Honey extraction

The removed bits of wax, called cappings, are rich in honey which can be slowly drained off with the help of some heating.

Automated uncapping machines normally work by abrading the surface of the wax with moving chains or bristles or hot knives.

Care must be taken so that this is done at a time when food is not scarce, or else bees from differing colonies will fight over the honey.

Once the combs are removed from the hive, they can be processed in several ways: Flow frames consist of plastic honeycomb lattice.

When the combs are full of ripe honey, the mechanism of the frames is activated, the vertical gaps are moved to offset by one half of a cell.

This breaks the wax seal and allows the honey to flow down through the cells into a channel at the base of each frame and out into a collection vessel.

[2] The system is then reset and the bees clean up any remaining honey, remove the capping, and refill the cells, beginning the process again.

However, new entrants to small beekeeping may find that the greater cost per hive of flow frames is more than off-set by saving time, labour, space, mess, and disturbance to the bees.