Beekeeping 101

Since coming to Miller Honey Farms we have gotten a lot of questions about how honey is made. I had Jason write up a brief overview of the honey harvesting process. At MHF it all starts with a beehive in North Dakota.

Here is a picture of a bee yard, each of the white stacks is a beehive, so you can see about 7 beehives in this photos, each of our bee yards has about 40 hives and we have just under 300 bee yards. If you look close the bottom two boxes on each hives are taller than the other boxes on the hive. The top boxes are called 'supers' and that is where the bees store honey. When we harvest honey we drive the bees down into the bottom boxes with smoke, and then we remove the supers that are full of honey from each hive.

Once we get back to the plant the full supers go into the hot room, where they sit for about a week at around 100 degrees. This heats up the honey so it flows out of the frames quickly.

Here you can see two of our three extractors. The pallet of honey on the left is placed on a lazy susan for easy loading onto the uncapper.  

Here a worker is loading a super into the uncapper, a hydraulic ram then pushes the individual frames out of the box.

When the bees finish filling an individual cell with honey they cap it over with a thin layer of wax, unless that wax capping is removed the honey won't spin out of the cells. The uncapper works by scraping the wax capping off of each honey cell. It accomplishes this with a series of wire brushes. You can see the two frames on the top are partially capped over. The two frames on the bottom are uncapped. 

The frames are then run up a conveyer chain where they wait to be loaded into the extractor. 

A worker is loading the extractor here, each of our three extractors holds 120 frames. The frames are spun for 10 minutes to spin out the honey.

The dry frames are then reloaded into the super boxes and the wax is scrapped from the top bars.  Before being stacked for reuse in the field.

The honey from the three extractors drains into a sump where any large chunks of wood or other debris is filtered out and the honey is pumped up the heat exchanger.

Here the heat exchanger heats the honey from 95 deg to 105 deg before it is pumped into the wax separaters.

The two wax separator centrifuges remove almost all the wax from the honey.   

The wax goes into the melters sitting below the spinners and comes out as pure bees wax. This wax is sold for use in lip gloss, creams, lotions, and moisturizers. You may also find beeswax in candles, and cosmetics, such as eye shadow, blush, and eye liner.

After the wax separator, the honey is pumped into holding tanks which together hold about 30 barrels of honey. We typically extract 25-30 barrels a day.

The honey is then tapped-off into barrels which are stacked in the warehouse until they are loaded into semi trailers and hauled to the packing plant. We don't pack honey so our crop is sold to honey packers who then do the final filtering, color blending, and sanitation steps.

Gin in a beeyard helping me place supers on the beehives that need additional space. 

At some point I may add more detail to this post explaining how honey gets from the flower to your table, but I don't have the time now.  

Our time in Gackle has come to a close.  We leave tomorrow for Utah and will spend a week at Lake Powell with Jason's family.  I am actually really sad to leave.  I am looking forward to going home, seeing family, being in our home again, and seeing friends, but I know life will be super busy and Jason will be gone from us for the next two months or so :(  I am also not looking forward to the drive home.    Luckily we get to do it all again next summer :)

Honey Hub Update:

The Honey Hub has been hopping the last few weeks.  We have had multiple groups staying with us for the last four nights.  Some contacted us ahead of time through warmshowers, others just find us when they get into town.  It has been a lot of fun for us to meet new people and get to know them. We look forward to next summer.  Here are the pictures we have taken with our cyclist friends (more have stayed who are not pictured because we were out of town when they were here).

Mary and Jay

Driscoll

Sean and ???

Scott and Karla, David and Eric

Chuck

Jim and Teresa

Peter and Steven

Kale and Tony

Bill, Dan and Bill

We set up this little area in the room downstairs for people who may want to know more about our beliefs.