First honey harvest! | healthy home economist

How and when to harvest your first raw honey and honeycomb from your backyard beehive.

As a novice backyard beekeeper, I wanted to share some details and photos with you about my first raw honey harvest.

Of course, honey also contains delicious honeycomb, a healthy natural chewing gum.

timing

Harvesting honey from my backyard beehives was never an overnight success.

My first colony was established in March 2023, so it took over a year for the hives to grow to a point where I could consider extracting honey.

That said, it is unwise to remove nectar from a colony that is newly established, small, struggling, or not thriving and bursting at the seams with enough nectar, nectar, and pollen to sustain itself.

The honey with the honeycomb pictured above is from one frame that meets the criteria for a beekeeper to photograph it.

How to Harvest Honey

The process of harvesting honey was quite simple.

I shook off a few bees from the honey picture frame and brought them into the kitchen.

I then carefully scraped the honey, with the honeycombs still intact, into a large bowl, as you can see above.

Combs and honey are stored in the pantry in a glass bowl with a tightly closed lid.

After removing the honey from the mold, it was placed on a patio propped up against the sides of a chair for easy access to both sides.

Since the patio is not far from the hive, the bees found it easily and quickly began cleaning up the sticky residue.

After the bees have cleaned it (this will only take a day!), the frame can be placed back into the hive.

I preferred to have the hive clean the frames rather than immediately putting them back in (the bees will clean wherever you put them!).

This is because frames with a little bit of honey run the risk of the honey dripping onto the bottom of the hive and attracting wax moths. It was a scary intrusion that has been problematic this season.

There are other techniques for harvesting honey that work just as well, but this is a very simple and straightforward approach for small-scale harvesting.

Hopefully, this is the first of many to come!

Learn more about backyard beekeeping

If you would like to read more about my adventures as a backyard beekeeper, I have a growing list of articles in the Backyard Beekeeping category.