Problems with extracting your honey by hand
There
are two small difficulties with extracting
your honey by hand.
The first occurred to me as I left the honey dripping into a bowl
overnight --- in the summer, that bowl would attract ants like
crazy. (Of course, in the summer, it probably wouldn't take all
night for the honey to settle out of the wax.)
The other slight problem
is that you get a few wax particles in your honey. There are
several ways to deal with this --- you can strain the honey through a
finer sieve or cloth, or you can wait until the wax floats to the top
of the jar and just skim it off. Or you can do what I do and just
savor the honey, wax and all --- the tiny specks aren't really
noticeable.
Or explore more posts by date or by subject.
About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
Want to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed, or simply check the box beside "email replies to me" while writing your comment.
We use a crock pot + temperature controller to hold the honey at a precise temperature without supervision. The results is a clean separation of wax from honey using a metal filter. This is quite similar to your technique, but might give you some new options.
http://blog.holyscraphotsprings.com/2011/10/video-separate-honey-from-wax.html
Short and sweet --- I liked it.
It looks like you're using plastic foundation, thus the butter knife?