In this instructional video, a North Wales beekeeper walks viewers through the complete honey‑harvesting workflow, from the moment the bees finish filling and capping frames to the final jar of raw honey. The process begins with the use of clearer boards to encourage bees to vacate supers, followed by careful removal of the supers and transport to the extraction room. The beekeeper demonstrates uncapping—both by hand with a serrated knife and with an uncapping machine—while emphasizing that all wax cappings are collected for recycling into foundation sheets or beeswax products. The uncapped frames are then placed in a centrifugal honey extractor that spins the honey out without heat or pressure. After extraction, the remaining wax cappings are processed in a wax‑cappings press, yielding both compressed wax curls for candles/foundation and a second batch of raw honey recovered mechanically. The combined honey passes through a light filter that removes only tiny wax and propolis particles, preserving pollen, enzymes, and nutrients, and is then allowed to settle in tanks where air bubbles rise naturally. Throughout, the presenter highlights sustainable practices, the unique flavor derived from 80+ wildflower pollens in North Wales, and offers a tasting of the final product. The video concludes with a call to action to visit blackmountainhoney.co.uk for bee sales and premium honey.
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This is where the honey's journey begins. Thousands of bees, millions of flowers, and months of hard work, all leading to this very moment. Today, I'm gonna take you behind the scenes and show you how we take the honey from the hive and get it into the jar. We begin with the bees. All summer long, thousands of them have been out foraging miles from this apiary, collecting nectar from wildflowers and transforming it into honey. Now, after weeks of work, the frames are full, the honey is capped, and it's ready to harvest. The night before, we fitted the clearer boards beneath the supers, and these encourage the bees to go down and don't allow them back up, leaving these supers here almost entirely free of bees by the morning. We might have to do a little bit of blowing 'cause there's still a few bees left. The next day, we gently lift off whole supers, boxes filled with frames of perfectly ripened honey. It is one of the most rewarding moments in beekeeping. seeing the work come together just like this. So I can't resist a cheeky little taste of this amazing honey. Absolutely wonderful. What we have in North Wales is an abundance of wildflowers, and that's what makes our honey unique. So many different wildflowers. On the last time we tested it, we had about 80 different types of pollen. Once the supers are removed, it's time to get them safely back to our extraction room. We use the wooden roofs all the way through the process to ensure that nothing can get inside to the honey and it's fully protected. The first step is uncapping. Each frame is sealed with a thin layer of wax, which we carefully slice away by hand. Even the wax isn't wasted. Every capping is collected and recycled into new foundation sheets or turned into beeswax products like lip balms or candles, keeping the process fully sustainable. You can uncap the frames by hand using a really sharp serrated knife, or you can use a machine like this, which really does save you a huge amount of time. All you do, you pop the frames in like that and leave the machine to do the rest. So if you have a poorly spaced frame like this where the uncapping machine can't take the wax off, you just get the fork in and touch it up like that. Everything needs to be fully uncapped before it goes into the extractor. If the cells aren't uncapped, they can't come out in the extractor and end up in the tank. Once the frames are uncapped, it's time to load them into the honey extractor. It spins slowly and evenly, using centrifugal force to draw the honey out of the comb. There's no heat, no pressure, just pure honey flowing naturally from the frames into the collection tank. This is the moment where months of work from thousands of bees all comes together in a single golden stream. All that's left to do now is get that extractor running and get that honey flowing from the frames down into the tank. The honey is spun out onto the back of this drum wall. It falls down the sides due to gravity and collects at the bottom, and then all that is left is to open up this honey tap and you get perfectly unfiltered raw honey. We're gonna do the filtering next, but you can eat the honey just like this with wax and propolis and pollen inside. It doesn't get much better than this. Once we remove all of the wax cappings, we put it through the wax cappings press. This recovers all of the honey with no additional heat whatsoever. using an Edison screw. The cappings move along this tray here, fall into the hopper, driven into the screw, and then pushed through an ever tighter channel which recovers all of that beautiful raw honey and gives us wonderful wax spirals that we can take away and make into beeswax products. The wax cappings press improves our yield but keeps the honey at the very top quality. So the wax cappings press produces 2 products. One here, which is compressed wax curls. We'll take that off now, go and melt it down and produce candles or beeswax sheets or foundation. But for me, the more important product is this recovered honey here. It's perfectly raw, perfectly natural, and it's just been recovered through mechanical means. And I'm going to take this off now and go and put it back into the main tank. All of this honey gets mixed together. From here, the honey passes through a light filter, just enough to remove the tiny flecks of wax and propolis but leave all the natural pollen, enzymes, and nutrients intact. After that, the honey is transferred into settling tanks where it rests naturally. Tiny little air bubbles rise to the top all on their own without any pumps, heat, or force, preserving the honey's raw quality and smooth and silky texture. So we've gone from hive to jar, and we can't finish it off without a little taste, so let's get straight in. Really beautiful warm honey still straight from the hive, very light. Let's get in there and have a taste. That is perfection. If you like honey and you want to keep your own bees, check out our website blackmountainhoney.co.uk where we sell the calmest bees in the UK and also produce the very best honey.
