Once you’ve harvested your natural honeycomb from your Warré (or other kind of top bar) beehive, it’s time to make get some of that goodness into jars! Fortunately, like many other aspects of natural beekeeping, getting the honey out of natural comb is easy and simple, once you know how.
We’re just at the start of our beekeeping journey, but still, even though we don’t have whizz-bang equipment, we found this a wonderfully tactile and rewarding experience. It’s prettymuch just a case of crushing the comb, sieving it, and bottling the results. 100% organic yum, with all the goodness of the honey still utterly intact.
At first, this seemed just a bit to easy – don’t we need extractors, hot knives, spinning things and somewhere to store all the frames? Not when doing natural beekeeping, you don’t. You simply cut the comb off the top bar, crush it up, strain it through a sieve and, um, that’s it.
Tim cuts the honeycomb off the top-bars
Warré honeycomb, all ready to crush…
Nick tucks into a spare piece of semi-capped honeycomb
The comb is crushed and mashed…
Then into the sieve over the honey bucket…
Getting all the crushed comb in, including some older stuff from a previous harvest
And proceed to get squishy! It’s quite a sensation…
The result – pure, cold-pressed organic honey
Mmmm honey…
The advantages of harvesting honey in this way include:
- You get everything that was in the comb, in your honey. Pollen, propolis, the lot. Which is ridiculously good for you, in all sorts of ways.
- Because the natural comb is not re-used year after year, there’s less chance that environmental toxins that might be present in the comb can build up, affecting both the colony, and the honey.
- You get a big glob of organic beeswax, which you can then use creatively (we’re using ours for sealing the ends of our shiitake mushroom logs).
- You get honey that is not heated in any way during the process, which means none of the delicate antibiotics and enzymes within the honey are destroyed. It all makes it into the jar.
The advantages to the bees by harvesting honey from hives managed in this way include:
- The bees get to build natural comb, with no plastic or pre-set foundation. This benefits the colony in heaps of ways including but not limited to: communication (vibrating the comb to send messages), general hive health, toxin accumulation, etc and so on.
- By getting to build new comb, the bees get to re-set their cell size according to what is needed in that comb at that point (did you know they make all different gauges of cell size, given the chance?).
Tim Malfroy’s tips for a happy honey harvest from Warré comb:
- Have all your gear washed and ready, and process the comb soon after you return from collecting it in the hive. The honey will be more liquid at this point.
- If for some reason you have to wait to process the comb, put it in the sun before crushing it to gently warm it. It will make everything quicker and easier
- If you’re not going to process the comb straight away, cut if off the frames and store it in slabs of comb. While it’s in the comb, it is sealed and pure, and will last much longer than broken up.
For this harvest, we placed a big sieve on top of a honey bucket with a ‘gate’ on the front, then simply crushed the comb in a bucket and then tipped it into the sieve. To speed the process up, we all squished the comb by grabbing great handfuls – this meant we expelled the honey from the wax much quicker.
At the end of this process we had about 5kg of strained honey (from 3 combs – we’ll be harvesting more later) and about 0.5kg of beeswax in lumps.
The beeswax we’ll melt down in water and skim off, from which brew we’ll be left with honey water, which is what mead is made from! But we’ll probably just drink that straight – it’s an awesome cocktail-like honey hit of propolis, pollen and honey.
So there you have it. Honey harvest the simple way. I dare say we’ll get more experimental and advanced in our techniques as we go, but as a starting point, this was great fun!
If you’d like to read more about Warré beekeeping, head to Tim Malfroy’s Natural Beekeeping website, which is full of great info about this very permaculture-minded approach to bees.
And the journey of Warré beekeeping at Milkwood Farm is here.
Sunlight in a jar. So many millions of flowers went into making this… many thanks, Milkwood bees!
- Natural Beekeeping courses at Milkwood Farm + inner-city Sydney
- More Milkwood.net How-to’s on everything from planting spuds to shiitake logs
Thank You! Excellent survivors information here. Off Grid folks will enjoy the simplicity, the hand powered nature of this. Jars for preserving, storing will be needed, Good thing to stock up on now while the “getting” is good!
What seriously pisses me off about these photos is how much life-saving honey you all appear to have *wasted* playing around. I am viscerally appalled!!! Honey should never be handled so carelessly. Shame on you!
Wow. That’s interesting… Miki, have you got any constructive suggestions? (i gift your rage back to you, by the way – thanks but no thanks)… 5kg of honey harvested from 3 natural combs of this size is a pretty good yeild, from what we’ve been advised.
Don’t think very much got wasted… every surface was scraped, every finger and bowl was licked…
Also, at this point it’s about getting to know the task, so things are bound to be a little messy. All the best and very open to any useful comments you might have –
miki – I am wondering why you have chosen to post such a disrespectful and misleading comment? Being the beekeeper that teaches the 2 day Natural Beekeeping Course, and oversees all things ‘bee’ at Milkwood, I am deeply offended that you would think we ‘wasted’ honey, or handled it ‘carelessly’. I can assure you – not a teaspoon was wasted!! In terms of us ‘playing around’ – yes, we were incredibly joyful and thankful to the bees for the gift of wild honey, but we are also deeply committed and serious about Natural Beekeeping – please see my website and… Read more »
Admittedly, my experience of beekeeping and honey harvesting ended 46 years ago and I know nothing of changes to commercial honey extraction practice since then, but I can think of nothing we did in those days that would have altered the natural status of packaged honey. Artificial heating was only to a maximum of natural hive temperature, in order to facilitate a good natural flow. Comb foundation was pressed from pure, clean beeswax (no plastics). The only filtering we did was straining through a muslin bag to remove wax particles, which I concede some consumers might prefer remain in their… Read more »
Hey Keith, cheers for your comments – Warré beekeeping is about finding a balance between the bees natural tendancies and getting a harvest of honey. No, you dont get as much honey as a conventional hive. But that’s fine – especially in Australia, where our honey production is ridiculously good. As you can see from the photos, the bees do store plenty of honey when left to determine their own cell size. And there’s some research now that shows that, even tho drone production isn’t ‘good’ for conventional ‘maximised production’ beekeeping, more drones means more varied genetics in the new… Read more »
I can’t see where any honey was “wasted” in this process? It has all been bottled, eaten or used to make wax or a honey drink. I am sure any honey that was on your hands was promptly consumed!
Great story and photos Kirsten, it is nice to see the process is so simple. Too many things are over complicated these days! The honey looks amazing! Yum!
🙂
yes we did have rather a lot of fun licking it off our fingers. no colds of flu for us, with all that goodness! Om nom nom…
Great stuff. Must get cracking on finishing off my almost finished top bar hive! Bees and mycelium blow my mind.
A couple of points from your response, Kirsten: 1) “Also, the bit about bees only raising drones and not workers if allowed to determine their own cell size and not given standard foundation is frankly not true. At all.” I don’t know how you deduced that from what I said. What I did say was that “the bees will only raise worker brood in the standard gauge cell. Any eggs laid in larger cells will result in drone brood and consequently, greater than necessary numbers of drones”, certainly not that bees only raise drones and not workers if allowed to… Read more »
YUM!
Thoroughly enjoying the regular online articles updates on what’s happening at Milkwood, very inspiring, I hope to make it there some day!
Dear Keith, Thanks for your comments. I’ve responded below: You wrote: “Admittedly, my experience of beekeeping and honey harvesting ended 46 years ago…” I would say that an awful lot has changed over the last 46 years. I won’t go into details, because it could fill an entire book. Unfortunately, the pure comb foundation you speak of is now laden with chemicals – a scoping study in the US last year found a staggering 121 types of pesticides and miticides in beeswax samples from around the country: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0009754 We are creating an environment in which we are not only poisoning… Read more »
After sitting and watching your bees at the hive in December, and eating your comb honey, it is good to see how you extreacted it all. I was imagining spinny things too. Too easy (sort of).
Great article! During Rosh Hashana, in our top-bar hives we place the honeycomb inverted on the table and let out guests spoon off honey onto their bread and apples.
Hi, This is an excellent and informative article. Thank you. Your Milkwood site is definitely one of the best sites for excellent and non-ideological information on permaculture and all things related. Could I ask if there is any use for an excluder in the Warre hive? If not, how is the brood separated from the honey production? Actually, the same goes for the top bar hive? Is the honey in top bar produced in the outer frames while the brood is restricted more to the inner frames? Final question, are the side bars on the top bar hives as well… Read more »
Hi Charles 🙂 There is no excluder within a Warré hive – the queen is free to roam. The brood colony naturally moves down the hive, filling the comb above them with a thermal dome of honey as they vacate the cells – The Warré hive uses top-bars (ours have side bars also) but is not a “kenyan top bar hive’ which is quite a different approach and perhaps less suited to Australian conditions (in our opinion) as its harder for the colony to expand and store honey on a big honeyflow such as our eucalyptus brings. Also harder to… Read more »
Thank you Kirsten. Much appreciated. So, your top bar hives are essentially rectangular boxes as opposed to the “kenyan” design. Is it please possible to obtain the actual dimensions/design of the hives you use? I was going to build some top bar hives but if they are not really suitable for here it would be good to do it the right way first.
I think I might have misunderstood your response on the Kenyan and Warre hives and have sent you an email Kirsten to clarify. I understood that you had both hives but I think you mean you only use the Warre hive. My apologies for mixing it all up.
Wow, whats with all of the anger these posters seem to have? I’m NOT a beekeeper. All I know is 1. Bee stings hurt and 2. I love honey. Thanks for posting how it’s extracted. I’m glad to see your having a good time with it and I’m looking forward to reading/learning more.
I have tried to do what I think is the most natural way to raise a hive. I use Langstroth Hives but I use foundationless frames with just a started strip and harvest the honey out of the honey supers by crushing the comb and making them rebuild fresh come every year and the honey seems to be lighter and cleaner looking than extracted honey. In the hive bodies I only change out the frames and make them rebuild them when they get old and dark, maybe every 3 or 4 years and not all at once but on a… Read more »
Charles, I like the way you manage your girls! I have had experience with both top bar and warre but far and away prefer good ole Langstroths! I, like you, do the foundationless thing, but I don’t even use starter strips: the top bar is angled as in a top bar hive and the girls build right off it. I’ve been working bees, chemical free, in the middle of an organic 5-acre property, for 13 yrs and am a NC State Certified master beekeeper. As I tell my students, there is no wrong way to keep bees as long as… Read more »
We removed our shower while renovating our restroom to find an enormous 5′ tall honeycomp filled with delicious orange tasting honey. I want to harvest and jar the honey and found your photos most informative, thank you. There are no bees since my husband plugged the hole and exterminated the bees about 6 months ago. We did not realize this was such a large colony, i feel bad now. Is there any reason the honey would not be safe to eat? twards the bottom, there is no honey in the comb and it is a blackish color. Twards the top,… Read more »
Isis depending on what you exterminated them with (and whether that in turn contaminated the honey), the honey would likely be fine… if you’re wondering, you could harvest and jar it and then get it tested to be sure?
I know nothing about bees per se, and just started using honey for health reasons. My questions are: 1. is raw honey solid or liquid or can it be both? I bought two jars of honey, one is called Really Raw Honey from Baltimore, Maryland, that says it is raw honey containing the pollen, propolis and the honeycomb. This honey is solid and has a fine grainy, yet smooth texture (if that makes any sense?) it also says that they never transport their bees to pollinate commercial crops. The second one I bought is called Y.S. ECO BEE Farms and… Read more »
Oheloil, all honey candies (goes solid) after a time if it’s not super heat treated – the length of time it stays liquid depends on the different nectar’s that make it (stringybark honey, for example, almost never candies b/c of something in the nectar’s constituents)… the word ‘pure’ is used by many different camps of honey producers to mean different things… to us it means honey from natural comb from a colony that is completely chemical free, when the comb is crushed whole so that the honey has all the goodness of pollen, propolis etc in there with the honey… Read more »
Behind our house (in the woods) are two half barrels stacked on top of each other (been there before we moved in). Some honey bees have made their home in it for a couple of years. My husband went out and was able to shimmy off the panel on the top barrel where they go in and out without damaging anything, reach in, and grab the nearest bit of cone. We don’t want to harvest and sell or anything just enough for us. Is this harmful for the bees/hive? (very very large swarm btw and only 2 bees were harmed)… Read more »
Hi, what gauge was your sieve? I am about to try extracting honey from my first ever comb.
Excellent story covering about honey processing and some great comments. Would you mind telling us what size sieve mesh you are using to filter the mush? Where can you find one of those for sale?
All that honey looks great! I love seeing hard work pay off in the long run! I am an organic farmer in Northeast Oklahoma. We are busy planting 300 tomato plants we grew from seed since February. We just finished planting 4,000 onion sets, and 100 pounds of red potatoes. This time of year, all is work and none is harvest, but harvest time will come. Thanks for the pictures, they are very encouraging, as we’ve spent all day tending bee hives with sugar water, since the flowers have not come on yet. (If you place your frames inside a… Read more »
There is never waste in harvesting honey like this. I don’t have all the fancy equipment so I am messy, however, I enjoy watching all the bees show up after I’m done, and clean the mess I left behind. I know the little bees are happy to gather all the honey and return with it to the hive. They gotta eat too.
My frames have the rite cell foundation, what happens to it? It’s not edible I’m sure, do I cut one side off the foundation, then the other?
jackson that’s a totally different kind of beekeeping. see any conventional beekeeping site on the internet for info to harvest homey from your combs 🙂
Great post, I am getting my first bees this spring. I opted for a top bar hive. Your pics make me so excited about someday harvesting honey. I love that you make it fun and not work!
we have a beehive that moved into one of our small barrels last spring,they swarmed and moved on this morning, yet there are a few dozen( or more )left, we don’t want to disturb them if they will start a new colony , altho we would like to harvest the left over honey , how can we tell if they are starting a new colony? any help would be wonderful , we don’t want to be part of the distinction of the honey bee’s, these bees are very calm and never stung any one and they are right out side… Read more »
if the swarm was an optimistic one, it means the hive has self-split, leaving behind a viable colony. If you’re sure the amount of bees left behind is very small, it is unlikely that it’s a viable colony. I would wait a week and see. Sounds like you should be right to harvest the remainder tho.
Looks interesting. Crushing honey outdoors. My bees would hear that dinner bell and come in droves. Crushing comb not as easy as you imply. I have had natural comb and beeswax foundation. Crushing comb is a messy chore. Making comb takes twice the effort or time for the bees compared to producing the honey. We collected a couple feral hives from an old farmhouse about to be demolished last spring. Put their natural comb, brood, honey, etc. in empty wooden frames. They have now abandoned their natural comb for the wax foundation and have about eighty pounds winter storage not… Read more »
these are 100% bee-build comb (as opposed to wax foundation) so it’s quite a different story to crushing foundation-based comb – and *is* as easy as we imply 🙂 – we have plenty of beekeeping friends who use this technique. Also, this crush was done on a major honeyflow in Australia – a time when the surrounding bees were very busy with the eucalypts – as always, context drives the method. If you’d like to read more about comb renewal and how whole-comb harvesting can benefit overall hive health, there’s plenty in our archives about that I’m glad your bees… Read more »
I am talking about 100% natural comb. I crushed a good bit of honey out of feral hives or cut outs also. Sorry, I just did not enjoy crushing comb. Wax foundation is beeswax. You could argue cell size are toxic reclaimed wax, but most beekeeper I know are rotating out their wax every 3-5 years. The wax in the honey supers doesn’t get as contaminated as the brood frames and has a longer life span. I loved my Top Bar and eventually converted it to a hybrid with Langstroth supers on top. Are you melting your wax and collecting… Read more »