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CENTRIFUGAL HONEY EXTRACTION IN FRAMELESS-HIVE BEEKEEPING by Rainer Krell
Extracting the honey Honey in a jar has been carefully removed from the wax combs. In modern beekeeping the wax caps with which bees seal their honey cells are removed by the beekeeper with a knife, the wooden frame with uncapped honey comb is placed in a centrifuge and the honey is spun out of the cells. The wax caps, referred to as cappings, are then processed.
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An adapted four-frame tangential extractor.
An adaptation to modern centrifugal honey extraction can allow traditional, irregular honeycomb to be spun quickly and efficiently, increasing both the yield and the quality of the honey.
Beekeepers have made great strides in designing equipment that allows greater manipulation of colony conditions, and increases yields and quality of the extracted honey itself. The beekeeping methods used in industrialised countries, which use standardized boxes with movable wooden frames within which bees build their wax combs, have been developed over the last 150 years.
Traditional beekeeping
The straw skeps of northern Europe, the clay pots and cylinders of northern Africa, and the bark and log hives, also of Africa, are examples of traditional ‘frameless’ beekeeping. But honeybees’ behaviour varies with different climates and different environments. Economic, cultural and social conditions, too, differ widely throughout the distribution area of the honeybee. Movable-frame hives have always been expensive and difficult to make, and despite the advantages of easier handling, have not always been the most productive or economic choice. Intermediate hive-types then evolved, hives that combine many of the advantages of both traditional and modern beekeeping. Cheaper, locally available building materials can be chosen and less precision is necessary in their construction. The bees are encouraged to build their combs on wooden sticks or bars laid across the top of the hive container. The result is referred to as a top-bar hive, and it still permits the easy moving of brood or honeycombs for hive management and honey harvesting.
Different types of corners for baskets. B is easiest to build, and C is probably stronger. B and C are small in diameter, so the drum used can also be small.
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But since bees store honey in tiny hexagonal wax cells, the harvesting of honey is not finished when the combs are removed from the hive: the honey still has to be separated from the wax. In ancient times and still today honey is eaten with the comb, sometimes with the brood and pollen.
In traditional beekeeping, which does not use frames and centrifuges, honey can only be allowed to drip from broken-up combs or be squeezed out by hand. Appropriate technology has provided special presses to squeeze the broken-up comb more efficiently. This process is slow: presses are still expensive and cannot be used for frame hive beekeeping and the honey almost always contains a lot of pollen. What is really needed is modern centrifugal extractor that can be used with traditional non-frame beekeeping. a
Centrifugal extractors
High-technology beekeeping has solved this problem inadvertently, by adapting radial centrifugal extractors to process cappings, which resemble in many ways the irregular and broken combs harvested from frameless hives. A commercial beekeeper in the US used the same 72-frame radial extractor to spin both frames and cappings. Stainless steel quarter sections were laid on the bottom struts of the cage, and vertical sheets, perforated by '/4-*/s inch holes, two per square inch, were fitted to the vertical reinforcements. In less than 30 minutes over 30 gallons (140 litres) of cappings were spun relatively dry with no reduction in honey quality. In 1987, went to Zambia and Malawi for Africare to help beekeeping extension officers. Local beekeepers did not have or want 72frame radial extractors, but after their harvest from bark hives, Kenya top-bar hives and modified Dadant top-bar hives, they were left with a honey and broken comb mixture very similar to the cappings from frame-hive beekeeping. |
The most common practice among advanced frameless-hive beekeepers is to press honey from the comb mixture. Sometimes honey is left to drip from the broken combs through a screen just as some frame hive beekeepers let honey drip from cappings. For the project in Zambia four-frame extractors had been purchased, which were used only for the processing of frames. The bulk of the comb and honey mix from bark hives or incomplete frames was still processed by pressing.
Modifying small extractors
The four-frame extractors available had a basket to hold the frames, made out of twomesh (three wires or two holes per inch) wire screen or hardware cloth. The bottom of the basket was a solid sheet of stainless steel. This was fortunate since it saved a lot of work and material when converting to centrifuging the honey and comb mixture. All that was necessary was to lay a finer mesh hardware
