Cheapest Method To Extract Stubborn Honey

Right, you're probably thinking, why am I doing so many strange honey extraction videos? And what's driving these videos is that I'm aware that we're going through a bit of a financial crisis at the moment. Not everyone wants to spend hundreds, if not thousands of pounds on an extractor. And you know what, if you've got one or two beehives in your back garden, you genuinely don't need to spend that much money on an extractor if you're not going to expand your bees. So I've already done a crush and strain method. What I'm going to show you in this video is something that I'm going to do later on in the year with some heather honey. If you've got a very, very small amount of heather honey that you want to extract, this is the video for you. It's going to cost you probably about £10 to £15 to get the equipment in order to extract it, and if you compare that to buying a loosener and maybe a tangential extractor, I'm going to save you about £7,000 in this video. It's not as easy, it's not as quick, it's definitely messy, but you know what, it's very, very effective. And it's great if you want some wax as a leftover byproduct. So what we're gonna use today here is a potato ricer. And for people who haven't seen a potato ricer before, this is it here. This is one that I've just got in my kitchen, and as with all the caveats on these videos, this is honey for my own personal use and nothing else. Stainless steel potato ricer. What we're gonna do in this video is get some honey, put it inside there, squeeze all of that honey out, and then strain that honey. So it's as simple as that. I've already been told off once by my wife for getting honey in the living room, but she's not here today, so I'll try and tidy it up a little bit better. As I said, all we're gonna do is we're gonna take some comb honey, we're gonna put it in the potato ricer, we're gonna squeeze it down through a sieve, store the honey underneath the sieve, and then store all the wax cappings in this jar here. So I'm doing this with wild comb honey. If you're gonna do this with frames, plastic foundation's good for this, but you can do it with standard unwired foundation as well. If you're gonna do it with frames, you just wanna scrape back all of the honey off the frames, get it into the potato ricer like this. It's so messy. Again, perfect, perfect thing to do with kids. This is cheap, this is fun, and it is very messy. So once you've got your honey in there like that, really simple, just gonna pick it up, start applying that pressure, and you will see straight away just how easy it is to get that honey out. And it really is as simple as that. It's not gonna be quick. You're not gonna do this in kind of like 10 minutes and get your whole honey crop. If you've only got like 1 or 2 beehives, this is a really simple, effective method to do your honey extraction, and it does get the majority of the honey out. Like, when I did this the first time around as a little bit of a practice, I kind of thought, you know what, it's actually quite good. Little tip is do it as soon as you take the honey off the hive so it's at a nice warm temperature, which means that it's runny, it's not very viscous, and you're gonna get all of the honey out of the wax. So once you're finished, if you just open it up like that, you can see the majority of the wax tends to stick on the top like that. And all I've been doing is just taking that wax, scraping it off with a knife, and as you can see, it just pops off. Here we go again. So I've got another really sticky, chunky piece of honey. And if you're planning to do this, don't put the wires in your foundation. You can just do it with natural wild comb, works really well. So same again, you just Push it through, and I'm always just so amazed at how nicely it comes out. Like, look at that, it is so, so cool. You don't get any wax going through it as well. This is what I found amazing, and I thought that the press, the potato ricer, was gonna push that wax through, but it really doesn't. Gets the vast majority of that honey out, and you can see in the sieve at the end, there's just no wax at all in that sieve, and you've just got that really in there as a bit of a precautionary measure. So if you wanted to take your time doing that, you can wait in between each pressing there and let all the honey run out, I kind of think it's gonna slow you right down doing that, so I'm just bashing through it all. After each one, I'm pulling it back out, and I do find the majority of the wax stays on the top there, and you can just scrape it all off. Sometimes you will get wax in the middle here, and then it's just a case of going through it, scraping the majority of it out. You don't need to get all of it out. Right, so I'll do the last piece, get that one filtered, and then I'll show you what I'm gonna do with my honey and what I'm gonna do with my wax. So you can see here, we've got our wax left over in the bowl. Relatively dry, there really isn't a huge amount of honey left in that wax. Quite efficient using that potato ricer. And then over here, I'm just letting that honey drain through the sieve just to catch any remnants of wax. You can see there is a little bit of wax, but really not that much. Now we're gonna get that honey into a jar. So here's the honey that I've been collecting. Gonna get the lid off, been using various different methods for this. So you can put your potato ricer over there into your wax. You can see all of that nice honey coming through there now. And that is literally 3 presses. Like, it's a decent amount of honey. It's very, very efficient. I'm surprised how quick and how much honey I'm getting out of this. And then because it's already filtered, you can just go ahead like that and place it straight into the jar. So it's as simple as that. I've taken wild honeycomb, a £12 potato ricer, stainless steel one that you can get from Amazon, a sieve that you're definitely gonna have, and a couple of bowls, and I've showed you how to extract your honey in that way. So this technique here is for people who've got 1 or 2 hives, small amount of honey to harvest, and you want a really cheap, efficient way of doing it. But where this technique will come into its own, and I will repeat the video later on in the year showing you just how good this is, is if you've got some really stubborn heather honey. You can't spin out the heather honey, very, very difficult, if not actually impossible. You need to press it out in some way. If you're gonna go and look for a press, you're gonna get a big one, they are expensive. If you've just got a couple of supers of heather honey, really wouldn't take you that long to put it through this method here. It's very efficient, it's very cheap, and it does the job well. If you wanna see what I'm gonna do with the rest of the wax remnants from this one, definitely hit the subscribe button because I'm going to render them down using an Instant Pot.