Honey Extraction

Robbing the Bees

Humans have been taking honey from bees from the begining of our history. Honey is mentioned in the Bible and in other ancient texts and was greatly valued throughout the ages. Until recently honey was not easy to get out of the hives without getting stung many times by the angry bees. Unfortunatly it usually involved killing the hive outright and then taking the honey comb after the bees could no longer defend it. Fortunatly today we have more modern ways to take honey that is more pleasant for the beekeeper and the bees. Our modern hives have removable frames kind of like hanging files in a file cabinet. This allows the beekeeper to take only the frames that have honey and leave the others for the bees thus allowing the hive to continue it's work on the remaining frames. Much less disruptive for the bees.

Extracting the Honey

Once the frames have been removed from the hive we have to somehow get the honey out of the comb. The first step is to take off the wax that is sealing the honey in. You can see me doing this with an uncapping knife in the picture. Then comes the actual extraction of the honey. It use to be that to get liquid honey, folks would crush the comb and then let the honey drain out of it or sell the honey still in the comb. Many of our grandparents remember buying honey this way. It was a shame to have to destroy all of the bees hard work by removing or crushing their comb so someone figured out a better way. They invented a machine called a honey extractor which is basically a cetrifuge that spins the honey right out of the comb and collects it in a bucket. The comb remains intact on the frame and is given back to the bees to refill with liquid gold. It's less work for the bees to have to make all that wax again so they can concentrate on making more honey. The honey collected in the bucket is strained to remove any wax particals and then it's bottled. It's not heated or filtered so all of the goodness that the bees put in, stays in including traces of pollen and propolis. Because the honey is not heated it will naturally form crystals eventually. This in no way affects the quality of the honey and actually makes it easier to spread due to it's thicker consistency.

Fun Bee Facts

To make one pound of honey, workers in a hive fly 55,000 miles and tap two million flowers.

In a single collecting trip, a worker will visit between 50 and 100 flowers. She will return to the hive carrying over half her weight in pollen and nectar.

A productive hive can make and store up to two pounds of honey a day. Thirty-five pounds of honey provides enough energy for a small colony to survive the winter.

Theoretically, the energy in one ounce of honey would provide one bee with enough energy to fly around the world.

(From the Nova PBS series 'Life Inside the Hive')