This is about as simple as it gets. Its a very simple design and I figured for a cheap manual honey extractor there is not much to go wrong.

To uncap the honey frames, I built this simple uncapping station using an old stainless-steel sink.

I also have some very large uncapping and filtering containers, but again they are two large for my current needs and need a little work on the valves.

I am using the left side of the sink to hold the frames that I am currently working on.

I’m using the right side of the sink to hold a small board with a screw for the uncapping.

It has a simple strainer to let the honey drain ….

… into a food grade bucket.

The extractor sits on a wooden stand next to the sink. I made a small aluminum shelf to catch any honey that drips from the frames on the way to the extractor.

The extractor drains into a two-part sieve on a food grade bucket.

To uncap the honey, I have the four tools shown here.

The honey does not extend past the frame as it is first year honey so I can’t use the hot knife.

I will be using the Needle Roller and the red scrapper that came with the sieve set.

Before starting anything, I set the temperature in my beehouse to about 85 degrees.

Honey from a proper Slovenian AZ hive has very low moisture content. This is a good thing for the honey, but it’s very hard to extract. Raising the heat helps alot.

Two uncapped honey frames were inserted into the extractor, and it was spun up.

I tried to use two frames that were close to the same weight to keep the extractor from wabbling.

Once the honey has been extracted (or most of it) I flipped the frames around and repeated the process.

I realized early on that the small amount of honey I was going to extract would not even come close to the bottom of the spinning frames.

I removed the extractor from the stand and placed it flat on the floor of my beehouse.

This made it much easier to deal with and it vibrated much less when I had two miss matched frames.

Once all the honey was extracted, I set the extractor on a stand and opened the valve to drain the honey into the sieve/bucket.

Note that I purposely did not use a mesh bag to further filter the honey.

When the process was completed, I ended up with very close to 1 gallon of honey.

Since this honey was going to be made into mead, I sparged (using warm water) the leftover mix in the sieve into a second bucket.

This will be added to the must with the rest of the honey.

The wax will be melted down and added to new frame foundations.

Here is what I ended up with.

• Just a little under 1 gallon of honey.

• 1 Gallon of honey water

• A little wax for melting

This turned out perfect for my first Raw/Pressure mead experiment.

I will be making several changes on my next extraction.

One issue I had was this support board that holds the frame in place while I uncap the honey. It kept flipping over. I will be adding braces on the ends.

I also have to build a more stable stand for the extractor.

Two Frame Honey Extractor

This was the least expensive manual extractor I could find. It worked very well and was easy to clean with soap and hot water in a standard kitchen.

Double Sieve

The mesh has an 18 mesh on the top and 25 mesh on the bottom. The wax and propolis were captured by the top screen. Very small particles were captured by the lower screen.

It does come with a very fine filter bag that I did not use as I wanted pollen and very fine particles in my must.

The kit comes with a new valve that can be installed on a bucket. Since this was my first extraction I decided to wait and see where best to use this valve.

I did use the scraper on some of the combs.

Uncapping Roller

I used this on most of the capped honey. It worked well.