Hi everyone

Need help on thinking best solution. A bit of brain storming if you wish.
Hopefully some one have already invented the wheel I need.

I use on each, of the now 4000 hives, a propolis mesh instead of an inner
board. We use an italian plastic mesh with romboidal spaces made out of 1
mm thick plastic threads. Is like a mosquito mesh but stronger, thicker. We
buy it by the roll and then cut them per the langstroth hive dimentions.

We have designed a way of managing those meshes much like honey production
so the propolis is not contaminated with the varroa control products or
other potential cross contamination in the handling.

What I have not solved and need your help is how to take the propolis out
of those meshes easily. Each mesh might contain up to 100 gr but the
average is 50 grams.

I already have some 10.000 of them waiting to be cleaned/extracted . I'm
running out of meshes for the next extraction round.

We do now a slow, hard manual process. We freeze the meshes and then, one
by one, fold it , roll it, twist it ... and the like by hand on top of a
big wooden tray, till most of the propolis is breaked out, dislodged from
the meshes. A person might clean up to 50 meshes per day.

We storage the extracted propolis on 1 kg plastic bags at low temperature
in the dark for latter alcohol processing.

I need some mechanical help to take that propolis out. Is so slow the hand
work that as said I am behind schedule on that front.

I could go the "wet way", that is extracting the propolis with alcohol
dirctly from the meshes, but that implies I need to process all propolis
straight away, while in the "dry way" I only need to process as per 1 kg
batches.

Does anyone have a propolis mesh dry-cleaning machine already invented?

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