Cynthia: The last time on Modern Gardener, you saw us in our awesome bee suits, pulling honey from all of our hives.

We have so much to do.

This is a lot of work.

This is like, we kind of always dread this part, is when we get into the extraction mode.

Thom: This is the worst part of beekeeping.

(upbeat music) - We're gonna break this up.

We're gonna try to show you our way, and like Tom always says, if you ask a beekeeper how they extract honey, you're gonna get how many responses?

- 10 beekeepers will give you 10 different responses.

- And these are my tips that I remember.

And Tom, add in if you remember other tips.

One is making sure you're in a warm place when you extract the honey.

- We're upstairs today, in the hottest room in the house.

- We've turned off the AC.

- The first year we were in the basement where it was the coldest, and it took forever.

- And we were doing it in October, where it was like temperatures of like, at 50 degrees outside.

It was painful.

Like, we were getting blow dryers.

- Big mistake.

- It was awful.

So don't do that.

Hot days, hot sweaty days.

Turn off the AC, find the hottest place in the room to extract.

Another tip.

Don't do it outside.

Why, Tom?

- Bees love honey.

Surprise, right?

- They're gonna come find you!

- They will.

They will swarm.

- They will sniff it out.

- They will sniff it out in a minute, and you'll have hundreds of bees coming after you.

So, do not do it outside.

- So we're gonna do this right now.

Show you our process.

And both Tom and I have a different way of how we like to uncap the honey.

So when we have honey, you'll see that the bees are smart.

They don't want it to be loose, and they'll cap it with wax.

So, in each little cell, they store their honey and then put a thin layer of wax that honestly is crazy how strong it is to hold.

And we have to now take that wax off, and then we will start the process of pulling the honey out of the comb.

(upbeat music) - Should we take the wax off?

- Take the wax off, Tom!

- Okay.

- He's gonna show you his way, and I'm gonna show you my hot knife way.

- Okay.

So yeah, she has a hot knife.

She'll go over that in a minute.

But I bought this tool really cheap.

Has these little sharp prongs that are on the end.

You wanna feel it?

- Yeah, these things are pokey.

- So, the little pokey section goes right under the top of this wax capping.

You wanna be really careful just to stay right on the top.

To get the wax off.

And that opens up the cell, so that when you extract it, the honey will actually come out.

So you can see here that the top of the wax cappings are taken off, you can see the honey is exposed.

And look how much wax I got.

- I know.

- Not very much, it's a very thin layer, and hardly any honey.

- That's the goal.

- I'm trying to preserve as much honey as possible.

- [Cynthia] It's a lot of work, so you wanna get as much honey as you possibly can.

- [Tom] It's quite the process to render the wax and clean it up.

But it's fun.

- [Cynthia] It is fun.

- [Tom] You can see the honey is starting to drip, starting to leak out.

- And it's okay if there's some wax.

We're gonna get that off in the filtration system.

So there's many steps to this process.

(upbeat music) So when I use the hot knife, I kind of just make a little slice up there.

So again, just kind of like Tom, my whole goal is just to cut off the top part.

- And just to show the difference in size.

So that's a medium honey super.

We also put large boxes on top.

This is a frame from one of the large boxes here.

So you can see it's about double the size of these medium frames.

I don't know how much this actually weighs, but it's quite heavy.

Just one- - It really is shocking, how heavy they are.

- One frame weighs a lot.

- So there's a few here that you can see, that I wasn't able to get with the knife.

And instead of going back over the knife, I'm just gonna poke the holes.

With a fork.

- If you have a honey cell that's not decapped- - It won't come out.

- When you extract it, all the other honey will come out, but even those individual cells will not come out.

You'll still have honey in your frames.

- That was a long time.

This probably took us about, for one, that was probably about 10 minutes.

- Yeah.

And eight minutes of those were yours.

(Cynthia laughs) And we've got 30 frames.

We only have four hives, so we don't have very many- - 30 frames times 10.

- We have 30 frames to extract today, so.

It's a long process.

And that's just decapping, not even- - Extracting.

- Extracting, and filtering.

Filtering's the, ugh.

- Yeah.

- Filtering's long.

We, usually these boxes hold 10 frames, but the honey supers will typically do nine frames.

And that way, they have a little bit more room to draw the comb out, just a little bit more.

The honeycomb on this sticks out a little bit past the wood frame here.

That makes it easier with this hot knife to actually be able to get these cappings off.

Everything gets sticky.

It gets very, very sticky.

So we have drop cloths on the ground.

This here, we have a little rack, to catch the wax cappings on.

So the wax will sit there, but then the honey will drip below.

We're trying to save and salvage as much honey as we possibly can.

We have this cookie sheet down here, to catch it all.

We have it up on a stool.

And just to make sure this doesn't slide off, I've got a tie down here, holding that cookie sheet onto this little stool.

- So when you're wondering why raw honey at your local farmer's market costs so much money, it's because of this right here.

(upbeat music) - So this is our extractor we bought here a couple years ago.

We used to rent hand crank extractors.

There are a couple different types.

This is electric, so it does it all for us.

The hand cranks are not very much fun.

- Oh my gosh, it is so awful.

That was ... - Sit and crank and crank and crank.

- It was fun for about 10 minutes.

- Yeah.

So we're gonna go ahead.

We have four frames in here.

And there's a little wire basket.

We put our four frames in.

They're all about equal weight and size, so it doesn't get too off center.

We're gonna start slow.

And you'll see honey being pulled out.

So it spins really fast.

And the centrifugal force obviously pulls the honey out of the frames, because the wax cappings are off now, hits the side of the barrel here, and then slowly drains down to the bottom.

And then eventually we use this spigot here and drain it outta there.

So I'm gonna go ahead and start this up.

And actually, I'll start slow, and you can see that before we start spraying honey everywhere.

(machine whirs) And hope the weight is the way we need it.

And already you can see a little bit of honey spraying out into the sides.

And I'm gonna put these back on before I go faster.

I don't want honey everywhere.

I've learned my lesson.

So it's pretty nice and balanced.

You can see it wiggle a little bit, but not very much.

So I run it until, I'm looking in right now.

I can see honey spraying on the side of the container here.

Once I see that there's not really any honey coming out anymore, then I'll stop it.

Probably about done there.

I'm gonna turn it back down.

You can smell that honey.

- [Cynthia] Smells so good.

- Smells great.

And you can see that these cells, I don't know if you're able to see that, but the cells in here are empty.

There's honey here on kind of the outside of the wax.

You can see this side obviously is not empty.

This is still full.

So now, we're gonna flip 'em around, so that this side is on the outside now.

And we're going to extract the other side of all these frames.

(upbeat music) And start slow.

And gradually build speed.

So you can see those are nice and empty there.

Let's compare to the other side.

It looks quite similar.

So we did a pretty good job there.

We're gonna throw these back in the hive later today, and the bees will, we'll leave it there for a few days, the bees will clean it right up and put it back into their hive and store it for the winter.

(upbeat music) The moment of truth!

- [Cynthia] Ooh!

- [Tom] There it goes.

- If you can see, you'll start seeing all those big chunks of wax.

Little bits of dirt and debris.

And we're just gonna start clearing that out.

(upbeat music) Alright.

We got this half down, into the red bucket, filtered.

- Should we filter it again?

- Yeah!

- Let's filter!

- We like to filter it three times.

So this is filter number one, where we're getting all the big stuff out.

- Filter number two.

- Where we get some more big stuff out.

- And then filter number three.

- Where we get the itty bitty tiny stuff out.

- And then as it drips through this filter into this bucket, that's the final product.

- [Cynthia] That's when we're done.

- [Tom] We're done.

- [Cynthia] I don't wanna filter anymore.

- No.

Three is enough.

- Three is plenty.

- Three is enough.

- Alright.

Here we go.

- So we're gonna line this up.

Open up our honey gate.

And there it goes.

(upbeat music) - I am making sure, I've just got these jars nice and clean.

I'm making sure there isn't any water inside, because that is not, that's not good for honey, and can rot it.

So we want to make sure that when we're storing our honey, that the jars are dry.

Let's jar up this liquid gold.

(upbeat music) Ooh, it's a pretty amber color this time!

(upbeat music) Mm!

I hope you enjoyed harvesting honey with Tom and me.

We definitely love our harvest this year.

We're super excited!

Beautiful amber color honey.

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(ambient jingle)