In this hands‑on video, Laurence Edwards demonstrates how to move honey from a beehive to a jar in less than five minutes using the Hivekeepers Micro Harvester. He explains that the system’s plastic‑molded cassettes are compatible with virtually any standard frame size (National, Langstroth, Dadant, etc.) and must first be primed with a thin layer of real beeswax to attract the bees. Once installed, bees store nectar in the cassettes, hydrate it, and cap it with wax. The micro‑harvester’s design lets users open a cassette via a yellow tab, exposing the honey without disturbing the wax cappings. The wireless extractor can be charged on‑site, allowing each cassette to be inverted and spun to release honey directly into a jar, leaving the frame light and empty. Edwards highlights the device’s speed, its ability to harvest only selected frames while leaving others untouched, and its suitability for educational settings, markets, and small‑scale sales, while noting it cannot replace a commercial extractor for large‑scale operations.
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I'm going to show you how to get the honey from the beehive to the jar in less than 5 minutes. So I've got the Hivekeepers Micro Harvester here, and it uses a system that is unlike any other beekeeping frame system. Now, these cassettes here work in all frame systems across the world. They've modified this one for the National, but you can get it on Langstroth, you can get it on Dadant, you can get it on pretty much any sizing. And when these plastic molded frames turn up, your first job is to get some real beeswax and scrape it over the top of them. You'll see little tiny beeswax flakes drop down, and the art here is not too much, not too little, but just enough to get the bees attracted up to it. If you don't do this, the bees can potentially shun it, so make sure that you cover these frames well with beeswax. But once you've coated them with beeswax, place them into your hive. The bees are going to repurpose that wax. They're going to spread it all over the frames, and then they're going to come in here and Store their nectar. Once the nectar is hydrated and at the right level, they will cap all of this over with beeswax. It has a very simple design. You pop out your cassette, you find the little tab at the bottom with your yellow device, and you twist. What this means is you can open up the cassette. You get access to the honey inside without touching any of the wax cappings on top. So I came up here 7 days ago and took all of the uncoated frames and got a nice big block of beeswax and rubbed it into every single one. Put it onto a beehive that was just about ready for a super, and then I prayed for good weather. We got the hottest day in June ever. It was like 37 degrees and we got brilliant weather in North Wales. So luckily enough, I'm in a position to go and harvest some of this honey now. Let's take a look and see what the bees have done. Now this is one of the things that I love about the micro honey harvest. You don't have to harvest everything at once. This cassette of honey is going to be different from this one, it's going to be different from this one. So the beauty of this system is that you can just pop out individual frames and go and harvest just this small amount here. You don't have to worry about the other 2 cassettes that are there, they can just go back in, and all of the frames that are back in the hive can live there as well. But the beauty of this cassette system here is not only the fact that it isolates just a small unique amount of honey, But it is the speed that you can take it from this cassette and get it into the jar. It is so simple. You take the little yellow device that comes with it, pop it into the slot, pop the frames open like that, and you just place each side down into the Micro Honey Harvester. Now, this is a wireless device that you can charge up, which means that you can do extraction anywhere that you want to. We've just done an extraction today here in the apiary, and it was that simple. You just pop open the cages, Invert them round the other way and you spin the honey out from the inside, which means that once all of the honey has come out of these frames here and you take them back out, you get a really strange experience, which is you still see the wax. It still looks like a frame that's got honey inside it, but as soon as you lift it up, it's so incredibly light, you know all of the honey has gone out into the extractor and ultimately out into the jar. So it's a unique product in so many ways, and I honestly don't know where this product will end up in the future. It's not going to replace my commercial honey extractor because it can only extract a small amount of honey at a time. But how much fun is this little device here? Can you imagine taking this to a school and showing the children the honey and showing them how it opens up and putting it in and getting them to press the button, watching it spin all of that honey out and then getting it into the jar and then the children tasting it? It extracts honey in the most fun, fastest, most interactive way I have ever seen. The next time that I go to a school, the next time that I go to a marketplace, anytime where I'm selling someone honey or educating them, the Micro Honey Harvester is definitely coming with me.
