How to Process Raw Honey With an Extractor

Having access to pure, raw honey is one of the best reasons to become a beekeeper, in my opinion. But harvesting that honey in a way that doesn’t damage the frames, cause a huge mess, or a loss of honey can be difficult when doing it by hand. Here’s how to use a frame extractor to process raw honey and wax for use on the homestead in just a few simple steps.

How to Process Raw Honey With an Extractor

This post is being updated in 2024 and we hope it proves helpful to you! The pictures in the original post are dated but they’re an accurate representation of how simple it can be to process raw honey on the homestead.

As I say in the article, we spent a lot of years processing raw honey by hand. It’s perfectly possible to do, but a frame honey extractor makes the job so much quicker and easier!

Without further ado, here we go!

How to Process Raw Honey By Hand

In the past, we’ve tried the cut and squish method of honey extraction, whereby you cut the comb out of the racks and manually. Then, you  squish all the honey out into a mesh sieve or colander so the honey can drain through and the wax and “stuff” gets filtered out.

You can also use an uncapping tank (essentially a big box with a mesh screen for your cappings to rest on while they drain off all their excess honey). They’re cool but unless you’re doing many hives, they’re kind of big and unnecessary. And expensive.

The Best Part When You Process Raw Honey

May I just say that the best part about honey extraction, whatever method you use, is the smell!

I always say that if righteousness has a smell, it’s the aroma of your warm kitchen, filled with warm beeswax and warm honey dripping off your warm counters and sticking to your warm shoes and finding it’s way into your warm mouth.

Your kitchen becomes sacred ground.

Helpful Honey & Wax Resources for Later:

To keep you inspired through this process, just remember all the lovely things you’ll be able to do with your processed honey and rendered wax cappings.

Make Homemade Marshmallows with Honey

Vanilla Honey Caramel Recipe

Make Leftover Beeswax Fire Starters

Candle Making Three Ways

How to Process Raw Honey With an Extractor

Obviously, the squish method is messy and you end up wasting a bit here and there. Harvesting honey with an extractor has a lot of benefits which include:

1. It’s quicker to process the honey.
2. You don’t get covered in quite as much mess and honey.
3. The extraction process doesn’t damage the honeycomb.

This is actually one of the best reasons to use an extractor because your bees don’t need to spend time rebuilding comb, but instead can focus on making more honey.

Start With Uncapping the Honey Comb

1. Be sure all your honey frames are close by and have been cleaned of bees and debris.
2. Then, uncap the honey in the frames either with an uncapping comb or with some sort of hot uncapping knife/tool.

We’ve used both the comb or knife and they both work just fine. I like the hot knife better just because melting stuff is cool!

The purpose of this step is to expose the honey underneath the wax capping the bees put on the honey storage cells to keep the honey clean and fresh. If you want the honey to come out, you need to “pop the lid” on the bees ingenuity.

The following are photos of this process.

The cappings should sit in a colander to drain honey off for awhile (or you can use the uncapping tank if you have one); then heat them, cool them, remove the wax from the last bit of honey at the bottom of the pan. Enjoy!

Use those leftover bits of wax to make candles with our very own DIY candle book, Candle Making in a Day!

The Best Honey Extractor

Every beekeeper will have an opinion on which frame extractor is the best, but I like the two frame unit from Dadant . It’s compact for an extractor, gets the job done, and is more affordable than larger models.

Dadant is a quality company with years in the honey business, however there are many good ones from which to choose!

My favorite master beekeeper online is Ms. Charlotte from Carolina Honey Bees and she has a thorough article on the Best Honey Extractors for Your Apiary.

As compact as the 2-frame is, it’s still quite large; with it’s stand it’s as tall as my four year old and twice as wide. Considering how much centrifugal force these extractors exert, it’s no wonder they’re sturdy!

I prefer a manual crank over an electric one, again because of cost. If I were doing ten hives worth of honey, then I can see the wisdom in an electric crank.

However, since I only have a few hives and a very strong husband/son duo, we’re sticking with the manual crank. It has fewer parts to break down and is cheaper!

Using the Frame Extractor

• Uncap only ONE side of the honey frame at a time. You need to do this before you put them inside the extractor. This is so that the honey can be spun out of the frames. Honey super frames are shallower than brood frames and will fit nicely into the extractor.
• Then, slip each frame into the basket inside the unit. In the case of our Dadant, we can process two frames at a time. There are hobby  extractors that hold as many as 20 frames!

• Then, close up the top of the extractor, turn the crank, and allow the centrifugal force to remove the honey from the frame for you.
• After a few minutes, you open back up the unit and do the same thing for the other side of the frame.
• Make sure you remember to uncap and process both sides of the honey frame. To extract both sides takes around five mintues-ish.
• The honey flows to the bottom of the tank where there’s a spigot which you open in order to capture the honey in a bucket below.

A Note on Filtering

You can put some kind of filter over the bucket opening beneath the flow of honey in order to take out loose bee parts and propolis and the occasional stick that gets stuck to the frames. I like to have as much propolis in my honey as possible so I never really bother to filter it more than once, although many people do.

Bees are really very fastidious and you usually don’t come across much gunk in the honey frames. 

Fun Fact: Part of the bee life cycle is to act as a maid for the entire hive in order to root our any litter and keep things clean!

Finishing Up

After you’ve processed through all the honey frames, put them back in the honey supers and put the supers right back on the hive. The bees will clean up the residual honey mess, repair any broken comb, no doubt curse your name once or twice, and then start gathering more nectar to make a new stash of honey.

Honey bees are the most amazing and wonderful creatures!

How to Process the Wax Cappings

Once you’ve gone uncapped all your frames, you can collect the wax bits in order to clean them up to use in crafts and herbal preparations. This is the most local wax you’ll ever use on the homestead since it was made right on your land by your very own bees.

To Clean Your Cappings:

1. Gather the capping bits into a big pot and put them on the stove.
2. Slowly bring the temperature up to about 145°F/63°C so that the bees wax will melt.
3. Once it does, let the mixture cool until the wax sets up at the top. Underneath will be the rest of the honey that was trapped in the midst of all that wax.

I always save this “cooked” honey to use in baking since I add it to something that will be baked at high temperatures anyway.

Otherwise, I leave all my honey raw as it is not only fabulously good to eat but also fabulously good to use as medicine; it’s powerful stuff in it’s raw state.

The Sweet Results

The honey we got from this harvest was from early spring and so it didn’t have the robust quality of late summer/early fall honey but, oh, was it delicious!!!

We’re blasting through it, putting it in everything from our morning dandelion drink to cinnamon roll frosting. We have sudden Winnie the Pooh moments where we dash to the kitchen to make toast and honey.

To help with seasonal allergies and internal germ killing, I have the kids take a teaspoonful of raw honey every day. Yeah, it’s definitely their favorite medicine.

Checking on Our Swarm Hive

Incidentally, while we were down there harvesting honey from our  main hive, we checked on the swarm we captured and put into the other hive.

They’d built some beautiful burr comb and I thought you’d like to see those pictures. 

I am just fascinated by bees and find them truly, truly beautiful. I’m reading several bee books at once right now and have bees on the brain!

Please see our post How to Prepare for Beekeeping for our favorite serious bee books, but a fun one is Honeybee, by Marina Marchese.

What about you? Are you a bee lover or a bee hater?

Or just someone who’s not sure what they think about keeping 80,000 stinging insects in their backyard?

FAQs of Raw Honey and Raw Honey Processing

Raw honey is a topic that generates a lot of questions, especially when compared to commercial pasteurized honey. Here are a few common questions.

Is Raw Honey Always Unpasteurized?

Yes, raw honey is always unpasteurized. The process of honey pasteurization takes the honey to a temperature of at least 150°F/66°C in order to keep the honey from crystalizing and making it more shelf-stable. Or at least more appealing to consumers.

Crystallization isn’t harmful to consume but it doesn’t look as appealing as liquid honey, so pasteurization reduces the waste of un-bought honey (or so goes the rationale).

Unfortunately, pasteurization kills most of the nutrients found in raw honey because they’re thermosensitive and die off at high temperatures.

• Grampa’s Honey has a great article on Everything You Need to Know About Pasteurizing Honey if you’d care to learn more.

Do You Need to Process Raw Honey?

Yes, you do need to process raw honey to some degree in order to remove leftover wax cappings, bee parts, propolis, and other hive and bee bits and bobs.

You can simply filter the raw honey through a fine mesh sieve to get out the big pieces if you’re not too finicky about having random bits in your honey.

If you’re planning to sell your honey, though, you may want to slowly and gently heat your honey to around 100°F/38°C. Warming the honey makes it more viscous.

This loose, warm honey can be poured through cheese cloth or nylon screen with a finer opening than a simple sieve to filter out even more particulates. Your state may have specific regulations about filtering honey for sale, FYI.

Can I Eat Raw Honey Straight?
Unless you’re on a low-carb diet, yes you can eat raw honey straight. You can even eat it directly out of the comb, as long as it’s disease and pest free.

Even for low-carb people, raw honey can be a treat since it has way less carbs than even delicious real maple syrup.

Common medical recommendation is that infants under 12 months should not eat raw honey because of the risk of the bacteria that causes botulism. Botulism is a nasty thing and often deadly, so always be careful of it, especially when canning.

I will say that raw honey is reported to be antibacterial, antiseptic, and antimicrobial. I’ll let you do your own homework on that because it’s a great topic to study.

How Long Does Raw Unpasteurized Honey Last?

Raw honey will last so long that it seems that its “shelf life” is practically indefinite. One way to make it last as long as possible is to keep it stored in a cool, dark place.

Also, be sure that you keep your honey in a container with a tight lid. Contamination is one of the only ways that raw honey can spoil. 

Always check the honey in your long-term food storage for signs of mold that may have started growing because of something on the container or some contaminant that has made it’s way inside the container. 

Also, if you’re loosey-goosey with your filtering like I am, check your honey for spoilage consistently and use it within a year or two.