Kitchen Honey Extraction

Honey is heavier than wax.  I had a jar of globbed up honey and wax left over from the extraction  explosion I wanted to work with so I stuck it in the oven on low all day today and checked on it every so often.  Eventually, the wax rose to the top and the honey sunk to the bottom of the jar.  Then I spooned the wax out onto a tin tray where it hardened almost instantaneously.  My kitchen was a dripping sticky mess by the end of this process but I did get about 5 more jars of honey out of it.

First Honey Harvest

We harvested about 5 pounds of honey from the larger colony this week and took it over to Peter's house to have him show us how the extraction process works. 


The frames I carefully wired together in the summer were now full of drawn comb filled with honey and capped with wax. Each frame was "uncapped" with a hot electric knife.  The hot blade cuts through the wax caps and exposes the honey below.  We placed each uncapped frame into the extractor, a large steel drum with a lid that whirls the frames around and flings the honey against the sides of the drum. Unfortunately, my first wiring job was not secure enough to withstand the centrifugal force of the extractor and the wax and honey blew out of the frames and globbed all over the insides of the drum.  The whole point is to tidily separate the honey from the wax, not mash it all together, so the first extraction was not really much of a technical success. But as far as honey...success.

We ended up having to pour all the honey into a strainer anyway to get the wax out that had mingled during the extractor explosion.  I think Peter could have done without all the mishaps, but we were all focused on how tasty the honey was.