How to Harvest Honey

Female: Hello girls. It’s in there. Male: Well, we let that in there. Female: It’s coming up right? Male: Yes, so we’re going to clean up some of these—it’s called bur cone. So our friend has loaned us to this frame grabbing tool. They are pretty calm. They’re lot calmer then when I got bit. Female: Yeah, they are pretty calm. Male: Here we go. Female: Whoa, now we have to make sure the queen is not in there, right, oh another one. Male: Yeah Female: It gets warm enough flying. Male: That is a full frame of honey. These are the frames of honey that we’re going to keep. They are on our little holder, we’re going to look for the queen and brush the bees down into the super. Okay so wait. We’ve taken out four frames and we’re going to put in four empty frames here. You usually don’t take honey off of first year hives but this hive has been going like gang busters. The bees are getting a little anxious here so, see how when you put the smoke on, they go down? Female: Yeah. Male: That is the whole idea of the smoker, an Unidentified ant smoking them. Now it’s kind of a neat group people up here that are all into beekeeping now. So this is your prop polis, you can—this stuff is super sticky especially in the summer. Neat. So here we are. We’ve turned our side porch into the honey extractor room. These are super great frames full of honey and we borrowed an extractor from our neighbor, Shelly. Thank you very much, Shelly. How this works, is that the frames slide in here and then you crank this handle and by a centrifugal force, it weeps out the honey. The honey hits the walls in the extractor and drains down to the bottom. And this is stainless steel, it’s all food great, super clean. And it has to be varnished because again, we’ve never done this before, so we’ll see what happens. We have to remove the wax capping to get at the honey and we don’t have—you can use this electrocuted knife to do it but we don’t have one there. They are about $80 so until we get a honey bee sponsor, we’re not going to be doing that. But you can use a serrated knife and you put it in a really hot water so we have some water that we boiled here. And then we have—we just took a little cake pan and put a screen on it. And then you go just below the capping. Female: Okay here, it is. Male: And this comes off like that. Female: Wow! Can we do anything with capping? Male: Yes. This is bees wax. So we could take this and we could make candles or someone that makes candles, we can give it to them. Female: Clear. Male: It cuts pretty easily. I thought it would be more difficult to cut. Female: It looks difficult. I think—I don’t know other people make it look really hard. Male: Well in Garden Fork, we’re all about the easy, you know. So to get some of the column that we haven’t got with the knife, we use what’s called the capping scratcher and we just draw this across and it punctures open the tops and then this goes into the extractor. Female: The whole frame huh? Male: Yeah. Female: Cool. Male: Like that. How about this? This is the last frame. You got it cleaned on both sides. We’re going to put this in the extractor. Female: Cool. Male: So those are in there. Female: Could we put a lid on it? Male: Yeah we put a cover on it. So we’ve got our frames on our extractor here but we’re going to leave the lid off real quick just to kind of show you what’s going on here. So if you take this. Female: Do you see anything? Male: It is going too fast to see anything. Female: How long do you do that for? Male: I don’t know. Female: You don’t know? Male: I've never done this before. There is definitely a honey at the bottom. So we have spanned this and you can see here where—I really beat up this column with a knife but these columns are now empty. So what we do now, is we flip this around so that the other side of the column faces out and we extract this side of the frame. So for all four frames, we put them a 180º. That is honey. This is what we call the pour shot where we’re going to pour this in here. Female: Wow. Kind of like the moment we’ve waited for. Male: Yeah. Wow! Female: Whoo. Look at that. Male: Oops, it’s going too fast. Female: Ahh! Male: We’ve switched to a bowl Female: A new method. Male: With the sieve here. Look at that. That’s a really light color. Okay, I want to do a taste now. I have not taste this honey. Yeah Mina has been having little taste while we’ve been working. Female: Both of my fingers. Male: I know, its all in my fingers too but I don’t think you’re going to like honey. All right, so here we go. This is our first year. I’m kind of excited about this. Female: Your first year, your first taste. Male: Yeah. Wow! Female: Impressed? Male: Tastes really good. It has this floral—oh! it’s great and it is really good. I mean some honey is like, ‘oh yeah that is honey’ but this is and this is from the Maple Knowles Farms, we’re going to take some down to Bill and he’s going to love those. Puppies don’t like honey but I do. Isn’t this great? Okay, you can learn more about bee keeping on our site gardenfork.tv. It’s a easy hobby to do. It does not take a lot of time. Edward, this is phenomenal. This one is the cool thing we’ve ever done up here. Female: Wee! Male: All right, be good. You want to try some? Dog group going to get mad at me. Female: Here it comes, look for a girl. Male: Oh. Female: Oh. Male: A-a-a-a. Leave it. Leave it. Stay.