are full, empty honey buckets into bottling tank and begin filling jars. (NOTE: Be sure to allow honey to settle for at least a day in the honey buckets so air bubbles created during extraction can be skimmed from the top of the honey.) This is also when you test the moisture of each bucket to ensure it’s adequately dry.
6.1 - Cut rectangles of comb honey and place it into empty wide-mouth jars. Fill jars with light honey, if available, so the comb can be easily seen by the customer.
7 - Move filled jars into storage area. These still need to be labeled and sealed prior to delivery.
NOT COVERED HERE - Creamed honey requires extra steps of blending seed jars into buckets, filling jars, and rotating them through the wine chiller at 55-57 degrees for a couple weeks.
This is not a one-size-fits-all plan. But I hope it gets you thinking about designing your own extraction layout based on your personal situation. That could be anywhere from using a bread knife in your kitchen to building a stand-alone honey house with automated equipment.
A Note About Cleanliness
A frame of summer honey about to burst at the seams
While the focus of this has been process, I should note that your number one responsibility to your customers when extracting honey is cleanliness. I’ve simply seen too many beekeepers dripping sweat into their honey during the hard work of extracting. That kind of disregard for the customer, or a “what they don’t know won’t hurt them” attitude can ruin your reputation, and also the reputations of all beekeepers.
One reason I like my basement layout is because I can keep it nice and cool to avoid perspiring, and at the same time keep my supers in a warm tent so they extract well. When I’m pulling supers off the hives, I wear a bandana under my veil to catch any sweat (and replace it often). The entire workspace shown above gets covered in plastic to help keep both the basement and the harvest equipment as clean as possible. For plastic covering, I’ve found clear shower curtains are great—they’re much more durable than painter’s plastic, they’re easy to clean between extraction sessions, and they can go into your washing machine for use year-after-year. Also, in my own design I’ve got a basin sink right next to where I’m standing most of the time. Having a sink or some other way to frequently clean your tools and hands (which I keep gloved) might be the most important feature of my whole layout, and it keeps me from getting bogged down in stickiness.
The honey harvest is HARD work. But it should be something we enjoy, not dread. Developing a system can take some of the mayhem out of it, and might even make it a meditative process you look forward to each summer.