Harvesting Your Honey, Honey!

It is very, very tempting to take honey frames out of hives prior to them being fully ready to extract and store. When honey frames aren't fully "capped" (meaning part of the honeycomb has a thin layer of wax sealing the honey into the cells of the comb but some of the cells aren't sealed with wax yet) the honey will crystallize much faster. This is caused when the moisture content is too high (>17% - 18%) because the bees haven't finished fanning to dehydrate the honey. Below are photos of unfinished honey frames. The only time I would harvest these at this stage would be because the season is over and I know the bees don't have time to finish capping frames.

Please read the following website for more information.
http://basicbeekeeping.blogspot.com/2007/10/lesson-twelve-moisture-level-of-honey.html


 Unfinished honey frame

 Unfinished honey frame

  Unfinished honey frame

 Finished honey comb:

 Finished honey comb: