Processing the season’s honey haul is sticky business

Ayrshire Farm’s dairy barn is buzzing with activity as honey extraction gets underway for the day. It’s the perfect place for this part of the operation, with plenty of workspace and warm conditions for maintaining the right viscosity — too cool, and the honey won’t flow easily.

The crew is on their second day of extraction, a process that takes patience and a certain appreciation for repetition, not unlike most other phases of honey-making. They’ve harvested nine “supers” this week (short for “superstructures,” the series of boxes that are stacked atop a hive for honey collection) and are a little more than halfway through the work of spinning out the frames.

Bees toil all season long, gathering nectar that they deposit, drop by drop, into hexagonal cells made of beeswax. Once the cells are filled, bees seal them to preserve the honey for sustenance in colder months — that is unless an enterprising beekeeper gets to it first. The initial step in the extraction process involves removing the tops, or “caps,” of these cells. Ayrshire Farm’s beekeeper, Chris Windham, uses a capping fork that looks like a large metal comb to carefully pry off the white protective layer from the first side of the frame. Then he flips it and starts again on the second side. It takes about an hour to tackle one box.

Next, the uncapped frames are placed in a manual extractor and spun around with the use of a hand crank, driving the honey out of the frames through centrifugal force. Flip the frames, spin again, and repeat … and repeat.

After more uncapping and more spinning, Windham’s crew has finished extracting this year’s haul: 300 pounds total.

The empty honeycomb is left on the frames to give the farm’s bees a head start on next year’s harvest. Without it, the colonies would have to begin from scratch building a new network of cells. Life’s hard enough on bees as it is, and this gesture gives them a slight advantage.

The extracted honey is now poured through a filter to separate undesirable waxy bits from liquid gold. It’s just a matter of time before that gold makes its way into jars and then, ultimately, to homes and kitchens.

READ MORE. Honey Harvest: 1 | Honey Harvest: Part III