Honey harvest on the cheap!

The process of being a beekeeper is great fun. You learn something, you meet people, you find out all about lots of different things that you didn’t expect. Like plants and bees and honey.

but it’s not the cheapest hobby!

Aside from the investment in the hive and beekeeping clothing and other equipment, you also need to think about harvesting.

Sometimes, if you’re part of a beekeeping club, you can borrow equipment and that does help keep costs down.

Harvesting equipment including a Honey spinner can set you back quite a lot of money. This may be an investment beyond the reach of your wallet especially at the start of your beekeeping career.

We’ve managed to start harvesting honey without going through the beekeeping catalogues and spending a fortune.

Here’s how we did it.

In the photo you can see the one key item to help us harvest is an electric drill. We also used some sieves, a plastic container that we adapted with a special tap, and a large bin.

Honey is harvested with a centrifuge system. First of all you need to open the capped comb. You can either do this with a knife, special comb or other various pieces of equipment.

A normal kitchen knife does it very well.

We created a special frame to hold the uncapped honey frames out of metal.

This fits into the place on the drill where the bit would normally be.

We place two frames of honey into this contraption then attach the drill and gently spin inside a bucket.

The delicious honey flies out onto the sides of the bin and then drips down the inside.

Then we turn the two frames around and spin again so the honey on the other side of the comb is extracted successfully.

Later on we’ll use a specially adapted plastic container with the honey tap on the side to divide the honey into each of the sterile jars.

This time we had 9 kg of honey to extract from the frames. There were only eight frames in total. So this was an ideal solution for a fairly small quantities honey.