Topic: Honey Production/Extracting the honey crop

Honey Production

Extracted Honey

Most large scale honey producers produce only extracted honey.  There is a good reason for this.

• It is less labor intensive
• It is easier to market
• The demand is greater

At one time in the United States comb honey production exceeded any other type of honey production.  Customers were afraid to buy extracted honey because of the fear that it was not pure honey.  All of that has changed.  In fact, many young consumers have no idea of how you would even use comb honey!  There is still some demand for it but chunk honey (comb added to extracted honey) seems a better way to go if you are interested in producing comb honey.  Chunk honey does not need to be as perfect as comb honey and requires no special equipment to produce other than thin wax foundation.

Our emphasis is going to be with extracted honey.

Once the honey crop is removed from the bee hive, it must be transported to a location where it must be protected from robbing bees.  The design of a honey house is again an individual thing but I am going to try to give you a general idea of what you will need if such a facility is not yet available to you.

An ideal honey house will have:

• An unloading area --a loading dock -- truck can be backed up to the dock to unload the honey supers or a concrete pad situated so a fork lift can remove pallets of full honey supers from the truck and moved into the building.
• A building with a concrete floor large enough to contain the following areas:  A heated extracting room with some room to store and handle the honey crop coming into it (according to some health districts this area must have hot and cold running water and all stainless steel equipment), an area for storing the wet honey supers as they come from the extracting room, and an area to contain a large storage tank to which the liquid honey is pumped (This area should have facilities for filling drums and room for a fork lift to move the drums).
• Additional building for storage, work rooms, and vehicles.
• Expansion room around the building to place from time to time hives of bees, nuc's, queen banks, etc. and even the addition of future buildings.

The extracting room

The extracting room must be easy to clean and concrete floors with proper drains are almost mandatory.  The room must be bee tight.  Modern facilities are usually built without windows and cooled with fans and air conditioning.  They are entered through a door large enough to admit forklifts and other equipment such as pallet jacks.  This means a door usually eight feet wide and seven feet high.  In colder regions of the country, the room is usually heated with hot water run through pipes in the floor or gas heaters mounted near the ceiling. 

 This particular extracting room is 30 feet square.  It contains enough room for four extractors, the uncapper, honey sump, wax capping spinner, honey pumps, 750 gallon holding tank, and room to store 48 pallets of honey supers.  It is well lighted and has controlled heat controls.  In addition a rest room and wash area are available thru an exit door within the same building.  If thinking about how to go about this, visit commercial beekeepers in your area, visit vendors at major conventions, and design a honey house to fit your needs.  But always know what the health regulations are in your county and state regarding the processing of honey.  

The book, The Hive and the Honey Bee published by Dadant & Sons and available at almost all bee supply dealers is an excellent choice to review equipment needed and floor plans.  An article appearing in the January 2004 issue of The American Bee Journal page 31 would be of interest to read.  The article is entitled "Making the Jump from Sideliner to Commercial Beekeeper" and has some good material written based upon the experience of an individual dealing with many of the problems you will deal with.

Sending for catalogs from major honey-extracting equipment is another step you should take.  Buying used equipment is always available but sometimes this equipment may be more of a bother than a help.  One thing about new equipment: It usually doesn't break down just when you need to use it.

Check with the following:

Cowen Manufacturing Co, Inc.       1-800-257-2894

Dakota Gunness, Inc.                      701-553-8393        dkgunn@rrt.net

Maxant Industries, Inc.                   978-772-0576        sales@maxantindustries.com 

You must determine what you can spend and to what extent you can afford the type of honey house you want.  It may be better at the beginning to work with limitations until you are sure you can make a go of beekeeping on a commercial scale.  Many have started small and gradually built their business a little at a time and over time accumulated the knowledge and experience to have a successful business.  Others have jumped right in getting money from the bank and learning while getting experience (my friend Billy Engle has a nice way of putting it -- they jump out of a plane thinking that all they needed was a parachute but didn't know they had an anvil tied to their ankle when they jumped).

By the way, the extracting process is much the same for the small beekeeper as the large one except -- the scale.  Larger automated equipment is used by the commercial beekeeper due to the number of hives and time required to complete the job. 

See Lesson eleven  The honey crop in 201 beekeeping lessons