Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/07/31/honey.html
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Apiculture is my dream career.
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It’s a “uncapping knife” used for uncapping the comb in the act of doing some uncapping, pursuant to using a centrifugal extractor to do some …y’know extracting (one of the better videos about this particularly sticky business)
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I often think a kitchen centrifuge would be of use. A salad-spinner is sort of one, but one that separates liquids from other liquids and gets rid of precipitates.
ETA
Maybe “often” is a stretch. I have occasionally thought…
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Anybody interested in beekeeping? Consider top bar hives. aka African beehives. You can make your own in a day from plans available online; you can extract honey with nothing more than a bucket & a sieve, without disturbing or smoking the rest of the hive, & you don’t need the upper-body strength that is required to lift one full box from the top of a Lang hive. You can hang one from a tree (as is done in Africa) to keep it away from predators or put it on a roof, a corner of a garden, or a back porch.
Langsdorf hives like this one require a lot of effort, energy, & bee-death to extract honey. Then you have to set up new frames with an elaborate wiring process & the frame size forces the bees to build in a way that is not natural to them. It’s almost impossible to do an extraction or open & close the hive without killing bees. Having tried my first top bar hive ten years ago, I’d never go back to a Lang hive.
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I’ve considered raising bees for a couple of years now; my main barrier is that DH would probably not approve (doesn’t care for anything potentially hazardous, including lifting heavy objects or using power tools larger than battery operated drills). Honey is desirable, however, so maybe I could work around it.
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Langstroth
hive and frames are what we use and have used for over a decade in Central Texas.
The bees put honey in some frames, brood in others. There is nearly no overlap.
No bees are killed when we harvest honey from our Langstroth frame. As lifelong committed vegetarians who have aimed for ahimsa most of our adult lives, that’s our contract with our bees.
We uncap the honeycomb (as seen original post which features just such a frame) and then replace frame with the intact comb (sans honey) back in the hive as long as the frame carries no pathogens or pests like wax moth, varroa mites, etc. The bees can reuse the remainder as a foundation for new comb-building.
When rescuing bees, which is several times a year, my DH uses rubber bands to hold rescued comb in the frames, avoiding
… this is usually just before some exterminator company arrives to spray the place, or the house gets demolished, or the landlord has had complaints and sends his maintenance guy over with 5 cans of Raid. For the bees, it’s either Langstroth or those fates, all of which have happened here.
By contrast, it is my understanding that the only way to harvest honey from a top-bar hive setup is to destroy the entire comb. For folks who don’t know, this is a top bar hive:
There is no effective, simple way to reattach comb post-honey-extraction on a top bar “bar.” Even if you uncap it carefully, the comb is soft and detaches easily from the wooden bar.
So you have any pictures of successful return to hive of extracted comb, and/or explanation, please let me know because
yeah, that’s hard and we try to avoid lifting where possible.
I have seen any number of pictures where
… bees seem to find a way even under nonideal conditions.
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