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Eric Miller
When should I remove honey from my hives? Beekeepers ponder this question every year. By mid-June, we’ve gotten through the primary swarm season—to me the most mentally challenging part of the beekeeping season—and we’re deep into the main flow. At this point, I’m monitoring the flow and thinking about the next major step: harvest. Below I’ll share six things to consider when deciding whether or not it’s time to pull honey supers for extraction.
1. Hive Weight
If you pull honey supers before the flow ends, you can miss out on a lot of incoming nectar. (Assuming you don’t replace the supers with empty ones, which I’ll discuss more below.) If you wait too long after the flow ends, the bees can start eating up your harvest. So I like to wait until just after the end of the main honey flow, and then pull supers. And the best way to know when that flow ends is to use hive scales. I’ve recommended the Broodminder hive scale in the past, but any way to monitor the weight of a hive works. The key isn’t so much knowing the exact weight of your hives, but rather watching the changes in weight. If hives are getting heavier, the flow is still on. If hive weights level off for a week or two, the flow is mostly off—this is when I start pulling supers. If hive weights start dropping, the bees are eating through surplus honey. If you prefer to avoid gadgets, the age-old technique of “hefting” hives is an option, but I for one can’t remember how heavy all my hives felt from week-to-week, so I highly recommend investing in at least one hive scale for each bee yard.
2. Visual Cues
Another good way to decide if the time is right for extraction is to look for signs of expansion in your hives. Do you see a lot of new, white honeycomb being drawn each week? Is it being filled with nectar? If the answer to those questions is Yes, there’s still a lot of nectar available to your bees. Once all that comb building and filling stops or significantly slows down, then it’s probably time to start extracting.
3. Flowers in Bloom Near You
I’m an advocate for tracking bloom times in your area. I’ve even got a page showing some common bee forage bloom times here in the Midwest. Once you start to understand the wildflower blooms in your area, it can be a great help in deciding when to put on, or remove, honey supers. Let’s say the hive weight leveled off and you’re thinking about starting your extraction. But then you look at your local bloom schedule and see that a couple major honey-producing plants will bloom soon. If that’s the case, you might want to give the bees a chance to make more honey from those flowers.
As I write this, it’s June 13th. I can look at my spreadsheet of local wildflowers and anticipate the flow will continue or even improve in the next couple weeks, because major nectar sources like mountain mint are about to bloom. This kind of “intel” is invaluable when it comes to making decisions in the bee yard.
If you do multiple extractions each year, this might not matter so much because you replace full supers with empty ones ready for filling. I personally prefer to do a single extraction each year at the end of the main honey flow. This takes me multiple weeks, so every super doesn’t come off the hives at the same time; but once I decide to start pulling supers, I don’t generally add more. This is just personal preference, because I don’t want my basem*nt to be a honey factory for half the year. So I divide local wildflowers between the main spring/summer flow and the secondary fall flow. I keep the honey from the summer flow, and my bees keep the honey from the fall flow.
4. Providing Ample Winter Stores for Your Bees
Don’t take all your bees’ honey. After all, they collected it for a reason—they need plenty of food to survive the coming winter. As mentioned above, I leave any fall honey (mostly aster and goldenrod) for my bees, and only do a single extraction of spring/summer honey each year. But even then, I won’t take an ounce of honey from colonies that seem light on resources. I’d much rather leave extractable honey in the hives than replace those bees next spring. It’s just not worth it. Each year I have hives that produce zero surplus honey for one reason or another, and that’s okay. Just expect it.
5. Processing Equipment/Facilities
My capacity for processing honey supers is limited. Everyone’s is, really. Understanding your own limitations can inform you on when you need to extract. One major limitation I have is my deep freeze—I like to cycle every frame of honey through the freezer for a few days to ensure I don’t have wax moth or hive beetle larvae that could cause problems later. My freezer holds seven honey supers, so I plan my harvests to pull seven supers at a time. Once those get three days in the freezer, I can store them inside and go pull another seven supers. Maybe you extract in tiny shed, or maybe you’ve got a commercial processing facility. Either situation affects how many honey supers you can handle at a given time, and you'll need to plan accordingly.
6. Market Demand
This is the least important factor for me. Don’t get me wrong, I greatly appreciate the good people who buy my honey. I love getting to interact with them each fall and winter, when I do most of my selling. But my honey is not a commodity product, it’s a luxury product. It’s in scarce supply and it’s only seasonally available. By July, I’m getting quite a few messages asking if I’ve got honey for sale yet. I don’t let that dictate my harvest, but it admittedly injects a sense of urgency in my processing pace. I’m thankful to have buyers willing to wait until late in the year for my honey, but if you’ve got people demanding honey in May, you may find yourself needing to pull supers mid-season to satisfy that demand.
Your exact situation is not the same as mine. As anyone’s, really. But hopefully these general tips help inform your decision on when the time is right to start pulling supers. Happy harvesting.
