Letter from Australia
G’day Bee Craſt readers,
Only last month I was talking about the impacts of bushfires on our bees and now, in the land of ever-changing weather extremes, we have had floods. Scenes from Australian news look similar to British news about Storm Dennis – although it is still at least 10–15ºC warmer here!
Only one load of nucs was badly impacted by the floods, and, despite the water geting to halfway up the combs in some hives, they all survived!
The wet weather has led us to do more indoor jobs and honey extraction. Although, many new hobbyist beekeepers are excited to process their first harvest, others shudder just at the thought of the sticky mess leſt to clean up!
This has been my first season using a full extracting line – an uncapper, a reducer, 60-frame horizontal extractor and baffle. The bee farm I work for here produced around 200 tonnes of honey last year and, while I won’t need such a big extracting set up for my own business for a while, it has been great to see the large-scale equipment in action.
The boxes are cleared using clearer boards which are put on the day before we take the honey. The next day we ‘pull’ those boxes, and a leaf blower is used to remove any bees that remain. The cleared boxes are then stacked onto pallets and loaded onto a truck.
When we have around 300 deep boxes to process (from one load or several), they are loaded onto the uncapping machine and a pneumatic liſt transfers the frames from the boxes to the conveyer. The frames are separated, the box
Bee Craſt April 2020
scraped of burr comb and put onto rollers that run down to the end of the line.
The heated blades of the uncapper remove the cappings, which fall directly into a wax reducer, where heated strips melt the wax. The honey floats and flows directly into the baffle. The wax is removed and put into the wax melter.
The uncapper doesn’t always do a perfect job, so someone (usually me) uncaps the parts of frames missed and scrapes the top bars so that they are tidy for their next use. We then load 60 frames, 20 at a time, into the extractor. The empty ones are pushed out the other side onto a rail for stacking back into boxes.
The extractor runs for only six minutes because the honey is usually warm from being in the shed. The honey drains straight into a baffle which pumps into a three-tonne tank, and from there we fill IBC tanks (pallet tanks) with 1,460kg of honey.
This whole process can run at maximum speed and, with three people, we can process between three and four tonnes per day – including a good hour cleaning down at the end.
Honey infected with American foulbrood (AFB) is quite common here – the boxes in the photo have combs from AFB hives. In the UK, we would extract that honey under supervision of a seasonal bee inspector, but the frames must be burnt. Here, these boxes and frames are tightly sealed and sent to be irradiated, aſter which they are completely free of AFB spores and can be re-used.
Mathew Ingram
mathew@holthallapiary.co.uk 27
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