Honey Extraction

A few days after removing the honey from the bees it was time to extract it. Last year I crushed the comb and strained out the honey. Whilst that works it does mean losing the comb so the bees had to remake it this year. Not a problem if you're also harvesting the wax but if you're more interested honey yield it's better to try and reuse the comb next season. Around 1850 an Italian chap invented a machine allowing him to do just that, and it's a machine we're still using. The honey extractor uses centrifugal force to remove honey from comb which has had the capping cut off. I acquired one last year and it's been sitting in a huge box in my roof space since then. It's essentially a large bin made of food grade plastic with a big tap at the bottom and a rotating plastic cage spun by a hand crank. When extracting honey you want to make the honey more runny so I turned the heating right up.

Uncapping honey with a capping fork.

The bees make a wax cap over cells containing ripe honey. This capping needs cutting off. There's various tools to do this with including heated serrated blades, machines with spinning abrasive brushes and heat guns. I decided to try using a heat gun as it seemed the least messy. Well I say heat gun what I mean is my house mate's hairdryer. She was all packed up for her move to London Metropolitan and it was sat on a box on the landing so I decided to borrow it. Unfortunately it failed completely. The idea is the hot air melts the cappings over the honey so they recede to the cell walls. What actually happened was the honey below the cell cappings dissipated the heat from the cappings but the walls of adjacent empty cells melted. Having learned that wasn't going to work I put the dryer back and chose Plan B. Plan B was a capping fork. In fact the capping fork would've been Plan A if I hadn't seen Yazz's hairdryer out a decided to give it a whirl. Anyway a capping fork is a fork about 2 inches across with a number of sharp round needle-like tines. To uncap honeycells you just slide the tines under the caps trying not to push too far into the honey and lift them free. It's also used to pull developing bee larvae from brood cells when checking varroa levels.To uncap the shallow frames took quite a while, but as I'd never actually done it before so there's probably some room for improvement in technique and speed gains to make.

Honey Extractor and a couple of food
buckets I'd readied optimistically

The extractor took two frames at a time so I was uncapping them as they went into the machine then extracting from them before uncapping the next two. There's two kinds of spinners: tangential and radial. With a tangential extractor the frames are held so a whole side is facing outward from the cage, in a radial extractor the frames are held with the tops facing outwards. With both types the honey is flung outwards to the extractor sides and flows to the bottom where the tap can be opened to decant it. Mine is a tangential extractor so I popped in a couple of frames sideways and turning the handle soon had the frames spinning. I couldn't see any honey flying out but when I checked the comb was empty so I then did the other side. You actually have to spin the frames slower at first so the weight of the spinning honey on the side you're not extracting doesn't make the comb collapse then after extracting the second side you turn the comb round again and spin the first side a second time faster to get the last drops.

Two Shallow Frames in the Extractor

It took a little experimentation to get the speeds right and initially I was evidently spinning the combs too fast as the empty cell walls were bearing an imprint of the cage. I started extracting with the emptier shallow frames and whilst I couldn't see any progress happening initially as I'd started extracting from the emptier frames at one point realised there was an inch of honey sat in the bottom of extractor. Shortly after that I opened the honeygate and started decanting it into buckets every few frames.

Letting go the golden flow
-the other golden flow!

Honey is pretty viscous stuff so after extracting all the frames I had and pouring it into buckets I closed the honeygate (door the honey comes out of) and turned the extractor almost upside down over a bowl for a whole day for the last of the honey to slowly dribble out, I gave this to my housemate as a little leaving gift as she was going to soon for the rest to have settled. This years crop was 17 kilograms, more than last years  but less than hoped, after the dual setbacks of losing a swarm and the unusual weather.

I'd never used an extractor before and I have to admit it was really easy to do. I also think I managed to extract more of the honey that I'd managed by crushing and straining it last year. The honey still had to settle in the buckets so air bubbles and bits of wax and whatever else was in there could rise to the top for skimming off. I don't have a warming cabinet for that so I just left them in a warm room to settle. Meanwhile I was left with a load of sticky honeycomb. Some beekeeper prefer to store their comb wet as it apparently deters wax moth -yeah wax moth doesn't like honey but lives in honeycomb, on the other hand wet comb attracts prettymuc everything else including bees and wasp wanting to rob it -I've even heard of wasps gnawing holes through the wooden sides of stored supers to get at the honey left inside.

Wet Honeycomb

In the same way you can depend on a light fingered chap in tatty sports casual to have away with the knackered fridge freezer you've hauled into the front garden and don't want to pay the council to remove the bees' habitual honey thieving can be put to good use. As I've mentioned before any honey not within the hive itself is considered fair game -just like the copper pipes in an empty house for the afore mentioned light fingered fellow. I previously tried to use the bees thieving tendencies to manipulate them into consolidating all their honey into the one one super by putting a crown board below the more empty super and so moving it out if the hive proper but that failed. After a little research (yeah OK a couple of minutes googling then) I discovered that a bit of space between the crown board and the honey to robbed means less of the queen's pheromones reach the wet supers making them seem less part of the hive and so more likely to get robbed out. I added an empty super with placed two wet supers above it on each hive. Five days later I checked to find them picked clean and dry as a bone.

Dry Honeycomb -cleaned by bees

Last thing to do was jar up the settled honey. Despite having had over a week to settle including some time in a sink full of warm water it was really tricky to remove the bits of wax from the top of the honey. I removed a lot but a little managed to get past me. Not a problem as I'll be selling it as raw, unfiltered and unprocessed but next year I'll probably give some thought to filtering. Just need to label the stuff come up with a price and I'm done!

My 2012 crop.