In this episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping, Laurence Edwards of Black Mountain Honey provides a hands‑on review of the Abelo Lyson 100‑litre settling tank with a sieve attachment. He walks through the tank’s stainless‑steel construction, large removable sieve, and the key design element—a conical bottom that enables complete gravity drainage without tilting. Edwards demonstrates his workflow: warming honey to 38 °C, pouring it into the tank, using the sieve to capture wax cappings, and allowing the honey to settle. He explains how the tank can be used both as a primary settling vessel and, with an airtight lid, as temporary storage (though he prefers not to store honey there to avoid crystallisation). A major upgrade he installed is a ball valve on the bottom, replacing the factory honey gate, which allows direct connection to bottling machines, pumps, or extractors, making the kit more multifunctional. Throughout the video he offers practical tips—checking the valve is closed before filling, ordering pours from cleanest to wax‑rich honey, avoiding overflow, and using the sieve even for relatively clean honey as an extra precaution. Edwards also describes how he reclaims raw honey from wax cappings before melting the wax for baker’s honey, maximizing product yield. He concludes by recommending the premium model for its sieve, ball‑valve option, and especially the conical bottom, noting that other models lack this efficient design. Contact information for the supplier, Damien at Abello, is provided, and viewers are encouraged to subscribe.
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Hi, I'm Lawrence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Today we're going to take a look at the Abello Lyson 100 litre settling tank with sieve. So everyone needs a settling tank. This settling tank is a really, really good buy. There's a few Really good features about it, some that I want to share with you today. So purpose of this video is just going to kind of give you a top to bottom of the settling tank, talk about some of the features, and I'm going to put some honey in it ready to get it jarred up. So it's a really simple design. Top of it here, like I say, it's not clean because I've just run loads of honey through it. Um, it's got wax on the top there, it's got a silicone seal there on the lid and a little kind of thumb pull. It's a really nice solid lid. And then what sits on the top is a very big sieve, as you can see. Just run loads of honey through that. But this stays pretty much like this all season. I mean, all that goes in there is capping-grade wax, and then I just pour warm honey, 38°C honey, never heated above that, through here, and the mesh catches all of the wax that I need it to catch. And then the inside has got a conical bottom, and this was the big reason that I bought this one. So what that means is that as the honey is working down, when you open the valve at the bottom— and I'll move on to the valve in a second— every last bit of honey comes out of the settling tank. So you don't have to tilt it, you don't have to scrape all the remnants out. It's a conical bottom and every last bit will drop out through gravity. That makes it so much easier to bottle with. So I use this predominantly to originally settle, so I put all my honey through it. So when I'm doing my extraction, I go through the uncapping machine that takes all the wax off the frames. It then goes into the wax capping screw press. Or I extract the honey out through the centrifuge. I then— that goes into the sump, so it passes through the sump, various different screens, and then it gets pumped into here. So if I'm running it through the sump, then I don't bother with the sieve because the honey is all kind of clean and filtered. Now, if I'm doing a smaller batch, or I've got batches that's got wax in it from the capping screw press, Then I run it through this sieve, so it comes straight through there, and then that just takes out the remnants, the remainder of the wax, and it's really, really efficient at doing that. I'll cut to a couple of pictures and show you kind of what's left, but it's just a thick cake of wax. There's really not that much honey left in it. The force of gravity If you kind of mush it up a couple of times, tends to get all of that honey through within about 24 hours. So it's a really, really efficient, good design. 100-liter tank, this is built out of stainless steel. You've got these catches up here, so the sieve sits nicely in there. You can pour a lot of honey in, let it fall through, and then you've got a lid that sits on top, and then you've got these catches. That actually don't work with the sieve in, but once it's all sieved, if you want to use it just as a settling tank, that all ratchets down and gives you an airtight seal, so you can store honey in there as well. I don't use it as a storage tank though because I don't like the honey to set in that tank. If it sets properly in there, you've got real issues. So all I do is I use it just to settle, just to get that wax filtered from the top, and then any finer little bits to settle on the top there, and then I'll take it all out into buckets. Perfectly filtered honey. So that's what I use that for in my extraction room, and I'm just going to run a couple of buckets through it now and show you how well it works. So final thing to say is I upgraded this and I put a ball valve on the bottom of it. Now it comes just with a honey gate. I find the honey gate is slightly limiting because you can't connect it up to a bottling tank. So you can't connect it up to a bottling machine. So what I like to do when I'm doing my bottling is I'll fill both of these up. So I fill my 100-liter creaming machine up with soft-set honey, and I fill a 100-liter settling tank up with runny honey, and then I can run both of them through the bottling machine, and then I can clean them out at the end of it. If I didn't have the valves on both of these, I couldn't connect those up. I'd have to pump into a dedicated holding tank that had the valve on. So it's just little extraction rooms like this, you need to make sure your kit is multifunctional, and that's why I've invested in these ball valves, and they're really, really good, and they connect onto the hoses. So they connect onto a hose like this, the hose just slots on as a push fit, and then you've got a flanged connection on that end, and then that end there will connect into your bottling machine. So you can run this into a pump, you can run this into a bottling machine, you can actually connect it directly to the extractor via a pump. Endless kind of possibilities as long as you're running all of the same kit. And that is why all of my kit is from Lyson, just so you've got that compatibility between each of the units. Now, everybody who's got a settling tank would have done this, and that is they put honey in the top with the gate open or the valve open. So before you ever put any honey in anything, make sure your valve or your gate is closed. Make sure it's tightly sealed. Otherwise you get honey all over the floor and that's no good for anyone. So check your valve and then we'll get some honey in there. So I take my liquid honey that I've warmed to 38°C in a bucket overnight and then I just pour it through and it will settle in the tank and you can kind of mix and match the different buckets to get a nice batch. These are all from the same apiary and then we're going to run it through the bottling machine. So you take your buckets of warm honey and just pour it through the top. And then a feature that I really like— not really a feature, just the way that I do it— is that you leave the bucket on the top like that, and all of the kind of dregs of the honey, so all of the stuff that's stuck to the sides will just naturally fall out over time. You can hear it just kind of dripping through that sieve. Depending on the amount of wax that you have within the honey, you might need to kind of pour it in in 2 or 3 stages. The top sieve actually takes a really, really good amount of honey at a go, but I kind of pour like 60 or 70 pounds in at a time. So sometimes if there's a lot of wax, so if I'm using the stuff that's come out of the wax cappings press, there can be a lot of wax left over in that. So I just need to take my time Make sure that it's not overflowing. Sometimes give it a little bit of a stir just to get that honey to break down and kind of go through the wax. If you're in a warm room, it really doesn't take that long, but make sure you pour in your cleanest honey first. So honey that's coming out of your extractor, honey through your sump, get that in first, build up the level, and then pour in your waxiest honey at the end. Right, so that's my 3 runny honeys that I've got in there now. The final bucket of honey has got a lot of wax in it. So like I said, I wanted to do the 3 first, and I'll give you just a little close-up of what the 3 first look like. The sieve is clear already, and then I'll show you the wax that I'm going to use. So as you can see, I mean, I've got remnants around the edge. That's from previous filterings. All of that honey's gone straight through. It was really, really clean honey anyway, but I always put it through the sieve just as a kind of an extra precaution to get out any of that other wax or bits that could be in the honey. This is what's going through, and that is probably 10% wax sitting on top there. Once it's heated up, do you mean all that wax comes to the top? And then I use this filtering tank to get rid of all of that wax, and I'll show you how that's done now. Right, so you can see how well that's worked. That's kept kind of all of the crud, all of that wax that would have otherwise gone into your honey, and kept it in the sieve. And it's doubled up as a settling tank as well. So if you're buying one of these settling tanks, I highly recommend getting a sieve attachment. It makes life so much easier. It's really, really well made and does a really good job. So just a sneak peek kind of underneath. What you can see there is all of the honey's gone through. Obviously you get some really small particles of wax still coming through, but because of the way that this settling tank is designed, they will all remain on the top until the last couple of jars. So those last couple of jars, they always end up in, in my cupboard at home. They don't go out for sale for the public. So it's a good way of kind of minimizing the amount of wax that's going into your jars and just a really good multifunctional piece of kit. So now I sometimes run absolutely loads of these wax cappings through this machine here. So what a lot of people do is they take the wax cappings from the wax capping screw press and it just goes straight into the, the Meliflow or your melter. And then they melt the wax, and then what you get is baker's honey. What I do is I take it and I run it through here first, and then that way I'm getting another batch of kind of raw honey, honey that's not been heated above hive temperature, to sell. So I'm kind of maximizing the amount of honey that I reclaim from my wax, and then the wax cake that forms in here, then that goes into my melter and I reclaim the baker's honey from that. And then the baker's honey just gets sold off in buckets as baker's honey, and I use the wax to either trade in for foundation or to kind of sit off and look nice. I don't really tend to do a huge amount with my wax. Um, so that's it. I mean, I just wanted to kind of run you through some of the pieces of kit that I use in my extraction room. We've done little reviews on them before, but you haven't seen them working in practice. So I'm just going to show you a couple of the pictures of the cakes that form once you put a decent amount of honey through this machine, or a decent amount of wax cappings through this 100-liter settling tank just to give you an impression of how well it actually gets that honey out of those cappings. And that's it. So I hope you've enjoyed the video. If you're interested in buying a settling tank, I highly recommend this settling tank. It's the premium one. It's a little bit more expensive, but it comes with those features that I couldn't do without. One is the sieve, makes it such a multifunctional piece of kit. Two is the ability to add that ball valve on. Some of the lesser models you can do that to as well. But the final one for me, and the biggest one, and the reason that I bought this machine, is the conical bottom. I just don't understand why other machines don't have conical bottoms. I don't understand why it isn't the standard. Other than it probably costs a little bit more, but it's such a good, good way of maximizing the amount of honey that comes through and a good way of just making it user-friendly. And so you don't have to tilt it. The way that the honey gates are normally set a little bit higher than the base, you always lose a bit of honey at the bottom, and it makes life really, really difficult. So if you've got any questions about it, give Damien at Abella a call. You all probably know Damien, really, really friendly guy, really approachable and incredibly knowledgeable. Um, with all of his beekeeping machinery. So give him a shout, he's happy to help you out. Thanks for watching. Please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.
