Spring Honey

Since Peter's hive split he decided it was time to check and see what spring honey we might have left.
Obviously, as we just put the swarm in to our new (smaller with a feeder) hive Peter only opened the older hive.

To extract honey you only take the top box (the super).  This is half the size of the other boxes because the others are too heavy, and the frames will not fit into the centrifuge. 

After removing the frames from the super you cut the caps of wax off of each frame (setting the wax aside for candles, lotions or lip balm).   Place six frames at a time into the centrifuge.  As you spin the frames the honey will come out and drip to the bottom, in order to get all of the honey out you must turn the frames around and spin them again. 

From there open the bottom of the centrifuge an allow the honey to poor out into the next 5 gallon bucket through a filter to remove the wax (you can close the centrifuge again if you happen to be getting more honey than can fit). 

See the filter on top and the opening on the bottom, it is very important to have both of these features to your bucket.

From there, open the bottom of the bucket and poor honey into jars.

This spring we got 12 lbs of honey out of only 6 frames (each supper has 12, but ours were not all full).  Without the swarm we would probably have gotten significantly more.  Additionally we expect to get more this fall.

Up next, things you can do with honey!