Hi Juanse and All

I use an old potato conveyor that I bought at an auction for $10 thirty
years ago.  It has moved up about 70 ton of honey in boxes each year for
the last half of that time (less earlier) so I think it has paid for
itself.  I probably did have to put about $30 in parts into it, but
remarkably the wood of the conveyor is still serviceable even though it is
outside all the time.  It runs from the hot trailer which is separated from
the honey house up through a hatch into the upstairs of the honey house.
When we are putting in boxes there is bee leakage, but there are also some
bees in the boxes anyway.

A potato conveyor of this vintage (the new ones have rubber belts) had  two
chains, one on either side, and wooden crosspieces.  It requires the person
loading to wait for one crosspiece to come around the bottom and then drop
the box on the wood floor.  The next crosspiece pushes it up the wood floor.

The really nice thing about the upstairs extracting is that the empty boxes
slide down a slide into the storage trailers.  They slide well by gravity
alone.  When we are filling the first one we need a really good rubber
bumper.  For the second we need much less of a bumper.  For the third one
we usually wet down the slide with a bucket of water and then the boxes
will slide right through the other two trailers.  (We are going sideways
through the trailer walls and then filling them manually, they are 15
metres long).

There is no pumping of the honey until after the final settling tank.  Then
I use a pump for drumming off or pumping to the bottling tanks (which have
a filter in them).

Stan

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