Episode 77 - Summer Extraction Time

Hi, I’m Stewart Spinks and welcome to Episode 77 of my podcast, Beekeeping Short and Sweet.
Who’d have thought we’d be extracting honey so soon, the Summer season has flown by and I’m heading into the honey room to get set up to extract the Summer supers over the weekend? Listen on for a rundown of my extraction set up and how I extract from over sixty colonies in a room that measures just 3 metres square.

Check Out my Patreon Page HERE

Equipment discussed in today's Podcast:
Stainless Steel Tables
Scales
Apimelter
Brush Uncapper
Extractor
Double Strainer
100kg Settling Tank
Honey Creamer
Bottling Machine

Before we head into the honey room I wanted to say a big thank you to Craig from Jedburgh, one of our Patreon supporters who very kindly drove down to Norfolk this week to spend a few days helping out and inspecting bees. Craig is new to beekeeping and has been absorbing all or my videos and podcasts on Patreon and offered to lend a hand for a few days so not wanting to turn away any help I swapped around the workload a little so we could get over to the workshop and clean up the rather large stack of frames and boxes that needed cleaning instead of extracting honey. 

A lot of the boxes are left over from the early season oilseed rape extraction where we had to cut out the comb and honey as it had granulated in the frames and couldn’t be extracted in the normal way. This leaves lots of frames that need to be roughly scrapped and tied into bundles before being boiled and cleaned ready to take fresh foundation in the Spring next year before going back out onto the hives. We also scrape out the supers and scorch them lightly as part of our ongoing disease management and this also entails removing frame runners and either washing them before replacing or if they’re too badly damaged we replace them. I think I might have mentioned before that I’m switching my super frames over to Manley frames, these are the straight, wide sided frames instead of the more traditional SN1’s or SN4’s, SN1’s are the narrow straight sided frames for supers and SN4’s are the Hoffman style spacing. It’s interesting that there are so many different types of frames that you could use and each beekeeper no doubt has a favourite. The same applies to the frame runners in the supers, I’ve always used castellated runners with set spacing for ten frames although I have tried eleven and nine frame runners. The point here is you start of using frames with foundation that have eleven frames meaning the frames are placed closer together and hopefully the bees draw out the foundation perfectly straight before progressing to ten frame runners and finally nine frame runners thereby getting more honey per frame which ultimately means less frames to extract.

The trouble with this is if you have more than a few supers it can get a bit confusing when you think you’ve got ten frame spacing and it’s eleven or nine. Add to that the need to get everything organised and i