How we Harvest our Honey
A little run down on the honey harvesting cycle...
Harvesting typically takes place in spring and summer. This is because it’s when the bees are busy making honey, and therefore the only time in the year the bees have excess supplies.
In a nutshell, during the spring and summer months the worker bees (all female) fly out to the flowers, suck up the nectar, store it in their special honey tummies, take it back to the hive, and spit it into the open cells. At night, the bees fan the nectar with their wings to make a breeze and it off. Eventually the nectar becomes gooey, sticky honey, safely stored in these cells. The bees then seal the cells with a clean white wax, protecting the honey as a winter food source.
If it’s a strong hive they make enough to survive the winter, when there are fewer flowers to visit. This is why we only harvest in spring and summer! And we ALWAYS leave the bees with enough honey when we harvest.
Following the cues from nature...
We’ll only extract honey from hives when there is enough honey to spare, as we always like to leave every hive with at least one full box (up to 20 kilograms of honey) in reserve for our clever, hungry, special little creatures to feed on.
When we are harvesting, the bee boxes/hives are taken from the site. We use a smoker filled with pine needles to calm the bees during this process.
At this time the bees are given an empty box to refill. We take the boxes back to Mount Henry, and the frames are removed from the boxes and uncapped. They are then spun in a rotary extractor and the honey runs into a storage tank! It’s that simple!
We are a boutique operation, and bottle around 2,000 jars a year.
Our business is slowly growing, so yes, we expect this to increase as we have more time to work on our venture, as opposed to in it. The best aspect of Mount Henry Honey is that it fits around our expanding and changing family, and allows us to live this wonderful lifestyle on the farm.
