There is nothing sweeter, both figuratively and literally, than harvesting honey, but it is sticky and sweaty work. Some beekeepers harvest only once or twice a year, in the fall at the end of the honey season and sometimes in the middle of the season as well.
I have a different philosophy. I begin harvesting as soon as there's honey to be had, and I do so every few weeks afterward. I harvest this way because I believe it causes less stress to the bees to lose a couple of frames of honey at a time when there is still plenty of nectar out there, with the full combs immediately replaced with empty combs that are ready to fill. I believe that the empty space decreases their urge to swarm and inspires them to collect more honey. Furthermore, I believe that autumn is the most traumatic time for a big harvest, since they want to have full stores as winter comes on.
The evidence for this is that autumn is the time that they are most aggressive in defending their hive and in robbing weaker colonies if they themselves have been robbed of their winter food supply.
There's another reason for harvesting throughout the season. It makes sense commercially. The people who love my honey want to get some as soon as possible after a long winter drought. They also like tasting the differences in the seasonal output, from the light colors and flavors of spring honey through the dark molasses flavors of the autumn. For those who believe that the trace amounts of pollen in the honey help relieve their hay fever, it also makes sense to be eating honey with the most recent pollens of the ever-changing seasons.
Extracting honey with a hand-cranked centrifuge is a little like making cotton candy. Microscopic strands of honey get airborne, covering me and everything within several feet with a subtle layer of stickiness. In a single harvest, I might extract from twenty to sixty frames of honey, two at a time. It's fairly strenuous work and best done on a warm to hot day, so by the end of the day, I am very grateful to shower the sweat and stickiness off my arms, face, and body. I do, however, like expending the physical exertion instead of using an easier, more common, motorized extractor.
The process starts with a very sharp, double-edged, serrated blade. With it I saw off the cappings, the thin layer of wax that bees use to seal up honey when it's done drying and ripening in the comb, without doing much damage to the rest of the comb. The combs slide into a wire basket in a stainless steel barrel that's about the size and shape of a small, tapered trash bin; the handle works exactly like the handle on a salad spinner, gears translating each turn of the handle into several turns of the basket inside.
The honey is heavy and the wax is fragile. You have to start spinning slowly at first, extracting only some of the honey from each side of the comb so the weight of the honey on the other side doesn't collapse the delicate structure into pieces. Each time you turn the comb around, you can go a little faster until finally the basket is going maybe three or four rotations a second and the honey is flying in long threads to the sides of the barrel and slowly gliding down. When enough collects, you open a faucet at the bottom into a very fine strainer to screen out chunks of wax, propolis, and other foreign matter, but not so fine that it removes the bits of pollen that slightly cloud the honey, adding a bit of protein (and, perhaps, tolerance to the allergens). With the honey bucket, you beginning filling pint-sized mason jars, weighing them on a scale as you fill them. When you get just a smidgeon more than 22 ounces of honey, you seal it up, label it, and offer it to a honey-hungry world.
HEAVY HONEY
“A pint's a pound the world around,” goes an old memory aid for cooks and food servers. However, that's only true for water. Honey is so thick that a pint of it weighs 1 pound, 6 ounces.