Comments on: Honey Harvest

By: Gloria @ Honey Extractors

Gloria @ Honey Extractors — Wed, 11 May 2011 08:30:56 +0000

Nothing is more exciting but harvesting time! I am always thrilled during harvesting. I wounder if the bees are all mad/angry during this time? Just imagine someone else is taking away what you have worked so hard. LoL! =)

By: warren

warren — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:57:02 +0000

Hey Amanda! I get the bees off of the frames with a very sharp jolt. I don’t know of that makes sense, but the pretty much all come off in one quick snap. I don’t know your build but my wife does not have the strength/grip/something to do it as well as I do. You may have the same issue. As soon as I do the snap, I grab the brush and start walking to the place we extract. I brush bees off as I go. That part happens super quickly so they don’t have any time to get back on the frame. Our extraction place is maybe 50 feet from a bunch of my hives though. If you are farther away, you may want to consider using a plastic storage box 50 or so feet away. You could snap/brush/walk and stash them before the bees knew what hit them. I suppose a few try to come in to where we extract but we’ve not really had much or a problem. We’re very particular about opening and closing the door but you can’t miss the smell outside so the bees no doubt smell it too. It seems that my bees spend the day trying to get to know each other again in their new, smaller home. We find that they are not aggressive and settle down pretty quickly after we harvest.

Don’t know if that helps any but holler if you want to talk some more about how we do it (or anything else too!)

By: Amanda

Amanda — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:31:33 +0000

I’ve been reading up on your honey harvest blogs. I’ve been keeping bees for a couple years but this year was the first year I had enough honey to harvest. I found it really difficult to get the bees off the frames, even after I shook them off and brushed them off with my fancy bee brush. They just flew right back on the frames. Do you find it best to be really rough with them?

Do you harvest the honey at a house where the hives are not beneficial so that the bees aren’t waiting outside the window? I found that when I took the honey, even though my house is a ways away from the hive, they were waiting at the window, watching me extract in my kitchen because of the smell.

Thanks for your posts!

By: warren

warren — Wed, 06 May 2009 13:27:55 +0000

Hi Colleen – glad you are getting in to bees! Some folks use chemicals that really stink to get bees out of the supers. I prefer to either brush them off (see the yellow brush in the top pics) or just shake them really hard to get them off. I do it frame at a time though. Folks who take the whole super off at once pretty much have to use chemicals. There usually aren’t too many bees in the supers, but once you remove them, they become very interesting again!

By: colleen tucker

colleen tucker — Wed, 06 May 2009 05:33:08 +0000

Very informative! Love the pictures. We are NEW to this. I was wondering how you get the bees off the the frames that you want to harvest. Possibly there aren’t that many bees on the frames as they are all capped off?