In this instructional video, the presenter demonstrates the use of an Abello wood‑fired burner—a heavy‑duty galvanized bucket mounted over a wooden fire—to clean and sterilise beehive frames without electricity. He shows two main methods: (1) boiling frames for about 12 minutes in a washing‑soda solution, which dissolves wax, propolis and other residues, followed by a quick dip in hot water and drying; (2) a steam‑only approach that uses a shallow water level to generate abundant steam for less intensive cleaning. The speaker highlights the burner’s simple, robust construction, its ability to melt wax and steam‑clean frames, and compares its fuel efficiency to electric or gas alternatives, noting that if wood is readily available the device pays for itself quickly. He also shares personal enjoyment of the process, describing it as therapeutic, and recommends the Abello burner for beekeepers in the UK.
Chapters
I'm busy cleaning and sterilizing my frames here using the Abello wood-fired burner. In this video, I'm gonna show you why it's probably one of the most cost-effective tools that you should have in your apiary. So I've been using this piece of kit now for a couple of years, and I use it for so many different things. It's the simplest construction in the world, which is effectively a big, massive, heavy-duty galvanized bucket that sits on top of a huge wooden burner. And you can do loads of things in here. You can boil up frames, you can steam the frames down. I'm cleaning some frames here in some washing soda solution. I scraped out all of the wax. I've melted it down over there, as you can probably see. I've taken out the wax, but I've put it in here, scraped it off, put the washing soda in, got it nice and hot, got it up to a rolling boil, and then I'm boiling my frames in here for about 12 minutes and it dissolves all of the wax, all of the propolis, absolutely everything. I then have another container over here that I dunk these into boiling water, and then they go off onto my little mat over there and they become dry and I put new foundation in them. But that's just one way of using this brilliant piece of kit here. At the moment, I've got the water filled right up to the top because I'm doing a hard boil, but this little device here means that you can operate this piece of kit here with just an inch or 2 of water at the bottom. And because this sits up above the bottom of the tank there, it generates a huge amount of steam, and then you can clear frames just with the steam. You don't actually have to boil them as hard as this if you don't want to sterilize them. As you can see, really nice heavy-duty construction, Very good, thick quality galve on there. This is not going to rust anytime soon. But I do, I use it for any sort of steam wax melting at that raw stage. I use it for boiling up all of my frames like that as well. There's probably tons of other things that you could use this machine for. So it's a super simple design. As I said, big solid galvanized metal bucket, solid metal base there, and then if you come around the front, you can see we can get a roaring fire underneath. I've got tons of good quality hardwood up here, so it's really easy to get that rolling boil to get the temperature up. A lot of the electric ones takes quite a lot of energy to get it up, and when you're using gas, you burn through loads of it. Now chopped wood isn't cheap, but if you've got your own source of wood, then this for you is gonna pay you back so, so quickly. And I have to say, I really like being out here in the forest, having little fires, melting down wax, clearing up my frames. It is very, very therapeutic. So these are brilliant machines. You can get them in the UK from Abello. They are highly recommended by me. Very efficient, very effective, and something that I really do enjoy using.
