Honeybee_ Lessons from an Accidental Beekeeper - C. Marina Marchese [37]
When you are ready to remove your honey shallow, use your hive tool to gently pry it away from the hive’s top deep, leaving the fume board on top of the shallow. Check the shallow to make sure there aren’t any live honeybees left inside. You can brush away any few bees left behind using a simple household brush. Store the shallow in a plastic bin with an airtight lid that snaps shut, to protect it from mice and ants that love to feast on fresh honey.
Honeybees can get defensive while you remove the honey shallows, so you may want to wear your protective beekeeper’s veil and gloves. Remember that in the late summer, when you are most likely removing your honey, there may not be many nectar and pollen-producing plants for your bees to feed on, so they may defend their honey more fiercely. Also, be prepared to deal with lots of propolis, which can make removing hive parts a challenge.
When you have removed the honey-filled shallow, it is time to begin extracting the honey. Extracting and bottling your first honey harvest is a glorious and sticky event. Give yourself and any helpers you may be able to enlist plenty of time to do the job. Confining the job to just one room will help you contain the big, sticky mess that accompanies the process. A warm room makes the job easier, because cold honey can be difficult to extract. Spreading a plastic drop cloth or tarp under your work area will save you time on the cleanup afterward. A large table allows you to spread out your equipment. Cover it with plastic or newspapers to protect it. Keep a bucket of warm water and a few old rags handy just to wipe off your hands and clean up any drips along the way. You will be happy you took these few extra steps to prepare your work area.
There are a few pieces of equipment available for extracting your honey. But if you simply want comb honey, you do not need any fancy equipment. You can slice the honeycomb right out of the frame. A warm knife will work well, or a metal cutter, resembling a cookie cutter and made especially for this purpose, will help you cut a perfect square of honeycomb from your frames. Beekeeping-supply companies sell various types of clear boxes made for packaging honeycomb, or you can keep the comb in a dish in your kitchen, so the honey in it is ready for everyday use.
To extract liquid honey from the comb, you will need a few more pieces of equipment: a heated uncapping knife, a capping scratcher, an uncapping tank, an extractor (or spinner), a mesh strainer, and a clean five-gallon bucket with an opening called a gate.
The heated knife is used to slice off, or uncap, the wax cappings from the honeycomb, thus exposing the fresh honey inside each cell. You hold the frame in a vertical position over the uncapping tank, resting it on the horizontal bar across the top of the tank, and tilt the frame toward your body at a forty-five-degree angle. Starting toward the bottom of the frame, run the heated knife over the surface of beeswax towards the top of the frame. Be careful to keep your fingers away from the edge of the knife. The heat from the knife will melt the beeswax slightly and make the cappings easier to remove. The beeswax and any excess honey will fall into the tank. A wire screen, positioned inside the uncapping tank, will catch most of the wax while allowing the honey to dribble through to the bottom of the tank. Use a fork to gently scratch open any cells that your knife missed, and continue letting any excess honey drip into the tank.
TOOLS FOR EXTRACTING HONEY
Once both sides of the frame are uncapped, the frame is ready to be placed into the extractor. This large, stainless steel circular tank spins the remaining honey out of the cells. The frames sit securely inside the extractor, held in place by wire grids. My spinner holds nine frames, or one complete shallow