>        If the terrain permits having 2 levels will permit the
>use of gravity for pumping. Raw honey enters on the high side,
>finished honey exists on the low side. It doesn't have to be two
>stories, just raised enough.
>
>        Maybe someone with experience can speak to how much
>height is needed for gravity pumping.
 
Hi all:
 
My honeyhouse is a regular two story house.  It just happened to be an old
house on land that I bought when the owner died, because my cattle graze the
fields.  We put the supers up to the second floor and through a window using
a conventional hay escalator that can be obtained at most any farm auction
very reasonably.  It has worked just fine with one modification.  It is
necessary to attach a board to either side rail to keep the corners of the
supers from hooking in the upright supports of the side rail.  The person
putting the supers on the escalator also has to be careful to lower them
onto the chain in front of the little carrier hooks.  If that person (yours
truly) puts them down ON the hooks then they will carry the super up from
the inside of the leading edge and tend to flip the box up at the top.   It
has not proved to be much of a hardship, and it would be possible to have a
little ramp or sort of grocery box rollers to take the supers away from the
window if you couldn't have help.  Carrying full depth supers up stairs is
torture.
 
But I have never had to use the honey pump for anything since moving into
this honey house.  There is a hole in the floor where the clarifier sits and
accepts honey draining from uncapping tank and extractor. There is a forty
gallon filter tank under this and then a 300 gallon bulk milk tank, and it
is up over two feet off the floor, so we can bottle or fill buckets out of
this.  The filter tank is not exactly over the bulk tank, it is beside it,
but sufficiently high for the overflow which is near the top to be above the
top of the bulk tank.
 
All that said, there are disadvantages in the two story honey house once you
reach a certain size commercially, but I think it is not too bad for one or
two hundred hives.  I have been considering building a little slide to put
the empty boxes on to go to storage (that would also make use of gravity).
If I was building a two story honeyhouse I would certainly make the stairs
nice and wide.