Honey, warm out of the hive, tastes like sunshine. But how does it go from hive to table?

Like many farmed goods, people who enjoy them don’t really understand what it takes to get that delicious drizzle into your tea.

After a year of keeping the bees healthy and happy through all of Mother Nature’s moods, here’s a behind the scenes look at our harvest season.

Step 1: Set up Honey House

Our 18 frame extractor.

For years, we harvested in our kitchen - which meant no cooking for weeks. And EVERYTHING was sticky, all the time.  In 2024, we converted our garage into a honey house.  During the off-season, it stores our equipment.  When harvest season arrives, we  clear it out, sanitize everything and give the uncapping trough and extractor a good hot-water wash-down.

Rinse & Repeat

We harvest each of our six yards separately so you can taste the place where then honey was made.  That means we do steps 2 - 10 six times over the season.

Step 2:  Load the Truck for Harvest

Harvest starts with loading gear:  stainless steel pans to catch honey drips, boxes to hold the honey, replacement frames for the hives, buckets for damaged comb, bee suits, tools —  and most importantly -  hydration.  Harvest happens in July in Texas where the temps, even early in the morning are sweltering.  Inside a bee suit it feels like a million degrees.

John pulling a full deep frame of honey.

Step 3:  Pull Honey Frames

We harvest honey one frame at a time.  This allows us to closely inspect each frame and make sure the honey is cured (17% moisture) and that our hives  have enough resources to get them through dearth, the time when nothing is blooming.

This sounds simple enough, however it is the one time each year that we are “the bear”.  We’re there to take the resource our bees have worked tirelessly to make.  Each bee will make 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey in her life.  Our hives are big and healthy which means that the guard force, the bees whose job it is to defend the hive are large AND SASSY.  Bees target the CO2 in our exhale so you immediately have a veil full of bees blocking your vision.  If we were real bears, the only way bees can defend is to sting their soft tissue - eyes, ears, nose and mouth.

Step 4:  Secure the honey for transport

Our bee yards are a good distance from where we harvest.  We put each frame in a transport box.  Each box usually has 3 or 4 frames and weighs between 25-40 pounds.  That box gets carried to the truck where the frames are covered and stored for travel.  Depending on the size and the location of the apiary - we pull anywhere from 100 - 900 pounds of  honey.

Step 5:  Unload, Uncap & Spin

Thanks to John’s smarts, we have a portable air conditioner in our honey house to keep us cool.  But…we want to extract the honey while it’s still warm and will flow easily out of the honeycomb.

We unload the boxes of frames and then using a big serrated knife hand cut the wax cappings off each side of every frame.  The frames rest in a stainless uncapping tank until they are ready to go in the spinner.  The tank catches the honey that drips off.

The extractor, a big stainless tank with a motor spins the frames and uses centrifugal force to sling the honey out of the cells.  You have to spin both  directions to release the honey from both sides of the frames.

Step 6:  Bee Clean Up

Even though we work hard to extract all the honey, the frames are still wet with the sweet goodness.  Nothing goes to waste.  We take boxes of spun frames back out to the bee yard where the bees clean up any drop of honey and even reuse some of the wax.

Letting the bees clean the spun frames.

Step 7:  Raw & Unfiltered

Once extracted, we use one large strainer to remove little bits of wax from the honey along with any stray bee parts.  What we leave in are the micro particles of pollen and propolis that give flavor, protein and health benefits to  the honey.

Step 8: Rest.  Bottle & label

We let our honey sit overnight so that all the little air bubbles rise to the top.  The morning after we extract it, we put our honey in glass jars where it will wait for you to enjoy it.  But we’re not done yet!  Each jar has to get a label and be stored.

Step 9: And then, the beeswax!

The cappings cut from the fames are beeswax.  They are covered with honey, so they sit in a strainer overnight so that every available drop can be bottled.  Once drained, we render the wax by melting it down in a mesh bag to remove all the extraneous material.  Generally it takes two renderings to get the beeswax clean enough to reuse for the bees or to craft body care products  or candles.

Step 10: Put the dry frames back on hives or pack them up for winter storage.

We move every pound of honey we harvest at least ten times!  That’s what I call BEE-fit.

It often surprises people that we sell our honey for a reasonable price.  Reasonable is subjective on all fronts.  No two ways about it - honey is expensive.  But if you think about it as part of your health care as opposed to just something sweet - the investment starts to make sense.

When you buy a jar of our honey - we’re excited to share our journey.  We want you to know how the bees were treated, where they live and why we’re so passionate about protecting our pollinators.  If you’ve read this far - you deserve a reward!  Follow our Instagram to find out when / where we’ll be at market or just give me a text.