We actually began extracting the night before we planned – Labor Day night – after the kids went to bed. Jana described it as two kids the night before Christmas or two kids in a candy factory. We just couldn’t wait to get started. So we spun out two supers that night and started with the bulk of them the following morning. It turned out since we were able to end extraction around supper time on Tuesday.

We had 17 honey supers, a fan, and a space heater under a long table with a tarp over it. You have to monitor and play with that type of setup, but it creates a cozy environment where we were able to get a lot of the supers between 95 and 115 degrees. At that temperature, the uncapping goes faster and the honey flows out of the supers better in the extractor. We had this going for a day and a half before we started extracting. Honey is quite dense and it takes a long while for it to heat up even if the boxes feel quite warm. As we extracted, I tried to rotate some of the bottom boxes to higher up in the stack. We had drip pans and cardboard on the floor, and fortunately, the box rotation we did before taking the supers meant that they were not very drippy.

Got the hot knife going, plus we had some groups of home school families going through the process both days. Here is Evan with a couple of the Satterbloom boys. More on this field trip in the next post.

Loading the extractor….

And watching the honey come out is certainly a bit of a mesmerizing experience. Sadie here is moving the honey around in the top filter. We had a triple filter system, where one filter sat inside the other with some space before the next filter. The last filter was a 400 micron nylon type basket that sat on the top of a five-gallon pail — not too coarse and not super fine either. My dad installed a honey gate valve in the pail which made for easy bottling, both from here and especially after setting the pail on a table.

Kyle was a great help for the day. Here he is filling a jar from the table configuration. Once the 5 gallon pail is empty, then it is just a matter of refilling it from the pail getting filled with the filtered honey from the extractor.

Evan is filling an Arizona tea jug with fresh capping honey. It was quite light as well since the hot knife didn’t caramelize things very much.

Lots of tasting has to happen during the day!

Wow! So blessed to have a lot of help in the whole process. And the end product looks so nice!