Honey Harvesting

We love the opportunities to harvest excess honey from beehives we host in our apiary! And, in the spirit of Thanksgiving (the season of food and flavor), we’re going to talk about honey harvesting.

Our Process

When it comes to the actual honey harvest, the process is relatively simple and can be done in any kitchen. You just have to remove the honeycomb first. Below, we will talk of the process in chronological order, starting with getting the honeycomb itself.

Oh, and if you were to be following these steps, we would assume you have the proper beekeeping equipment if you have a hive to harvest from. This is mostly written for the curiosity of others who want to know how it’s done.

• First, we analyze a hive and determine if it’s harvestable. And by harvestable, I mean if the hive has excess. The bees keep most of their frames to continue growing their colony.
• If we acknowledge excess to harvest, then we extract the comb from the hive with a hive tool (kind of like a crowbar with a sharp edge) and place the comb into a bucket.
• Then, we bring the bucket inside.
• And prepare fine mesh bags.
  • There’s no end-all, be-all method for extracting honey from the comb. Fine mesh bags (intended for paint) works wonders, and those can be bought from your local hardware store.
• Simply, place a large bowl under where honey will be harvested.
• Honeycomb is put inside the mesh bag and squeezed.
  • This will be very sticky. And requires a surprising amount of grip strength.
• Then, we pour the lot into storage containers.
• Local honey, voila!

The process isn’t all that complicated, especially when we do small-scale harvesting. Honey harvesting is not our focus, as we focus on cultivating bees as an apiculture—raising honeybees and selling colonies to other beekeepers.

Is Harvesting Honey Healthy for the Bees?

Simply, yes. As long as you leave enough comb/frames for them to continue growth. You can take away too much, which will stunt their growth. But, a hive produces honey in pounds aplenty–easily able to fill several beehives–in a season. The loss of a few frames doesn’t phase
them.

In fact, harvesting honey is healthy for them in the sense that it gives them work, which prevents swarming. If you don’t harvest a hive, then the untouched colony will surely swarm twice in a season. Which is great for fostering genetic diversity in nature, but swarms are less appreciated in urban areas. Hence why we do bee removals in Dallas and all over the United States.

When you receive a bee service from Bee Safe Bee Removal or any other bee removal company, it is highly important that you know what to do to make sure our professional beekeepers will do a safe bee removal service job.
Our bee services include a wide range of options for our customers to choose from. Customers can select a safe bee removal service that will fix construction or leave it as (perhaps you find a more affordable contractor) or a wasp extermination for the main job. Either way you go, customers will be able to find great pricing options from us. After you agree to a job and pricing with our sale’s team, our professional beekeepers will be able to go out there to perform a job. You will know the time they will arrive. While weather and traffic can delay a beekeeper’s arrival, our sale’s team will always let you know if anything about your job changes. Our beekeeper’s main focus is to perform the bee removal or wasp removal job, never to sell you anything else.
Afterwards, our beekeepers will start going at the time you have agreed on, so you will need to prepare for their arrival. This bee removal preparation is not only for the beekeepers but it is mainly for your safety and the safety of others. Please make sure that dogs, children, and other adults are inside or away from the location of the bees or wasps. You will also need to make sure to alert neighbors or visiting people that there will be a bee removal job in place. Doing this type of preparation before the bee removal and staying away during the bee removal service will allow everyone to stay safe. Many times during our bee removal service, bees will become hostile as they attempt to protect their bee hive so they will attack anything that is close to the bee removal service. Even if you are a couple of feet away looking, bees will still attack you and chase you for a long time if you are not inside or in a closed area.
Our main priorities during every bee removal service is to save the bees and make sure our customers are safe from any danger. If you’d like, you can interact with the beekeepers after the job to see the completion or ask for some delicious honey. Warning: there might still be some uncollected bees that will not be happy to see their beehive gone. Never try to dive in a situation without protective gear like our professional bee suits. Bee stings are no joke and can cause either an allergic reaction or death. Once the bee removal service is done, you will probably need to wait for the next morning to see trickling effects. However, there will still be stray bees that have wandered off to collect pollen that will see that their bee hive is no longer there so be careful of the bee removal service for a couple of days to see them gone.