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When honey is obtained, one of the important processes is pumping out. This procedure can be carried out either with the help of a special honey pump or without it. There are many ways to get honey from a honeycomb. Each of the procedures has its own characteristics. It is pumped out most often 2 times per season: in spring and autumn.
How to pump out honey without a honey extractor
According to most beekeepers, pumping out a valuable beekeeping product without a honey extractor is an almost impossible procedure. This method is disadvantageous and inconvenient. The honey extractor significantly speeds up the process of pumping out a valuable product. But if such a device is not available, do not despair, there is a way to pump out honey without a honey extractor.
To do this, follow the steps below:
- The collected combs should be removed from the frames. They are crushed into small pieces and placed in a bucket.
- Using an ordinary wooden crush, the mass is crushed into puree.
- The resulting mixture is filtered. For such purposes, you can use ordinary gauze.
- The remaining honey from the walls of the bucket should be collected and also filtered.
This sequence of actions answers the question of how to pump honey without a honey extractor. True, you should be prepared for the fact that the process will be laborious and lengthy.
The process of separating honey from wax
You can separate the components of the honeycomb with gauze, you can use a faster method that will help to collect the wax and prepare it for further use. After all, it is also a valuable product that can be used in folk medicine or cosmetology.
Some beekeepers separate them from each other using a double boiler.
To manually separate honey from wax and other particles, you will need:
- double boiler;
- wooden spoon;
- capacity;
- filter with coarse and fine mesh.
The pumping process in this way is as follows:
- The honeycombs are removed from the frames and crushed.
- The mixture is heated in a double boiler to a temperature of 60 degrees, the mass is stirred with a wooden spoon.
- Honey is heavier and will sink to the bottom, wax will rise to the top. It should be removed with a wooden spoon and placed in a container.
- After the wax hardens, it is washed from the remains of sticky delicacies under running water.
- To clear it of other impurities, the honey mass should be passed through a sieve with a coarse metal mesh, then again through a fine mesh.
When printing honey frames, a lot of wax cuts accumulate. They also contain a useful product.Accordingly, the question arises of how to separate wax from honey. Many beekeepers have long invented convenient methods for separating honey from wax cuts.
Many, when cutting off such wax lids, do it so that they fall on a special metal mesh, through which the excess flows into a container substituted from below. But this method does not guarantee that it will be possible to expel all the honey.
There are several ways to separate honey from wax at home (some of them were discussed above):
- Can be loaded into special fabric bags made to fit the honey extractor cassettes. In this case, the honey is extracted by centrifugal force.
- You can heat the wax pieces to a temperature of 60-70 degrees and get the wax up from the total mass.
- You can use special separators, with which it will be pumped out much faster.
Some of these methods can significantly reduce the quality of the treat, especially when heated.
But you can use special tables for printing honeycombs. For small ordinary apiaries, a basin or tank made of stainless materials is sufficient. A mesh is inserted inside, through which pure honey will drain.
With their help, pumping out a valuable product much faster, since several people can work on such tables.
Filtering process
When pumping out, particles of wax, bee bread and other debris get into honey, which is important to remove. For this, the product is filtered. For small farms, a double sieve is sufficient. The upper sieve is represented by cells with a diameter of 1.8x0.7 mm, the lower one is smaller, with a diameter of 0.2x0.12 mm. They are inserted into each other and fixed on containers of different diameters.
For a continuous filtering process, it is better to purchase two sieves, as wax can clog inventory. While one sieve is being cleaned, you can work with the second.
It is much more convenient to take funnels with a sieve in a special store.
The opening overlapping from below will allow you to control the filling of the container with honey. A double sieve is located at the top of such a tool, which prevents foreign matter from entering into the funnel.
These two described devices are suitable for obtaining honey in small apiaries, for large industrial beekeeping farms they are not profitable, since the filtration process with their use is very slow.
As you can see, it is not difficult to organize the process of forcing and filtering honey, even in the absence of special devices. True, the use of improvised means in beekeeping will slow down the process of obtaining a valuable product, now it is clear how to get honey from the honeycomb at home.