I want honey this year and that means extracting honey. You can make chunk honey and let it drain or you can use a spinner. The advantage of a spinner is that the comb is kept mostly intact.
Comb takes as much as 10 time more sugar to make than it takes to make honey (one source says 17 times as much sugar). A pound of comb could have been 10 pounds of honey, so it make sense to preserve the comb as much as possible in order to return it the hive. The bees will then fill up the old comb rather than have to draw new comb at the expense of making honey. Reuse of comb means more honey.
The chunk honey method is to just chop up and mash the comb and set it in a colander and let the honey drain out. Then you can process the beeswax. You then filter the honey and you are done. You do this if you can’t afford a honey extractor.
Spinning requires a honey extractor. The cheapest extractors cost around $200. There is a guy who is making a spinner that you attach to a drill that can spin a couple of frames, but he charges $140 for his.
I have been planning my do-it-yourself extractor based on a few old magazine articles and I think that I can do it for under $50.
What you need for a honey extractor is a clean garbage can. Rubbermaid has a good variety at the local Home Depot. You need a central rod that you can drive with an ordinary drill (think 1/4 inch threaded rod). You need a base to keep the rod from cutting through the bottom of the garbage can (think galvanized pipe fittings). You need a brace at the top to keep the thing steady and then you need a way to attach the frames to the the rod so that they are held out from the center when they spin. It should be easy to flip the frames so that you can do both sides without taking the thing apart. I am thinking about using galvanized strapping for braces and holding the frames, but I am not sure it will be stiff enough. I will have to experiment with that part of it.
Stay tuned. I am going to start buying the parts this weekend. Maybe by next week I will have the first prototype working.
