Harvesting Honey from a Top Bar Hive
Harvesting your own honey is an enjoyable and rewarding experience, not only for the great tasting honey itself, but also as a necessary part of keeping your beehive healthy and strong.
Honey is nectar that the bees have ripened by adding enzymes that breakdown the complex sugars in the nectar into simple inverted sugars, which easier for the bees to digest and less susceptible to bacterial attack. The bees also evaporate the nectar until it contains less that 18% water. That protects the honey against fermentation caused by yeasts.
Deciding when to harvest your honey is easy - just take a look in the window. When there are only three or four top bars left for the bees to use, it's time to make some more room!
This usually happens either in early spring, or during the height of nectar production season. As leading beekeeper Gunther Hauk recommends, early spring is the best time to harvest your honey.
Any honey that is left over from the winter can make the bees start to feel crowded, so removing the honey is an important part of swarm prevention. Spring harvesting is easy and usually doesn't even involve protective clothing as the bees seem to appreciate you making them more space.
The other time to harvest your honey is during the nectar season - usually in the summer and early fall. In the fall, remember to leave plenty of honeycombs for the bees to live on during the winter.
Your climate may require more or less, which you will figure out as you live with your bees, but this is a good number to start with. If you have an excess of honey, you can remove the honeycomb. Make sure it isn't brood comb!
In a drier climate, only harvest comb that has at least half the cells capped with wax. In a very humid climate, only harvest fully capped combs as bees have a harder time getting the honey sufficiently dehydrated in these conditions.
If the majority of the honey on the comb is uncapped, it is probably not dehydrated enough to prevent the honey from fermenting. Leave it for the bees to finish off.
In removing the comb from the hive, use a very thin, sharp knife to make sure the comb isn't attached to the sides or back of the hive. Once this is done, lift the top bar out of the hive with the comb attached. Honeycomb is made out of wax, and it breaks easily, so be sure to hold the top bar so the comb is straight up and down, or you will risk the comb breaking off and falling to the ground, spoiling your honey!
Gently brush off any remaining bees with something like natural grass and take the honey to your bucket. Put the comb, which will probably still be full of bees, in a crate that the top bar fits accross and place all the top bars that you pulled out into this. Then, when ready to close up the hive brush all the bees off at once to avoid having them in the air the entire time.
Cut the comb from the top bar in a straight line into the bucket and place the lid on quickly to keep as few bees as possible from landing on the harvested honey, and replace the top bar in the back of the hive.
This is the best time to process your honey, while it's still warm from the hive and easily manipulated. Crush the comb with hands or something like a potato masher until it looks like a wax and honey soup.
Tape damp straining material securely to another bucket, leaving a generous pouch as the honey takes a long time to strain. Pour the honey and comb mixture onto the material and cover with another bucket and leave overnight in a warm place where ants cannot invade! In the morning, you can pour the strained honey into jars, where it will be ready to eat. Yum!
Here's a little tip about harvesting: If you do a comb or two at a time here and there, you get different flavors of honey reflecting the nectar that was used to make it. If you harvest all at once, the flavors tend to run together, taking away the fun of sharing the different tastes with your friends and family!