Each July, we spend a day harvesting honey from our hives. This is always a Process (capital P), mostly because it is usually at least 90° F with 80% humidity and feels like a sauna. Throw on a bee suit (even a ventilated one) and it’s even hotter. But here in US Zone 7A, this is the ideal time to harvest.
Bees eat both pollen and nectar, which they find by foraging in approximately a five miles around their hive. Nectar is what gets turned into honey. Early spring is known as the Nectar Flow; there is regular rain, everything is blooming and food for the bees is abundant.
By mid-summer, it generally starts to get dryer and hotter, which puts stress on plants and results in fewer blooms. The trick is to harvest honey right after the nectar flow to capture all the abundance of spring, which then allows time in summer and autumn for the colonies to build back up their stores for the winter months.
So: harvest in early or mid-July.
We typically start the process as early in the day as we can to avoid the worst of the heat. Each hive is inspected and any frames of honey that are 100% “capped” are pulled. Capped frames of honey have a thin layer of wax over the comb which indicates that the honey is “done” (ie, the moisture content is at 18% or lower, which will keep the honey from fermenting).
Partially capped frames get left for the bees for their winter stores. A single hive might have anywhere between 20-100lbs of capped honey depending on the weather that year, the age of the hive and how quickly they produced offspring in the early months of spring.
Late afternoon is for extracting. We have a powered extractor, which allows you to load in 4 frames and spin out all the honey after you’ve uncapped each one. This is a time-consuming process, even with motorized help.
When the honey is spun out into the bottom of the extractor, we filter it through a fine mesh sieve into 7-gallon buckets with spigots. From there, it gets bottled up and sold or given to friends as gifts.
We started keeping bees in 2016 and I was thinking the other day about how much we didn’t know then. We lost hives, got stung, had swarms, and had a queen walk out of her hive. We’ve come a long way, but there’s still so much to learn.
Beekeeping can be incredibly rewarding, not just measured in honey harvest, but also in the depth and breadth of things to learn beyond the basics. And if you happen to be a gardener, it is doubly rewarding because your fruits and vegetables will always be generously pollinated and the flowers you choose to grow will help your hives thrive.
But it not a casual hobby, nor an inexpensive one. There is a lot of work and a lot to learn and for the beginner, it can be daunting, made more so because if you ask a room full of beekeepers a question you’ll likely get two or three completely different answers. That’s just how beekeeping works.
That said, there are a few things that are worth doing if you are thinking about getting bees or have recently come into possession of a hive or two. I promise they will make everything easier.
Find your local Beekeeper’s Association and join it. Every city or county has one. Most of them have monthly meetings that include educational sessions and networking. This is the best way to get plugged into your local community and find support.
Take a Beginner Beekeeper Course before you buy bees. These are often offered at least once a year by local Beekeeper’s Associations and typically teach the basics to get you started. You can also find them online, although I think this is one of those things where it works better in person.
Find a mentor. A good mentor can answer questions and help you with your first hive inspections. When things come up (and they will), it’s always nice to have someone on speed dial.
Get more than one hive. Having more than one hive is an insurance policy against many things that can go wrong in beekeeping. When a hive does struggle (and it will, I promise you) - when you have lost a queen, have spotty brood production, or slow growth - having a second hive can mean the difference between losing your colony or saving it.
You can take a few frames of brood from your strong hive to bolster a weak one, or help a hive that has lost a queen produce a new one. It also betters your chances of making it through winter with at least one hive which you can then plan to split in the spring.
“Field Notes from Woodside Gardens” is a collection of stories about creating a garden. Most Fridays, I share what’s going on in our garden, along with tips and ideas that you can use in yours, wherever you are. Please consider becoming a free subscriber if you haven’t already.