Honey Spinning Kicks off Early This Year:

Queen Bess, Latifa, Victoria and Agatha all contributed:

It has been a busy beekeeping season, with hives and stores building quickly due to the nice weather, and plentiful forage. A stark difference to last year. Last week we completed our first ‘honey spinning’ session of the season, which is outlined below: 

• Our junior beekeeper, pictured opposite, worked with our beekeeping team and uncapped the honeycomb – scraping the wax cap layer off with a knife. Great care was taken to ensure we didn’t cut too deeply into the honey comb. 
• The honeycomb frames were placed into the baskets within the large metal drum extractor and the manual process of honey extraction followed. Spinning takes some work with our old machine…
• The honey collected at the bottom of the drum, which filled up slowly as we spun through the frames. This was then filtered through a fine sieve to remove wax and debris.
• A refractometer is used to check the water content of the honey and make sure it is viable. The honey is then left for 24 hours for the air bubbles to move to the top.
• In total we counted just short of 100 jars from 6 supers this week. 

The day after the honey spinning, the empty frames were returned to the bees to re-use. Later in the season, the wax caps will be melted down, cooled off and used for our wax warps.

We are incredibly grateful to Worthing Homes for loaning their communal kitchen to the Worthing Honey Collective for this honey extraction session.

Head to Our Events Page For Information On Where We Will Be Selling Our Lovely Worthing Honeybee Honey: