That’s a lot of honey!

We harvested nearly 2,000 pounds of honey in early August, the highest yet for us here at the Hive! To conceptualize this amount of honey, think 3 55-gallon drums or 33 5-gallon buckets or 2,000 1-lb jars. That’s a lot of honey!

But what we think is even more amazing is the process of honey harvest. It starts with gratitude, as we thank the bees for collecting more honey than they need and for sharing it with us. We’re careful to leave plenty of honey for the bees to eat throughout the winter, as honey is the best food source for the bees. 

While we could feed sugar water or high fructose corn syrup to the bees to get them through winter, we don’t believe that HFCS is good for anyone, AND honey has so much more to offer than sugar. Think enzymes, antioxidants, and probiotics. We’re convinced that the nutrition from feeding our bees honey is a large part of our ability to keep our bees alive through the Wisconsin winters. 

Back to honey harvest, it’s a several day process of lifting the boxes of honey – 3,342 lbs this year with all the equipment! – three times within a few days. The first lift is to check that each hive has 1.5-2 full boxes of honey to keep for winter. The second lift is to add an escape board, a one-way valve to get the bees out of the honey supers. The third and final lift is taking the extra honey supers off the hives and moving them into the trailer. 

After carefully stacking these boxes, we drive to our friend’s honey extraction location and spend a sticky afternoon loading the frames into the extracting equipment, where the honey is uncapped, spun out of the comb in a centrifuge, and collected in a 55-gallon drum. 

These drums of honey are returned to the Hive where we use this honey to make delicious sparkling meads. Grab a can and let’s cheers to the bees!