Beekeeping: Harvesting Honey with a Solar Wax Extractor versus a Solar Wax Melter

By Brian Rogers, Great Falls MT:

We had a question on this blog from Monique in South Africa.

Monique Budge: Hello, Thanks for the information! I'm a new beekeeper from South Africa and I would like to build my own solar wax extractor. I think this would be similar to the crush and strain method but you would be able to better use the melted wax. Do you foresee any issues with this?”

Wax Extractor Versus a Solar Wax Melter... What's the Difference?

Hi Monique!  Wow, a solar wax extractor (one that melts wax and honey), rather than just a solar wax melter (one that melts wax only) is a great exercise in efficiency and ingenuity at first glance!  So, in the interest of brainstorming this concept let’s see if what we would get in reality is the same as what we envision.  As with anything going from theory to practice, we need to make sure we can come up with the right issues to weigh before we can decide if it’s the right decision for us.

So, let’s dig into this together and see what issues we can foresee…

We’ll start out with walking through how the current “normal” crush and strain process works first, just as a reference to get us warmed up.

Crush and Strain Method with a Solar Wax Melter

Let’s go out to the hive and take our hypothetical frame of honey out and bring it inside with us.  With the traditional crush and strain process, we cut or scrape that honeycomb off the frame.  We walk back outside, put the frame back in the hive and tell the bees, “Refill please!” as we walk back inside.

We get the bowl and mash up the honeycomb opening up all those little ‘bottles’ of wax-sealed honey so that it will drain effectively through our strainer or filtering device. Now we take that big glob of mashed honeycomb and honey and put it in a strainer with a clean bowl under it, and let gravity work for us, mashing up the glob a little bit every so often until the stream from strainer to the bowl stops.

Once the honey is removed and bottled, we are left with a bunch of sticky wax in the strainer.  That wax can now be put into a solar melter that puts the sun and gravity to work for us.  The wax glob becomes liquid and pours into a container below creating layers or ‘stratified’ contents where the residual honey, contaminants, wax, water all make separate layers.  When it’s done draining, we pop out the wax, discard the other layers and we have a good block of recently sun-bleached wax ready for rendering, candles, etc.

So that’s the short version where we have honey and wax as outputs to the system.  Let’s try the same with our test solar wax extractor…

What a Solar Wax Extractor Setup Looks Like

We get the same frame of honey from the hive, we crush and we get the same glob of wax and honey, but this time we put it in our solar wax extractor to let the sun and gravity do their thing in one easy step.

We watch as the temp rises in the melter; 90°F and the honey is dripping down from the glob into the container at the bottom.  100°F and the honey starts pouring.   110°F and the honey thins and starts pouring faster.  120°F, 130°F, 140°F, still has us watching honey pouring from the glob to the container until it stops and slows to a crawl.  Hopefully we did a good enough job opening all those cells to let the honey escape, right!?!

Finally, the wax-melting magic starts around 150°F as the wax turns to liquid and pours down into the container to create a floating layer on top of the hot honey.  After all of the wax drains, and it cools off, we open the melter and CAREFULLY grab our container of everything.  Whew, it’s still warm!

First, we have to get the layer of wax off the top so we cut/pry/pop it loose, trying very carefully not to tip or invert the container because we don’t want the honey to pour out.  Now we have our block of wax just like the first way.  We remove the top layer of contaminants always present that’s just under the wax, and we have a nice thick layer of honey which we pour into bottles!

Congratulations, both methods produce honey and wax and it seems the solar wax extractor is a success because that was so much easier!

How Heat and Extraction Method Impact your Honey

Here’s where we notice that the honey is considerably darker, and thicker, than the normal method.  It also has a different flavor too!  Same source, same mash, same bottles, only the method changed. So, what gives?

In the normal crush and strain method which utilizes the solar wax melter, the mashed glob of honey never goes above room temperature. In the solar wax extractor, the temperature of the honey got to 165°F!

So, what difference does it make if the honey got hot?  Remember, honey is not just food, but a medicine that’s sought after the world over for its healing qualities. It bears repeating that those wonderful qualities of raw honey are gone if it’s heated over about 117°F -120°F.

All those great enzymes inside raw honey are killed during pasteurization (heat over 117°F) after that, the honey ends up as an inert sweetener.  This means we have to go back and ask ourselves: what’s our honey ‘why’? Why do we want to harvest honey?

If our intent was to leave the honey in its natural state to be used as both a food and a medicine, then we must choose an extraction method which does not heat the honey past the point where the enzymes are killed. If we’re happy with an inert sweetener, then we can choose either method. However, we do not want people smearing an inert sweetener on burns the same way they could with the medicinally-intact, raw honey.

We’ll also still have to carefully watch out for the solar extractor method because if it gets too hot, we end up with caramelized honey (or burnt honey) that not even a starving bear would eat.

Note: Pasteurized honey is also bad for feeding back to bees as they have trouble processing that overheated, inert sweetener-honey.  So, if you need to feed honey back to the bees (unlikely in South African winters, but hey let’s cover everywhere here) giving them unpasteurized honey is just fine, but feeding them pasteurized honey (the solar extractor method) is not.

Do you Sell Your Honey “Raw and Unpasteurized”?

There’s a resurgence of customers looking specifically for raw, unpasteurized honey for the reasons mentioned above.  People are getting more and more educated on how the supermarket honey doesn’t provide the medicinal value they thought they were getting.

Basically, there is a growing market demand for honey that is extracted from the standard crush and strain method rather than a version that requires heating the honey over 117°F like the solar extraction method. That tends to tip the scales toward sticking with the normal crush and strain, rather than a solution that risks the coveted “raw” categorization of honey.

Side note: Depending on the temperature the wax reaches in either method, it can discolor and range from light to dark, especially if the temperature during melting exceeds 185°F for any length of time.  Expect variations in wax coloration based on temps, sunlight, clouds, time, etc.

Final Thoughts on Solar Extraction versus Solar Wax Melters

It’s great to explore other options when it comes to beekeeping and honey extraction and, as always, if it works and still meets your needs then go ahead! If you were already aware of the issues outlined above, ad you accepted them, then this hypothetical walk-through should only help reinforce your decision to try it out!

That’s one of the great things about beekeeping, you get to try all kinds of variations and test what the bees (and you) do (and don’t) like.  If you hadn’t anticipated those things, then this exercise may have just saved you a bunch of time, money, and/or effort!

Either way, thanks for the question and good luck with your beekeeping!