Yesterday I robbed a super from one of my hives in order to test out the honey extractor I made.<\/p>\n
I have pictures and some information about building it, and I will post that is soon as I can.<\/p>\n
The extractor worked better than I thought. My last one screwed up like an accordion when I tried it. This one stood up to five heavy frames being spun at one time.<\/p>\n
What I learned was that when I did fewer than4 frames, the frames tipped over and sent the cage out of balance. I had to load empty frames back into the basket in order the spin them.<\/p>\n
I bought a variable speed drill so that I would not have to spin the frames at very high speeds. I learned that I could get the frames up to a good speed (about 400 RPM) and it took about 45 seconds to completely dry out one side of a frame. This is very quick.<\/p>\n
I will go back and create some kind of system to hold the frames in place when I spin. I expect that this will limit me to 4 frames. The extractor can hold up to 6 medium frames with just a slight overlap. It can easily hold 5 medium frames or 4 deep frames. I will set it up to do just the 4 frames in case I need to spin the deeps from a dead hive.<\/p>\n
I was afraid that the light weight construction would warp when I spun the heavy frames (and they were heavy – most frames were 100% capped honey!). The basket took a beating, even when the frames moved about and it started to buck. At one point I put my knee on the top to hold it steady and while I spun a bucking bronco.<\/p>\n
On the negative side, the bees found my spinner and the box I used for uncapping and I could not keep them out. I filtered out dozens of dead bees when I poured out the honey. Last night, the uncapping box was full of bees, too gorged to fly.<\/p>\n
When I do this again, I need to find a way to keep the bees away from the works.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday I robbed a super from one of my hives in order to test out the honey extractor I made. I have pictures and some information about building it, and I will post that is soon as I can. The extractor worked better than I thought. My last one screwed up like an accordion when […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=262"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}