I know a commercial oufit who used to offer the service at £10 per super but soon gave up on the idea as it was not cost effective.
Honey extraction services
- Thread starter BeeBelle
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100 standard super boxes (SN4) can be processed in a day with not much kit, the expense is the food grade facility to house the kit and storage.
My setup would cost 50-80k for an idea, i'd not rent this out simply due to disease risks. With my setup the honey ends up *jar ready* same day, saves a load of work down the line.
Sounds like you have a lot of planing/thinking to cover as the last posts were looking for a simple jar hand pump?
My advice, don't rush as processing a stack of supers will be the least of your concerns.
Very best of luck
(good to see the progress).PS. The lack of response might be down to processing supers finished months ago (for commercial in bulk start August for me).
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Would love to see more info on your setup with not much kit ideas?100 standard super boxes (SN4) can be processed in a day with not much kit, the expense is the food grade facility to house the kit and storage.
My setup would cost 50-80k for an idea, i'd not rent this out simply due to disease risks. With my setup the honey ends up *jar ready* same day, saves a load of work down the line.
Sounds like you have a lot of planing/thinking to cover as the last posts were looking for a simple jar hand pump?
My advice, don't rush as processing a stack of supers will be the least of your concerns.
Very best of luck
PS. The lack of response might be down to processing supers finished months ago (for commercial in bulk start August for me).
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100 supers a day .. without mechanised uncapping and extraction is an exceptional achievement.
I have a 15 frame motorised extractor and uncap manually (and I've tried lots of different uncapping methods) and I average about 30 minutes per super when I include uncapping, loading, spinning, unloading and draining/filtering the honey into buckets. I do accept that I don't rush, the only pressure I have is my time and I could probably be more efficient. One of my problems is lumpy fat combs on the frames and this year I've been absolutely ruthless cutting them back to be level with the frames so, hopefully, next year, the uncapping knife, heated plane or even (in my dreams - an uncapping machine) will be more use than a fork .. I could probably knock a good few minutes off my time ... but 900 frames a day .. doing it with minimal equipment - pie in the sky for me !
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Ha certainly graft but nothing special.
I use the best heated knife there is, an uncapping tank plus custom rack that holds 50+ frames and a 40 frame extractor (with a huge filter system and a few other bits). Frames (not first year and also spaced to get full nice thick frames), can uncap them in seconds and load the rack (uncap to the frame and let the tank/filter do the work). Once machine loaded and spinning you uncap more boxes and fill the rack, giving a near continuous flow of frames etc. I've a few bits of kit for moving the boxes about etc and fast.
Room is heated to 30+ avoiding pumps (drink lots of water) and get the filter system working.
I'm using DN4 frames btw, you do need a good level of strength and fitness but you get the gist. A day is bee farmer day (graft) so 12/15 hours, which is about standard fare in this game in the season. If you put the hammer down you could run 16 boxes an hour through it, risk burns and failing into the honey but 6-7 hours I guess...
I use the best heated knife there is, an uncapping tank plus custom rack that holds 50+ frames and a 40 frame extractor (with a huge filter system and a few other bits). Frames (not first year and also spaced to get full nice thick frames), can uncap them in seconds and load the rack (uncap to the frame and let the tank/filter do the work). Once machine loaded and spinning you uncap more boxes and fill the rack, giving a near continuous flow of frames etc. I've a few bits of kit for moving the boxes about etc and fast.
Room is heated to 30+ avoiding pumps (drink lots of water) and get the filter system working.
I'm using DN4 frames btw, you do need a good level of strength and fitness but you get the gist. A day is bee farmer day (graft) so 12/15 hours
, which is about standard fare in this game in the season. If you put the hammer down you could run 16 boxes an hour through it, risk burns and failing into the honey but 6-7 hours I guess...
