Next Saturday, 7th October, will be a final Sale Day of the year, and it will be a big one! Held at our Head Office & Factory in Rand, Lincolnshire, not only will we have our usual bargains on beekeeping equipment, but we will also have wax exchange, factory tours, beekeeping talks, and labels printed while you wait! The talks will be from Tony Jefferson and John White and will be covering the following topics: Chemical Free Beekeeping Using Small Cell Foundation, Simple Swarm Measures and Checkerboarding.

We will also have our ever popular thirds at our Sale Day. Prices are shown as below and will be first come, first served. National broods will be limited per customer.

For the first time this year, as well as our cedar supers, we will also be selling pine supers. These will be sold in packs of ten and will be £120. The pine is home grown in the UK and has a very low carbon footprint. Nails and runners will not included.

We will be at the National Honey Show later this month celebrating their 100th year! You will be able to find us in the main hall. As well as our usual bargains, we will be offering our wax exchange service. You can order online for collection from the show up to Monday 23rd October.

If you would like us to take along your entry for you, you can drop them at any of our branches. If you are dropping at Newburgh, Stockbridge or Devon, you will need to do so by Wednesday 18th October. If you are dropping at Windsor or Rand then you have until Monday 23rd October. 

We look forward to seeing you there!

Equipment Focus

Bucket Blanket

We are thrilled to introduce this new product to the market. A simple, yet effective way to heat your honey. This heated blanket is designed to wrap around a 30lb bucket to gently warm your honey. The Bucket Blanket comes complete with an adjustable digital thermostat. We suggest a temperature of around 45°C for 18-24 hours to get the honey to a runny state. The electrical workings can be fully removed so that the blanket can be washed.

Priced at £84

Ask the Expert

How to reclaim and clean wax

When you extract honey from a hive, you normally have to slice off the wax cappings from the frames. This wax can be reclaimed and cleaned up into a nice block and used in different ways.  You may want to simply exchange it for foundation, which is a cost-effective way to restock your hives with clean wax.  Or you could use it to make candles, cosmetics or polish. Pound for pound, wax is worth more than honey, so it is worth the effort to clean it up and reuse. If you use a hive that only uses top bars, like the Top Bar Hive or the Warre hive, your wax harvest may be even higher.

Essentially the wax has to be melted down and separated from everything else in the frame: casings, pollen, brood, general dirt and any wire that may have been in the frame. This can be a little tricky and messy partly due to the fact you can’t simply boil down wax on a naked flame, it has to be done using water, steam or a double boiler. Depending on what you are melting down, it can be more or less smelly – if you are simply melting down clean wax cappings from honey extraction you should have little dirt in the process and the beeswax will come up nice and clean almost straight away. If you are melting down old brood frames that have old casings in, pollen (and potentially a bit of mould too!), the process is a lot dirtier and a lot smellier!

After you have your block of beeswax, it is always worth checking it over and removing any dirt that is on the underside of the block as this is where it tends to congregate. If you want to trade the wax in, you won’t get anything for this layer of dirt and a bit of weight might be knocked off, so it is best to just have it reasonably clean in the first place to make sure you are getting a fair exchange.

Below are a few ways you can make the process of reclaiming and cleaning wax a little easier for the small and large beekeeper.

For the small beekeeper: (just a few hives)

Easi-Steam

This is a very easy way to melt down whole frames or pieces of comb. You simply put a box with frames (or just the wax) you want to melt out onto the stand with the floor on and place the roof on top. The roof is specialised to fit a steam generator which produces the steam needed to melt the wax. Once on, simply place a bucket or similar container below the spout and watched the contents flow out. Leave the bucket to cool and the wax will separate out on top. Once fully cool, you can remove the wax in a block from the top. Scrape the bottom of the block as this inevitably has a bit of dirt on and then you can use this block to do with what you want.

Wax/Honey Separator

Once you have uncapped your frames, you will have wax and honey everywhere! If you are using a heated uncapping tray you can place one of these wax/honey separators underneath the spout to catch the wax and honey as it melts and drips out from the uncapping tray. It works on the basis that wax always floats to the top, which therefore separates wax from honey. The honey will flow out of the baffle spout and the wax floats to the top to flow off from the spout on the other side. You will have to have two buckets underneath here obviously to catch the wax and honey but using this means they are both already separated and you won’t have to wait for the wax to harden on top to take it off.

Steam Wax Extractor

This is another very easy way to melt down entire combs into clean blocks of beeswax. This wax extractor comes in two sizes, small and large to suit your needs. As with the Easi-steam, the premise is that steam is used to melt the wax down. Once steam is being generated, you simply place the combs inside the extractor and watch as the clean beeswax pours from the spout at the front. Any condensate will come out from the bottom spout so you will need two buckets or other containers to catch both this and the beeswax. Casings and other general dirt will be caught in the mesh insert so as not to clog up the spouts.

For large beekeepers (lots of hives)

For the beekeeper with more hives, the process of uncapping and reclaiming wax can be labour intensive but most will know that it is well worth the effort. Essentially the processes for the large beekeeper are the same for the small, but with time more of the essence, it is imperative to have equipment that does a good job and quickly too.

Konigin Wax Melter and Centrifuge 

Similar to the small and large steam wax extractors, this wax melter can hold up to approximately 40 broken combs. Again, it uses steam energy to heat the wax, however, it can also be used as a centrifuge to spin out frames cold without using the steam generating facility. Made from stainless steel and with sturdy legs, this is a useful piece of equipment for a beekeeper with more than just a few hives.

Cappings Melter and Honey Liquefier

This machine heats honey and wax together using a thermostatically controlled heating element in the lid. It is fan assisted which helps to make sure there is even temperature distribution all over the tank. Up to 20kg of wax/honey can be placed into the grid at any one time. Honey and wax are drained off out of separate spouts, making the next stage in the process easier as you don’t have to wait for the beeswax to cool before removing it from the honey. The tank can also be used as a warming cabinet for liquefying honey in jars or buckets when set to 40°C.