Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Uncapping knife
The idea of this implement is to slice off the honey cells' cappings so that the honey can
flow out of the cells. This knife could be a simple bread knife with a serrated edge if
that's all you can find. You can buy them very cheaply, and the shape of the offset blade
renders purpose-made knives easier to use.
Uncapping knives are best used when they are hot so that they go through the wax more
easily. You can soak a knife in a bowl of hot water before slicing off the cappings or you
can purchase an electrically heated model or even a steam-heated model.
Moving up the scale, there are electric uncapping machines based on a revolving nylon
brush that spins very quickly. You put the frame of honeycomb against the brush and this
'rubs' the cappings off. It resembles one of those brushes you find in hotels for cleaning
shoes. They are now much cheaper than previously and are coming into the expenditure
range of the serious hobbyist. And then there are the professional uncapping machines
that cost thousands and that are used by large commercial companies. If this is your
first attempt, we'll assume you'll be using some sort of knife and a bowl of hot water.
Honey filters
A honey extractor will extract everything on the comb, including pollen, bits of bee,
twigs, pieces of broken frame and so on, and so before you jar up your honey, you should
filter it. There is a market for unfiltered honey for those people who regard it as having
more health-giving properties than the filtered variety, but most people want a clean-
looking product without the bits. A filter can be just about anything, from a muslin bag
to a high-performance, high-pressure filter using diatomaceous earth to eradicate the
chances of any possible microscopic particles from entering the food chain.
Personally I prefer muslin bags. I started with them and then moved on to an old MOD
UK tea strainer, shown in the Figure 22. This still works well. As I moved up to being
semi-commercial, however, I used the Strainaway
®
system, which consists of a couple of
buckets on top of each other separated by a filter. The different buckets have different
sized filters. By creating a vacuum in the bottom bucket, honey tipped into the top
bucket was sucked through the filter and stored in the lower bucket. It was brilliant and
easily capable of looking after an operation of 3-400 hives.
