How To Harvest Honey From Your Hive

Learn how to harvest honey from your hive as a sweet reward!

If this is your very first year keeping bees, you won’t want to harvest your honey just yet. The bees will need all their honey stores to get them through their first winter. Since pollen and nectar will be unavailable during the winter, the bees will eat through their honey to keep them alive over the winter, which is why it’s critical to always leave enough honey in your hive, even if you’re an experienced beekeeper.

If you’re in your second year (or more) of beekeeping, you’ll want to get ready to harvest your honey soon. Late summer is the ideal time to begin the honey harvest. It’s a fairly simple process as long as you have the right tools. We’ve outlined the steps below and highlighted a few tools of the trade.

So how, exactly, do you get the honey OUT of the hive?

• Step 1: Remove your honey super and bring it inside, where the bees can’t get to it. When you’re outside, gently brush any bees off with a soft bee brush
• Step 2: Once inside, one by one, remove each frame of capped honey from the super
• Step 3: Use an uncapping knife to remove the wax cappings
• Step 4: Use an uncapping scratcher fork to remove any remaining cappings, or those missed by your uncapping knife
• Step 5: When you’ve uncapped both sides of your frame, place it vertically in your extractor and begin to crank. Make sure you have your bucket with honey filter/strainer set up below your extractor’s honey gate
• Step 6: After a few minutes of cranking, you can check your frames and one side should be clear of honey. Remove and flip the frame to get honey extracted from the other side of the frame.
• Step 7: The honey will flow out of your extractor and into your strainer, then into the bucket below. And it’s ready to be bottled!