Something New

This should make extracting the honey much easier and faster. It can extract up to 9 frames of honey at a time. You get about 3+ lbs. of honey per frame.

This is a single frame of honey. It has 2 sides like this. I am removing the wax capping with an electrically heated knife to expose the honey. It can then be extracted by spinning and letting centrifugal force work to remove the honey from the cells.

We harvested about 150 lbs. of honey this week. It is a dark, dark red honey mostly from Japanese Knotweed that is abundant in this area. This plus 60 lbs. we harvested a little over a week ago gives us around 210 lbs. total this fall. This is just a dozen bottles of the harvest. We are saving some to make some mead.

This picture sort-of shows the color of Japanese Knotweed honey. It is not really this bright pink but a dark mahogeny color. This photo is taken with the honey bottle within inches of a 100W light bulb so you can see through the bottle. I'm guessing that the color is distorted for that reason as it appeared the same to the naked eye.

This is a slab of beeswax from our honey extraction process. This wax comes from the cappings that are being removed (see photo top right) from the honeycomb so that the honey may be extracted. The dollar bill is just for giving a scale.

Here's a side view of the beeswax. This was heated, melted and filtered through a double layer of 100% cotton material to remove impurities. This particular block weighs just a tiny bit over 3.5 lbs.