Honey Comb
Premium comb ready for harvest.
No supers, fume boards, fumes, blowers, extra supers, bee boards, bee escapes, honey boards, super carts, warming rooms, uncappers, scratchers, extractors, sumps, pumps or holding tanks are needed when harvesting honey from a top bar hive. The hive products are the only stuff coming back from the bee yard. And there's no finer product than fresh honey comb. I like it a lot.
Honey comb is easily harvested. Just brush the bees off the comb with a yellow, plastic bee brush. Cut the comb off the top bar. Gently place the comb in an icing bucket. Cover the bucket. And return the empty top bar to the hive. If wax moths are a problem, place the bucket in a freezer for a few days. Then retrieve comb pieces from the bucket as they are needed. My comb honey lasts throughout the winter without granulating. While my honey from a conventional extractor granulates within a month.
Great honey, but not the best looking honeycomb. It's a prime candidate
for extraction.
Extracted Honey
The Strainer
Unfortunately, not everyone likes honeycomb as I do. And not every piece of honeycomb is esthetic enough for it. But getting 'extracted honey' from a top bar hive is almost as easy. But first, you'll need a strainer.
The strainer is made from:
- two icing buckets
- a 2 x 2 wooden block
- a nylon paint straining bag with elastic top
Cut a large hole in one of the lids. Drill lots of smaller holes in the bottom of another bucket. Drill a few holes around the same bucket's top edge.
Set the lid with the large hole on top of the empty bucket.
Set the other bucket, with the smaller holes, on top of that. Place the wood block in the middle of this bucket. Attach the nylon paint strainer bag to the top bucket draping it inside.
That's it. You've built the strainer.
Operation
The bees are brushed off harvested comb as before. The comb is cut into an icing bucket. Don't fill a bucket more than three fourths full
At home, throughly mash up the comb inside the bucket. I use a wooden 1 x 2. It's easy when the comb is warm from the field.
Pour the mashed up comb into the strainer bag. Allow the field bucket to drain out. If the field bucket is the same size as the strainer bucket, it can be left on top of the strainer, overnight.
Then place a solid lid on the strainer's top. It can be left this way until the honey stops draining from the bucket.
Volume
A full shallow super fills a standard icing bucket with comb mash. And three-fourths of a bucket of honey drains from a full bucket of honey mash.
Extracted honey before skimming the top 1/4" of foam.
Temperature
If the temperature stays above 80 degrees, you get 'extracted honey' in several days. And it's almost labor free!
If the temps drop below 70 degrees, extracting is slooooow. So this process works best when honey is harvested during the summer's heat. So, harvest frequently during the summer rather than a single harvest during the fall.
Shifting
After a day of straining, gently lifting the strainer bag out of the bucket. This lets the wax shift. Then set it back inside the strainer. This speeds up the straining process somewhat.
Granulation
If your honey granulates fast, make sure you 'extract' when the weather is hot. Or it may granulate before it's 'extracted'.
Cleanup
Foam rises to the top of the extracted honey. Skim it off. After skimming, you're left with raw honey and it is flavorful. It tastes like comb honey without the wax.
To clean up, fill the empty buckets with water. Place the filter in the bottom of one of the buckets. Come back a day later. Dump the buckets. Rinse them with a hose and you're done. No big mess. No big clean up. Pretty neat huh! It's perfect for a limited amount of 'extracted honey'.
Beeswax
Cappings/Comb
After extracting the honey, cappings and comb pieces will remain in the strainer. This strained wax can be feed back to the bees. They remove every trace of honey from it. Or it can be rendered as is. The cappings can also be washed, per Brother Adam, and the resulting syrup used to feed bees or make mead.
Rendering
There's alot written about rendering beeswax. So, I won't go into that here. Most involve melting the cappings above water or in a double boiler. It's a messy business. And it can be dangerous when done wrong. Overheated beeswax can burst into flames. And over heated water, confined below melted beeswax, can suddenly flash into steam, blasted melted beeswax everywhere.
Some points to think about:
- Carefully control the temperature when melting beeswax.
- Never use an open flame.
- Have dedicated beeswax rendering equipment.
- Never use the kitchen or kitchen utensils.
- Copper, nickel, zinc and iron discolor melted beeswax.
Solar Melter
Consider a solar melter. They are a great top bar hive accessory which can safely handle those constant small scraps of beeswax and comb commonly generated when working top bar hives. They:
- Keep the mess outside.
- Are efficient and safe.
- Require minimal attention/time.
- Can extract wax from dark comb.
Filtering Beeswax
Harvested top bar comb produces the best beeswax possible. But with common rendering methods, beeswax is usually not clean enough for making candles. It will still have too much pollen and propolis which eventually fouls a candle wick, especially in larger, poured candles.
A grease filter, used to filter hot restaurant deep fat fryer oil, is the best beeswax filter available. They are available at commercial restaurant supply houses. And cost about 50 cents apiece.
Extractor Modifications
Floating It
Smashing and straining is powered by gravity. But buoyancy is another important force that could be harnessed improving the speed and efficiency. To exploit this force, the comb is mashed as before. But rather than pouring it directly into the homemade bucket strainer, a clean 5 gallon paint strainer bag is placed directly in a clean honey bucket. The mash is poured inside the stainer bag/bucket. The bucket is covered with a lid and allowed to set for a few days until the wax and nylon paint strainer bag float to the honey's surface. Then the paint strainer bag, with its contained wax could be removed from the bucket and placed, intact, into the homemade bucket strainer to finish draining.
Most of the liquid honey separates without dripping through the homemade bucket strainer. This creates less foam and the necessity for skimming the strained product.
And a larger honey crop could be extracted, simultaneously, with the addition of a few extra paint strainers.
This season, I tried using buoyancy. The upper half of the wax was drier than if it had been allowed to drip through the strainer. The remaining wax was slightly more wet. Letting the wax drip out through the strainer, resulted in slightly drier wax overall. But it took at least twice as long. It's much easier to strain it without messing with it.
Squeezing It
I've also tried another method using a water filled bucket, for weight, on top of the mash. It accelerated the initial honey wax separation. But pressed the wax against the bottom of the strainer bucket hindering the honey's free flow during the latter stages of straining. The net result was about the same as letting the honey drain.
