Obtaining equipment and bees - A Practical Manual of Beekeeping - page 62

Fig. 15. A smoker.
When you buy a smoker, choose one with a protective
grid around it so that, if you pick it up without gloves
on, you won't burn yourself (see Figure 15). Also, spend
a little more and buy a decent-sized one. Small ones are
no good at all because they don't hold much fuel and
so have to be constantly re-lit. Make sure, too, that the
bellows aren't made of flimsy material. These are the
first bits to wear out and should therefore be strong.
I use rolled-up corrugated cardboard as fuel, mainly because it burns slowly, is easy to
light with newspaper and it's free (although believe it or not, you can buy rolls of it from
bee-appliance shops). Old sacking is another good fuel, as is dried grass.
The aim is to get your smoker to produce cool, dense smoke. Prior to inspecting your
bees, try to get the smoker going well so that it doesn't go out while you are working
on the bees. It is a general rule that most smokers - of whatever make - really work
well only when you've just finished inspecting the last hive, and then you have difficulty
putting them out before you can go home.
To avoid all this, you can buy liquid smoke that you spray on the frames from a garden
spray bottle. Although this seems to work and you don't have the bother of lighting
a stubborn smoker, I don't like spraying any liquids in my hives and, when I was an
organic honey producer, smoke was the stipulated method. You also have to pay for the
liquid concentrate!