Honey Extraction Room - Plans, Layout And Workflow Explained

Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey, and today I'm going to show you around my honey room. Now, I used to extract honey in my kitchen, and it was an absolute nightmare. I had a manual 6-frame extractor, and come the end of the season, I'd take all of my honey off, I'd get a normal knife out, and I would take the wax and cappings off and spin them out within the kitchen. I used to process maybe 100 pounds of honey a season that way, and it soon became apparent as my number of hives grew that that was no longer a viable option. So luckily, I've managed to get myself a reasonable quality honey room. So the honey room is about 3.5 meters by 5 meters long. It incorporates a number of pieces of machinery, mainly from Abelo and Lyson. In fact, it's actually all from Abelo and Lyson. I'm really fond of their products. I know they're definitely at the cheaper end of the high-end machinery scale, but I find that the quality is really, really good, especially their premium line stuff. Really good quality, and hopefully will serve me for many years to come. So in this video, I'm just going to give you a very quick kind of brief intro into what I've got into my honey room, the layout, the configuration, what I like about certain pieces of kit It's, it's the middle of Jan, so I'm afraid I'm not going to be able to show you extraction of any honey because everything's in the buckets. But I'll turn some of the machines on and show you and tell you what I like about them, what I don't like. So we'll have a look around. So the first piece of machinery that I'm going to show you is my wax uncapping machine and capping screw press. Now, I haven't actually used these yet, so these are very new purchases. I've only had them for about Probably about a month and a half, something like that. And the reason that I decided to go ahead and buy these was I was really struggling with my previous uncapping device, which was the steam uncapper. Now, it was, it was okay, it wasn't terrible, but it was a bit slow, and it really, it was just, it was just quite temperamental, and I was struggling to keep up with my extractor. So I wanted to find a way that I could keep up with my extractor and preferably kind of keep a little bit ahead of it. So I'm not entirely sure how it's going to work. I've seen a huge amount of videos of these online and they look fantastic, to be honest. They work on a closed circuit pump system, so it has 2 sets of heated knives along there which kind of gyrate against each other like that. And then there's a tank up here that you fill with water. I believe you have to fill it up every 6 months or so, and there's a level indicator on there for you. So if you fill this water up and it heats the knives And then as the knives fall down this system here, they, uh, the knives uncap them and then they rest on the tray over here. So I'll move the camera around and show you the different angles of it, but I'll just turn it on and see what you think. So I'll just set it up now. Like I say, it's a chain-driven system and it's a gravity-fed system at the same time. So gravity feeds the frames into the uncapper, they're aligned onto the chain system, the chain pulls them through the knives They gyrate against each other like that, take the wax cappings off, which falls into the cappings press that I'll discuss next, and then it moves the frames along ready for extraction. So you turn it on like this, you press the button here, and the knives go on. So as you can see, the knives gyrating there like that, and then you turn it like that, and then that moves the frames forward. So I'll just get a couple of frames and put them in it, you can see what I mean. So you just pop the frames in like that. I mean, imagine these are kind of nicely— nice fat wax frames. So you just pop the frames in like that, then you turn on the drive system, and then you have to wait a little bit while the first one goes in. Now you can see it's kind of engaged, just taking that first frame through. Then the frame reaches the knives, and that's it. It would be uncapping it now, taking off all that wax cappings off the honey frame. All the wax cappings will be falling down into the capping Press underneath, and then once it reaches the bottom, it pushes it along and the next one comes down. And as you can see, it's pretty quick. So we'll stop that for the time being. So the view from the other side here, you see the frames coming down, the wax will be falling off, going into the capping screw press. Once the frame's completed there, the next one comes along, and then the chain drive system pushes those frames along. And as you can see, you've got tons of space there. I've got a 24-frame extractor, and I've got plenty of space here to, to keep 24 frames while I've— while I'm wait for my extractor to finish its cycle. And that was the big thing that was causing the issues before, is that I just didn't have the space to keep any of these frames. So now I've got the system in line to kind of uncap for me while I can do other stuff, and then the storage space to actually keep the frames while I'm waiting for the extractor to finish its cycle. Now what I plan to do with this side here later in the season is I'm going to buy myself a header press. So Abello do a very reasonably priced manual header press. I did look into going into an automatic one for these, but not only are they very expensive, I don't actually need the speed in which it's going to give me. My extractor doubles up as a 6-frame swing cage extractor, so all I need to be able to do is make sure that I can uncap and loosen only 6 frames of honey while the cycle's going on, so it should work fine. So what I plan to do, and I've already spoken to Abella about this, is I'm going to get them to design So I'm going to get them to modify their heather press in order that it's going to mount directly on here, because at the moment this area of my apiary is completely dead space. I'm very limited on floor space, so I try and keep things as efficient as possible in terms of movement and space within the room. So I can maintain all of this space under here for the frames. I mean, the frames will sit here. If any honey drips off, then it comes down onto this tray and tracks back down into the capping screw press. But then what I'll do is I'll have a heather press mounted here so I can take an uncapped frame, put it in the heather press, hit the plunger a few times and loosen it, and then put it over here into my centrifuge, which I'll show you next. So it appears that it's a little bit tight in here, and the reason it appears that way is that it is tight. Um, when I'm actually operating things in here, it's fine, it doesn't cause me an issue. I'm here on my own doing it, um, I'll just put kind of a TV on or something and crack on with it. When I'm showing people stuff, it can get a little bit awkward. So this is my extractor that I use. So it's a Lyson 24-frame radial extractor, but it's also got capacity in it, capability in it to do a 6-frame swing basket-like modification on it as well. So it's basically designed upon their 30-frame radial extractor, and then they weld in these additional bits and give you the baskets in order to do a 6-swing cage frame as well. Now the reason I wanted that is I wanted the flexibility in order to extract frames within the swing baskets. I do quite a lot of heather, and last year I had to kind of go through all of the frames and unscrape them all, and I pressed most of it out last year, and it was really, really hard work. So I wanted to get an extractor that would allow me to work with an uncapping machine, a heather loosener, and then some way of actually getting it out of the combs. So let's turn this one on. So I'm not going to go into any detail into these at the moment, um, rather than be falling around. I'll do separate reviews on each of the products when I've got the time to do it. So let's just have a quick look at it. But it is, it's a 24-frame radial extractor. It's fully automatic, so you can run the cycles within the computer here. You can run it as a manual extractor as well, where you just kind of go up through the 10, 20, 30%. And see how it goes. It's a surprisingly big extractor. I wasn't quite aware how big it was going to be when I bought it, obviously because it is the 30-frame extractor that's modified down, so I wasn't quite aware how big it was going to be, but it's fine and it works, it works very well. It's a little bit flimsy if I was going to be ultra critical. I maybe should have gone for the premium line with the thicker steel, But it was a big jump up in cost. So yeah, so that's my extractor, and as you can see, very simple controls, surprisingly quiet. This was one of the things that I was really surprised with because my other one was quite loud even though it was a manual extractor. They obviously worked quite hard to get this very quiet. I ran this last year on casters and it was a It was a nightmare. It was moving all over the honey room. So this year I've taken the casters off and it works a lot better that way. Um, shakes a little bit when you put a full load in it until it's balanced out, but apart from that it's really good. So that's, that's kind of a 40% there, so it's not too loud at all. So moving on then, I've got my Mellow Flow Pro. I needed that for any remnants that comes out of either the hydropress that I used to use or the capping screw press. Um, goes in here and then I melt out the honey that comes out of that. We sell that off as baker's honey, so that doesn't go into any of our jars, any of our raw honey products. That is strictly baker's honey and sold as such. And then I render down the wax and I use that for various things— beeswax wraps, sometimes trade it in for foundation, sometimes leave it there in a nice pretty block and don't really do much with it. Um, and this is, this is a great bit of kit. You can kind of get it up to 70-80 degrees. It's really efficient. It's big. You can get a lot of stuff in there, a lot of cappings in there, and just turn that on, let it work overnight. And then there's a valve on the other side that you can open up and just get all the stuff out. So that's my Metaflow Pro. Now again, I'm not doing full reviews here, but this is my favorite piece of kit in the whole honey room. That's my Lysen jarring machine. Now that saves me so much time. I, I can't even begin to explain how much time it saves me. Before, I was using jugs and trying to use honey traps and valves to fill up jars of honey. And it was just a real pain. I used to make so much mess, I used to lose so much honey, and it just wasn't worth the time. So this was— it was quite a big investment, it's about £3,000, but it saves so much time. I'll probably get about 500 or 600 jars an hour through it. I'll fill up both of my tanks and hit them both in one go, so I can do 1,200 jars kind of in the morning. And really, obviously, 1,200 jars last me quite a while. So that's by far and away the biggest time-saving piece of kit. I'll do a separate review on that because that's— it can be a little bit fiddly to set up that one, so you need to put a bit of work into it to fill it up. Now I can't get a good angle with me in with these 2 because I'm on my other phone at the moment that doesn't have a wide-angle lens, so I'll just talk about them from here. So on the left-hand side you can see my 100-litre creamer and decrystallizing machine. So we use that when we're doing our soft-set honey. We leave a seed at the bottom of it and seal it all up And then when we put fresh honey into it, we churn it ever so slowly for about 3 or 4 days, and then we extract that directly into— through the bottling machine into jars. And then we leave that around 12 to 14 degrees and it sets into a naturally soft-set honey. And then on the right-hand side, that's just a 100-litre settling tank. A really neat feature on that one is— I'll just go and change the, the, the top of it so you can see through— is it actually has the sieve built in. So I'll just go and change that now. So there you can see it's got the sieve built in at the top, so that forms a critical part of my extraction process. So I put the sieve in, and then when I'm extracting out of the extractor, I go into big buckets, 60 or 70 litre buckets, and then I take those buckets and then I go and put them through that sieve there, and then I leave it in there for a while to settle through. That takes out all of the contaminants that could potentially be in the honey— bees' legs and bits and bobs and anything else you might find in a natural product like that— and then when it comes out, it's perfectly clear. It's not the— it's not a very fine mesh at all. It's probably around 400 microns, and so it's only filtering out those very coarse elements of it. It goes through another filtering system. Now, one thing to note at the bottom of both of these, and I actually have these on all of the elements, and this is one of the real benefits of having a system that's all produced by the same company, but I have ball valves. So instead of having honeygate valves I actually have ball valves connected, and that gives me so much more flexibility in terms of actually being able to stop and start the flow of honey. But the big, the big benefit to it is that the fittings all work and are compatible with each other. So what that actually means is it can connect directly up to my honey jarring machine. So what I end up doing is when I'm doing an extraction run, I'll fill both of these up. So I have 200 litres of honey, which in my experience, works out to about 1,200 jars or thereabouts. And then I'll run them out of both of these machines directly through the bottling machine and into the jars. And that saves me a massive amount of time. It means I don't have to extract into buckets and then put it through some sort of sieve or filtration system and then go into— and then go into a system where I'm jarring. It means that I can do all of that in one hit. say for example on a Saturday I'll come in, do all of my extraction, fill both of these containers up with honey, tidy everything up, and then on the Sunday I'll come in and I can just go straight into jarring. They're both filtered, they're both ready to go. So that is a real— well, probably a top tip for me is that if you're going to start buying equipment, it's probably good to pick a manufacturer and stick to it, because then you can have this cross-compatibility between the machines, which is It is really helpful. Now again, I can't get a good angle of me in this one without crouching down and sitting on the floor, but underneath the uncapping machine there is my capping screw press. Now I've been using for the last 2 seasons a hydro press, and I've had so many instances where I've nearly caused a huge flood in the honey room, or I've nearly contaminated all my honey. It's probably not the best method of extracting heather honey. It works extremely well, but it's a bit of a faff, and it's very hard to kind of set up and not make mistakes with. Also, I try and keep things as absolutely simple as possible. I don't want to extract the wax, have to store the wax, and then go into processing the wax afterwards. I want to do it straight away. So this setup from Lysons, great for that because it uncaps the wax straight away. It falls into the capping screw press, which churns these, the mix of cappings and wax through a screw, which results in very, very dry wax cappings and honey. So at the end of, at the end of that day where I'm doing all of my extraction, I'm literally left with buckets of honey, buckets or bags of very, very dry wax cappings, and then I can just clear up. I've got no kind of slum or gunk or anything that I need to process at a later date, other than the wax cappings. If they come through a little bit wet, I'll probably have to stick them through the Meliflow, but I've got plenty of space in there as well. So the whole idea is just to try and minimize having to come back and any repeat work. So that's it for today. I just wanted to have a quick walk around the honey room and show you how it works, the equipment that I've got, a little bit about my process flow and how I move honey through the different pieces of machinery to end up with the honey in the jar. I hope you enjoyed it. If you have any specific questions about any of the pieces of machinery that I have, feel free to drop me a message. I'm always happy to chat about the machinery that I own. And that's about it. So what we'll do is later on in the season, once we get some honey, so probably around June, July, we will come in here and I'll show you kind of the process as it stands, from bringing the supers in here to taking the jars of honey out. It'll probably be a bit of a long video, but I'll edit it so it doesn't take too long, and it'll give you an indication of how the process works. So thanks again for watching. Hope you enjoy the videos. Please subscribe to the YouTube channel. Thanks very much and see you next time. Bye. Bye.