Extracting Honey with No Extractor

In our first attempt to extract honey, we didn't have the proper honey extractor. Extractors are essentially a barrel with a spinning pivot you rest the frames on. Depending on the size of the barrel, you can extract 4 or 8 frames at a time. These barrels save time, energy, and bee cells by spinning the honey outward onto the barrel wall and allowing gravity to do the rest. 

If you've ever spilled honey on any type of surface, you definitely have your work cut out for you, for the next thirty minutes or so, scrubbing or licking, ayy. But seriously, getting honey on something is no joke, especially honey from your bees, where every drop is super valuable and precious to the bees. Just know, a lot of things get sticky fast!

We extracted honey in our home, and my honey doesn't want to clean up honey, let alone waste it. So here are some items we used, purchased from our local Ace Hardware for 40 to 50 bucks. 

First and foremost are your table covers. It is important to purchase 3 to 5 of these sheets and make sure they're the largest ones available. Here at Ace, they are 1.99 each. Uses: Covers the table, honey, utensils, bins, and frames. You do not want fly's flying around, let alone sitting on honey.

Second, are your utensils. Do not use your grandma's or your aunties'. They're gonna get mad because they're super hard to clean off. Pure rez honey does not lick off easily and depending on the utensil strength, there's a possibility it could break. Utensils to use; and buy two or three sets: Long Bread Knife, Long Wooden Spoon Scoopers, Wide Spatula, Wide Triangular Spatula for pies, and an aluminum baking sheet to rest these on. Remember it's gonna get sticky. All together these utensils came in sets and cost no more than 10 dollars.

Third, is your bowls. I got lucky Ace has matching bowl sets that are inexpensive and get the job done. Price, 3 dollars each at 6 bucks total.

The most expensive item you see was the tupperware and the large bin. The tupperware came in a set of two and the bin was just itself. The tupperware, (tubbaware) was 12 dollars and the large bin was priced for 10 dollars. 

The other items you see that are esstential, are the pearchment paper (to immediately cover honey), large baking sheet, funnels, and 5 gallon paint filters. The most important of all, that is not in the picture, is soap and paper towels. 

If we had an extractor, we could've save the cells to allow bees to refill their honey easily. However, gravity only allowed the top of the cell to drain and not the whole insides of the cells. So we used the utensil to scrap everything and it worked great. All of the scrapped honey was put into a 5 gallon bucket with the filter in place and it worked just fine.

I sure hoped this helped your efforts in trying to decide what to buy when on a budget. In best practice, choose the extractor to save the cells.