How do you get honey out of the honeycomb?

Commercial beekeepers use a specially-designed centerfuge to drive honey out of the comb without damaging the comb so it can be reused. While we have tentative plans to purchase an extractor, the cheapest high quality models (i.e. not the plastic thing from China that WILL break after two years) cost around $300, and the motorized 9-frame radial extractor I have my eye on is more like $1500.

We'll need to sell a lot of honey to fund this kind of capital investment -- at the least, we'll need to have a lot of capped frames of honey to process so the time we save becomes significant. For the 18 frames I had capped, it is very difficult to justify such an expense.

My dad and I had read in various books and websites that it is possible to simply allow the honey to drip out of the comb once the thin wax caps are removed if it's kept at a high enough temperature for a few hours. We figured that if this method didn't work we could always fall back on the old "crush and strain method."

This method failed. Even at around 100 degrees F over night in a "honey room" in my parents' garage, the honey simply would not drip out of the honeycomb. I suspect there's some equation involving viscosity and surface tension that could have predicted such a result.

We then implemented our crush and strain backup plan. My mother and I ripped all the wax and honey out of the frames and dumped it into our uncapping tank. The uncapping tank is set up like a double boiler with a wire grid keeping most of the wax off the bottom of the lower tank so that the honey can drip off the wax into the lower container which is set up with a honey gate so we can empty the tank as it fills up.

This second picture shows the honey gate (propped open with a cork) dripping the honey into a two-stage strainer on a 5-gallon bucket. The strainer removes any small bits of wax and clumps of pollen that are floating in the honey while leaving the honey unheated and unfiltered so it remains "unprocessed." It's not uncommon for beekeepers to use a 200 micron filter which results in clearer honey that is less likely to crystallize, but pushing honey through such small holes often requires heating (which destroys many of the aromatic compounds that give unprocessed honey its amazing taste) and it's an extra step I don't consider necessary at the moment.

In the background, you can see the dehumidifier we ran during the processing operation. Honey is essentially dehydrated sugar water (nectar and some enzymes from bees) so it easily absorbs water from humid air. With the honey open to the air over night, it was important to pull water out of the air so the honey didn't get too watery. Honey is generally defined as having less than 18.6% water -- more than that and it's prone to fermenting. Below 18.6% water content, any yeast and bacteria in the honey can't grow. I used our refractometer to measure the water content of our honey at 17.0% -- a perfect level for honey!

Finally, here is a picture of the smashed honey comb at the bottom of the uncapping tank. You can't see the lower tank under the wax, but it's offset by about 2-3 inches. I left our "honey room" with a five gallon bucket full of honey that weighed around 50 lbs. I left the wax to drip and around 10 lbs. of honey in the bottom of the tank for my parents to finish processing. I have a hard time driving out to their house on week days (30 minutes one way is tough when you have a job and a baby) and they were happy to help.

Hopefully, we can melt down the wax in a double-boiler and make candles out of it later. I don't think we'll have quite enough to be worth the effort this year, but wax stores well and we'll save it up until we have enough for some winter activities.

Up next: my kitchen houses a brief honey bottling operation!