After moving the bees the day before, I decided to extract the honey in the morning time as the temp. was kinda low, 99 degrees. I have a problem right off the bat. My air conditioner went out and the box fan had burned the motor up and I had no more options. I had to keep the door closed to keep the bees out and the windows were too hard to get to open. That means I was in a sweat box. Ohhh welllll! You gotta do with what you got.

I started to scrape the caps off with a cap scraper into a bucket, then loading the frame of honey into the extractor. My extractor is a 20 framer and I decided to double up and put 36 frames in it by double stacking the frames. The idea was sound as that is the way it is done most of the time by beekeepers with radial extractors.

The problem was that I had loosened the tie-down straps when I cleaned the tank and forgot to tighten them back up. With the weight of the tank, motor, and the stand, I added the weight of the frames and honey. When the extractor started to spin, the stand started to walk and walked right off the 2×4’s and I had about 2 1/2 hours of humping and groaning and using ingenuity to get the whole shebang back in place and buckled down. I then continued to extract.

While extracting, there was enough wax knocked down in the tank that it stopped the drain pipe up and I had a time getting the wax broken up to empty the tank of it’s honey. Needless to say, I decided to just do 20 frames at a time from then on.

It still took me longer to extract than it should have. Heat, everything going awry, working alone, and being rushed for time to pack and get ready to leave the next morning to the mid-summer workshop in Orlando, FL. All in all, I did finish and got to go to the workshop on time.

I am sorry that I have no pictures at this time to show the extracting operation, maybe next time I can find the camera and do just that.

Until the next post; read books, watch bee videos, and have fun.