The main flow of honey for the summer has now stopped and it is now the time of the year to harvest the main crop from the hives. Its was a hard days work to remove the frames of honey (minus the bees) and ship them to a safe “bee free” place for extraction. I go through each frame and inspect it to check the honey is ready before it is taken off the hive. More importantly, half the crop is left behind for the bees so they have enough stores to sustain themselves. The following weekend the wax cappings were removed (We use these to make beeswax candles later in the year)  and the honey was spun from the frames using a hand cranked extractor. This is a laborious job and makes everything very sticky. Once extracted our honey is passed through three sieves of ever smaller mesh to remove any wax. The empty frames are now back on the hives for the bees to pick clean (and to fill up again in September when the heather flowers)
The honey then is left in a settling tank for a week. This allows all the fine bubbles that are introduced in the spinning process to float to the top. (these are harmless, but give the honey a slightly cloudy appearance). You can see in the photo on the left all the mini bubbles that have surfaced. All that is left is to tap the honey into jars and add a label.

If you are interested in purchasing a jar of the 2019 Summer crop please contact us.