We do it old-school, low-tech... The honey is, to say the least, minimally-processed. Never warmed to more than, say, 90* (the ambient temperature). A good thing in my book.
In the pics, almost none of the honey was capped. I live close to you (we've met), and I've found that even capped honey has to be stored in the freezer to keep it from fermenting (or the refridgerator, but I've got more room in the deep freeze). Do you have any problems with honey fermenting? Do you make mead?
i used a knife to uncap the honey, then drained the capping separately. this was, like, the lowest tech honey extraction ever. it involved cheese cloth, buckets and a lot of patience. (even more cleanup!)
everyone talks about honey fermenting, but it's never happened to me. we store the honey in a warm place, and i always have SOMETHING fermenting in the kitchen (so there are ample bacilli and yeasts)... and i don't even follow terribly stringent hygienic procedures... and yet... no problem.
never made mead. always wanted. i need to divide my hives and increase the number of supers. maybe next year!
Looks fantastic. We just had bees move into a bee log I had on my property. One day... honey. I've had a lot of problems with losing hives over the last few year. It's really good to see you're pulling honey this spring.
5 comments:
I've always been interested in how honey is harvested so I'm glad I ran across this article, thanks for the good read.
In the pics, almost none of the honey was capped. I live close to you (we've met), and I've found that even capped honey has to be stored in the freezer to keep it from fermenting (or the refridgerator, but I've got more room in the deep freeze). Do you have any problems with honey fermenting? Do you make mead?
i used a knife to uncap the honey, then drained the capping separately. this was, like, the lowest tech honey extraction ever. it involved cheese cloth, buckets and a lot of patience. (even more cleanup!)
everyone talks about honey fermenting, but it's never happened to me. we store the honey in a warm place, and i always have SOMETHING fermenting in the kitchen (so there are ample bacilli and yeasts)... and i don't even follow terribly stringent hygienic procedures... and yet... no problem.
never made mead. always wanted. i need to divide my hives and increase the number of supers. maybe next year!
Looks fantastic. We just had bees move into a bee log I had on my property. One day... honey. I've had a lot of problems with losing hives over the last few year. It's really good to see you're pulling honey this spring.
Thanks for sharing. We got a top bar hive just the other year and are still learning so it's great to see what other people are doing.
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