How To Extract Ling Heather Honey - Loosen, Press And Filter Thixotropic Honey

Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Today I'm going to show you the full process of how to extract heather honey. So as always, in the honey extraction room, I apologize for the cramped conditions. I apologize for the bees in the corner. I apologize for the poor lighting and the probably poor audio. It's so difficult doing videos in here. Behind you is a mess, as in there are like hundreds of supers all stacked up, all honey buckets. I've had to move everything over to that side of the room just to kind of give me a little bit of working space. I don't normally work in these conditions. It's a lot more cramped than this. I've got supers flying around everywhere. I'm literally in the middle of my honey extraction. So all of this equipment is live, it's sticky. But I've done that so I can show you exactly how I extract heather honey. So in this video, we'll talk you through the full process, so make sure you stay tuned all the way to the end. We're going to take you from frames of heather honey— this one here's got nothing in it— we're going to put it through the loosening machine that we've covered in a separate video. Should be in the corner up there if you want to see the separate video on the heather loosener. We then take those frames and we put them in the 6-frame swing cage extractor machine. I'll show you a little video of how that works. Um, we spin all of that honey out, we put it into buckets, then we put it over there into the filtration machine, which is basically a big sieve. Um, one thing I missed at the beginning, obviously we uncap the frames first through the uncapping machine, or what I've found with a lot of the heather honey is it's just as easy just to kind of put it off with a knife. Um, there's not a huge amount in there, and if you don't get it perfectly uncapped, The uncapper does take the remainder of the cappings off, so it's not the end of the world getting it perfectly uncapped for heather honey. Right, so tiny little bit of background. I've covered this in previous videos as to why we have to go through a long-winded process for heather honey. I suppose it adds weight to why it is so expensive. I've always looked at heather honey and thought, yeah, geez, that's really expensive, but oh, the effort that goes into getting the honey out of the combs and into the jar I would say it's 5 times more difficult than normal honey, if not more. Certainly takes that long. And the reason for that is the fact that honey, heather honey, is thickstropic. So that means that it doesn't flow normally like a regular honey. So regular honey, if you had a jar and you turned it upside down, it would all come out. Heather honey, if you turn the jar upside down, it doesn't come out straight away. It takes a long while to flow. Because it's in a jelly-like consistency. So in order to get it to flow normally, you have to agitate it. So if you've got a jar of honey, just whip it up with a spoon, and then you go like that and it all falls out. That's because you've agitated it and put it into a flow state. You can't do that with a frame. So this machine here, the heather loosener, we covered on a separate video, that's what loosens it. Then it needs to go into extractor. And you can't use a normal radial extractor, one that kind of pivots around the center of the frame. So we've discussed that radial goes like that, whereas tangential goes like that, like an orbit. So you either need to extract it tangentially or you need to extract it using a swim basket. Now, if you're doing it tangentially, you need to do one side of the frame at a time, and you need to be really, really careful to avoid blowouts. So ideally what you need to do is you need to do it one side of the frame at a low speed, turn it round, the other side of the frame at a low speed, and then go a little bit quicker, and then turn it around again. So almost doing like 6 orbits or kind of cycles on your extractor. If you're using a swing cage, these are great. Have a look at swing cage extractors, really, really good. Basically you have cages fitted in your extractor. I'll put the video up so you can see it. And it does all of the hard work for you. It puts the automatic cycle on it for you, so it does a slow cycle both ways and then a medium cycle both ways and then a fast cycle both ways. And it gets really, really— I guess basically all of the honey out of the combs. Radial extraction using the heather loosener, I just can't get it to work. I know some people have had experience of getting the majority of it out. I can't get it to work, so I'm sticking to my method, which is loosening it here with the heather honey loosener and then using a swing cage basket extractor. And I find that gets the vast majority of the honey out of the frames. So let's get on with it then, and I'll show you how to extract heather honey. Right, so first thing you need is some heather honey, and here we go. So that's not fully capped, but I've tested it and the refractometer reading is under 20, which is really, really good for heather honey. Um, surprised that it's so low, but yeah, obviously Nothing's going to shake out of that. If you tried just uncapping that and putting it in the radial extractor, you wouldn't get any of it out. Chances are you'd blow your frames. So we're going to uncap that. We're just going to take that off. That's not worth going through the uncapping machine. So I've got a bucket underneath the loosener here. All I'll do with that is I'll just kind of take the very, very top of those cappings off. Doesn't matter if you don't get that perfect. Using a hive tool for this works surprisingly well. Sharp hive tool. Obviously a knife is better. So then once you've got that uncapped, it goes into the heather loosening machine. So I'll just turn this round so you can see it a little bit better. So now, like we said, you need to loosen that honey. So all you do, give it a few plunges, and then you need to move it along that way so you're making sure you get a needle in every single comb. I like to go a little bit wild, 8 to 16 plunges on this. I probably wouldn't do so many if I had a bigger swing cage extractor. 'Cause I've only got 6 frames in there, I've got time between each of the cycles, so I might as well get it as loose as I can possibly get it. So that's what it looks like after it's been loosened. You can see it's starting to drip, it's starting to flow, so I'm going to get that into my swing cage basket. So I'll do all the frames and then I'll show you the swing cage basket. So there you go. Heather honey is great. You get a real workout for the arms. It's hard manual work. Obviously that machine makes it so much easier. I do way more kind of plunges than required though, and if you kind of imagine, you'll see how long this one takes, about 4 or 5 minutes. I can do probably 12 frames in that time. So if I ever upgrade this, I won't do as many. Do a minimum of 4 plunges on the Heather Loosener though. Right, so swing cage baskets. So this is my 24-frame radial extractor. Um, I mean, I'm going to do a separate video showing you how this works, but basically you spin that round and you can see The cages want to spin like that, so as they go, they spin there and then they turn the other way and they spin there. So it's effectively, you're spinning it tangentially, but it's fully automated. You don't need to take the frames out and swap them around the other way. So let's put it on. This machine though is great, I mean, I've run so much honey through this machine. It's got a function on here that I really like to use for heather. So the one that I use is P7, so that's 320 phases and you just hit start. And it does it all for you. It's as simple as that. You can see, do you know what I mean, already on phase 1, it's chucking that honey out. So it's spun those cages out, so we're effectively straight away into tangential spinning. Does a first phase nice and slow, and that's what you want to do. So if you're doing this on a tangential extractor, I mean, that's the kind of speed that you want to do on the first pass. Don't put it in and set it to max because you'll blow your frame straight away. So you need to do it one side and then do it on the other side, but you need to start off slow and then you need to move that up and go faster each time. So apologies for the bees and the wasps. Like I say, they, they're absolutely crazy at this time of year. They're not getting in, but they've come in on the boxes and a couple of wasps have snuck in as well. Could just see one there. They're having a great time eating all this honey. So I'll just run with this for a little bit because I just want to show you kind of the automatic function. And as you can see now, it's slowing down. So that's it, it's come to a stop. It's going clockwise at the moment, and that's it, it turns now. So now it's doing anti-clockwise, and it does the same speed as anti-clockwise. And that's really, really important, that two-way, do you know what I mean? Doing two phases, clockwise and anti-clockwise, at a really, really slow speed. Like, it's probably extracted 2 or 3% in terms of weight if I was to take it out at this point. But this is how you stop the blowouts. It's this kind of slow release, relieving the tension on both sides. Because if you just chuck all of the honey out of one side and then you go to try and chuck all the honey out of the other side, the frame isn't balanced at all and you just get blowouts. And blowouts are an absolute nightmare to deal with when you come to heather honey. Because it's really difficult, as you'll see in the next few processes, it's so difficult to filter because it's hydrotropic and because it doesn't flow readily. It's very, very difficult to filter. So you can see now we're onto the next cycle and that is considerably quicker. So it stays anti-clockwise direction now, moves straight onto the kind of medium strength cycle. That's what we want. It's really, really getting rid of kind of like a good amount of the honey now. I still think though it's the final cycle where all that honey comes out. So if you were to kind of let that go on to the next medium cycle and take it out, I think you're probably looking at maybe 30 or 40% of the honey in terms of weight from the frame. What's great though with the swing cage basket extractor is I haven't got to do any of this work. So during this whole time, I would go back to the heather loosener and I'd start loosening the next batch. And that's what makes it really, really easy. So when this is finished, All I do is I take the frames out, put them back in the box where they're going, put the readily loosened frames back in here, and we move forward. So it's really, really efficient, and it's the same as, I mean, like the uncapping machine, it does the work for me and it frees me up to go and do something else, which makes me more efficient. So you can see it's turned there again. I'm going to run all the way through to the end, I think, now. So that's the second medium phase now going in a clockwise direction. This is where, I mean, a lot of the honey will start coming out now, and you can see it now sliding down the side of the walls. But the majority of it really will come out at the end. So this final one jumps into it in kind of like 20 or 30 seconds, and you can see it goes into kind of almost warp speed, and it's pretty much running at 100%. One thing to say is when you do your first couple of cycles on any extractor, don't let the honey run out, keep it at the bottom of the extractor. Gives you really good ballast, stops it shaking. As you can see here, I mean, that shakes a little bit. If you just steady it, and then that's it. It's banging up against something there, but you know what I mean, we can have a little bit of shakage like that, that's no problem. You will expect that with a heather honey. Probably getting a bit of distortion on the camera as well, but that is the machine going at 100%. So that is Spinning out all of that honey from that side of the frame. And then obviously it's gonna stop and it's gonna go onto that other side of the frame as well. And that's it. So then you can lift it up. And it never gets old, the smell of extracted heather honey. It is quite incredible. And then you look at the frames and they're empty. And do you know what I mean? They take a little bit of a battering, the frames, using the heather because— You get all the kind of injection with the needles that ruffles them up, and then obviously you're using a tangential machine, so it's quite an aggressive method of extraction. But it's got all the honey out, and the bees, I mean, they will repair that in absolutely no time whatsoever. You haven't lost any wax, it's just mushed it around. They will repair that, especially with the remnants of the honey on there as well. But I mean, you can feel 95% minimum of that honey's gone out of there. And again, All of the combs nice and empty, nothing on them. That one there, a little bit more than others, could run that one again. Got a few there that's maybe not been fully, fully uncapped. Um, this is kind of a good advertisement for fully uncapping, you know what I mean? I didn't uncap that one fully. Couple of the cells there still got the cappings on, probably a little bit of honey in them. So I'll run that one again. I'll make sure the cappings are taken off. I'm only doing that because I've got a very small crop. But yeah, I mean, the majority of the frames in there are good. You do see the odd cell, do you mean like a cell there that's obviously been missed? A cell there, but you're not going to worry about that for a couple of cells. You're talking kind of milligrams of honey. But yeah, so if there was ever an advert for pure thick, tropic heather honey, this is it, you know what I mean? If you were to do that with normal honey, it would be absolutely flying out. Um, you can tell the gelatinous nature of it, that it's really, really pure heather honey. Might have a few other little bits in there as well. Needs to be 75% pure to call it Ling heather honey. I mean, that, that's definitely Lingheather honey. The fact that when I come to filter it, it's so difficult to filter, that's a really, really good indicator as well. The colour, the fact that it's a dark amber colour, really good indicator. And obviously the taste and the smell is a complete giveaway. This is really, really high-quality, pure Welsh Lingheather honey. Takes absolutely ages to fill the bucket. But that's a good sign. Obviously, never decant everything out once you're doing in the middle of it. You want to leave kind of a good amount in the base there to keep that extractor from jumping around. Acts as a really, really good ballast, keeps the center of gravity on the extractor low, which is a good thing. So we'll let that flow for a little bit, fill up the bucket halfway, and then we'll move on to filtration. So then to filter this honey, I use the Lyson 100-litre filter, um, I mean the 100-litre premium strainer with the sieve, but it's really slow. It, like, it's incredibly slow and you need to constantly, constantly go around with it. Um, I mean, take one of these scrapers that's got wax on it and just constantly agitate that honey because it will just gelatinify on you. And just become a jelly and it won't go through. So every kind of 3 or 4 minutes, come in, give it a good stir. It does all eventually go through, but what you need to do is make sure that everything goes through and then scrape up all of the wax each time. If you let the wax build up, it really doesn't work. So normally, do you know what I mean, that would be through now if that was a normal honey, pretty much. Maybe kind of like a couple of minutes more, but it doesn't take long. By the time your back's turned, it's literally all gone down. This one, it requires a good few kind of scrapes, and you need to make sure you clean the wax out every single time. That's what's left at the end, and obviously that just goes then through into the wax uncapping machine, and I reclaim as much of that honey as I possibly can. So as you can see, this is what the honey looks like once it's been filtered. It's very, very difficult to filter thick, stropic heather honey because you need to keep on constantly agitating it to get it to become like runny, so it will either extract or in this case filter. You end up with quite a lot of slop at the end. So that'll go through the wax cappings press along with all the cappings, and then we press out the honey that way. But it just adds another process into what is already quite a difficult process. So we let that honey filter. We continually kind of more frames into the loosener, into the swing cage basket, into the bucket, into filtering machine, the sieve, and then we just fill that container up with heather honey, and then we jar directly from that machine. It's a nightmare moving heather honey around from bucket to bucket. It's not like normal honey where it flows really well. You're constantly scraping everything out. So by Jarring directly from the machine that you're storing it in and that you're filtering it in saves a huge amount of time. Definitely a method that I would recommend. So that's it for the video. You've seen from the frame into the heather loosener, into the swing cage basket, extracted into the bucket, then into the filtering machine. And obviously all I'll do next is I'll just connect my jarring machine up and I'll jar straight away. If you want to see a video of the honey being jarred, I'll stick up a link there and you'll be able to see the heather honey being jarred as well. So I hope you've enjoyed the video. Please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time. Bye.