“At a recent beekeeping event we heard that to enter prize winning honey with maximum aroma it is worth considering extracting honey by letting it drip out of the comb, as the more vigorous action of tangential spinning allows too much of the aroma to escape.
We hadn’t considered this until we inspected our bees last week and found that they had been very busy and there were several unexpected capped frames that we could remove without leaving them in any way short of stores. Having thoroughly cleaned and put away our spinner I thought it might be the ideal opportunity to see if we could get the honey to drip out and thereby have an exceedingly fragrant jar or two of honey to exhibit.
I can report that after 48 hours of trying to get the honey to drip out (yes, I did uncap it!), a process involving cordoning off a third of the kitchen and a very large bucket, I am still waiting for the frame to drip all of its honey. The honey is not especially viscous, and there is no obvious reason for it not to drip, so it must be that we simply have a lack of gravity in the kitchen. We have searched Thorne’s website and they do not appear to sell gravity, either loose or by the jar, so it looks like we are going to have to get the tangential spinner out again, and then clean it all over again, just for 6 frames.
Has anybody else successfully separated honey from comb before in a low gravity environment, or using other methods that don’t involve spinning ?”
David Ramsay
Many thanks for this lovely item, David; it really is a bit special.
Does anyone have some suggestions in response to David’s request? Let us know, even if you have not tried such a method yourself.