Latest / Honey Bee Obscura Podcast / Small-Scale Honey Extraction with Anne Frey (301)

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Small-Scale Honey Extraction with Anne Frey (301) · Honey Bee Obscura Podcast

0:01
Hey listeners, it's Jim here again this week.
0:05
I've got a fairly routine special guest.
0:08
Even though she's routine, she's still special.
0:10
Say hi
0:10
and
0:11
Hi, it's Anne Frey
0:12
with Jim today.
0:14
She's from Betterbee,
0:15
Bee, people who provide bee supplies to the world.
0:18
Anne and I were talking about this time of the year when we extract honey
0:23
What do you do if you're a smaller producer,
0:26
even a larger one?
0:27
What are the options available for uncapping and straining and whatever?
0:32
It's an old topic, but it's always a messy topic.
0:35
And
0:36
I'd like for you and me to discuss it.
0:38
Sounds good.
0:39
I like this topic.
0:41
Honey Bee Obscura listeners, I'm Jim Tew
0:44
and I come to you here once a week at Honey
0:46
Bee Obscura.
0:47
Today
0:48
Anne and I will try to talk about something you do
0:50
with plain
0:51
talk beekeeping.
0:53
Welcome to Honey Bee Obscura, brought to you by Growing Planet Media, the producers of the Beekeeping Today
1:01
podcast.
1:02
Join Jim Tew, your guide through the complexities, the beauty, the
1:08
fun and the challenges of managing honey bees.
1:11
Jim hosts fun and interesting guests who take a deep dive into the intricate world of honey bees.
1:18
Whether you're a seasoned beekeeper or just getting started, get ready for
1:23
some plain talk that'll delve into all things honey bees.
1:27
Extracting honey is like me trying to make biscuits.
1:31
The only place I don't have flour in my house is down on the mailbox down by the road.
1:36
It's just the biggest mess, and I try not to splash it to make a mess, but I just get flour everywhere.
1:43
When I try to extract honey, why does it always end up being kind of a
1:48
kind of an exciting, sticky, tasty, sweet job.
1:52
It's just one of those things that's not really beekeeping, but it's certainly an aspect of beekeeping.
1:58
I
1:59
used to have a friend, he
2:00
passed away
2:01
now, he used to say that honey was the most annoying byproduct of beekeeping.
2:05
Oh, I love that.
2:07
I've never heard that and I
2:08
I love
2:09
that
2:10
I thought that number one would be stings, so
2:12
occasional
2:13
stings, but I've come full cycle.
2:15
I started out with a two-frame extractor and then the years passed
2:19
and
2:20
to
2:21
speed this thing up.
2:22
I ended up at Ohio State.
2:23
We never were big, but we had a 20-frame
2:26
DC driven
2:28
30
2:28
frame.
2:29
And we had sumps
2:31
and pumps and we had four hundred hives and now the years have passed
2:35
and I've gotten old and I'm back to seven or eight hives at a two-frame extractor.
2:40
So I'm ending up
2:41
where
2:42
I started.
2:43
What are options for people like me?
2:45
Let's start with the small people like I am
2:48
now.
2:55
And
2:55
then
2:56
if they're really into it, they're quickly trading that in
3:00
or putting it in the attic.
3:01
At that early stage people should just borrow the extractor from their
3:05
their
3:05
beekeeping club and see how they like beekeeping before they buy a tiny little extractor really.
3:11
Sorry, Betterbee, we do sell a lot of those small ones, but I just said don't buy 'em.
3:16
You know, there's the
3:17
the beekeeping clubs pretty often have
3:19
uh
3:20
whole extracting setup to loan.
3:22
And clubs are something that the beginner should always be aware of for every reason.
3:27
Well I agree, but I want to go one step further.
3:29
On that two
3:30
frame you bought and you outgrew it quickly, just put it up in the top of the barn and let it sit there
3:37
because if you keep bees for fifty-five years
3:39
You're gonna get it back down and
3:41
and use it again and it's going to be stainless steel.
3:44
It's not going to be plastic.
3:46
It'll be a useful gadget
3:48
There is a plastic extractor.
3:51
It's the least expensive, weirdest little thing I've ever seen, but it works.
3:56
It's like for the
3:58
person
3:58
who jumps into things really quickly with or maybe the student or something like that.
4:03
Usually it's stainless steel though.
4:05
It's never gonna go wrong if you put it away and take it out again.
4:08
Stainless is forever
4:10
Well, that's exactly what happened to me, and I'm using the extractor now.
4:14
And and happily
4:15
it's an old A.I.
4:16
Root—
4:17
no offense to Betterbee—but it's an old A.I. Root
4:19
motorized.
4:21
two-frame extractor.
4:22
They were using some kind of sewing machine motor on it to drive the extractor.
4:26
That's the kind of AI like.
4:28
So
4:29
that's kind of
4:30
Kind of an old-fashioned gadget.
4:32
I always wonder how to go about this.
4:35
In
4:35
in the earliest days when I was at Maryland, I used a Walter T.
4:38
Kelly vibrating knife.
4:41
It was a contraption with a horizontal knife.
4:44
They sold them forever.
4:46
I figured out a way to use a pressure cooker without the safety valve on it, which is going to make a lot of people, including me, cringe.
4:53
And I would use that to provide steam heat for the blade.
4:57
I thought I was just Mr.
4:58
Modern.
4:59
Somewhere there's a picture of me with a head full of hair and a skinny guy and no
5:03
no belly
5:05
running
5:05
that odd
5:06
frame across that thing.
5:07
And I just thought that that was the epitome
5:09
of modernness.
5:11
So I took off the pressure weight
5:13
off
5:13
the pressure cooker.
5:14
I hope I didn't manufacture a bomb.
5:16
But I enjoyed those old techniques.
5:18
And I'm talking too much, but in the earliest days of my beekeeping you could make
5:23
There were plans for making an extractor.
5:26
Now
5:27
hold your nose
5:28
using a galvanized garbage can
5:31
and the drive mechanism off a bicycle
5:34
to spin a basket that you made out of, uh,
5:37
quarter-inch
5:37
mesh
5:38
hardware cloth.
5:39
You take off one of the pedals and the bicycle drive mechanism was lying sideways
5:45
And then you'd use that to drive the extractor, and then when you'd stop driving it, the clutch would engage and the thing would coast
5:52
Now you needed to be a
5:54
a good machinist.
5:55
You need a you didn't never know what you were doing, but you could make a remarkably efficient
6:01
extractor
6:02
using galvanized which is not good.
6:11
I think it could be good, but I'm picturing people
6:14
just cleaning up a can and getting a a pedal set off of some old junkie
6:19
bike.
6:20
Yeah.
6:21
Yeah.
6:21
Use Clorox wipes on that.
6:24
Well, we're past all that.
6:25
What about uncapping knives?
6:28
You know, I'm surprised that more people don't know about the uncapping plane.
6:31
I love the uncapping plane and when I describe it to people it seems like their eyes light up and they go
6:37
What do you call that again?
6:39
All they know of is the
6:41
the long knife, the heated knife or the cold knife, and the plane looks like uh
6:46
a razor, you know, like uh you'd shave your face with
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It's just bigger.
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It's like uh
6:52
as wide across as a medium frame is tall
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and it's heated with a self-contained
6:57
electric element and
6:59
plug, and it's just a better motion.
7:02
I love the plane.
7:04
You know, I know those exist and I've seen people use them, but in my life, oddly, I've never owned one.
7:10
Yeah, it's a pulling motion and uh I started to get a a real pain in my wrist when I was using the knife for
7:16
days
7:17
and so uh
7:18
I
7:19
just
7:20
uh
7:20
I gotta recommend the
7:22
the plane to people.
7:23
Give it a try
7:24
Let's come back and talk more about knives and planes.
7:28
Sounds good.
7:31
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8:29
You touched
8:29
on something and kept right on going that I wanted to go back to.
8:33
You know most of us envision using that hot knife
8:35
or nice
8:36
white
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light
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combs.
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But if you get honeycombs with stored honey that's older and been used several seasons and gotten dark, that can really stress you, your wrist, and the knife.
8:48
To hack through that.
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It kind of is the same thing as when people do beekeeping their first
8:54
year
8:55
or, you know, two years and then they feel like that's the only way to do beekeeping.
8:59
You know, you
9:00
gotta progress and keep learning.
9:03
You may grow to
9:04
to seven or fourteen hives and still act like it's your first year
9:08
and you gotta, you know, understand there's more and different ways to do things.
9:13
It's my personality
9:15
to talk about the negative things.
9:17
And so the wrist pain
9:18
and the stickiness and all that.
9:20
But a good honey crop in the can is really a rewarding thing.
9:24
But it
9:25
it really is uh a challenge to get it all done.
9:28
And in the earliest days, people
9:31
just used a straight knife and you hacked through it.
9:35
And then there was a serrated
9:37
edged knife that came along.
9:40
And then in the old books, yeah, the cold knife.
9:43
And then they would tell you to take a cold knife and put it in hot water
9:46
and to rotate that every now and then
9:49
uh
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you know, swap out.
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So when that knife would quickly get cold, when it was
9:54
especially up against cold honey.
9:56
So those old those older people
9:58
they really had to work at getting that honey off.
10:00
We'd we'd like to think that these combs are all nice and new and they come right off
10:04
Often you get
10:05
you get that nice canary
10:07
yellow beeswax,
10:07
but sometimes those combs are not that great and you want the honey out of that.
10:12
Yeah, I know some people who
10:14
year after year are using the cold knife and they just say they love it.
10:17
But there's there's other ways to do things.
10:20
Actually
10:20
the person that says that is very young and strong.
10:23
But you know, you could just
10:24
Scratch at them, you know, you don't get any wax
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then, but
10:29
there's rollers, there's steam-heated
10:32
rollers, there's scratchers
10:35
Have you seen that steam-heated
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roller
10:37
that sits on the on the top of an uncapping tank and you just sort of press your frame straight down into it and up again?
10:44
It's just gonna pierce all the capping so they've kind of gone past all these circular blades
10:49
once down and once up.
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It's kind of neat
10:52
Betterbee
10:52
10:53
has that, but
10:53
you know, for hobbyists we also have all the smaller versions like just capping scratchers.
10:59
You know, that pierces the cappings
11:01
and the honey will come out.
11:03
You don't use
11:04
And don't have any
11:05
cappings later to make candles out of though.
11:08
Well what are you gonna do with all that when it rises to the top?
11:11
You've gotta let that settle, so you may not get as
11:14
as
11:14
many cappings, but you've still got
11:16
You'll get some little remnants 'cause some of
11:18
of those torn
11:20
cappings will tear off
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uh
11:22
and
11:22
come to the top surface of your honey.
11:24
You're right.
11:25
Yeah, somebody was asking me all about that the other day and what does she do when she's finished bottling
11:30
in her bucket
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and the surface has that fine layer of
11:34
wax
11:35
up on it.
11:36
What do I do?
11:36
What do I do?
11:37
And I
11:38
I said, you know, don't
11:40
don't bottle it for giving away or selling in those jars 'cause it's gonna look weird, but
11:46
I would just eat that honey from that last
11:49
that last bottle, the last two bottles that came with that
11:52
layer of fluffy, fine wax on it.
11:55
It's
11:56
it's delicious actually.
11:57
It's a different taste
11:59
I've never thought about doing that.
12:00
I always skim it off.
12:01
And
12:02
do what?
12:03
Strain it, and then you get about two tablespoons of wax out of it, and then you put that in your wax bucket and in fifty years
12:10
you got a whole bucket of wax cappings.
12:12
That's a long-term
12:13
plan.
12:13
You mentioned something a bit ago that flashed me back to an old memory.
12:17
I
12:17
I used to give a lot of TV and radio interviews and whatever.
12:21
Not that I was important.
12:22
I was just I was the representative here in Ohio.
12:26
And I was interviewed by a a reporter from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and I was explaining all this as though he was an accomplished beekeeper.
12:34
And I mentioned the fact that these cappings and parts of propolis
12:37
rise to the top, and I said, it
12:39
you know, it looks like scum.
12:41
You just break it off
12:42
and
12:43
And it
12:43
everything's fine.
12:44
Well
12:45
of course the guy used the word
12:46
scum, scum, scum throughout the article, and I just cringed every time I read that because
12:52
I just used that one time to give him a visual
12:56
analogy
12:56
so when you're talking to people about bees
12:59
who are not beekeepers—
13:00
don't use words like
13:02
scum
13:04
and junk honey I used the word
13:06
junk honey one time
13:08
And that became the guy's go-to
13:10
information source for what we were going to be talking about was junk honey and what we did with it.
13:15
All right, I'm off the subject
13:17
All right, Anne, how do you keep those small extractors tied
13:21
down?
13:21
They're always like trying to ride a bronco
13:24
in a small room.
13:29
For years, probably
13:30
twenty
13:31
years or more, he had been just shoving it into the corner.
13:35
You know, so he had it with
13:36
straight
13:37
legs not flaring out and he would just push it into a corner
13:41
and like
13:42
lean his hip against it while he cranked it.
13:44
It was on the top the crank.
13:46
But that's
13:47
Other people they tell all their children to sit down al
13:50
along the bottom parts and cling to the legs and things like that.
13:54
But
13:55
early on I learned that
13:57
you
13:57
gotta
13:58
put some chains or uh
14:00
you know, something
14:02
that comes straight down from the
14:04
uh
14:04
top edge and anchor it to the floor anchor it to a
14:08
big piece of plywood and your
14:11
extractors on that, you're standing on that, that's a lot of weight.
14:14
If it still moves around, you could put some weights on it, like buckets of water.
14:19
It's just
14:20
you know, if it's not balanced just right, it's gonna wanna move around and you
14:24
gotta
14:25
hold it down somehow.
14:27
Probably not by asking all your children
14:29
or bringing in all the pets.
14:31
You know,
14:32
there's more modern ways of holding something down.
14:35
I almost couldn't believe it until I saw it.
14:37
Someone in my beekeeping club made a stand that was on three wheels.
14:42
And
14:42
it just rolls free.
14:45
And so the extractor kind of does this little
14:47
circular wiggle on the wheels, three wheels.
14:51
as it's going
14:52
and everything is fine.
14:54
It's like you're kind of going with the flow. It wants to do a little wiggle, and you're letting it do it, not resisting the wiggle.
15:01
It's crazy, but it works.
15:04
So it's not restrained to the wall at all.
15:06
It can go across the room if it chose to.
15:08
No, it doesn't go across the room.
15:10
It just does a little kind of a
15:12
tiny circular dance in place on its wheels.
15:16
Okay, I
15:17
I thought it would over time
15:18
move.
15:19
Admittedly he only showed me fifteen seconds of video, but
15:22
Well that's fine.
15:23
I'll take it.
15:24
It sounds like a good idea if you're able to build such a thing.
15:27
It's
15:27
uh
15:28
it's a crazy idea, but it just might work.
15:30
I
15:31
worked out a system myself
15:33
that I can't recommend for anybody else because I happen to have the gadget.
15:37
I've got a
15:38
a small trailer that goes behind my small tractor.
15:42
And ironically, it has springs on it.
15:45
So
15:46
I would bring that trailer into my shop and then I would ratchet
15:49
strap
15:50
my extractor to the trailer.
15:53
And then the springs would absorb a lot of the vibration as the thing bounced around.
15:58
Kinda the
15:58
kind of a
15:59
same idea.
16:00
It's basically the same idea.
16:02
I just happened to have an old trailer that actually had light springs
16:06
on it.
16:07
So
16:08
I could have put four extractors on it; I just had one, so my extracting room was mostly
16:14
dirty trailer from outside.
16:22
We've started to do that here, and it's an
16:24
it's an idea for not just buying a larger extractor when your operation gets bigger.
16:31
You can just
16:32
Like
16:32
say you had a four-frame or a six-frame and you got
16:37
to be too big just to deal with that.
16:40
Like why not just have
16:41
another
16:43
six-frame motorized extractor next to you and you know you
16:47
essentially
16:48
you're filling up something with twelve frames and turning it on
16:51
or
16:51
maybe they could be offset in time so there's just a constant
16:55
You know, that one's running while this one stopped and you unloaded it.
16:58
It's a
16:59
just these
17:00
ideas
17:01
of thinking of a different way to do things.
17:04
You know, without resorting to bicycle parts, Jim.
17:07
Right.
17:08
Well ironically
17:09
I can
17:10
comfortably
17:10
say this.
17:11
There is no standard way.
17:13
It's one of the ways in beekeeping that a beekeeper
17:16
can really express
17:22
Oh yeah, you can make comb
17:23
honey or m other people
17:25
who don't want
17:26
to invest
17:27
in an extractor and they don't know about beekeeping clubs, they
17:30
They actually, can you believe it, scrape the comb off of the frame every time they want, honey?
17:36
And they
17:37
you know, of course you know it
17:38
crush and strain.
17:40
I hate when people tell me they do crush and strain.
17:43
All that wax the bees made, it's just, you know
17:47
each year, but they are getting the freshest, most amazing color
17:51
wax.
17:51
I hope they make some candles out of it, but
17:54
I kind of
17:55
uh
17:55
just cringe when I hear
17:57
crush and
17:58
strain.
17:58
It's the twenty-first
18:00
century
18:00
folks
18:12
that was capped honey
18:14
and it was just too much to put into frames
18:18
and I wanted to
18:19
minimize what was put into the frames for the
18:22
colony I kept so I just did the brood comb and some honey.
18:26
This would be excess.
18:27
I would crush it in a colander
18:31
and just keep mashing it like with a potato masher or something.
18:34
you know, these are slabs of comb that were cut out of a wall or something like that.
18:39
It's not hard to crush it if it's only one year, you know, a few months
18:44
really
18:44
old.
18:45
It's very easy.
18:47
That's another way to do it.
18:49
And
18:49
years ago there was a
18:51
a uh
18:51
wax press
18:53
that was sold by the companies and you was
18:55
it looked like a fruit press.
18:57
Oh
18:57
like
18:57
yeah, like a cider
18:58
press, yeah.
18:59
We got one of those too.
19:00
It's a very shiny modern one.
19:02
Those are cool.
19:03
I wonder if you could use that to
19:05
to squeeze honey out of comb.
19:07
Oh yeah, yeah, definitely.
19:08
It's again though, it's kind of a shame.
19:11
It's uh like a modern version
19:14
of uh
19:15
the old cider
19:16
press kind of thing that a family would have.
19:19
Anne, I'm so sorry, but I have to be the timekeeper
19:21
here and our time is up.
19:23
We could keep on going, but basically
19:26
I've decided that there's no standard way. You do whatever's creative and clever for your individual operation and be prepared to change
19:34
When something better comes along.
19:36
Definitely keep things clean.
19:38
Don't say hey this is a natural product and let things get all dirty.
19:42
So uh
19:43
yeah, I think we've covered a lot of uh points here.
19:46
If you say we have to stop, we have to
19:50
Say bye,
19:50
Anne.
19:51
Bye,
19:51
Anne.
19:52
All right, I'm saying
19:53
bye, listeners.
19:54
Bye,
19:54
listeners.
19:55
Bye,
19:55
Jim.