- Hi there.
We're going to demonstrate the extracting process that we use here at the Honey Bee
Research Centre.
Every extracting system is scaled to the appropriate scale.
What we're doing here works for from 300 to 500 colonies, but the principles are the same
no matter what scale you're doing this at.
You're basically uncapping and then centrifuging the frames to spin the honey out.
There's a few more steps involved, but lets' go through them.
Taylor's going to wheel in the stack of supers here.
And the first thing we're going to do is scrape the excess wax off the top of the frames.
We scrape the top, the bottom, and the end bars of all the frames, and scrape the boxes,
but we do that all at different stages.
So she'll switch that box around and then scrape all those top bars there.
There's not much honey in those top bars, so she can throw that wax directly into a
bin that just has dry wax in it.
You'll notice that she's containing the wax in her hand as she's scraping it, so it's
just not flying all over the place.
Once she's done that, she loosens up every frame on both sides.
There's a lot of honey in these boxes and they're really stuck down, so you don't want
to be pulling them up by hand.
So, she loosens up both ends and they're all free and easy to move.
We then advance the frames into our uncapper.
The uncapper that we're using is a Cowan Silver Queen.
So, go ahead, Taylor.
You can pull out a nice full frame there.
And she's just gonna hold that up to show all the wax on the surface there.
The odd bee, we'll brush those off.
All that cappings needs to be removed.
So our device uses heated knives that saw that comb off, or the cappings, rather, off.
And then that liberates the honey so it can be extracted.
So go ahead, Taylor.
Turn that noisy--
So the frames that have been uncapped, all those cells are wide open there, you can see
the honey dripping out.
Lots of honey in there, we've removed some cappings from the surface.
There's the odd little bit we missed there.
I don't worry about them.
Once we've uncapped enough to fill this whole rack system here, we're then ready to advance
the frames into the extractor.
The cappings that drain out of the uncapper go down into the capping spinner.
It's a perforated basket inside there that spins very rapidly.
The honey and wax mixture of the cappings gets thrown to the outside.
The cappings are retained, or the wax is retained, inside the basket, but the honey leaks out
through that screen down there.
So we're able to separate the honey and wax at that point.
We're now ready to advance these frames into the extractor here.
To do that we open up the lid of the extractor.
We orient the rack so that it's vertical, like that.
And then, we connect this rail with the rail in the extractor.
Like so.
And we connect the outfeed rail by pulling it over.
Now, we have one continuous rail running through the system.
Now, I get my honey, my sticky hands, into water to get them freed up so nothing gets
too sticky.
And we select that spot right there.
There's a little marker right here that indicates how many frames we're going to be pushing
through.
There we go, now we're ready to push them in.
Now, these full frames that we're pushing in automatically push the empty frames out.
We can then advance these a little bit further.
Open that up.
Open this up.
And let that heavy rack drop down to the bottom.
We'll line that up again.
And grab up some more frames here.
Slide them forward.
Go to our mark.
Slide those forward.
Okay, that's all full now.
The next thing we do is we scrape the end bars here.
Just scrape those down there, we get excess wax on that surface there.
So we scrape those off, while we have them all held into position here.
It's really quite quick because we have pretty good access to those end bars right here.
That's ready to spin now.
Because these are not self-spacing frames, we give them a little bit of a wiggle, so
they're not stuck together.
We give that a big pull, turn the switch on, and then lower our lid down.
That runs for about 10 minutes.
And while that's running, we can uncap another load over here.
And the frames that are advanced out of the outfeed rail can then be handled.
So, those frames that have advanced out of the extractor are pretty empty, they're still
a little bit sticky.
Katherine's going to hold a frame up there so we can have a look at it.
You can see how the honey has come out of that frame.
It's kind of mangled up a little bit, but the bees will fix that up.
It's a little bit sticky, but most of the honey is out of there.
So that's what the frame looks like.
Those frames are going to go in the boxes, but first we need to scrape the boxes.
So we scrape the frame rest area there.
Get any excess wax off that surface, and then we scrape the walls of the box.
Get it nice and clean, and then we can put the frames back in there.
We grab three frames at a time.
We have nine in a box, so three, three, three.
Wiggle the frames around a little bit so they drop down into those frame rests that we use
in our boxes.
And then the next step is going to be straightening the bottom bars, the last surface of the frame
that we need to scrape.
So Katherine tips the box forward, holds onto the frame and scrapes down, and removes all
that wax that's along the bottom.
Once that's done, the box is ready to either go back onto a hive or into storage for winter.
Let's back up a little bit, and we'll go back here, and we're going to look at where the
honey flows in this system.
We've got honey coming out of this end from the capping spinner.
We have honey coming out of the extractor.
They both feed into what's called the sump tank, down below here.
I've opened the cover up a little bit so you can see inside.
Wax floats to the surface.
There's nice clean honey on the bottom.
When that tank gets full, a float lifts up and turns on a switch.
That switch operates this pump here, that pumps the honey up and through this hose here
and over into our settling tank that we have in the hot room.
The hot wax that's in that settling tank floats to the surface.
We are then able to take the nice clean honey out of the bottom and fill up barrels.
And then from there, we can process the honey or just store those barrels.
Those are all the steps that we use in our extracting system.
As I said at the beginning, these will be different at a different scale, but all the
principles are exactly the same.
Thanks for watching.
Have a nice day.