Extracting a Sweet Treat

Today's honey extraction day! This is a great event for including students, faculty and staff. It’s the day of enjoying the process of when we take all of the honey that the bees here at Barnard have made during the year and we get it out of the frames so that people can eat it.

This is also a really nice local event because the bees are making honey from nectar that's collected from flowers in this local area—probably about a square mile at most. They're able to taste a bit of the the plants and the plant products of this area. It's also kind of a light honey that's sort of sweet with a little bit of a floral accent.

"I work with the bees and I do research on them year round and this is the other fun part of the process that we get to engage with. It's really fun to be able to collect the honey after you know, doing research on these bees all year long," said Texeira.

Three Steps on How to Extract Honey

Step 1: The first thing we do is take the frames containing the honey and we use a hot knife to cut the wax off of those frames.

Step 2: Next, we're going to place these frames into a hand-cranked centrifuge. Then the students crank the centrifuge and the honey will sling out to the sides of the centrifuge and gravity makes it flow down.

Step 3: Lastly, we're going to filter the honey through these metal meshes to remove any chunks of wax and any excess particles.

The bees often make enough honey so they have enough for overwintering and enough for us to enjoy.

"I came to the honey event today to get a taste of some of the fresh honey from the bees at Barnard. Seeing how much honey they're producing is really amazing and especially how good it tastes and that we all get to enjoy it together. That makes me really appreciate their presence here on campus," said Carman.

Once we filter the honey, we bottle it in these little bears, which are sort of like Millie the Barnard Bear, and we typically give this away to friends of the bees on campus.

"It feels really good to be able to share, you know, my excitement about the bees with the broader community through the honey extraction event. And, you know, I couldn't really do it without help from a lot of people in my lab and in the biology department and of course, the bees," said Snow.

Credit: Barnard College