Having just finished extracting our Spring 2025 crop, I thought I’d share what I have learned about processing honey. It’s a subject many new beekeepers pay little attention to, until the day comes when their bees make a decent crop. What to do with it all? Do I have to spend even more money? Is there no end to the capacity of my hobby to devour ever more resources?! Well, the good news is that honey is a wonderful, natural product, prized by consumers (some of them, anyway) – so you can sell it and recoup some expenses. The bad news is that, yes, there are costs associated with processing honey.

Clearing Supers

The first thing you have to do, once your bee hives are impressive towers with many honey-filled boxes, is to separate the bees from the honey. This is preferable to bringing thousands of bees back to wherever you do your extracting. Here’s what we do for the Spring crop:

1. Check the honey supers to see which boxes are full, or nearly full, of capped honey. Not every single frame needs to be fully capped, especially if your crop includes honey from oilseed rape, which crystallises rapidly.
2. Occasionally, we move a few capped honey frames from one box to another, to be able to take away full boxes. We like to leave some honey for the bees – this will be a super with several frames of uncapped honey.
3. We take off the supers that are ‘full’ – the ones we are going to extract, and place them on a nearby stand, or upturned lid.
4. Based on the strength of the colony, we add back empty (previously extracted) supers to replace the ones we plan to remove. So, if we are going to take away three supers, we will add back two or three supers of extracted frames.
5. Then, we place a clearer-board on top, followed by the heavy boxes full of honey that we want to clear. Don’t use those silly porter bee escapes; the rhombus type work better (as does almost everything else). Clearing supers means removing the bees. The cover board and lid go on the very top.
6. The following day, or every so often the day after that, we return to take away the supers above the clearer board. They should be nearly free of bees, but there may be the odd straggler. We carry these to the van, then remove the clearer board, and put the cover board and lid on top. The clearer board is tapped on the ground to shake off any bees, and that goes into the van too.
   

Sometimes things can go wrong. Firstly, as we are generally removing honey at a time when the nectar flow has finished, the bees can be grumpier than normal. This is just one of those things; not much can be done. Wear a bee suit and move slowly and deliberately.

Secondly, these honey boxes can be heavy. If you cannot manage them alone, get help. If you drop the super when it’s full of honey, it will probably break. Moreover, you only have one back, so look after it. I hold the super against my body (hip or stomach) so that the weight is more dispersed. Occasionally, my son and I take one side of the box each, especially if it’s a deep box such as one with brood frames in it. It is also easier to put supers down onto a hive stand rather than bend all the way down to the ground. Some commercial beekeepers use pallets as floors and then a fork-lift or Ezyloader type of crane lift to move them onto the truck. At scale, this makes sense.

Occasionally, the bees don’t clear very well, or at all. When this happens to us, it normally means that there is a gap somewhere that bees can get into. Bees from other hives will sneak in and start to rob the super. You have to have no gaps between the clearer board and the boxes above. And no holes in supers, or gaps where wood has warped a bit at the corners. Another cause of bees not moving down towards the brood nest is if they have a virgin queen, or no queen, and little brood downstairs. Whatever the cause, you either have to brush bees off frames one by one, or leave those supers on the hive and get them another time. Oh, and fix the leak to stop the robbing.

Warming The Honey

It is incredible how the viscosity of honey can change with temperature. At 18 degrees Celsius, honey is over five times more viscous than at 32 degrees Celsius. This makes a huge difference. At the lower temperature, honey will take longer to extract, and uncap, and you will leave plenty behind in the comb, even with a good extractor. You will probably remove around 78% of the honey at 18 degrees Celsius, compared to 95% at 30–35 degrees. So, if you warm the honey in the supers before extraction, you will get over 20% more honey out of the frames. That equates to a lot of money. Suddenly those ‘expensive’ warming cabinets (see below) don’t seem such a bad idea, if you have a good number of colonies. An actual warm-room is better still, and can hold hundreds of supers and keep them warm.

The supers should be stored somewhere warm and bee-proof overnight, then extracted the following day, or later if that’s what you want. Some extractors even have a heating element in them, so that honey quickly runs down the sides and out, but they are seriously expensive. By the way, heating honey to around 35 degrees Celsius is not going to cause any damage; it’s the temperature inside the brood-nest anyway.

Uncapping

You can uncap by hand, like we do, or buy an expensive machine to do the job. There is probably a tipping point where making the investment in a machine makes sense, but for me, as somebody with less than 100 production colonies, I can’t bring myself to do it. We experimented with many ways to uncap and have finally settled on using uncapping forks like those shown below.

We purchased an ApiMelter from Swienty a couple of years ago and the wax cappings go into that. Also, any frames of crystallised honey go into it too, as do occasional frames which have lots of pollen at the bottom of the cells.

Our extracting room is a converted shipping container, which is lined, has windows at each end, power, lighting, and water. The Mole and I have compiled an ‘extraction playlist’ which booms out as we stand up, removing wax cappings, then loading frames into an extractor. There is also a fan to keep us cool, if required, and a flask of tea.

Things that go wrong:

• stabbing ourselves with the uncapping fork (need plasters, as people don’t want blood in their honey)
• Unwired frames or newly drawn and soft comb can get pretty cut up by the uncapping process. It just means the bees have more rebuilding to do when the frame is returned to them.
• Uneven combs, brace comb, old and stiff combs, bits with lots of pollen in it, partially drawn plastic frames, all need sorting out. Plastic combs are quite good when properly drawn out, but the bees don’t always do that. At least the wax can be scraped off, and the frame reused.
  

My general approach is that if frames are not in pretty good condition, I’d rather not give them back to the bees. Anything crystallised gets put in the ApiMelter.

Extracting

We have two radial electric extractors made by Lyson; a big one (30 frames) and a small one (12 frames). Those little ones which need to be manually cranked are only for people with a couple of hives, and they don’t work very well compared to the electric ones. It all depends on scale and budget, but I think an electric radial extractor is a wise investment.

The most important thing when loading frames into the extractor is to try to keep it balanced. A good way to do this is to load two or three frames next to each other, then spin the cage round 180 degrees, and load another two or three frames opposite. If they are of similar weight, and you keep doing this, the whole thing should be balanced by the end.

Also, the legs should be bolted into the floor, or something solid like a wooden frame. Once it’s loaded, I start the thing off spinning slowly, and ramp it up periodically until, after about ten minutes, it is whizzing around at 80-100% of top speed. Do not start off too quickly; I tend to start at about 30% and go up by 10% every few minutes. The overall spin time is 12–15 minutes, but I suppose longer would be fine too.

As the extractor spins, we have the gate open and honey running straight into a bucket with no filter. The filters get clogged up, and it takes far too long. In a more advanced set up the honey would go into a sump, with compartments separated by filters, and then be pumped into a tank. We scoop out any dead bees but leave the small bits of wax; they get removed much later on before the honey goes into jars.

After spinning out the honey, the frames are returned to the supers and piled up, ready to be taken to the next apiary (see ‘Clearing Supers’ above).

Storage

We store our extracted unfiltered honey in plastic buckets in a cool room. We write the apiary location and extraction date onto the lid. As long as the lids are securely in place, they can stay like that for years, although ours tend to shift within one year.

ApiMelter

The cappings are made of wax and still hold a surprising amount of honey. There are also frames of crystallised honey. This is where the ApiMelter is very handy because we can close the lid and set the temperature to 45 degrees Celsius for a day. Then, the honey can be tapped off into buckets. Often, once it’s filtered, this goes towards making soft set honey. If you are absent-minded, like me, you might let the honey overflow and run all over the floor. That’s a whole lot of fun to clean up.

Next, we ramp up the temperature to 70 degrees Celsius, and the next day we tap it into buckets, but this time it is melted wax. Well, it’s melted wax mixed with burnt honey. We discard the honey once the wax has cooled down, and use the wax to make candles or sell it to a customer who produces cosmetics.

Clean Up

Finally, we have to clean the disgusting mess that is left in the ApiMelter, the extractors, floor, and walls. It takes a few hours, but there is a feeling of deep righteousness that accompanies a lovely, clean, non-sticky, processing room. A pressure washer, various scrubbing brushes, a rubber brush with a squeegee side, some bleach, soda crystals, and detergent all play their part.

That’s the Spring honey processing over with; the summer one will kick off in August. The only real difference is that, when we clear supers, we tend to leave just one partially filled super under the clearer board, and don’t add back empty ones. The empties go into storage, wrapped in cellophane, ready for the following spring. Incidentally, our spring crop worked out at 35lbs (16kg) per production colony. My friend Paul Horton is headed for about 90lbs (41kg) per colony from Spring. He got a lot of oilseed rape, whereas none of that was growing anywhere near my bees. So, my honey is delicious, but it wasn’t a ‘Klondike‘ for me this Spring.