Cleaning tools after honey harvest is a crucial step. It is important to clean your tools after each extraction to ensure their upkeep for next harvest (and so you will have less work to do later on). The last thing you want as a beekeeper is to have another thing on your to-do list during summertime.
Cleaning depends on the level of your extraction and your frame set up. The more honey you pull, the more you’ll have to clean up and consider. When dealing with wet honey frames, try to be far away from your apiary.
Potential things to do with your wet, freshly extracted frames:
- Shake them out as much as possible. You could leave a honey bucket with a filter on it and try to shake as much of the honey out to get as much as possible.
- Place the empty frames back into a super and put it back on your hives for a few days. This allows the bees to clean them out and leave you with fresh clean frames.
- Remove the cleaned frames and store them away. Freezing them will keep any pests/wax moths away from the frames. If you freeze them when they’re still wet with honey, it could make the frames more enticing for next honey harvest (luring the bees up into the honey super faster than they normally might).
- Destroy them. As bees use comb, the cells slowly become smaller with use until eventually they are too small to allow brood to properly fit. Once honeycomb gets to this level, consider destroying it and replacing it with new foundation for bees to build up. This is only relevant if you pull from frames that are in the brood chamber, or you don’t use a queen excluder.
