Processing almost 1000 pounds of honey in under 3 hours.

before the video begins I like that I'll ask you a big favor watch the video until the very end because at the very end of the video I've got an update on what happened on the 4th of July so check out the end of the video and let me know what you think about what you see there hello it's Mr Ed here and today is July 1st 2023 and still a little bit early in the mornings right around 6 40. quarter till seven something like that and it is humid here in Louisiana this morning my gosh it's got it's got to be like 80 85 percent humidity this morning and but still the temperature's not bad as I think it's right around 76 77 something like that so it's really not bad but it's going to be another another record-breaking heat day here in Southeast Louisiana yesterday we hit 101 yesterday uh day before it was a hundred today they're saying it's going to be 99 or 100 so it's going to be another hot day so thankfully we'll be inside of the air conditioning building all day today and what are we going to be doing there we are going to be processing honey that's right it's finally time so generally at the end of June I always try to pull in our honey at the at the end of June so here we are July that's close enough so we Charlie and I and Julio we we've been pulling in our honey supers this week man we get up we'd actually leave The Abbey at 5 30 in the morning and go pull supers because it's just we can't work very very long in that heat it's just like I said before the heat these last few days have really been bad so we get up leave the Abbey about 5 30 in the morning and get back here from around eight o'clock and it would seem that that we were doing a lot of work but we were just mostly doing driving because our honey crop this year is basically zero it's it's hardly anything um my my biggest concern and I've been saying this for months me and world famous Mike Barry been talking about it since March about the lack of nectar and then the freeze that killed at Tallow a lack of nectar now privet it just it never was a it never looked like it was going to be a good year for honey and it's been proved true my my greatest concerns during this whole time is that this year I may actually have to feed our bees just to get them through the winter fortunately or it didn't happen and I am ever grateful for that I I'm the little bit of honey that we got man I'm I'm thankful for that and and even more thankful that I'm not gonna have to spend my time or any money uh buying sugar water to feed our bees the the bees were able to produce or gather enough nectar to store enough honey in all all their boxes for them but unfortunately any surplus which is what I take that that part wasn't there so I'm walking over to the honey house right now and I've got it all set up ready to go and I'ma show you what I'm going to be doing today show you the machines before everybody gets here let's step inside the honey house right here and see what is going on for today and here we go that's right we got it all set up in here I have it all set up in here and I've been running my dehumidifier in here this has been running now for three days 48 humidity in here which is really good and the reason I want to run the the dehumidifier is to dry out our honey and not to get let it absorb any moisture because like I said it's so humid right now that our honey will absorb the honey the water and it it well we don't want that so this is um I've been running down there so this is all of the honey that we got that's right we have 20 boxes that's all we have let me turn off these fans and quiet things down a little bit things a little bit quieter here other than the echo right so let me let me show you the process of what we're going to be doing and I'm sure most of y'all have seen this stuff already but it's it's interesting uh at least I find it very interesting the process that that I use to process our honey and we start with our uncapping machine now this uncapping machine is a Dakota gunness on the Capper and what this uncapper is is a chain on Kappa there's basically two types of uncapped machines a knife on Capper and a chain on Capper and When selecting make my selection on Capra I was going to be using for our operation I decided to go for the chain on Capper mostly because I just like the way it made the wax cappings instead of layers it comes out a little very fine particles and it does chains and here you go you see these chains right here there's a bar on the top right here with chains and then underneath it there's another bar with chains underneath it and so what happens is that as our frame of Honey passes through the machine the bar would change on top drag These Chains you see how long they are they're about they're probably about an inch and a half long it drags those chains across the surface of the cone and these chains drag the cappings off and so the bar on the top remove the cappings from the top of the frame and then the bar underneath down here will remove the cappings from the underneath side so as our frame passes through the machine here and exit out on this side the frame is completely uncapped the um and you'll see that later on during the process how the uncapping machine this particular time the chain on Capper how because of the length of these chains right here it doesn't matter if your frame of Honey is straight or whether it's curved the chains follow that configuration of the comb and uncap everything it's really incredible how that thing works now with knife on cappers as long as the the frame is drawn out far enough it'll it'll uncap it otherwise you have to scrape it off but using the chain and capper I I it's very rare that I have to scrape anything off and if you notice underneath the conveyor right here you have a tray this tray extends the entire length of the machine and I actually had another about nine inches added on to this tray because it used to end right at the very end of the machine but I needed it to extend a little bit further this way as well as this way because I needed it to extend over the edge of my uncapping tank and this tray captures all of the honey wax that is coming off of our conveyor off of our frames it just runs down this conveyor onto that tray and the tray is elevated on this end it's got about it you see I put about a two and a half inch block down there to elevate this end so our honey just runs all the way down that tray and then all the cappings and honey will then go into our untapping tank and once our frames come out of the conveyor on this side um we then stack them into our uncapping tank now this this uncapping tank I had this this one made uh it it it will hold 50 frames and that's the reason it holds 50 frames is because our extractor is a 48 frame another thing I want to point out about our uncapping tank just as in our uncapping machine I Elevate the tray at this end so we have a drop to this end so to our tank has a drop in it you can see at this end I think it's 13 inches at this end and it goes all the way down to 15 inches so you have a a drop in the tank so our honey flows from right to left and then it flows down to our gate at the bottom now on the other side of our gate we have a valve in our hose and that goes right into our low pump what I love about this type of pump this low pump is that the gearing in it which is right here it's the configuration is just a set of three lobes and they rotate around each other and in that rotation it it makes a suction that draws the honey through and then passes it along and what's great great great about this type of pump is that it matters not what it is inside the the tube um for for me it's full of wax and honey the wax will not build up in here and clog our gears I used to have a honey pump that um when I ran it it worked until the wax built up into the gears so much that it just stopped the machine this low pump this type of pump a low pump it will not block up and lock up on you so our low pump will then take the honey that's in our uncapping tank it'll pump it out and then we just store everything in drums and it'll just go right into the drum now after our uncapping tank is filled up with our 50 frames we would then will load them up into the extract and let's go look at the extractor now this is a man leak 48 frame extractor and I've had this extractor now I think four years now and it is a doozy of a machine for our purposes it works excellent I love the way the frames sit inside of the holder right here in fact let me grab a frame and show you so this is how it works you'll see down here there's a hole right here and in line with that whole of space right here and what's so nice about this is you put your ear of your frame into that hole and it throws the frame back and it it'll it basically locks the frame in place now these little side bars down here they will hold the frame at the bottom and that that is in there really really nice there's no there's no issues of this um using this machine wearing frames are moving around hitting each other they're locked in place it it really is good the other thing that I like about this extractor is at the bottom it is a cone shaped bottom down here but the cone slopes down and to the center and at the bottom of the tank look at that our Honey comes right out right out of the bottom it'll drain right out in our pump will then take and pump the honey there you go a little pump our honey right through our tube right up our pipe right here and into our drum now this type of pump this is an auger pump it's just a big auger blade inside of this tube right here is just a big auger and that thing it doesn't matter what goes through it it's going to push whatever is in there it'll push it out through that tube and it'll have enough pressure to come up the pipe and down into our drum right there and there you have it the process of us running through uh when we have when we have more than this amount of honey we usually have 10 12 people in here but today since we only have this little bit of Honey right here it won't take any time so it's simply going to be Good Time Charlie Wreck-It Ralph Julio and myself we're going to be doing the processing today let me let me show you these frames of honey that that we've got to run this is as always they're just beautiful goodness look at that that is a beautiful frame I I I'm very partial to running for my honey supers I love using new frames uh because I just like this look right here I mean it's a new wax new frames New Foundations or at least clean foundations and and this this year I went with all the the premier frames is what I used this year and these are the triple coated wax ones and when they were able to they drew them out beautifully that's just we when we were going through our frames I actually was picking frames I probably only had two or three boxes that had were full boxes of honey I know this is one because all of them are all the same the performance of this was a whole full box of Honey right here and this is just another example and then I had a few of them that as I was picking through you know right here's one of the next one that it's different there may be some let's see that aren't completely capped out but for the most part all of these all of these are drawn frames pretty much capped a little bit of uncapped on it but this is this is what we're going to be running now my guess my estimate guess is that since I've got 20 boxes and I figure an average of four gallons per box we're going to be somewhere around 80 gallons of of honey so that's uh times 12 what's that 8 times 2 is 16 890 I don't know it's a lot a lot of pounds of honey so I know you all are gonna tell me how many years but uh it's still it's still I'm grateful for this because even though we don't have the abundance that we normally have I still have four drums of Honey back there from not last year to Sunday but two years ago honey that I'll be able to decrystallize that stuff and still be able to supply onto the gift shop all year round now I don't know if you can see way back here look look at this I'm really maybe shouldn't even be telling you all this right here I've got the hill cone extractor right there now the reason it's here right now is because in January at the hard life uh 2024 John Hill the owner of hilco he's going to be given that extractive weight so I'll bring that up to to Tennessee with me when I go out there and some lucky person is going to win that extractor now if you've ever seen that extractor you'll have to go look at the video in fact I'll post a link to that video on extractor comparisons on it and that bit that that extractor right there will be given away so by the grace of God it isn't going to take but I think two hours which will make Charlie very happy a couple of guys we're gonna process this honey and then push our boxes out this outside let the bees start cleaning up and we're going to have all this honey in those drums in the next couple hours Let's Wrangle up some honey okay we can start let's do it look at that he already messed up he messed up oh look at this oh [Music] all right we've got a full Workforce here Julio good time [Music] [Applause] because you can finally be here in video so we just finished running our first run and we got our uncapping tank all filled up and you can see it dreams really really good and a couple of years ago what we were doing as soon as our frames were coming off the on Capper we'd load them into the extractor and we were losing all kind of Honey on the ground down there and so that's when we decided we need an uncapped paint so this is what we've done we put the frames and on Capper let a bunch of the honey and wax milk uh milk drop down and then from here we can load it into the extractor and that way we're not losing a lot of Honey on the ground so now that's what we're going to do we ran all this through the extract to the uncapper and now we're going to load up our un extracted show us how to do it Charlie all right we're going to start from this end because these were the last these were the first ones put in there so they pretty much drained off so now we're going to load the this is really not my job whose job is it uh this should be route hey Charlie's got to have one job you know we're Union around here Charlie is now going Charlie's now going to go ahead and put his magic touch on the controls right here you see and he's gonna tell him what you're gonna do Charlie tell us what you're gonna do well I'm gonna start off slow and and get it going and then eventually as as some of the Honey comes off the frames I start increasing the speed okay and that's it it's technical well Charlie you are you are a technical man and you do have airplane experiences it kind of does look like a dead end that's true well that's kind of how you wake up in the morning nice and slow get your bones working there we go what's that noise Charlie uh I have no idea yet oh it sounds like a lack of lubrication maybe there wasn't enough oil in the transmission you can see the honey dripping down starting to drip down and then on the side [Music] we're supposed to have these doors closed to prevent people from putting their hand in there sounds like we've got a loose brain in that truck Charlie at what point are you going to turn on the pump [Music] uh at this point we need to turn the pump on so we're going to turn it on you can see the honey below out of the extractor the first well Charlie's finished running the first one and what we do is we separate frames that only have honey in them like this one from frames that had brewed in them like this one brood or pollen and the reason we separate those is because the the moths are attracted to this they're not attracted to the to just frames that hit honey in them as long as they were all honey we separate those out the Moss won't get in them if they're as brood the Moss will get them so we separate these out in our 48 frames there were about 10 20 30 40 of them 41 of them only here honey and seven seven of them fit through so that really that's a good deal so now we're going to go ahead and start the process all over again load from the on Tapper tank into the extractor start out on Kappa fill up the capping tank again do it again awesome foreign foreign we have got a tank full of cappings and honey in here uh I hope that 30 gallon drum is going to be able to handle it but we'll find that out so we got the tax rate the drum is all set up and all we got to do is Julio plug it into the wall please and we're going to get this process going it takes a little while getting a big show but we gotta we gotta push these these boxes out we've got one more behind Charlie so yeah you want to start pulling stuff down we're going to open up the garage door [Music] foreign [Music] what time is it right now Charles it's time to go eat yeah we're gonna go eat eat lunch we roll those things out and we're gonna uh come back from lunch and finish cleaning everything up and get you a shot of the bees what they look like so we'll see in a bit thanks for watching [Applause] more God bless everyone till the next we're gonna clean out our Funk right now what is that foreign that was left inside of there hardly anything clean that out that's it our pump's clean now we can get to clean and everything else [Music] all right so we're gonna do our Capper we're gonna first clean it up underneath this because Charlie can you show that camera see what it looks like underneath that there's a lot of captains underneath that so we gotta wash all that stuff off and then the rest of it as well we can store at the top and work down here [Music] and open up the bow right here to let all our water drain out and that'll just go onto the ground any honey whack the bees will come out here and get this stuff as well it's not like we're wasting it thank you again foreign [Music] Charlie we got a spot for you right here oh no I don't want to get any too many bees get out of here if he's everywhere Charlie there's bees there's never I'm scared of bees I hate beekeeping look at this mess all right well well Ralph I'm going to let you uh do the honors what what I mean it's just been a long day we're ready to get out of here and oh wait before we go we wound up with right around 80 gallons of honey I don't know probably close it's gonna be close to a thousand pounds and I'll be skipping all that wax all that stuff off next week well they're not here and they won't be complaining about it so I'll be doing that and unless Julio wants to show up because Julio lives a couple of miles from here all right anything else anybody nope it was a pretty simple dog it was small this year we didn't have half of what we normally have half we didn't have a quarter you know so it only took a few of us to get it done and I think we did it in about an hour but it took longer to clean up like just said and it did to actually extract the honey yeah one of one of the mistakes I made was I took that a rack that was in the uncapping tank and the tray that was underneath their camper and I put it outside big mistake because as hot as it is it actually melted the wax it baked it on yeah so me and Ralph well I'll just scrubbing the wax off that stuff about 25 minutes but all good we got it well Charlie what are we gonna say we're gonna wrap it up thanks for watching keep all watching we'll be making more God bless this Mr Ed good time trolling Wreck-It Ralph the next video God bless everybody thank you look at all them bees [Music] so on the 4th of July I decided I'm gonna go live and talk about our honey Harvest or the little bit of Honey Harvest that we had and when I whenever I'm talking going live I like to use my office upstairs in the wood shop um to to do my broadcast from and so that's really where what I want to show you um is located what it is that I want to show you is located because what happened was just uh the week before the fourth uh the Saturday before I'm going to say come on Jeff we're going over to you to your office and we're going to clean it up and we're going to get that wall quilt on your wall and so she came over and spent a couple of hours in there going through all the layers of dust that it built up on everything and she cleaned it all up and hung up the wall quilt and I tried to talk about the wall quilt um during the broadcast but I really only had my camera on the on the computer and it really didn't justify the work that she did and and I received so many comments about oh you need to show more of the quilt you gotta how much how much time there's so many questions about the quilt and so today I'd like to show the quilt a little bit better using the camera and show you all what what she did so let's go inside and I'll show you and there it is now this quilt took her a long time probably about about three months to do and it was all inspired by of course the logo from for my videos Studio B Productions but I'd asked her if she would make me a wall quilt that would reflect kind of like what a frame would look like and so she came up with the design of these little hexagons and she did a grid on the quilt initially and then cut out all these little different sized hexagon shapes that quilted them and what I what I asked her to do is I'd love to be able to get YouTube people to sign the hexies at least signed some of them and put them on there look at that we got Fred Dunn Ian stay play Bohemia V's Jason look at this we got JP Jody Rouse and so we have the different sizes of hexes and each one of them each one of them is embroidered and they're they're different colors look at that world famous Mike Barry I actually got spots where I can get some more names to sign on to it and the embroidery work on here she spent so much time look look at all the little bees that she embroidered on the quilts looking in a queen she put a little crown on it with the m for Mona with all the little tender bees all around it and and the wings kind of look like three-dimensional like she can actually fly and hold the camera I mean what a great wall decoration and a testimony of the artwork and talent that Mona Hayes for their quilts now she also did helped clean up the office because if you remember this whole wall was just one wall of pictures but since we put the wall quilt right there which is where I wanted it then she went and redecorated all the other of other is the whole as well got it all nice and clean got my honey Shelf and all my goodies up there and this was this was the original one that she had embroidered for me when we were still dating and of course the silver play button and Mom holding it when she unboxed it but look at the centerpiece of the office what a work of art that thing is thank you Dave thank you foreign [Applause]

Channel: Jeff Horchoff Bees

Views: 35,020

Keywords: Processing almost 1000 pounds of honey in under 3 hours., processing honey, processing honeycomb, processing honey at home, honey extractor diy, honey extractor review, uncapping tank for honey, uncapping tank, uncapping honey, Dakota Gunness uncapping machine, honey pumps, honey drums, capped honey comb, quilts, wall quilts, missouri star quilt company, fat quarter shop, Studio Bee Productions, embroidery, hand embroidering a quilt, Mann Lake honey, mann lake honey extractor

Id: fnduT_BOk6M

Length: 44min 0sec (2640 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 14 2023