GardenFork – Eclectic DIY

Tag: honey harvest

Honey Harvest Made Easier

Its honey harvest time again. I’ve talked about the uncapping roller before, video here, but you combine this tool with putting 9 frames in a 10 frame honey super and you’ve made your life much easier.

Most beekeepers use a hot knife, or uncapping knife to cut the beeswax caps off the tops of the honeycomb cells. Uncapping means opening up the cells so you can get the honey out, usually using an extractor.

But with this roller tool, (buy it here) you don’t need to use a knife to cut off the caps. The photos look kind of messy, but this works pretty good. With a hot knife, you run the risk of gouging into the honeycomb. This means more work for the bees, rebuilding the comb before they can fill it with honey again.

The uncapping roller punches holes in the caps. Its not a perfect process, but you get much less wax in your honey when extracting. So you don’t have to filter nearly as much wax when bottling the honey.

The second new thing I’ve done is put 9 frames in a 10 frame honey super. This means one less frame than the box is designed for. But what this does is create a bit more space between each frame. The bees draw out the honeycomb a bit farther, which makes uncapping easier. And it means less propolis between frames, its much easier to pull these frames out of the super.

I use brackets that set the frames at the right spacing. This has been a really nice thing.

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August 8, 2017
How To Harvest Honey – GF Video

Here’s a video on how we harvest honey using an uncapping roller. This extracting tool has saved us a lot of time, say goodbye to capping knives.

Using an uncapping knife gouges the honeycomb

Previous to my friend Rick telling me about this cool too, we would use a capping knife to cut open all the honeycomb to harvest honey. This results in a lot of wax and damaged honeycomb frames. I never liked this part of the honey extraction process, always gouging out chunks of honeycomb.

But the uncapping roller is great –buy it here . You have to take care not to press it too hard into the comb, or you will damage it, but you get the hang of it pretty quickly. Roll it several times back and forth and up and down. You may have to pull a few frames out of the extractor and re-roll them.

I have found that not all the honey comes out of the comb, but its not an issue for me. I put the honey supers back on the hive, above the inner cover, and let the bees clean up the frames. Its all good. I have found it helpful to have a hair dryer, aka blow dryer blowing hot air into the extractor. It seems to help the honey sling out of the comb.

Combining this new roller with the DIY bee escape board we made – video here – , honey extraction has become a much easier process. I have found its best to put the escape board on the hive a 2 days before you plan on removing the honey super.

The capping roller doesn’t ruin much of the comb.

The uncapping roller cleans up easily. I use a spatula to remove as much of the wax cappings as possible from the tool and then I run it under water for a minute.

There are more photos of the uncapping roller in action here.

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August 19, 2015
Our First Honey Harvesting – Beekeeping 101 GF Video

Here is our first honey harvesting video where we show you how to use a comb knife and an extractor to extract the honey from the honeycomb.

Our teacher, Jim, sent us an email after he saw our video with the following comments. Jim has strong opinions, like most beekeepers, I agree with most of what he says here, but not all of it. Again we are beginner beekeepers, so we can and do make mistakes. my goal here is to show people that they too can raise bees. So here is Jim’s take on our first honey harvesting video.

Offered in what I hope is noticed to be a TOUNGUE-IN-CHEEK and FRIENDLY

tone, are the following comments from your peers, as summarized by me:

1) Putting an undrawn frame of foundation into a hive in September is a dead

give-away that not only did you fell asleep in class, but you also failed to

do the reading. Bees are very unlikely to drawn comb after the middle of

August. Much better to simply replace the extracted frames when you are

done extracting.

2) The “purpose of the smoker” is not to drive the bees down in between the

frames. That level of smoke was last used by Richard Nixon against anti-war

protestors. The purpose of the smoker is to simply block alarm pheromones

from alarming other bees, and can be used sparingly.

3) When you are fully suited, veiled, and gloved, the bees can fly around

without endangering you. There is no reason to be concerned that they take

flight when you are brushing them off frames.

4) Brushing should be done with the frames upside down, so that any bees

with their heads in cells will not be bent backwards or pulled apart. Cells

slant upwards within the frame, so brushing from bottom of frame to top (by

bushing with the frame upside down) is much easier on you and the bees. If

your sound effect was the actual brushing, you also need to use much shorter

strokes, so as to avoid “rolling” bees on the frame. A fume board and some

Bee-Quick might have made the job quicker, easier, and sting-free, but I’m

not going to shove specific choices at anyone.

5) “Finding the queen” should not wait until frames are hanging on the frame

rest, as the queen might fall outside the hive. One wants to inspect frames

as one removes them, while holding them over the hive. The odds of the

queen being on frames of honey are small, but they are non-zero.

what do you all think? let us know here:

October 7, 2009