In this concise tutorial, Laurence Edwards of Black Mountain Honey demonstrates a rapid two‑minute process for extracting heather honey while preserving the comb. He begins by explaining that heather honey can have a high moisture content (up to ~23%) and stresses the need for well‑capped frames. After uncapping the frames—using any tool such as a knife, fork, or uncapping machine—he removes the wax cappings and stores them for later use. The core of the method is the Lysen loosener, a needle‑based system that temporarily liquefies the thixotropic honey, allowing it to be extracted without destroying the comb (as opposed to a crush‑and‑strain approach). The loosened frames are placed in a swing‑cage basket extractor, which runs automatic cycles to spin out the honey, leaving relatively dry frames. Because heather honey remains gelatinous, Edwards performs an additional sieving step combined with repeated agitation in a settling tank, using a spatula to break down the honey and release remaining wax particles. The result is a filtered, pure heather honey. Throughout, he emphasizes speed, equipment choice, and the advantage of preserving combs, ending with a typical call‑to‑action for viewers.
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Today I'm going to show you how I extract my heather honey in under 2 minutes. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. I've already done a video showing you how to extract heather honey, took 15 minutes though, so I'm doing the video again. I'm going to condense it right down and give you a 2-minute bite-sized bees on how I extract my heather honey. So first thing to say is heather honey can can have a really high moisture content, up to about 23%. You want to get that down to as low as you possibly can. You want to make sure as many of the frames are as capped as they possibly can. Once you get your frames that are really well capped, take them into your extraction room, and the first thing you want to do is you want to uncap those frames. Now, you can do that a million and one ways. You can use a knife, you can use a fork, you can use an uncapping machine. Get the wax cappings off. Before you move on to the next step. You can use the loosener, which I'm going to talk about next, without taking the cappings off, but it makes filtering really difficult. My advice, get the cappings off first, then move on to loosening. Once you've taken all your wax cappings off, store them somewhere nicely. You can melt them down, get the wax off them, get the cappings off them, get the honey off it as well. But take the frames, and then what you're going to need to do is you're going to need to loosen those frames somehow. I use the Lysen loosener, and all that is is a needle-based loosening system that agitates the thixotropic honey and liquefies it temporarily, which enables me to extract it tangentially. This takes quite a bit of time, but it's the only way to keep the combs. The only other way of doing this is like a crush and strain method, and you lose all of your combs, so it's not the method that I use. So once you've loosened the honey, you've Probably got about 5 to 10 minutes, absolute maximum. Try and get it in around a couple of minutes ideally, to take those frames and to put them in the extractor. And what you need is either a tangential extractor or you need a swing cage basket extractor. I use a swing cage basket because it means you can just put it in the extractor, put it on an automatic function, it goes through various cycles, left and right, clockwise, anti-clockwise, fast and slow. And in the end, all of the honey gets spun out and it leaves you with relatively dry frames. Not quite as dry as any other honey, but relatively dry. Now, with most other honeys, that's the hard bit done. All you do is you pop that into a sieve and you just sieve out the wax cappings, and then you enjoy your nice filtered honey. But with heather honey, it's slightly different. You need to go through a process of agitation again to get the remainder of those wax cappings out. You just put that in a settling tank now. It won't settle properly and you will get wax throughout the honey. So the process that I use is I put it through my sieve and then you need to keep on agitating that to get all of the honey through. And what you'll see is that it starts off really gelatinous. Get a little spatula in there, keep on agitating it, keep on liquefying it, and it'll just become drier and drier and drier. And finally you end up with filtered pure heather honey. So there you go, that's it for the video. The cows really, really enjoyed that. They were giving me a fantastic chorus all the way through, but I just wanted to condense that one down for you just to show you all of the steps in terms of how I extract my heather honey. So I hope you enjoyed that video. I hope you found it useful. As always, please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.
