Cleaning and storing the extractor, the tanks and the uncapping kit

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Do it the week it comes in

The National Bee Unit puts a time on this job, and it is not March. It lists cleaning and disinfecting beekeeping equipment as best practice when you bring it in from the field for storage, at the end of the season, or before you use it again. 13 Both of its cleaning sheets open with that same list.

The house reason is simpler. Honey that has sat in a tap since August has to be soaked out. Honey rinsed off in August comes away in cold water. An afternoon now saves a morning in July.

Cleaning is not disinfecting

The two get run together, and the National Bee Unit separates them plainly. Cleaning is a routine activity. Disinfecting is used when disease is, or was, known or suspected to be present. 2

Extraction kit needs the first, thoroughly. It needs the second only when disease is in the picture, and at that point the question is much bigger than a washing-up bowl.

Worth knowing where the bar actually sits. Washing hive boxes with soda crystals cleans them but does not disinfect them, unless the boxes are simmered in the soda solution at 80 °C. 1 So a good scrub is a clean rather than a sterilisation, and nobody is claiming more than that.

The routine standard for boxes, tools and frames is scraping the wax and propolis off, then scrubbing with 1 kg of soda crystals in 4.5 litres of water. 2 That is the method for woodwork and steel tools rather than for the inside of an extractor. Hive tools, and keeping them clean covers it.

Soda is not mild. Wear protective clothing, gloves and eye protection and keep it off your skin, because eye contact with washing soda can cause permanent corneal injury. 2

Cold water first, and no detergent on honey surfaces

This section is ours. It is the order we work in, and nothing official covers it.

Go in with hot water and the wax softens, smears across the steel and hardens again as it cools. You then spend January polishing off a film you could have rinsed away in August. Cold water takes the honey off and leaves the wax in lumps you can lift out.

• Scrape the bulk out first. Wax, cappings and anything solid go in the wax bucket. Saving frames and rendering wax covers what happens to it next.
• Cold rinse, hose or cold tap, until the honey has gone. Nearly all of it leaves here.
• Then warm water and a brush for the film that is left.
• Rinse again with clean water until it runs clear.

Keep detergent off anything that will hold honey next year. Honey takes up taint from almost everything, and a rinse you thought was thorough is not always. That is our rule for the extractor, the tank, the strainers and the buckets.

It is a rule about honey surfaces, not about cleaning in general. The National Bee Unit’s own method for frames and queen excluders is soda solution with a dash of washing-up liquid in it. 3 Different surface, different job.

The rinsings, and why they do not go back to the bees

You finish the wash with a bucket of sweet water, and two questions follow it. Both have clear answers.

It is not honey. In law honey is the substance the bees make and leave in the comb to ripen, and extracted honey is what comes out of de-capped broodless combs in a centrifuge. 4 Add water to it and it is neither, so it cannot be sold as honey, or under any name with honey in it.

It also does not go back to the bees. Those rinsings are honey from every colony that went through the extractor, pooled into one bucket. The National Bee Unit says it twice in the same short document: avoid feeding honey or pollen from other colonies back to bees, and never feed bought honey to them either. Sugar syrup is named as the safer alternative. 2

That is a foulbrood question rather than a fussy one. Our winter feeding guide takes the same line, and sugar syrup is what a hungry colony gets instead.

So: mead, if you make it, and quickly, because it ferments within days. Otherwise down the drain. Not into a feeder.

Wet supers go back on the hive they came off

There is no choice to make here, and it is worth being blunt because you will read otherwise.

The National Bee Unit is direct about it. When wet supers go back on colonies so the bees can take the leftover honey, always return the super to the original colony. Never leave wet supers outside for any length of time, because they quickly attract robbing bees. Put each one straight back on its hive of origin. 1

Robbing is itself a route of disease transmission, which is the part the robbing-war framing leaves out. 2 A super stood out in the open feeds half the parish from one colony’s comb.

Cleaning, freezing and storing supers has the method: above the crown board, late in the evening, and bee-tight. Wasps and robbing covers why September is the worst month to get this wrong.

Drying is the step people skip

Ours again, and learned by opening a rusty tap in July. A stainless extractor put away damp corrodes at the seams. A settling tank with a wet gasket grows mould, and a stack of damp buckets grows something worse.

• Leave everything upside down or on its side to drain.
• Then leave it another day somewhere with moving air. A breezy afternoon beats a warm shed.
• Dry the tap, the valve and the gasket separately. Water hides in the thread.
• Look inside the drum with a torch before you close it up. It should look dry, not shiny.

Take honey gates and taps apart, clean the seat and the thread, dry them, and put them back loosely or store them loose. A valve put away tight and sticky is a valve that will not turn next July.

Storing it, and keeping the mice out

Mice will get into an extractor. They will get into a tank with a loose lid, and they will nest in a stack of buckets. Everything below follows from that.

• Off the ground. The National Bee Unit’s rule is written for honey supers in the apiary: never directly on the ground, but on an upturned roof or a suitable stand, because of the risk of contaminating the honey with botulinum spores from the soil. 1 Applying the same to the extractor, the tanks and the buckets is ours. It deals with mice, damp floors and flooding at the same time.
• Lids on. Keep lids on any bucket that holds brace comb or scrapings, because the honey traces in it draw bees. 1 A sealable container beats an open one. 2 An extractor with no lid gets a sheet tied down over it rather than draped.
• Dust out. A covered extractor is a clean extractor in July.
• Light out. Sunlight through a shed window makes plastic brittle over a few years.
• Not beside the chemicals. Creosote, two-stroke and paint in the same corner as food kit is how taint arrives. Ours, and learned once.
• Not on top of the comb. Frames and supers have their own storage job, and it is a different one.

Trap or bait for mice in the store if you have a history of them. Keep bait well away from anywhere honey or comb could ever sit.

Item by item

• Extractor. Scrape, cold rinse, warm wash, rinse, dry, tap off and dried separately, lid on, off the ground. Check the belt, the motor and the legs while it is empty.
• Settling tank. The same, with attention to the honey gate. Store it with the valve open and the lid on.
• Uncapping tray or bath. The easiest thing in the room to clean and the one most often left. Cold rinse, wash, dry.
• Uncapping fork and knife. Wash and dry. Oil a carbon steel blade lightly. Store a heated knife with the cable coiled loose, not kinked.
• Strainers and filters. These hold the most and get the least attention. Cold soak, rinse through from the clean side, dry right through, store flat.
• Buckets and 30 lb tubs. Wash and dry, nest them with the lids on, keep them off the ground. Check for hairline cracks before you trust one with 13.6 kg of honey next year.
• Clearer boards and Porter escapes. Scrape them, clean them, and replace tired springs now while you remember. These are hive kit rather than honey kit, so soda solution is the right thing on them. 2 A failed escape in July costs you a visit.
• Refractometer. Wipe the plate, dry it, close the cover, box it. Keep it somewhere that does not freeze, and calibrate it before the next use rather than after.

When the simple rule breaks down

• Kit used on a colony with a disease problem. Cleaning is not the answer and this is not the document. The National Bee Unit has a separate sheet on disinfecting after disease. 3 Reporting foulbrood covers the duties that come first.
• A borrowed or shared extractor. Clean it before it goes back, and ask the same of anyone lending to you. Disease organisms can be transmitted from used equipment for many years. 2
• Second-hand kit off an auction site. Same reasoning, less information. The National Bee Unit asks for all second-hand equipment to be disinfected before use, to a standard that kills American foulbrood spores, because those spores can stay inert in the environment for decades. 3
• An unheated outbuilding that swings between damp and frozen. Plastic goes brittle and gaskets perish. If it is the only store you have, wrap the vulnerable items rather than leaving them bare.
• Comb and frames. A different job with freezing in it, covered in storing supers over winter.
• Selling any of it. Where food business registration starts, and where it does not, is set out in selling honey in the UK. The answer is not the same for everybody, so read it rather than assume it.

The short version

• Clean the kit when it comes in from the field, not in the spring. 13
• Cleaning and disinfecting are different jobs, and extraction kit needs the first. 2
• Cold water first, then warm. Hot water first smears the wax across the steel.
• No detergent on honey surfaces. Soda solution stays the standard for boxes, frames and tools. 23
• The rinsings are not honey in law, and they are not a bee feed either. 42
• Wet supers go back on their own hive. Never out in the open. 1
• Dry everything for twice as long as you think, and take the taps apart.
• Store it covered, dark, off the ground and away from the chemicals. 1