Harvesting, extracting, bottling, and giving away or selling your honey are among the greatest benefits of beekeeping. In our past article on sizing your honey uncapping and extracting equipment, we talked about all the factors that go into choosing the tools you will use to get honey out of the frames in which your bees stored it. The next part of the process is choosing whether to strain or filter the honey, then figuring out the best way to bottle it all.
What is the difference between filtering and straining honey?
To start, we want to share the difference between filtering and straining your extracted honey. When you extract, you will undoubtedly need to deal with comb, wax, and the occasional bee parts that are pulled off the honey frames. But the question is: do you want to keep or remove the pollen in your honey?
Most individual pollen particles fall into the 25- to 150-micron size. As they leave the flower, the particles stick together and get bigger as the bees store them for use in the hive. If you want to remove all traces of pollen, your honey filters need to be finer than the individual particle (under 150 microns).
When filtering honey, you are generally filtering out all the wax and pollen with a fine, restrictive filter. You cannot consider filtered honey to be "raw and unfiltered."
If you choose to strain your honey, you will strain out a lot of the wax, but you will leave in the small grains of pollen (that we refer to as "the goodness of honey"). If you strain your honey, you can consider it "raw and unfiltered."
As the strainer builds with wax, pollen has a harder time making it through with the honey. In general, the beekeeper needs to balance the clarity of their honey with the amount of pollen that is retained. A strainer that is plugging should be cleaned to keep things moving and let the pollen pass into the honey.
All of the sieves and strainers that we sell at Betterbee (and reference in this article) are larger than the individual pollen particle size to allow as much pollen as possible to pass into your honey.
Where to start with your bottling setup
Many beekeepers with up to 20 frame capacity extractors start small with their bottling setup, draining their extractor directly into a double sieve over a 5-gallon or 6-gallon bucket with a honey gate for bottling. The bottleneck here is that the double sieve can fill up quickly as the smaller particles clog the finer lower sieve. We recommend either having a second sieve with a bucket setup or just extracting directly into your bucket and then straining afterward.
Extracting honey into a bottling tank
After extracting, the honey can be poured into a bottling tank to settle. Or skip the sieve/bucket combination entirely and extract into a sieve that attaches right to your bottling tank, such as the:
After the honey settles in the tank for a day or two, you can then bottle directly off the honey gate on these unheated premium bottling tanks. Why let it settle? Settling allows wax and bubbles to naturally float to the top, leaving clear, clean honey. These tanks have a couple of unique features:
- A conical bottom that drains out all the honey inside without needing to tip the tank to get the last drop
- A sanitary fitting connection for attaching a future hose (e.g., to connect to a programmable bottler)
You might also choose to bottle with a heated bottling tank. Warm honey flows quicker than room temperature honey into your bottles of choice using a honey gate, bottling valve, or our programmable bottler. Heating the honey prevents crystallization by removing small crystals that will eventually seed crystallization. Alternatively, we use these heated bottling tanks to decrystallize honey that has already been bottled.
If you want to bottle even quicker than opening and closing the honey gate, consider adding a bottling valve or connecting a hose to a
programmable bottler.
Upgrading to a honey sump system
If you are using a larger extracting setup, like a 30+ frame extractor or a Lyson Mini Line, the sieve-in-a-bucket setup won't cut it for your needs. For honey producers frustrated with multiple bucket changes or lugging buckets around the honey house, we recommend using a sump with a vertical sieve. The 13-gallon capacity of this tank is a great option to kick off your straining process. The sump removes wax and reduces the load on your strainer. We recommend straining the honey through a double sieve strainer over either a bucket with a honey gate or one of our bottling tanks after it goes through the sump.
If even that 13-gallon capacity isn't enough for you, you can upgrade to a 27-gallon capacity stainless steel heated sump. This sump includes a variety of perforated vertical baffles that can be customized depending on the size of your wax particles. A larger heated sump and other unheated sumps are also available for special order through Lyson.
When you might need a honey pump
Unless your large-scale honey extraction setup is on the second floor and your bottling/settling tanks are on the first floor of a building, gravity won't be able to transport your honey where you need it. This is where honey pumps enter the equation. Honey pumps from Lyson can move from 240 to 396 gallons of honey per hour.
Honey pumps can be used in the following helpful ways:
- To pump honey from a clarifying tank (like a sump with vertical sieves or a sump with baffles) to a bottling tank
- Pair it with a float or level switch to automatically control the honey level in a tank or sump
- To generally move honey or sugar syrup from one place to another (e.g., barrels, buckets, or tanks)
Automatic bottling options
After the honey has settled in the tank of your choice, it's time to bottle! If you opted to use a bottling tank, you can step your bottling game up another notch.
The Lyson honey bottler makes bottling your crop a breeze with its ability to fill up 350 1 lb. jars per hour! Attach the included five-foot intake hose to your tank and the bottler does the pumping and filling controlled by foot pedal or programmable bottler switch.
Watch the Lyson Automatic Honey Bottler in action here!
If you want the ability to fill jars even more efficiently, the automatic turn table with bottler is the next step up. It pumps, measures, and dispenses honey or creamed honey into glass containers quickly and easily. No more sitting there and individually filling bottles – just set 2-3 cases of empty jars on the turn table at a time and let the machine do its magic! This leaves you with free hands to install caps, label jars, and box up your goods to bring to market.
Now that you have a setup in mind for your bottling system, it's time to consider which bottles and labels you want to use to market your crop! Check out our Bottles 101 and Labels 101 articles for a quick-hitting summary of things to consider when you're shopping around.
As always, we are happy to help you dig in more to figure out which tools and equipment you need. Give us a toll-free call at 800-632-3379 or shoot us a help desk ticket at support@betterbee.com and we'll be glad to help you out!
