Harvesting the Sourwood Honey
This is BeeCo Apiaries fourth consecutive year of taking bees up to the mountains for the Sourwood Honey flow.
The process of moving bees back and forth from the Blue Ridge Mountains to our apiary in middle Georgia and extracting the sourwood honey is always an adventure — one that Mother Nature controls. The weather, timing of the sourwood bloom, and health of the bees are all key factors.
We also acknowledge that none of this would be possible without helpful folks at both ends of the road who make this a smooth process. From the secure site and location in North Carolina for the bees, to the many helping hands that load, unload, and pull supers from the hives, to the strong arms that help move the very heavy 5 gallon buckets of honey, it definitely takes a team to make this happen.
Collaboration and synchronization…as always we turn to the bees for the important lessons and reminders.
After extracting the honey, we place the supers back in the bee yard so the bees can clean out the bits remaining in the frames.
Mary with a full frame of beautiful capped honey.
Katherine using the honey comb to uncap a frame of sourwood honey before loading it into the extractor.
August 5 and August 6, 2020
Today we harvest the sourwood honey! I meet Mom and Bruce in the morning at the apiary. Mom has already gotten an early start and is in the apiary loading the medium supers onto the truck when I arrive. There is a process that we’ve found works best for us when pulling supers for honey extracting. Essentially, we work from the top down on each hive.
Repelling Bees with Fischer’s Bee-Quick & Fume Pad:
First, we open the hive and place a foam pad cover down onto the top honey super. This is a special type of cover that we’ve sprayed with a bee safe repellent, called Bee-Quick, that forces the bees down into the lower supers. We let that sit on the hive for a few minutes.
Next, we take that pad off and pull that medium super off of the hive.
We place the foam pad cover on the next medium super below the super we just removed.
With the super we just removed, we use a powerful leaf blower to blow off any remaining bees that are still lingering in the frames. We want to remove as many bees as possible before we take them into the honey extracting room.
Once we finish with the blower, we place the super on the back of the truck sandwiched between two telescopic lids to prevent other bees from getting into it.
We return to the hive and repeat the same process with the next super. Note: We try to reapply the Bee-Quick repellent onto the foam pad approximately every 3 uses. Just a few quick sprays seem to do the trick. You don’t need much.
Once we have six medium supers loaded onto the back of the truck, we drive over to the honey extracting room at Morgan Apiary. We then move the heavy supers into the extracting room where we process the honey. This year, we had close to 50 medium supers to process. We use a 6 Frame Electrical Radial Honey Extractor. First, we uncap the honey so it will spin out when placed in the extractor. To do this, we use either: 1) an electric uncapping knife that peels off the wax capping completely, 2) an uncapping roller that manually punches a small opening in each cell, or 3) a capping scratcher that resembles a small wire comb. This year, we opted to use the uncapping roller because it’s less invasive to the wax comb structure, thus the bees can quickly repair the frame for more honey storage. In addition, since they don’t have to completely replace and rebuild all of the wax when we put the frames back on the hive, the bees can direct more energy and resources towards tending to the queen and frames of brood, pollen, and honey. Each of these is critical to having a strong, healthy hive going into the winter months.
After a frame of honey is uncapped, we place it in the extractor. The extractor holds 6 medium frames at a time and spins for about 6 to 10 minutes per cycle. There is a honey gate at the bottom of the extractor. The honey flows continuously from this gate into the five gallon buckets we have set up on an oversized lazy susan. This set up allows us to easily move between three of the buckets, each of which has a large mesh strainer set on top to catch the big pieces of wax, bees, and bits that come out of the extractor with the honey. Even with three people working, this process takes us about a day and half to fully harvest all of the sourwood honey. After it was all said and done, we ended up with 17 five gallon buckets of sourwood honey, or roughly 1,000 pounds. When we finish extracting, we place the harvest frames back into the supers and put them out in the bee yard for a few days. There, the bees will clean out the remaining bits of honey before we store the supers away until next spring when our local plants start to bloom and it’s time to do it all over again.
Working through stacks of medium supers. It took us about a day and half to extract roughly 1,000 pounds of Sourwood honey.
A frame of fresh white wax capped honey. As you can see in this photo, the Sourwood honey is very light in color.