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Finished honey ready for eating

First Honey Harvest – Part 2

A few weeks ago, we harvested a frame of honeycomb from our bee hive. We’ve enjoyed eating thin slices of comb and chewing on it to extract the honey. What you’re left with is like chewing gum, but in this case you can either spit it out or swallow it (it’s technically a fat, not a wax, so it’s safe to ingest).

Regardless of whether that grosses you out or not, it’s a fascinating experience. Still, we wanted honey to put in tea, spread on toast and mix into yogurt, and the comb was getting in the way. So…

Photos by Andrew Cheeseman
Photo by Andrew Cheeseman

We took about a third of the honeycomb (from 1 frame) for the task and crushed it in a bowl. A potato masher is recommended but we didn’t have one, so we used a pastry cutter. Worked like a charm.

Husband's suggestion of using a pastry cutter worked out well
Husband’s suggestion of using a pastry cutter worked out well

Next we screened the honey twice: once through a medium sieve into another bowl, then again through a fine sieve straight into a jar for storage.

Using a fine sieve and a funnel to get the honey into a jar.
Using a fine sieve and a funnel to get the honey into a jar

For a larger harvest, these tools would not be sufficient to handle the load, but for a small batch it works fine. Ordinarily it is recommended to use 5 gallon buckets with a large paint strainer to filter the honey. Most professionals outfit their buckets with a spout at the bottom to make filling jars easy and mess-free. Here’s an example.

fresh honey being screened
fresh honey being screened

In the end, a third of a frame yielded almost two-thirds of a jar of honey. Typically you can expect to harvest about 5 pounds of honey from each frame. Those bees sure keep themselves busy! We’re very proud of our honey harvest and our bees.

Finished honey ready for eating
Finished honey ready for eating – Photo by Andrew Cheeseman

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