Last night a few of us ‘trainee’ volunteers completed a practise ‘honey spinning’ session with the more experienced beekeepers. We are incredibly grateful to the team at Field Place for loaning their commercial kitchen facility to the Worthing Honey Collective for this honey extraction training session. Huge excitement for all involved…
- Firstly, we uncapped the honeycomb scraping the wax cap layer off with a knife
- Care was taken to ensure we didn’t cut too deeply into the honey comb
- Next, the honeycomb frames were placed into the baskets within the large metal drum extractor
- Spinning the honey takes quite a bit of work! You have to build up momentum using the handle to spin out the honey
- The honey then fell down into the bottom of the drum and filled up slowly as we spun through the frames
- We filtered this through a fine sieve to remove the wax, debris and other lumpy bits
- A refractometer was then used to check the water content of the honey and make sure it was viable
- Next, we leave it for 24 hours for the air bubbles to move to the top. And VOILA, we have honey
We worked through 20 frames learning this process in preparation for the BIG honey extraction later this season.
In many cases if the comb is preserved, the frames can be returned to the bees to re-use. The wax caps can be melted down, cooled off and used in lip balms and many other products. Last year, in addition to our honey pots, we made our own Worthing honey chocolate and ‘sting film’ bees wax! Please watch this space for updates on forthcoming honey bee products. Great care is always taken to leave enough honey our amazing bees and all proceeds go directly back into the community.
