GardenFork – Eclectic DIY

Tag: how to harvest honey

Honey Harvest Made Easier

Its honey harvest time again. I’ve talked about the uncapping roller before, video here, but you combine this tool with putting 9 frames in a 10 frame honey super and you’ve made your life much easier.

Most beekeepers use a hot knife, or uncapping knife to cut the beeswax caps off the tops of the honeycomb cells. Uncapping means opening up the cells so you can get the honey out, usually using an extractor.

But with this roller tool, (buy it here) you don’t need to use a knife to cut off the caps. The photos look kind of messy, but this works pretty good. With a hot knife, you run the risk of gouging into the honeycomb. This means more work for the bees, rebuilding the comb before they can fill it with honey again.

The uncapping roller punches holes in the caps. Its not a perfect process, but you get much less wax in your honey when extracting. So you don’t have to filter nearly as much wax when bottling the honey.

The second new thing I’ve done is put 9 frames in a 10 frame honey super. This means one less frame than the box is designed for. But what this does is create a bit more space between each frame. The bees draw out the honeycomb a bit farther, which makes uncapping easier. And it means less propolis between frames, its much easier to pull these frames out of the super.

I use brackets that set the frames at the right spacing. This has been a really nice thing.

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August 8, 2017
Harvest Honey with a Bee Escape – GF Video

Here’s how we use a bee escape to harvest honey. When you harvest honey from your beehive, you need to get the bees out of the honey super ( the box of frames that has honey it it, usually the topmost super ). You can do this several ways; commercial beekeepers remove the bees from the honey super with a blast of air, you can use a fume board, which you put on top of the honey super to drive the bees out of that super, or you can use a bee escape. Watch our video how to harvest honey using a fume board here

A bee escape is basically a one way door that you slide in between the honey super and the top brood super. You leave it there for a day or two, and when you take off the honey super, it will be empty of bees. Watch our video here on how to remove bees from a honey super using a bee escape

I have found that leaving the bee escape on the beehive for 2 days is better than overnight. You will always have some bees still in the honey super, but that is a lot easier than removing a lot of bees from the honey super. Some hives will start to draw comb if you leave it in too long.

It isn’t shown here, but in newer versions of this, I added a 5/8″ upper entrance hole to the escape to take the place of the entrance on the inner cover, which we have covered in tape.

Here is the double three way bee escape I made. I based it on several on the internet. The hardest part is cutting the angle cuts of each piece of wood. the cut are either 30 degrees or 60 degrees, depending on how you set up your saw. The gaps between the sides of the triangle are at least 3/8′ wide. I used regular window screen to cover this. The outer pieces of wood are 12.5″ long, the inner pieces are 7.75″ long.

Questions or comments? Let us know below, we’ll answer to the best of our ability. thx.

November 1, 2011
Hurricanes, Gardening, & Beekeeping GF Radio

Today we talk about hurricanes, weather forecasting, and hurricane preparedness with Tyler, who is the CEO of Allison House, a severe weather data company you can learn more about Allison house at AllisonHouse.com ( a GF sponsor )
We continue with how to predict hurricanes and how the national hurricane Center creates different models using different algorithms make spaghetti patterns about where a hurricane is going to hit land or as they call it in the business, make landfall.
Do the TV networks over hype hurricanes rainstorms winter storms? Tyler talks about how TV networks and the media in general could do a better job informing us about hurricanes and severe weather.
It’s gotten to the point where people think the TV networks and media are just crying wolf, so many times a storm is coming and the media and TV networks make a really big deal out of it and then the storm doesn’t happen. Then people tend to become more skeptical and then when the real thing actually occurs they get taken by surprise because we’ve been numbed to the weather hype.
Next up is how to seal the concrete of your garage floor or basement floor. Tyler tells us how he is preparing the concrete floor of his garage for the epoxy paint sealer that he’s going to apply to the cement which is one of the last parts of his home renovation.
we move on to vegetable gardening and how to keep cabbage months from attacking your cabbage and what to do about squash vine borers and our squash vine borer video. Then how to mulch your vegetable beds with leaf mulch and how you can make leaf mulch and how you can use believes that people put out at the end of their driveway in the suburbs for leaf mulch and why we like raised beds . You can watch our how-to video on how to make raised beds here and we also have a video about how to make leaf mulch by clicking here
Next we talk about beekeeping and we are both harvesting honey this fall tyler talks about using a hot night for the first time and how long it takes to harvest honey. Tyler had a very large harvest of honey this year and Eric did not.
We’ve made a bunch of how to raise bees, we call it beginning beekeeping videos on garden fork and you can watch all of them by clicking here if you want to watch the video on how to harvest honey click here
Then Tyler tells us about his upcoming trip to Scotland Tyler recommends the website visit Scotland.com which is run by the Scottish tourism board. Eric would very much like to visit Scotland and looks forward to hearing from the Scottish tourism board. You do have a question or comment about garden fork radio you can call our listener voicemail line 860 740 6938.

photo by wallyir

September 11, 2011