When is the best time of day to extract honey?

[Dawn_SD]

Hi Nick,

I have answered questions similar to this a few times recently. You can do a search in the top right-hand corner of the forum to find existing topics with the answers.

e.g.

Honey extracting in high humidity

I live in Florida and am going to extract this weekend. I’m not really set up to do it indoors, so my question is this: How long does it take to empty a frame? The humidity will be 75%-79%. How long do I have before my honey begins to take on moisture?

Visually Inspecting Flow Frames before harvesting - is it necessary?

Welcome to the Flow forum! As far as harvesting goes, you should treat Flow frames like your traditional frames. When they are 90% capped or more, you can harvest and be pretty sure that you have ripe honey. I like to pull my Flow frames out of the hive to inspect before harvesting, because my bees tend to do sneaky things like leaving an arc of empty cells at the bottom of the middle frames. You can’t see that from the end window. There is much more risk of a leak into the hive if tho…

@nbstl68

If they do not cap it, how will I know it is ready to be harvested, (short of buying a refractometer and checking if the moisture content is below 18%)?

The best way if you don’t have a refractometer is to go by cappings. If it isn’t fully capped, please just spend the $40 on a refractometer - it costs a lot less than a Flow super.

@nbstl68

When it is ready to be harvested, is there is an optimal TIME OF DAY to extract it?

When is the best time of day to extract honey?

So my flow hive looks like it is starting to fill up this season for the 1st time. Through the viewing door several show 2/3 or more filled but when pulling they are not full from the middle out as I was expecting from reading here and they just do not seem interested in capping it off. So a couple of questions… If they do not cap it, how will I know it is ready to be harvested, (short of buying a refractometer and checking if the moisture content is below 18%)? When it is ready to be harves…

Late morning, but give yourself at least 4 hours to get every last drop.

@nbstl68

I have read some people’s 1st extraction the flow hives may leak down into the hive…What is happening there and how do I avoid that?

Open in 20% sections, leave 5-20 minutes between sections and never let the Flow tube get full to the top. Most of the time the problem is an airlock in the Flow tube.

Please have a search through the forum for answers, and if you can’t find anything after a bit of looking, we’ll do our best to help
Off to find a cocktail recipe for the weekend now. Hey @busso, got any chilled white?