At Breakwater Farms we’ve recently started beekeeping and making mead from the honey.  I took some frames off my hive earlier this week and extracted the honey. It’s essentially a two-step process. 

But going back to the first part, what you have to do first is take a frame out of the hive. On it will be all of this honeycomb. Some of it will be open and some of it will be capped, which are like little natural wax corks to preserve each honey cell from fermenting or spoiling.

You then take a special long, heated knife and draw it across the outer edge of the frame, which is the outer layer of the honeycomb, to cut off the caps and open the cells. That’s necessary because if the caps are not punctured nothing will come out when you try to extract honey from the frame. Meadmakers usually have a honey extractor, which is essentially a hand-cranked metal drum with a glass top so you can see down to the bottom of the drum. Mine fits three frames and I just crank it while it spins like a washer machine on “spin” cycle. The centrufigal forces the honey out of the comb and down to the bottom of the drum.

When you’re done, you open the spigot and let the raw honey run into a filtered bucket. You have all of this stuff that comes out of honeycombs such as comb, pollen and little pieces of bees that all has to be filtered out.

Then I give the filtered honey to our property manager and mead-maker, and he adds to the honey he’s using to make the mead. Now to make the mead, that’s a whole other story!

— Jeanne Johnson