A couple of questions from my first proper end of season extraction.

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1. Cappings and the inevitable honey that comes off with them are valuable. Make one of these for next year so that you can drain the honey off as part of your crop (nothing wrong with it if you uncap above a decent stainless or food safe tray.

Use the same seive to wash the cappings. Then melt them down in a Bain Marie and cast them into blocks (plastic box with a bit of rainwater in the bottom). There's plenty of threads on here about what to do with wax.

2. Scrape the wax out as much as you can and add to the cappings to be processed - the small amount remaining... just wash with cold water and it will become crumbs of dry wax which can be added to the bain marie for processing.

https://www.thorne.co.uk/candlemaking/bain-marie-1-5kg.html

That’s brilliant thank you very much
 
I've found that the uncapping tool of choice impacts the amount of sieve clogging, an uncapping fork scrapes the surface but leaves a lot of the wax in place which then extracts with the honey, blocking the sieve. An uncapping knife removes most of the wax so doesn't block the sieve as quickly. Experiment and find what works for you, there are plenty of options.
As for the extractor, can the dent be pushed out? 🤔
Actually, you should not use an uncapping fork to 'scrape' the surface - the correct way to use it is to work the fork along the frame with it in a sort of underhand way, getting the tines of the fork just under the wax cappings and easing it along the face of the frame. It lifts the cappings off, collecting them on the fork. I then have a fixed blade mounted in my uncapping tray which I use to scrape the cappings off the fork. Used properly it leaves very little wax on the face of the frame but it's not a quick method. It's a good tool if the face of your comb is not flat and you only have a few supers to extract.

How CGF manages to uncap hundreds of supers using an uncapping fork is beyond me - perhaps he'll give us some tips about how he uses his ?
 
After filtering, I put the my sticky filters, complete with wax and honey residues, back on top of the hive in an empty box above a crown board. By morning the filters are clean and dry and instead of sticky capping a you have beautiful dry flakes of wax ready for storage of melting. You do need to spread the capping out as evenly as possible, otherwise they can’t get to the honey in the middle.

Same with uncapping fork - just put it back in the hive for the bees to clean rather than washing precious honey away.

Thank you, that‘s a good idea. Put it all in a empty super, some great advice on this thread, thank you everyone.
 

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