Kitchen bottling operation

After getting the honey from the hive into a bucket, I needed to bottle the honey for distribution. Honey can be stored in food-grade plastic or stainless-steel air-tight containers for a very long time (centuries in some extreme cases). It shouldn't be stored in containers of other metals because the honey's acidity will oxidize the metal.

We purchased a few 5-gallon buckets and a "honey-gate" - a valve that is screwed onto a hole cut into the bottom of the bucket. The honey gate is designed so that it is easy to quickly change the flow from the bucket which allows bottle fillers (me) to avoid overflowing the bottles.

First, I put a cardboard box under the honey gate to catch all the drips. As well as the honey gate is designed, it isn't perfectly drip-free, and when dealing with honey you have to assume that everything you touch will be sticky at the end. My wife hates a sticky kitchen, and she seemed a bit relieved when she noticed that the honey was dripping into the box and not onto the floor!

I rinsed and dried the food-grade PET bottles, and then just filled them with honey up to the neck. Then I tightly screwed on the plastic cap along with a paper seal. The seal seems to have a bit of adhesive around the rim and helps to keep the jar air-tight. Finally, I wiped off each bottle to remove the honey that inevitably gets on the outside of the jar, and the honey was ready to meet a consumer!

Out of curiosity, I weighed a few of the bottles and found that I was adding more than 1/2 lb. in the 1/2 lb. bottles after subtracting out the weight of the empty bottles. I did measure my honey at only 17% water content which would make my honey slightly heavier than the 18.6% water limit for honey, but I doubt that accounts for all of the difference. Of course, honey from different locations has different proportions of different kinds of sugar as well as differing water content, so it doesn't particularly surprise me that they're a bit heavy filled up to the neck. It's also possible that I was overfilling them. While I think they look best when filled to the neck (not the brim), large operations probably use bottling machines that fill by weight -- but then they probably have bottles that are designed for their average honey density and don't have to accommodate the variation in hobby apiarists world-wide.

How do you get honey out of the honeycomb?

Commercial beekeepers use a specially-designed centerfuge to drive honey out of the comb without damaging the comb so it can be reused. While we have tentative plans to purchase an extractor, the cheapest high quality models (i.e. not the plastic thing from China that WILL break after two years) cost around $300, and the motorized 9-frame radial extractor I have my eye on is more like $1500.

We'll need to sell a lot of honey to fund this kind of capital investment -- at the least, we'll need to have a lot of capped frames of honey to process so the time we save becomes significant. For the 18 frames I had capped, it is very difficult to justify such an expense.

My dad and I had read in various books and websites that it is possible to simply allow the honey to drip out of the comb once the thin wax caps are removed if it's kept at a high enough temperature for a few hours. We figured that if this method didn't work we could always fall back on the old "crush and strain method."

This method failed. Even at around 100 degrees F over night in a "honey room" in my parents' garage, the honey simply would not drip out of the honeycomb. I suspect there's some equation involving viscosity and surface tension that could have predicted such a result.

We then implemented our crush and strain backup plan. My mother and I ripped all the wax and honey out of the frames and dumped it into our uncapping tank. The uncapping tank is set up like a double boiler with a wire grid keeping most of the wax off the bottom of the lower tank so that the honey can drip off the wax into the lower container which is set up with a honey gate so we can empty the tank as it fills up.

This second picture shows the honey gate (propped open with a cork) dripping the honey into a two-stage strainer on a 5-gallon bucket. The strainer removes any small bits of wax and clumps of pollen that are floating in the honey while leaving the honey unheated and unfiltered so it remains "unprocessed." It's not uncommon for beekeepers to use a 200 micron filter which results in clearer honey that is less likely to crystallize, but pushing honey through such small holes often requires heating (which destroys many of the aromatic compounds that give unprocessed honey its amazing taste) and it's an extra step I don't consider necessary at the moment.

In the background, you can see the dehumidifier we ran during the processing operation. Honey is essentially dehydrated sugar water (nectar and some enzymes from bees) so it easily absorbs water from humid air. With the honey open to the air over night, it was important to pull water out of the air so the honey didn't get too watery. Honey is generally defined as having less than 18.6% water -- more than that and it's prone to fermenting. Below 18.6% water content, any yeast and bacteria in the honey can't grow. I used our refractometer to measure the water content of our honey at 17.0% -- a perfect level for honey!

Finally, here is a picture of the smashed honey comb at the bottom of the uncapping tank. You can't see the lower tank under the wax, but it's offset by about 2-3 inches. I left our "honey room" with a five gallon bucket full of honey that weighed around 50 lbs. I left the wax to drip and around 10 lbs. of honey in the bottom of the tank for my parents to finish processing. I have a hard time driving out to their house on week days (30 minutes one way is tough when you have a job and a baby) and they were happy to help.

Hopefully, we can melt down the wax in a double-boiler and make candles out of it later. I don't think we'll have quite enough to be worth the effort this year, but wax stores well and we'll save it up until we have enough for some winter activities.

Up next: my kitchen houses a brief honey bottling operation!

First Honey Harvest

On Friday, August 6, my wife and I opened up Meg (our booming hive) to steal some of the excess honey the girls had collected. We chose 18 of the heaviest, fully capped frames in the hive and Rachel carefully brushed off all the bees with the bee brush. I think she was a little nervous about flinging so many stinging insects onto the ground in front of the hive, but we gave them a little smoke to calm them down, and only had to reinforce the message once or twice when they got too excited. For the most part, the bees just slowly crawled their way back into the hive to join their sisters after their crazy experience with the bee brush!

Rachel must have been particularly rough with one because she got stung through her jeans! Luckily she was wearing the heavy canvas bee suit so she probably wouldn't have noticed stings to the suit, and she didn't even swell up with the sting through the jeans. It's her first sting so her next reactions may be include a little more swelling, but I've found that stings through heavy cloth aren't much worse than mosquito bites. It's the stings to the face and hands that are really rather inconvenient (and easily avoided by wearing your veil and gloves!

After brushing and blowing off all the bees, we put the capped frames into an empty super we kept under a sheet to keep the bees from finding the honey (in the bottom right corner of the right picture). We ended up with 18 frames of capped honey which we stored in a box in our basement over night until I could bring the frames to my parents' house to extract the honey.

In the picture, you can see that a third of the top frame on the right isn't fully capped. Only three frames had any uncapped honey like this, and it is a small enough amount to make little difference in the moisture content of the final honey once it's mixed up. You can also see a gouge in the bottom of the lower frame where Rachel got a bit too enthusiastic about brushing off the bees. This "mistake" required some very tasty cleanup!

Stay tuned for my adventures with actually extracting the honey!

Still one good hive

Both my hives are doing well, and while Meg (the taller one) seems to be stalled at 2.5 full supers, Jo has drawn 70-80% of the fourth box and should have plenty of room for honey going into the winter. Jo is around 80% done capping two boxes of honey in the supers, so I'm looking forward to around 50 lbs of harvested honey from the one hive!

In other news, my dad reports that three of his hives are now queenless. He thinks all three of his hives swarmed, and while he caught one (now doing very well and building up for the winter) the three original hives have neither eggs nor larvae suggesting that they are queenless. The hives are still reasonably strong, so he's planning to purchase three new queens and cross his fingers that they'll build up a good bunch of bees for wintering.

Other than that, not much to report. I suspect we'll be harvesting in two weeks as I want to have most of the honey fully capped to make my life easier when we're harvesting. If too much of what we take is unripe, we could have to run a dehumidifier in the room with the honey to get it back under 18.5% water content (so the honey doesn't ferment).