Note: The following article on harvesting early summer honey from your hives is meant for beekeepers with hives that have already made it through one winter. If you just got new bees this year, don't try to take any honey from them this spring. (And don’t count on harvesting any supers full of honey until at least next year.)
Around Greenwich, NY where Betterbee's hives are located, the nectar flow often starts going strong when maples and dandelions begin raising our spirits. In spring, we discover that some hives have swarmed and are set back, but some are often on their way to having capped honey in the supers! If you find yourself in the same situation, why not harvest some early honey?
Why harvest early honey?
Harvesting early honey can produce different flavors and colors to offer your customers. Around here, early season honey is usually lighter in color and milder in flavor than later honey and it tends to be thinner due to the particular sugars in the nectar of different flowers. If you wait and only do one harvest, those flavors and colors will be mixed for a blended taste and a color similar to late honey. That’s certainly fine, too!
Harvesting a bit of spring honey from your strong colonies also helps clear space in the supers for the bees to fill up with nectar later in the season. This will reduce the number of supers you need to maintain while still providing your bees plenty of space to store the next incoming flow of nectar.
What types of plant nectar may be in early honey?
While plant nectar content varies from location to location, we can give you an idea of the makeup of our honey harvests. Late honey for us consists of various goldenrod species, Japanese knotweed, and some clovers. Honey from earlier harvests may include a mix of tree blossoms like locust and basswood, plus many clovers, staghorn sumac, raspberries, and dozens of wildflowers.
The plants contributing to your honey will always be a mixture unless you have only one kind of plant for miles and miles around you. You can test your honey to pinpoint which flower types make up your honey—but if you can't claim a specific floral source for your harvest, you can always give your varietal honey interesting names. How about something as simple as "Early Harvest" and "Late Harvest," "Woods and Fields," or "August Abundance?" You might add the name of your town, like "Greenwich Witches Brew.”
How to tell if honey frames are ready for extraction
Honey that the bees haven't capped with wax isn't ready to extract yet: It has a lot of moisture in it, and the bees are not satisfied with its metamorphosis from nectar (very watery stuff) to honey (less than 18% water content). Follow the guidance of the bees—they will keep fanning and testing it, so wait for it to be capped before harvest. You may choose to examine your hive and group all finished (capped) combs in an upper super and put less-finished ones in a lower super where they will get the most attention from the bees.
Water-filled nectar takes up a lot more space than thickened honey, so don't be surprised to find fewer combs full of capped honey than nectar. Bees repeatedly sip up nectar and redeposit it elsewhere as part of the curing process. As the honey cures, it loses water and volume—which compacts many frames of nectar down to only a few frames of honey.
In August or September, we can sometimes get away with harvesting frames that are only about 80% capped and the honey is still thick enough to prevent fermentation. Honey harvested earlier in the year really should be 100% capped before you consider extracting it, or else you may face fermentation and spoilage.
The shining cells of nectar below the capped honey show that this frame is not suitable for extracting.
Photo by Arthur Sproat
What to do with crystallized honey frames
We can't spin out crystallized honey with an extractor, but if you have a lot of frames from last year with crystallized honey, let the bees handle it. Put frames with crystallized honey into the hives a few at a time — for instance, against the walls — to keep track of them. In a few weeks, the honey may be reconditioned: Bees reliquefy crystallized sugar and move it to other cells, then fan it to thicken it again. Tada, the crystals are gone!
Beekeeping Tip: To save the frames for later, put them into your freezer and cycle them out again when you’re ready—this will kill wax moths that may be lingering in the wax in all stages, egg to adult.
Be careful not to extract brood with your honey
Of course, only harvest from the honey supers, not the brood chamber. If you don't use a queen excluder between the brood chamber and the supers, there may be brood in the supers. Even with a queen excluder in place, you may occasionally find brood "upstairs." Perhaps the queen excluder was faulty, or maybe a swarm occurred and the new queen reentered the hive through the upper entrance. As you pick frames to extract, leave any with brood in the hive.
If you use a triangle escape board to get the bees out of your supers and find bees are still there after 24 hours, there must be brood up there — and maybe our queen, so be careful! We like using the triangle escape board to harvest from up to 5 hives, but for more than that, we use fume boards. They only need to be on for about 5 minutes on a warm day to drive the bees down into the brood chamber, out of the supers.
Prepare to extract or store honey right away
Have your extracting equipment ready before taking the supers from the bees—when away from the constant vigilance of your bees, honey can easily fall prey to small hive beetles or wax moths. As long as your honey doesn't sit unprotected for days and days, you should secure a beautiful harvest of golden spring honey without any headaches—just keep these honey harvest tips in mind.
After pulling supers from hives, extract the honey within one week and strain it, just in case any of these insects or their larvae were in the combs. For comb honey, put the sections or the whole supers in plastic bags and freeze for three days to ensure any minuscule larvae are killed—keeping them out of your pretty comb packages. To prevent condensation from forming on your comb honey as it warms back up, thaw it inside the bag.
Leave some honey for the bees
If you're just getting started with bees, it's wise to ask your mentor or other bee club members how the season normally goes so you ensure your bees remain prepared for times of nectar dearth. In our area near Saratoga Springs, NY, we have a few weeks of minor dearth between the May to June flow and the arrival of goldenrod in August.
If you are extracting early honey, always ensure you’re leaving enough for the bees to eat when nectar becomes scarce, and be cautious of taking too much honey when you harvest in late summer as well. If summer or fall nectar flow is low, you may have to feed your bees thick sugar syrup as a replacement—but, usually, this is not the case. Harvesting one super per hive in late June or early July should not harm the colony, and you likely will get another super later on without interfering with the bees' ability to stock up for winter!
There are benefits to harvesting early honey, including a varied product and providing space for your bees to work on producing new honey. Follow these tips when extracting to ensure your bees have what they need for summer, fall, and winter. For more beekeeping and honey harvest tips, explore our Beekeeper Guide.
