Honey Equipment
Harvest Equipment
One of the things about being a beekeeper is you will harvest honey. Some people like honey and others don’t. I personally don’t like honey but I have fun harvesting it and raising bees. But here’s a little run down of some of the beekeeping equipment.
Fume Board,
This is like the outer cover to the hive but in the inside of this board it has a pad to absorb Bee Go, which is a substance that stinks and so the bees hate it. It doesn’t make the bees aggressive in any way but makes them run down further into the hive away from the Super you are harvesting. I like to think of this as like a type of “Fumigation” without the killing of any insects.
Bee Blower
This is basically a powerful fan with a hose in which you can blow the bees out of the supers. Easy to use but usually expensive to buy, not recommend for the beginner unless you plan to expand your hobby.
Capping Scratcher
The Capping Scratcher is a tool with long needles on one end which you use to scratch the surface of the comb. By using this you open up the cells for honey to come out. This is great if you don’t care about getting beeswax from the bees.
Heated Uncapping Knife
Like the Title this Knife is an excellent tool for removing the cappings off of the cells of honey. When you use this you want a bucket for the capping to fall into. When I’ve used this tool I would uncap into a large Pan. There is a lot of honey that falls of with the cappings but its no problem to recover it.
Note: There are larger industrial uncappers that uncap both sides of comb simultaneously but I’m not going to go into that.
The Extractor
This is the highlight of harvesting honey. Watching the honey come off the frames in the extractor. After uncapping the frames of honey you put them into the extractor where it spins the frames around and let centrifugal force pull the honey off the frames. Some extractors will pull the honey off one side at a time and others especially the larger ones will pull honey out of both sides at the same time.
Note: you may ask how does an extractor get honey out of both sides of a frame at the same time?
See, honey bees build cells with the outward side of a cell pointed slightly upward. So if you put a frame in an extractor with the top of the frame near the outside and the bottom near the center of the extractor, when the extractor spins the force pulls all the honey to the top of the frames then on to the sides of the extractor.
Before I forget, there are two types of extractors. One is a hand crank model and the other is motorized. The real difference between the two is price.
Wax Melters
For those who want sell wax cakes back to Dadant or Glorybee for a discount price on your next purchase of foundation wax melters can be a good investment. One type of wax melter is a solar one where it sits in the sun and melts the wax down into a mold. The other type is an electric. My suggestion is if your beginning out you may just want to melt the cappings on the stove or build a solar wax melter, which isn’t hard to do.
Note: When your cappings are dry after harvesting honey you may want to wash the cappings in a light soapy water to clean some of the impurities off of them. Then use a strainer to get all the water out of the cappings (by this time the wax should be a bunch of flakes). Let the wax dry some then melt it. When you get a cake of wax you may want to let it harden for a few days before taking it out of the mold. If you let wax cool too quickly it will crack. There will still be impurities in the wax but most of it goes to the bottom of the wax cake where you can scrape off the bottom layer of crud.