Harvesting Honey
“Labor of Love” is truly the best way to describe harvesting honey on our farm! There are many steps involved and the whole process is done by hand. This more natural way of beekeeping results in the quality product you have come to expect from Sycamore Grove Farm. When you purchase honey from our farm, you can be sure that it is 100% local raw honey that is sourced in a way that is truly sustainable and safe for our bees. And keeping costs down means it is more affordable to all our farm friends!
We harvest honey twice a year—June & October. The spring honey is light in color and mostly comes from tree pollen such as maple & black locust. It has a sweeter, milder flavor. The fall honey is darker in color and has a more complex flavor. It is heavier in clover and comes from flowering plants such as aster and goldenrod. Each year’s harvest is different, the honey can have a different look or taste from one hive to the next. The variety of flavors found in local honey is what gives it such a distinct taste. Even apiaries a few miles apart can have totally different flavors.
The bees store honey in shallow frames called honey supers. There are 10 frames in a honey super and they are made up of many hexagon-shaped cells. When the supers are full of capped cells, we know they are ready to harvest. The bees dry the cells with their wings until the moisture content is below 18%. Then they cap it with wax to preserve it. The low moisture content is one reason for its anti-microbial properties. We test our honey through a refractometer to make sure the moisture content of all the honey we sell is below 18%. This is a critical step. If you buy honey from anyone, make sure they know what the moisture content of their honey is. It is also a good way to make sure you are buying pure honey and not sugar water!
We only take a select number of frames from each hive. As we are committed to sustainable beekeeping, we want to make sure that the bees will have enough food for themselves. A full frame of honey weighs around 3-4 pounds. Depending on the strength of the hive, each will have 1 or 2 honey supers. Sometimes the bees will also store honey in deep frames, where the brood is usually found. These frames, when full, can weigh up to 6 lbs. each!
After pulling the frames, we remove the wax cappings using an uncapping roller. The wax is set aside to be melted and sold. (We also use this wax to make our amazing lip balm!) After the frame is de-capped, it goes into the extractor. This large, stainless steel device can hold 9 frames at once. We spin the honey out of the frames by hand, using centrifugal force. As you can imagine, this is a labor-intense process! The honey will drain out of the extractor, through a strainer into a 5-gallon bucket. We will strain it through 2 more strainers with decreasing size of mesh to remove unwanted debris such as leftover cappings and sometimes a bee wing or two. This is not the same as filtering the honey, which is a process that also removes pollen, air bubbles and fine particles that we leave in. The last straining is done in a bucket with a nozzle assembly on it. This is the bucket we will fill our jars from.
While it is a lot of work to keep bees sustainably, it is worth it when our customers tell us how much they enjoy it. We are very honored to be able to share our delicious honey with our friends!
