Traditionally, small scale honey extraction involves use of a heated de-capping knife. This is a time proven method. With fully filled super frames de-capping is a breeze. It can become challenging for a novice when the comb is uneven in depth, but with a little practice and patience even these frames can be uncapped.
Traditional heated de-capping knife
This year to add a little spice to our extracting party we
tried three other methods. We had 5 people running the equipment. One novice, two highly experienced and two with intermidiate experience. The article summarizes our findings. The first alternate was
an “uncapping punch”; essentially a narrow plastic roller with short spikes that
penetrate the cappings. It was a breeze
to use; making an elongated hole in each comb cell. It was much faster than the uncapping knife;
especially on uneven comb surfaces.
However, it seemed to have two drawbacks. The spikes seemed to load up with wax over
time; resulting in a shorter elongated hole in the cappings. As this happened extraction efficiency
degrades. Over time we began finding
frames that were getting only partially extracted. Stopping frequently and cleaning the tool
could probably have alleviated this issue. Since the objective is to get as
much honey as possible, our consensus was to stick with the heated de-capping
knife and only use the uncapping roller in comb areas not readily accessible to
the knife. The second drawback is that
the face of the comb has hundreds of tiny wax flakes adhering to it. These flakes fall off the comb during
extraction and speed up the plugging of the coarse screens which we use to
remove wax debris from the extracted honey. (We don't filter our honey, but do run it through a series of 3 screens; 600, 400 and 200 microns, to remove wax and other debris. Pollen passes freely through all three screens.)
De-capping roller; notice the small spikes.
During our lunch
break we viewed a Utube video of de-capping using an industrial heat gun;
a hair drier on steroids. Not having an
industrial heat gun we actually pressed a hair drier into service. Although its power output was lower the hair
drier did uncap dry cappings (“Dry” cappings are white in color due to a thin
air bubble beneath the cap. A “wet”
capping has no air bubble beneath the cap and the cap appears the color of the
honey touching the cap’s underneath side. )
Using the hair drier was definitely slower than the heated de-capping
knife. A few days later we tried an
industrial heat gun. The industrial heat
gun definitely was faster than the hair drier; about on par with the de-capping
knife. However, we noticed that even
some dry capping cells glazed over again with wax. There was honey in some cells after extraction. The consensus of the group was to put the
heat gun aside.
Our final experiment was a de-capping plane. This tool was definitely faster than the
decapping knife; a definite plus.
However controlling the depth of cut was a little more difficult. We noticed there was a tendency to cut too
deep. This puts more of the valuable
honey in the de-capping pile. We fully recover the honey from the de-capping pile, but why cause ourselves additional work.
All said and done everyone gradually moved back to the heated decapping knife. Sometimes the old
tested designs are the best. Of course, if
someone were to let us try an automatic de-capping machine we could probably be
convinced to give it a test next year.
Put together 10 beekeepers and you get ten different opinions. Feel free to provide any feedback you desire. Maybe we were missing some important techniques that make these other tools more efficient.
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