When we bought this property in 2013, we set out a fairly extensive list of improvements to add over time. One of the larger items, and the last item on that list, was building a place to process honey and store bee equipment, we want to free up the garage for use as a garage.
Over the last two weeks, the project has been underway, and is now complete. The structure is 12×20 with a 4×12 section on one end carved out by an interior partition to be used as a warm room during the honey extraction process. The work area is 12×15 and will have the extractor permanently mounted, along with the bottling table and storage for all the relevant equipment. The building is finished, and over the next couple of weeks we will tackle the job of moving all the bee equipment from the garage into the honey house.
It was raining on Saturday, so we did spend most of the day on ‘inside work’, one of those tasks was to insulate the warm room (closet) in the honey house. The building is 2×4 framing, so we put fiberglass insulation between the studs, then stapled reflectex over that to contain the fiberglass and add another R3 of insulation value to the room as a whole. Based on how well the room heated up with two of us working in there after the fiberglass was in, and we were busy putting on the reflectex, it wont take much heat to keep it at a temperature suitable for storing honey boxes waiting on extraction.
The whole build was sized around a ‘serious sideline’ bee endeavor. The warm room can hold 50 medium supers stacked 5 high, which means no lifting of heavy supers up over shoulder height. With the Mann Lake 9/18 extractor, 50 supers is 25 loads in the extractor, so roughly 5 to 6 hours of extracting. A honey pull from 25 hives with 2 supers on each turns into a weekend project, extract on Saturday and we can bottle on Sunday, with an expected yield of between 1000 and 1500 pounds of honey in bottles after weekend of processing. We usually have two of us working when extracting honey, but the setup in this facility will be laid out so it can be a one person job, uncapping the next load of frames while a load spins in the extractor. No more storing honey in 5 gallon buckets till we can get around to setting up for bottling, it’ll always be ready.
For winter storage, the warm closet has enough room to squeeze in 150 supers stacked floor to ceiling. This will be sufficient for us for the next few years.
The interior of the main work room is set up with the washtub, extractor permanently mounted, the bottling table set up under the window, and shelving for equipment storage on the other walls.
It was raining on Saturday, so we did spend most of the day on ‘inside work’, one of those tasks was to insulate the warm room (closet) in the honey house. The building is 2×4 framing, so we put fiberglass insulation between the studs, then stapled reflectex over that to contain the fiberglass and add another R3 of insulation value to the room as a whole. Based on how well the room heated up with two of us working in there after the fiberglass was in, and we were busy putting on the reflectex, it wont take much heat to keep it at a temperature suitable for storing honey boxes waiting on extraction.
The whole build was sized around a ‘serious sideline’ bee endeavor. The warm room can hold 50 medium supers stacked 5 high, which means no lifting of heavy supers up over shoulder height. With the Mann Lake 9/18 extractor, 50 supers is 25 loads in the extractor, so roughly 5 to 6 hours of extracting. A honey pull from 25 hives with 2 supers on each turns into a weekend project, extract on Saturday and we can bottle on Sunday, with an expected yield of between 1000 and 1500 pounds of honey in bottles after weekend of processing. We usually have two of us working when extracting honey, but the setup in this facility will be laid out so it can be a one person job, uncapping the next load of frames while a load spins in the extractor. No more storing honey in 5 gallon buckets till we can get around to setting up for bottling, it’ll always be ready.
For winter storage, the warm closet has enough room to squeeze in 150 supers stacked floor to ceiling. This will be sufficient for us for the next few years.
The interior of the main work room is set up with the washtub, extractor permanently mounted, the bottling table set up under the window, and shelving for equipment storage on the other walls.
