Not sure how much the cappings are worth to you as a revenue source, but
combs with minimal (nearly zero) wax loss as a result of harvest are worth
thinking about.

 

I recently acquired a Lega "Sideliner Uncapper", as it was faster than
uncapping one side of a frame at a time by hand, and offered less chance of
novice beekeeper injury than any of the chain or vibrating-knife uncappers.
The goal was to increase throughput at our extracting parties, so I needed
something that would be semi-portable, and nearly idiot-proof.  The
"drawback" is that one does not get a lot of harvestable wax from the
process, but the good news is that the combs can go back  to the hives
without any loss of width or significant "damage".

 

http://www.mannlakeltd.com/beekeeping-supplies/product/HH-226.html

http://tinyurl.com/q2n9ptx

 

I do not know if Mann Lake sells the Lega, or a knock-off of the Lega, but
the device in the photo linked above looks slightly more bulky, and lacks
the Lega logo.  (If one built a Lega from Lego, one could then have both the
Lega logo and Lego logo, but that would be loco.)

 

For those who have not seen one of this gizmo in person, imagine an 18-inch
wide pasta cutter, set for "angel hair" pasta.  Now take a 2nd pasta cutter,
and offset the blades with the first cutter.  Now spring-load them, and push
capped frames between them.  The blades rotate, and the cappings are slit
open, not cut off.  You end up with a "barn door" on each cell after
extracting.  Most frames are done in 2 to 3 seconds, and with consistent
comb thickness, one need not touch the tension adjustment.  The bottleneck
is the handling - one feeds one frame at a time into the thing, and one
takes each frame off the back side, also one at a time.  It seems like it
expects two people, one standing on each end.  Uncapping is not a
composition for four hands in most honey houses.

 

But I am a tinkerer, and outfitted each of my extractors with salvaged
washing-machine motors and belt drives.  I turned the hand-crank on the
Lega, and I thought of the pasta roller/cutter attachment for my KitchenAid
mixer and the shredder down in my co-op's mailroom into which we put all
those unsolicited credit card offers.  "What this thing needs is a MOTOR!"
grunted my inner Tim Taylor.

 

Sadly, the first motor I attached had too high a minimum starting current.
I had unwittingly re-invented the "pitching machine" for frames of drawn
comb.  I'll patch the wallboard at the lab next week.

 

But with a low-speed, high torque motor, or better yet, a stepper motor, one
would have a device that could move frames through much faster than a chain
uncapper, and with nearly zero wax by-product, almost all the wax left on
the comb for the bees to reuse.   Just don't get your fingers in there.  It
would take quite a bit of Rube Goldberg improvisation to integrate this into
any sort of semi-automated line.  The guys at Swienty would laugh and/or
cry. 

 

Another practical suggestion I'd offer is that I had good throughput from a
set of 3 motorized 9-frame extractors. At any one instant, one would be
loading, one spinning, and one unloading.  It may not look as impressive as
a big extractor, but it is all about throughput, and extracting each 9-frame
super individually allowed us to keep grades (shades!) of honey together,
and do a better job of handling multiple monofloral crops in the proper
artisanal manner, and pails stickered with super numbers, which tracked back
to hive and yard.  It allowed "hive to jar" tracking.

 

Back in the 1990s, I attached a 10 watt CO2 laser to the head of an old
drafting plotter, and vaporized the cappings on a whim.  (OK, it was yet
another drunken bet.)  Worked great for combs that had been capped by bees
that capped their honey with "dry" cappings, slightly away from the honey
surface, and worked much less "great" for bees that capped their honey with
"wet" cappings, ones that touch the honey.  As the trait for "dry" vs "wet"
cappings seemed impossible to select for in breeding, the laser went back on
the shelf, and the chain uncapper remained in place.  (That's why it's
called "R&D". If one knew what the result was going to be up front, it would
just be applications engineering.)

 

I hope that some scrap of the above proves useful, or that I have at least
continued to serve as a warning to others.

 


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