Honey House & Business Update
In this post:
What is a honey house?
Business updates
Hello friends!
It’s been a crazy month of getting back into the swing of things after the holidays, and have we been busy! Before I jump into the specifics about what we have been up to, I thought I would answer our most commonly asked question: What is a honey house and why build it?
To answer simply, most honey houses are just smaller buildings where beekeepers extract their honey and then store it. While that is our primary reason for building, it’s not the only one.
Currently our extractions look like this:
After doing weekly checks on the hives, we decide on an extraction date based on when we think a majority of the honey will most likely be ready. We have no place to store the honey supers where pests won’t destroy them, so it’s a very last minute decision. This is tough for us as a family because the extraction takes all weekend long so our whole life essentially goes on pause. So it’s not easy to plan for them currently. Once we decide on a date, we clean the kitchen top to bottom. We vacuum everyday to keep dust, dirt, and debris to a minimum and keep the dogs away from the kitchen during this period. The Friday before the extraction we do a honey check. If all is still as we predicted, we paper down the floors entirely and remove all the furniture from the kitchen. We then start bringing in the honey supers to store in the kitchen overnight. We shoo out any bee stragglers, eat dinner in the living room instead, and try to get to bed early. We wake on Saturday in enough time to eat breakfast and get everyone ready and start extracting by 9 am. The extracting takes all. day. long. We are slowed down by our two finicky extractors that only hold 4 frames each. About 6 to 7 pm we are usually done with the actual extracting and are pouring the honey into the honey buckets at that point. Then there is clean up and waiting for honey to drain out of the strainers and uncapping tanks. All to say, it’s a long and involved process that will be expedited to the extreme once we can extract in the honey house.
Future extractions:
No prep other than clearing a space. We will still make sure all equipment and storage containers have been cleaned and sanitized, but we won’t have to paper down the floor, move a bunch of furniture, sweep, vacuum, and mop endlessly the whole week prior to extracting, or worry about our dogs. We also will be able to schedule an extraction MUCH more easily since we will have a storage space (the warming room) for the honey supers that pests won’t be able to raid. The extractor that we are putting in will be a vintage one that Luke’s great-uncle used for his operation. It will hold 24 frames which is 6x as many as our current ones. We won’t have to finish it all in one day as we won’t need the space for our family life, and the clean up will be miles easier. Everything we need to jar, label, and package the honey will be readily available in the same building, so no fishing through storage boxes placed around our house, crawl space, or garage. Even just imagining the ease this will bring us and the space we get back in our home brings us such relief!
The practical reasons are enough that it made us jump at this opportunity as soon as we were able. However, as a homemaker, I also dream about the small personal details. We will have a beautiful history shelf that will showcase the history of beekeeping in the Moser family along with items from our own journey so far. We can feature all the honeys of extractions past that we have kept from every season. I will have lots of beautiful workspace that makes it easier to promote and market products without having to move kids booster seats or cookbooks from the background. I dream of pictures and bee decor adorning the wall so that it’s easy to pull decorative items for vendor markets. The space will be intentional, practical, and homey at the same time. And the only way we will be able to grow as a small business.
So now that you know the intricate details of the honey house goals, here is an update from the past month:
electrical run and finalized
plumbing run and almost completed
windows installed
garage door put together and installed (wow what a bear this door was!!)
front door installed
lights put in and set to temperature
breaker box completed
bird boxes for the roofing constructed and installed
house wrap tidied up
spotlights put up
Business Updates:
released Valentine’s Day Candles
released our Luxe Moisturizer: Whipped Beeswax Cream
got in with another local store: Philanthropy at River Ridge Mall
went antiquing and found some gorgeous new vessels to make candles in as well as two new sets of candlestick holders
designed and bought some new packaging insert cards
restocked a few locations
applied to sponsor and vendor at the Blue Ridge Bee Festival happening on Sep. 13 2025
And that is all for the past month! I will update you guys along the way on our Instagram, YouTube and TikTok but put the nitty gritty here in these posts. If you want to see more about how our honey house will affect our caring for the bees, check out the button below. Talk to you next month!