# What are your equipment recommendations for a major upgrade



## CedarHoney (Oct 1, 2016)

After keeping three beehives in my backyard for a number of years, we are considering a major upgrade. 
My son recently found a lot of land nearby on which the owner says we could put up a number of hives. We anticipate building up to about 50 hives. My son has a day job, so we need to keep this to a reasonable size that the two of us can manage on weekends. 

I have always found the bees a pleasure, but honey extraction a pain. In the past I've rented a hand cranked extractor with electric capping knife from our local bee club. Manual extraction would no longer be an option. We will need to get better extraction equipment to automate this as much as possible. I really can't see myself hand cranking frames from 50 or so hives.

What are your recommendations for the whole process, from uncapping, to extracting, filtering, and bottling? 
How to get this thing moving along quickly and efficiently without breaking the bank?


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## aunt betty (May 4, 2015)

Am running close to 50 and using a hand-extractor. (4-frame) 
Your experience with 3 and what it'll be like with 50 is going to be different. 

To give you an idea of what you're heading into I'll spill what I've spent on frames, foundations, squeeze bears, and some little odds and ends in the last 6 months. $4000 in six months and that's me doing it on a strict budget. Spent another $1000 on lumber. 
Bees...I bought two packages, caught swarms, and did some removals. I think I have about $6000 invested and that's with most of my stuff being given to me. Build deep boxes ten at a time. It's about $200 for 100 frames and foundations so I figure I'm spending about $30 per box. You'll need 100 deeps minimum. 

Suppose it takes you 15 minutes per hive to do a good solid inspection. This means you'll need to spend about 12-16 hours per week inspecting hives during swarm season. Your weekends are gone. Forgive me for just being real. 
My original plan was to become a sideliner with 300 hives. Hit a wall at 50. (money)


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## johnbeejohn (Jun 30, 2013)

Better to put ur money in the bees and less on the extraction equipment take care of the bees first then the rest


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## enjambres (Jun 30, 2013)

Fifty honey-producing hives in one location could be a problem, depending on the forage. Available acreage is not the only determinant of capacity.

I live on a very large farm, surrounded by other large farms and woodland (65 % open/35 % woodland). The open area is about 70 % cultivated (corn/beans/hay, including clover) the rest is fallow. I think I have an excellent foraging area, but I'm not sure I would bet the farm on suddenly more than doubling my hive numbers (there are approximately 25 known managed hives within my forage area, plus at lest 6 feral locations). 

Perhaps place 25 colonies (or less) at first and see what yields you can get. Look for a second site away from that area to place another 25. I think when there's a strong flow on, then you can have lots of bees in one place. But unless you plan to move them around, then at the start of the year, and at the end, the baseline forage has to be strong enough to provide for your bees or you will be feeding all your bees every year, instead of rarely.

When you see large concentrations of bees (almonds, pollination, etc.) keep in mind those are migratory operations and the bees don't stay there all year.

Enjambres


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## CedarHoney (Oct 1, 2016)

Ok, so I guess I wasn't clear. My mistake.
My question is to do with the equipment from uncapping to extracting, filtering and bottling. 
I would appreciate your recommendations on the equipment to make this efficient on our time.


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## zhiv9 (Aug 3, 2012)

Have a look at Maxant. A 20 frame extractor, pump, filter, spinner, sump/clarifier and water jacketed bottling tank. For uncapping you could use the Maxant chain uncapper or Kelly jiggle knife.


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## Fusion_power (Jan 14, 2005)

The best option would be to buy out a retiring beekeeper so check craigslist regularly. The minimum required setup is a 4 frame or larger motorized extractor, 2 storage tanks with 100 gallons capacity each, a good uncapping knife, and a capping spinner or capping drain tank. Remember that this is the minimum, improvements will be needed to speed up the process.


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## sakhoney (Apr 3, 2016)

Fusion hit the nail right on the head - Craigslist - While this will be time consuming - you can/will save big bucks going this route. You can't hardly destroy an extractor unless you just run over it with a tractor - so used are a bargain. Hand uncapping is a pain - Look for a side liner uncapper - Maxant website is a good place to get an idea of what to look for


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## Dunkel (Jun 12, 2009)

Focus on getting an extractor. An 18 to 20 frame one, skip the smaller ones if you are going for thirty or more production hives. Find one used if possible but that would be my recommendation.


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## Riverderwent (May 23, 2013)

zhiv9 said:


> Have a look at Maxant. A 20 frame extractor, pump, filter, spinner, sump/clarifier and water jacketed bottling tank. For uncapping you could use the Maxant chain uncapper or Kelly jiggle knife.


+1. The equipment pays for itself. Life is short. Make beekeeping fun.


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## CedarHoney (Oct 1, 2016)

Thanks all. 
At this stage we are consdering going with the 20 frame radial extractor. 


Does anyone have any experience with this uncapper
http://www.brushymountainbeefarm.com/The-Sideliner-Uncapper/productinfo/795/


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## Riverderwent (May 23, 2013)

zhiv9 said:


> Have a look at Maxant. A 20 frame extractor, pump, filter, spinner, sump/clarifier and water jacketed bottling tank. For uncapping you could use the Maxant chain uncapper or Kelly jiggle knife.


Maxant's customer support is remarkable. Twice now I've emailed them in the evening on a weekend while pulling honey and gotten helpful and immediate responses from Jake.


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## My-smokepole (Apr 14, 2008)

Plus one on the 20 frame and buying out a retiring beekeeper. Did both. The retiring beekeeper had a a nine frame. Sold it after a couple years and bought a 20 frame. Now I need to figure out how to work in the honey pump and clarifier.


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## Colobee (May 15, 2014)

:thumbsup::thumbsup: on the Maxant  - 'Best, most reliable equipment I've ever had. Don't scrimp on this aspect or you'll likely regret it sooner than later.


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## D Coates (Jan 6, 2006)

It's taken me 5-6 years to get all of the equipment I've got. Jake at Maxant has been great and I can't recommend his equipment enough. This is what I got major equipment wise and in the order. I'm only at 35 hives but time saving in extraction is VERY important to me as my manpower is limited. I anticipate getting up to 100 hives once I "retire" and I'm using annual profits to buy equipment that's more than I currently need, but will come in handy in the near future.

Dadant 20/36 extractor (used)
100 gallon settling tank (used)
Maxant uncapping tank
Maxant chain uncapper
Maxant capping spinner Jr.
Maxant bottling tanks 600-2 (I got 2 of these, I use one for bottling, one for wax melting and honey bottling)
Nassenheider (German auto bottler. Great unit but I'm too constricted to use and clean quickly. It will come in very nicely when I have my own honey house)
Maxant clarification tank
Maxant pump 400-1 (to pump from the clarifier to the settling tank)
Maxant Spinner Sr. (Sold spinner Jr. and put chain uncapper on top to make it a uncapper spinner combo. No double handling the cappings)
Maxant pump 400-1 (to pump from the spinner Sr. to the clarifier)


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## AstroBee (Jan 3, 2003)

CedarHoney said:


> Thanks all.
> At this stage we are consdering going with the 20 frame radial extractor.
> 
> 
> ...





I think you may be disappointed with the above uncapper. Do your own research, but my recollection is that there are many very mixed reviews of this unit. Particularly given the price, I'd definitely say look elsewhere. Here's a link to the uncapper I went with:

http://www.beesource.com/forums/showthread.php?328713-Review-of-the-Lyson-Manual-Steam-Uncapper


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## texanbelchers (Aug 4, 2014)

D Coates said:


> It's taken me 5-6 years to get all of the equipment I've got. Jake at Maxant has been great and I can't recommend his equipment enough. This is what I got major equipment wise and in the order. I'm only at 35 hives but time saving in extraction is VERY important to me as my manpower is limited. I anticipate getting up to 100 hives once I "retire" and I'm using annual profits to buy equipment that's more than I currently need, but will come in handy in the near future.
> 
> Dadant 20/36 extractor (used)
> 100 gallon settling tank (used)
> ...


Clearly a Maxant fan! Their equipment looks great. I'm currently doing everything with borrowed equipment by hand in buckets. But I'm looking down the road.

I wish they had some suggested layouts/process flows and better application notes online. Maybe I'm missing it, but the only thing I have seen are the 2 packages they list for hobbiest and small sideliner. I know a lot is subjective and if I had more exposure to other beekeepers it probably wouldn't be as necessary. But, the products are made for specific purposes. For example, what does a clarification tank give you that a settling tank won't? And, should the extractor output go to the clarification tank, directly to the filters or back into the capping spinner, like the continuous wax separators need? And, when in practical application is a storage tank better than a larger bottling tank or two? This might not apply since they don't seem to sell a separate "storage tank".

Their site lists the Jr Capping Spinner as 100 hives or less. You upgraded to the Sr, yet have currently have 35 with a target of 100. Was it a capacity issue or was it that the uncapper only fits on the Sr?


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## kilocharlie (Dec 27, 2010)

If you are not moving your bees to other blooms, you won't need a 20-frame extractor. You need a flatbed truck. Then you will have enough honey to warrant the extracting setup. Gotta move the bees to the food as it blooms. If they sit in one place, a 6-frame extractor should do it comfortably.

The double hot knife uncapper has several advantages. You can set the thickness of the resulting empty combs. If you run 9 to a box, it's different than if you run 10 to a box, or 11 for that matter. During the orange nectar flow, nice, clean, parallel-sided combs are a lot easier to handle in the honey house.

Before you buy, do look into Cowen Manufacturing in Parowan, Utah. That's serious automatic equipment, but don't go into it without a peek at Cowen.

www.cowenmfg.com


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## grozzie2 (Jun 3, 2011)

We are on the road from 5 to {not sure final numbers}, just like the OP suggests, but taking a significantly different strategy to get there. We started into bees with 2 hives, and then some years later moved up island, where we bought a rural property that allows us to have more bees. When we started down the road from hobby to serious sideline, we mapped out a business plan with goals on successive years. Ours are revenue oriented goals, not spending goals. We seeded the process with a fixed budget, and our goals are to grow the equipment over time by rolling bee revenue back into equipment. When we reach our final production goals, we'll be sitting on all the equipment paid for, and our initial seed capital returned. That is our finish line, and we had 5 years mapped out to reach that finish line. We are in year 3 now, and on track, but it may be year 6 before we have the seed capital fully returned.

Instead of mapping out in advance what we thought we would need, we did it differently. We just started growing the numbers and doing things the same way we did in the past, then watched for where our time consuming choke points were, purchased the equipment needed to solve that bottleneck.

Right after we moved here, we had honey to extract from 6 colonies. We borrowed the local club 2 frame hand crank extractor (we had been using a club 2 frame motorized before we moved, but this club doesn't have motorized units), and extracted 12 boxes of honey using that. The first purchase was obvious by that evening, and I started shopping for an extractor. We ended up with a Mann Lake 9/18 because it was in the size range we felt we wanted, and available from local supplier at the time. An interesting side effect I realized once we had the new extractor. When using the 2 frame unit, we used to think of pulling honey in terms of 'number of frames'. Now that we have an extractor that will do 18 frames at a pop, we think of pulling honey in terms of 'number of boxes'. Anything less than 10 boxes is hardly worth the setup / cleanup effort these days, that may change a bit when the extractor is permanently set up in a honey house next year.

The next year, when we had finished the first extraction, we were sitting on 600lb of honey to be bottled. My wife does most of the bottling, and she spent some number of evenings working the honey gate from a 10 gallon bottling tank. After 30+ cases of bottles, she was quite fed up with that process. That fall when we were attending the provincial association AGM, I spotted the nassenheider bottling setup on display and being run thru it's paces. We watched it fill a few bottles, and hauled out the visa card. Our seed money had bought the extractor and some boxes, first year revenue bought that bottling machine. Using that setup, we can bottle 500lb of honey in short order with one person taking empties from the cases and filling, then another person putting labels on and putting full bottles back into the cases. It may have seemed extravagant at the time, but a huge side effect, happy wife. 

In the second year, the money got spent on other stuff, boxes, frames, bee escapes, feeders, lots of little things. Another major purchase, we bought a trailer suitable for hauling bees around. The lesson learned that year, if you are going to have bees on other people's property, you need to be prepared to move them, and sometimes that has to happen on short notice. Not only do you need to be able to move them, you need a place to put them after the move. Another thing we did that year, built a proper stand out by the road, it's an honor stand where we sell the honey we produce. In hindsight, that was one of the best things we did, we sell all of our honey thru the stand, we dont waste our saturdays sitting at farmers markets trying to peddle the stuff. another item that chewed up a bit of cash, we had labels professionally printed. Sounds good and cheap to print your own, but, they look cheap, and they are expensive when you start looking at larger numbers of them. When we had it done, first roll has a substantial cost, but adding more to the same run worked out to less than 2c per each, so we had 5000 done in each of the sizes we use.

After our first extraction cycle in year 3, we determined the next bottleneck in the process is uncapping. when we were at the AGM again this year, my wife saw the Lega uncapper on display and being demoed at the booth from the Propolis Etc folks. She had the visa card out before I had a chance to say anything. We think the uncapping bottleneck will be solves with this unit, and as a bonus, since it's a slit uncapper, there are little / no cappings to deal with. We haven't used it yet, but I have set it up and we do have a dozen supers still left to extract, so it'll get a run in the not to distant future. After setting it up, I'm pretty confident it'll do the job nicely for us.

Where we are at now, the major bottleneck has turned out to be storage space. We have a two car garage, and by the time we stack up 50 supers, pile of bee escapes, excluders , a few surplus boxes, extractor, uncapper, numerous and sundry 5 gallon pails, a palette of empty bottles, and all the other little bits that go with beekeeping, there's not enough room for a vehicle anymore. The project next year is a small honey house that will double as storage for the winter season. It'll have one small well insulated warm room, large enough for 50 supers to be placed in advance of an extraction cycle. In the winter, we can use that room to store close to a hundred supers (we can stack empties to the ceiling, full ones wont stack so high). In the larger room we will set up the extraction and bottling equipment into permanent spots, then have enough storage left over to hold empty bottles sufficent for bottling a thousand pounds of honey. The goal is to have it set up so that it's a one person job to process a thousand pounds of honey over a weekend, extracting one day and bottling the next. it takes us about 15 minutes to load, spin, then unload the extractor, so 20 loads is a 5 to 6 hour job, with some time for cleanup, we can extract the thousand pounds in an 8 hour day, which is our goal.

Some other bottlenecks we've bumped into along the way. With 5 colonies out back mixing up a batch of feed for fall feeding is not a big deal, easily done in an hour in the kitchen. That changes dramatically when you need syrup in 30 to 50 gallon batches. Maybe you are lucky enough to have a source for liquid feed in those sizes, around here it's not available, so we mix sugar to make syrup. One of my projects this winter is to build up a more efficient way of mixing syrup.

If I put on my 'been there, done that' hat, recommending how to grow from 5 to a much larger number, I would say, don't get excited and spend your money up front. Just start growing the colony numbers, and wait to see where the real bottlenecks are, otherwise you will imagine various roadblocks that turn out to be minor, and completely miss the issues that turn out to be major during the expansion. When something shows up that you feel is to much hassle / work, then, and only then figure out what equipment you need to buy that solves the problem.

Our goals dont revolve around a specific colony count, they revolve around revenue targets. Our 'finish line' is to be producing 2000 pounds of honey in a season, and be all set up to handle it comfortably over two extraction cycles that last one weekend from combs to bottles. A second part of that goal, all the equipment used to do this has been paid for by revenue generated from the bees. When we get there, we will have a comfortable little sideline stipend coming in, and we will have the right equipment to take as much of the 'work' out of the process as we can.


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## D Coates (Jan 6, 2006)

texanbelchers said:


> Clearly a Maxant fan! Their equipment looks great. I'm currently doing everything with borrowed equipment by hand in buckets. But I'm looking down the road.
> 
> I wish they had some suggested layouts/process flows and better application notes online. Maybe I'm missing it, but the only thing I have seen are the 2 packages they list for hobbiest and small sideliner. I know a lot is subjective and if I had more exposure to other beekeepers it probably wouldn't be as necessary. But, the products are made for specific purposes. For example, what does a clarification tank give you that a settling tank won't? And, should the extractor output go to the clarification tank, directly to the filters or back into the capping spinner, like the continuous wax separators need? And, when in practical application is a storage tank better than a larger bottling tank or two? This might not apply since they don't seem to sell a separate "storage tank".
> 
> Their site lists the Jr Capping Spinner as 100 hives or less. You upgraded to the Sr, yet have currently have 35 with a target of 100. Was it a capacity issue or was it that the uncapper only fits on the Sr?


Grozzie2's post is a great one and I'd recommend it to anyone trying to figure out how to be financially successful as a sideline beekeeper. I went through all of the same pains and have answered many of the challenges in the same or similar ways. Every time I found a bottleneck I figured out a way around it, invariably with equipment, but sometimes brains too. As for how to lay it out, there's no perfect answer. As you'll find, people do their layouts to fit their desires, constraints, and the equipment they have. 

Case in point, a clarification tank warms the honey and allows the wax to float to the top relatively quickly. A storage tank is not heated so the wax and air takes a lot longer to float to the top. I also have a mesh fabric on top of the settling tank to catch anything that makes it through the clarification tank into the pump. The pump pushes the honey above the settling tank where it gravitationally drops onto the mesh and flows through it into the tank. I have no heavy lifting equipment and store my honey in 3-5 gallon buckets. So I use the settling tank to hold the bulk gallons while I'm extracting. Once it's full then I pour the contents into the buckets, put the lids on and set them aside as finished. If I didn't have that I'd be filling buckets in the middle of everything as a continual distraction. Keep in mind I do this all out of my garage twice a year. I set up and break down over a weekend so speed and maneuverability are my hot buttons. All of my equipment is modified to be on wheels. My bottling is in my basement so space is at a premium.

As for the cappings spinner Sr.? I'm all about speed, but I also need to burn off beekeeping income from my operation or the tax man will take it from me. The Cappings Spinner Jr. works great and exactly as advertised. My trouble (bottleneck) was I'd have to stop uncapping, or anything else, to slowly shovel the cappings into the Jr. This would take 15-20 minutes per unload and I would do it 2-3 times per extraction. Shoveling cappings is messy too. If I had the cappings dropping directly into the spinner and the spinners honey pouring into a filter cloth over a tank that's hooked up to a pump I'd be saving around 45 minutes and only have one piece of equipment to move. The chain uncapper only fits on the Sr. I'm combining 2 pieces of equipment (less storage space, less equipment to move) and not have to empty the Sr. of cappings until I'm done with the entire extraction which is a nice bonus. There's also no doubt by the time I (or my widow) sell it off it'll still have around 50% of it's value left though I wrote it off decades (hopefully) prior.


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## Metis27 (Mar 16, 2016)

Fusion_power said:


> The best option would be to buy out a retiring beekeeper so check craigslist regularly. The minimum required setup is a 4 frame or larger motorized extractor, 2 storage tanks with 100 gallons capacity each, a good uncapping knife, and a capping spinner or capping drain tank. Remember that this is the minimum, improvements will be needed to speed up the process.


great idea - I hear alot of folks dive in and then get tired of it after several years. Good luck on your venture ~~


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## grozzie2 (Jun 3, 2011)

D Coates said:


> Case in point, a clarification tank warms the honey and allows the wax to float to the top relatively quickly.


We tried something last year, and did it again this year. It worked well enough that we are incorporating this into our honey house concept. We have 5 gallon buckets that go under the extractor spout. If we extract into a bucket with a honey gate, then put it on a counter to sit, all of the wax floats up overnight. The next day we can put an empty bucket under the gate and open it up, clean honey flows out for a little over 4.5 gallons and we bottled that with no further processing. Collect the leftovers into a single bucket, then we ended up with one bucket that needs further straining etc. With our extractor, each load is roughly one bucket. We've currently got 5 of the buckets with honey gates and a bunch without. We tested this concept by doing a lot of cross pouring and leave it set overnight.

When we build the honey house, it will have the space allocated for storage tanks and clarifiers, but we wont buy any of it right away, we will buy 15 more 5 gallon buckets with honey gates. The work flow when we get started will be like this. During extraction, honey goes strait out of the extractor into those buckets with gates. During bottling, we will have a shelf in place to set one of those buckets so that opening the gate it pours directly into the 10 gallon tank we use to feed the bottler. With this process, there is only one heavy lift, and that will be solved with some form of mechanical assistance to lift buckets from the floor to the shelf.

With this workflow, we can extract one day, then bottle the next day, the stuff will settle / float overnight in between. Our bottling workflow will result in a bucket or two of dirty honey that has all the floating stuff collected together. That can be set to work its way thru strainers, and a day or two later we'll have a little more honey to deal with. We wont bother setting up to bottle that last stuff, it'll go in buckets for sale, we sell a fair number of 2 liter and 5 liter buckets.



> As for the cappings spinner Sr.? I'm all about speed, but I also need to burn off beekeeping income from my operation or the tax man will take it from me.


This is what made the slit uncapper look so appealing to us, no cappings of any significance to deal with, that takes a huge hassle factor out of the process. For the last couple years we have uncapped using the little spiked rollers, and once we figured out the correct way to use them (dont press, then it just gums up quickly, instead, run it up and down twice with little / no pressure, it pulls itself thru the caps enough to get the job done), we found there was very little wax to deal with. At the same time, constantly cleaning the little rollers does get to be a significant pain when you have a significant amount of boxes to do. With two of the rollers we can get 18 frames uncapped for the next extractor load, but then they have to be cleaned before starting the next batch.

As far as hiding the income from the tax man, that's all fine and dandy as long as we have more equipment on the wish list that we can purchase with 'before tax' dollars, but, we also want to reach a point where we can take some of that income and put it into the 'discretionary spending' account. to get there, it has to pass thru the tax man's filter between 'gross revenue' and 'spendable' lines. But this is an area where different folks will have far different circumstances and objectives, and it really depends on your personal circumstances and the tax rules in the jurasdiction where you live. My own philosophy is a little different than a lot of folks in this respect. If at the end of the year, the 'net taxable' line says zero many seem to consider that a success, I consider it a total failure. What's the point of doing the hard work if you aren't going to reap some reward at the end ? During a startup phase, re-investing is normal, but at some point there needs to be a bottom line that rewards one for the effort. 

We have that point well defined in our plan, it has a timeframe and a number attached. We didn't choose the number arbitrarily, it came from a conversation with the kids shortly after we moved into the new home. The kids said 'no way you can make 2 acres productive enough to pay for itself', my response was 'you just watch me'. My wife and I sat down, made a plan, seeded the farm account with a modest injection of startup capital, then put our backs into it. We are on track to reach the goal. The specific goal we set, re-invest for 5 years into growth, and at the end of that period, net revenue will be sufficient to cover a mortgage on this property if it was purchased with a minimum down payment on a 25 year amortization. We have a quarter acre of garlic as one cash crop, a growing flock of chickens, and a growing apiary. Combined, we are on track to reach the goal. We are not measuring success with make believe or otherwise made up sets of numbers. We have a very specific number that must be in the 'taxable income' line at the end of 5 years, on a tax return filed with the Canada Revenue Agency. For us, that is the only metric that defines success, bottom line on the tax return. Any other number folks spout forth is just a fairy tale if it's not reflected on the tax return.


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## zhiv9 (Aug 3, 2012)

As far as layout goes, one thing that I tried that didn't work is filtering right from the clarifier. Jake thought it would work and it did when all the stars alighned, but if the honey is a little too cool or the moisture content a little low the filter would back up during extracting. You need some method of settling before filtering.


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## D Coates (Jan 6, 2006)

grozzie2 said:


> As far as hiding the income from the tax man, that's all fine and dandy as long as we have more equipment on the wish list that we can purchase with 'before tax' dollars, but, we also want to reach a point where we can take some of that income and put it into the 'discretionary spending' account.


I think we're on the same page. I may be talking semantics but it's not considered hiding in the US. Any equipment I may need to handle a bottleneck I've noticed I buy outright to reduce taxable income on the honey business. I still report all taxable income from the business to the IRS/state and the money that's made it through the tax man's hands for the past few years is still accruing in the beekeeping business checking & savings. At this point I do not need the income. But I'm buying everything I do need now and in the foreseeable future so I don't have to buy it when I'm "retired". I'll be using beekeeping profits as my discretionary spending (play) money at that time.



zhiv9 said:


> As far as layout goes, one thing that I tried that didn't work is filtering right from the clarifier. Jake thought it would work and it did when all the stars alighned, but if the honey is a little too cool or the moisture content a little low the filter would back up during extracting. You need some method of settling before filtering.


I've had luck doing exactly that but I've got a 2' perforated inverted cone with the 4' of mesh filter material over it so maybe my surface area is large enough to get away with it. By the end of the harvest the filter fabric was pretty loaded so I bought another 2 4'x4' so I could pull off and replace as needed. I think they were $6 per from China off of Ebay shipping included.


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## zhiv9 (Aug 3, 2012)

D Coates said:


> I've had luck doing exactly that but I've got a 2' perforated inverted cone with the 4' of mesh filter material over it so maybe my surface area is large enough to get away with it


That's probably it. I am using their 200-2 filter - perhaps the bags are a finer material than the filter fabric on the cone? I know that once they are full of honey and backed up, they are really heavy and ackward to move. The input is 1.5" and the overflow is 1" - you can guess what happens if you don't notice honey flowing in the overflow soon enough.


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## D Coates (Jan 6, 2006)

zhiv9 said:


> you can guess what happens if you don't notice honey flowing in the overflow soon enough.


*AAAHHHHH!!!!* ..as a gallon or 2 spills on the floor.... 

I'm laughing with you not at you as I've gotten distracted while filling a bucket more than once. Once it's spilled, it's amazing how it just keeps spreading out and making things slick yet sticky.


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## zhiv9 (Aug 3, 2012)

D Coates said:


> *AAAHHHHH!!!!* ..as a gallon or 2 spills on the floor....
> 
> I'm laughing with you not at you as I've gotten distracted while filling a bucket more than once. Once it's spilled, it's amazing how it just keeps spreading out and making things slick yet sticky.


The worst part is it makes no noise at all as it spills


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## texanbelchers (Aug 4, 2014)

This is a great thread. Thanks for all the input. I'm still borrowing a 2 frame hand crank, but next year may be the last for that. My wife's arm got tired... :no:


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## PaulT (Sep 2, 2015)

Well written. Great insight and logical planning. Thank you.


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## sqkcrk (Dec 10, 2005)

johnbeejohn said:


> Better to put ur money in the bees and less on the extraction equipment take care of the bees first then the rest


Amen


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## D Coates (Jan 6, 2006)

zhiv9 said:


> The worst part is it makes no noise at all as it spills


Amen. It's almost like it's too quiet. You glance around, fat dumb and happy, then suddenly see the mistake. The jolt is as pleasant as a hot poker placed in one's nether region. I can laugh at myself now but it wasn't funny then and I lost 20 minutes cleaning up. It's why I added a couple pumps in my set up. Hard learned silent lesson.


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## kilocharlie (Dec 27, 2010)

Grozzie2 - I just gave this thread 5 stars. Great input, and congrats on your success.


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## sakhoney (Apr 3, 2016)

Grozzie 2- I have in the past ran into storage issues and the quickest way out I have found - hook on to either one of my goose neck trailers - depending on the size I'm going after - run to Houston and have them set a sea can/freight container on said trailer - Haul back to house and unload. I currently have 6 x 20 footers and fixing to go get a couple more looks like.


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