Our bees are buzzing! In our company-owned field located in Wiesbaden-Naurod, a few miles away from our headquarters, bees are happy inhabitants of our lush green meadow. This past June, we harvested our very own Seibert honey. Ever since, our hard-working bees have been busy filling up their beehive - it is safe to say that their hard work has paid off! Once again, our honey is back in stock. Our local beekeeper, Tom Junghans, was busy extracting honey for a second time! 

It didn't take long before several of our colleagues volunteered to take part. It isn’t really surprising though, because let's be honest: How often do you have the opportunity to harvest liquid gold?

Extracting Honey in the office? Our Headquarters becomes an operating room

Our Beekeeper Tom converted the Wiesbaden Headquarters into an operating room: He set out his honey harvesting tools - scraping tools; unclapping tools; and most importantly - the hive body aka “honey chamber.” This component is the living quarters of the bee colony where the bees store pollen, wax, and of course honey for food. Each “honey chamber” can house between 50,000 to 60,000 bee workers. 

To prepare the combs for extraction, we removed the honey chamber with the decapping harness. We placed the honeycombs into the honey extractor (it holds a max of 4 combs). The easiest and fastest method to extract honey is with centrifugal force. But, before we could really start spinning the honeycombs in the extractor, we first had to test it out. We carefully cranked the lever without damaging the honeycombs. Then, we turned the honeycombs over and cranked it with all our might.

After a while, we turned the honeycombs around and cranked some more. This was repeated a few more times until we got as much honey out of the combs as we could.

Throughout the process, the honey and wax were collected on the bottom of the honeycomb extractor. To get rid of the wax in order to have a clear, golden yellow liquid, we pressed the honey through 3 sieves. At this point - we may or may not have stuck in a taste of delicious honey!

Of course, Tom, our lovely beekeeper, properly scraped out the extractor - after all, every gram of gold is valuable. This time around we collected just under 20 kilograms of honey. This was way more than what we expected! Now many small honey jars are ready to be filled. For our colleagues, the honey harvest was once again an incredible experience - we are already looking forward to it next time!

Did you know?

Before we leave, we 'll give you a little DIY tip: we had to regularly scrape off the beeswax on the first sieve so that it wouldn’t build up. In case you didn't know: You can also recycle this to make, for example, new center walls for the combs and/or candles, wax cloths, and even cosmetics. 

We asked around in the company and many colleagues are interested in making homemade cosmetic products. And who knows - maybe this will be our next project... 

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Further Information

• Sustainability Is the Way to Bee
• The Great Bee Migration: Taking 100,000 Bees to the Seibert Media Field
• Sustainability Management at Seibert Media