We have 2 hives of honey bees. One hive we’ve had for years, the other one is a recent addition back in May. If you want to learn more about receiving and hiving honey bees click here:
24 hours after hiving honey bees
48 hours after hiving honey bees
In our corner of the forest in East Texas the best time to collect honey, otherwise known as robbing the bees, is in August. We finally robbed the honey bees a couple of weekends ago. We robbed the hive that we’ve had for years. We did not rob our new hive because they are just starting out and will need all of their honey to make it through our cold winter. We got loads of honey from our oldest hive and how delicious it was!
We try to keep things simple because of costs, so our honey extracting equipment consists of large bowls to collect the honey, a sharp knife, a larger strainer with small meshed openings to strain the honey of bee’s wax, and several glass jars with lids to store the honey. The process is quite simple. We bring the frames out of the hive and carefully wipe off the bees and bring the frames into the house. Once the frames are all inside we use a sharp knife to cut off the sealed caps of honey. We then scrape the honey wax and all into a large bowl that has been out-fitted with a large strainer with small meshed openings on top of the bowl. We let the honey drip into the large bowls. Once we have most of the honey dripped out, we give a final big squeeze with our hands to the bee’s wax and out drips the last drop. After the honey is strained clean without any bee’s wax floating around, we pour the honey into glass jars with lids and store the honey in our pantry to use throughout the year until the next honey extracting season.
While we were extracting the last bit of honey my husband told me to bake a fresh batch of homemade biscuits to sop up the last bit of honey. We have never tasted honey so good! But as you can imagine extracting honey is a sticky job. The bees were pretty calm during the process, but we also were covered from head to toe in our bee suits. If you have never had your own honey bees, it is worth doing.
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