From hive to jar

Where the bees stop and people start

A colony stores honey because flowers are seasonal and a cluster of bees has to eat through a winter. When a cell is full and the water content has fallen far enough, the bees cap it with wax, and at that point the honey is finished — it is the colony's food, complete, and nothing further needs to happen to it.

Everything below is a human decision layered on top of that. It is worth keeping the two halves separate, because the alternative slides towards the idea that bees are producing honey for people. They are not. A beekeeper who takes honey is taking a surplus from an animal that stored it for itself, and the craft of doing it well is mostly the craft of judging how much is surplus.

The sequence

1. 1Judging the surplusThe first and most consequential decision, and the one with no equipment in it. The colony needs enough stores to reach the next forage, which depends on the climate, the season ahead and the size of the colony. Take too much and the bees are fed sugar syrup through the winter or die; take too little and there is no crop. Everything else here is mechanical by comparison.
2. 2Removing the combIn a movable-frame hive, frames of capped honey are lifted out of the supers — the boxes kept above the brood nest for storage. Bees are cleared off first, by brush, board or blower. In a fixed-comb hive there are no frames, and comb is cut out instead, which is why the two systems produce quite different products.
3. 3UncappingThe wax capping is sliced or scratched off both faces of the frame so the honey can leave the cells. The cappings themselves are the cleanest wax the hive produces and are kept — this is where most beeswax comes from.
4. 4Extraction, or notUncapped frames go into a centrifugal extractor and spin, and the honey is flung out against the walls and drains to the bottom. The comb survives intact and goes back to the colony, which is the whole reason the extractor mattered when it was invented: bees no longer had to rebuild comb after every harvest. The alternative paths are pressing the comb, letting it drain, or not extracting at all and selling the comb itself.
5. 5Straining and settlingFresh extracted honey carries wax fragments, the occasional bee part and a great many air bubbles. Coarse straining removes the solids; standing in a settling tank lets the air rise as a foam that is skimmed off. This is the minimum any honey gets, and for a lot of small-scale honey it is all it gets.
6. 6The processing decisionsWhether to warm the honey to make it flow, how finely to filter it, whether to pasteurise, whether to seed it deliberately so it sets as a smooth creamed honey. These are where a packer's product identity actually comes from, and they are the difference between two jars whose bees ate from the same field.
7. 7Into the jarFilled, sealed, labelled — and the label is where the law arrives, with the origin declaration, the compositional criteria and the designations the honey is allowed to use.

Two paths out of the same box

Neither is the authentic one. Comb honey is the least processed thing the subject offers and it is also inconvenient, expensive and impossible to standardise. Extracted honey is the reason honey is an everyday food rather than an occasional one. A reader who wants to taste a single flow with no decisions in between should buy comb at least once; a reader who wants honey in their tea is well served by the extractor.

How it was done before any of this

The sequence above is barely two centuries old at its core. The movable frame and the centrifugal extractor both arrived in the nineteenth century, and together they changed harvesting from something that destroyed the nest into something a colony survives.

• Honey hunting takes comb from wild colonies and is still practised — the oldest form, and the one the rock art shows.
• Fixed-comb hives, skeps and log hives, where harvesting means cutting comb out and the colony is often destroyed or driven out.
• Movable frames, which made it possible to inspect a colony and take honey without wrecking it.
• Centrifugal extraction, which made comb reusable and is why honey became cheap.
• Stingless-bee harvesting, which follows none of this sequence — the honey is in pots rather than comb, and is scooped, drained or pressed.