Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
harvesting your honey you must collect some extra equipment. The main piece of kit is
the extractor itself, but you will also need an uncapping knife or machine, filters, food-
grade containers and somewhere bee-proof to do all this.
This last point is important. I have been in too many situations where extraction was
carried out in non-bee-proof areas - even professional extraction plants. If bees can
get in, they will, and soon it becomes impossible to work. Thousands will enter and
everything you touch will have a bee on it, and your fingers will end up looking like
marrows in no time.
Before you remove boxes of honey from your hives, therefore, you will need the
following equipment to extract your honey.
Extractor
Types
Extractors can be of the radial or tangential type (the latter so called because the
frames sit at a tangent to the direction of the spinner's rotation) and should be made
of stainless steel or food-grade plastic. It is important when you spin the frames that
the honey from both sides is extracted, and you can do this more easily with a radial
extractor because you simply rotate the spinner the opposite way to extract both sides.
You don't have to turn the frame over.
With the tangential extractor (see Figure 21), you should spin the frames one way quickly
and then remove them, turn them around and then continue spinning. It's usually a good
idea then to turn them again and spin again. This extracts the honey from both sides.
Larger, more modern machines may have cages that can be turned, and so you needn't
keep removing and replacing the frames. Another disadvantage is that this type of
extractor places enormous strain on the frames' wax and can destroy the comb. Because
of its design, fewer frames can be accommodated. The one advantage is that it is a more
efficient extraction process and clears out more honey - but not that much more.
Large commercial companies use all sorts of extraction machines, and a favourite is the
box extractor. The frames are uncapped automatically and placed back in the boxes by
