The Honey Production Process

Here at Crystal’s Honey, our goal is to provide shoppers with the best products made of raw honey so that they can experience this natural sweetener in its purest form. But how do we keep honey raw while extracting it? Well, we’re here to go over the honey production process for raw honey so that you understand what makes it so special.

Just like any other honey production, creating raw honey starts with the bees. We maintain our colonies year round making sure that when the short honey making window comes the bees are strong, healthy and ready to fly.  We let them do what they do best: collect the nectar, bees will fly up to 5 miles for a strong nectar source. Then the bees bring the nectar back to the hive and put it into the combs.

That night they fan the nectar decreasing the moisture to form it into honey. and cap it off with some beeswax once it’s ready. When the bees are done fanning the honey they cap over the cells with a thin layer of wax.  Typically a hive will produce much more honey than they need for winter so we take that excess off. We remove the boxes containing the honeycomb and move them back to the farm.  

The Honeycomb is built by the bees on removable wooden frames.  We remove the wax capping on the frames and, put the frames straight into the centrifuge extract all the contents out of the honeycombs. While in motion, the centrifuge forces all of the honey and beeswax cappings out of the frames and collects it below.

After that, we use a wax spinner to remove larger pieces of beeswax, insect parts, and other parts of the hive that you wouldn’t want in your honey. We don’t filter it any finer than that, though, because it would take away the raw aspect of the honey. We also don’t heat the honey up because that would kill most of the yeast cells, pollen and enzymes, which give the honey all the benefits of being raw.  This process is of extracting and handling honey with no heat is often referred to as cold packing.  

Once the honey leaves the spinner it goes into a holding tank where, we package it up, which wraps up the entire honey extracting and bottling process. Because of this simplified process, we might not be able to reach some of the higher grades of honey in competition but we are not here for awards.   We can offer a product that gives consumers the best raw honey possible as close to the hive as you can get without being in the bee yard yourself.  

Here at Crystal’s Honey, we hold ourselves accountable to the practices set forth by the Honey Bee Health Coalition and the NYS Grown and Certified program to ensure that both our bees and our customers stay healthy while we process our products. Safety comes first when it comes to our goods.