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I have used the SHF uncapper every season since I made the video and it has uncapped thousands of frames. I have been very happy with it. Due to my growth in business and decline in health, I just purchased the Lyson Steam Uncapper last month to help speed up my honey harvest operation. The SHF is still the best bang for that buck for a hobbyist or small sideliner. The Lyson was $4,000+ shipping and all. That was a big step.

Same hole size

Cleaning can be a pain. I let it sit out and let the bees and the sun work on it. Once you have nothing left but the dried and crusty cappings stuck in the roller bars, you can take an air compressor and blow it out. Doesn’t work great when wet and sticky. If no air compressor, I take a single chop stick and manually pull all of it out. It takes some time, but overall, a great time saver.

Thank You!

Yes, I do. It has held up well, but I have purchased some spare bands just in case it gives. I still use it exclusively. Extracted roughly a 1 1/2 tons last season and will be doing roughly the same this season. Still very happy with it. There probably are more callings in the extractor than with a hot knife. That is because you are really just breaking the callings open with the SHF while you are removing them with the knife. I have about six 400-micron filters that I keep rotating in order to speed up the process. I also got a settling tank and pump this year so I will be experiencing with that this season.

Cappings auto corrected to “callings” above.

Indeed it would! Even uncapping with the SHF, I don’t try to lift the basket out. I scoop out the capping from the basket into a bucket.

It seems that it would, but inverted mason jars containing sugar syrup is a very common method of feeding bees. Very small pin holes are made in the lids. When inverted, a vacuum is created that keeps the syrup from running out of the holes. The bees stick their proboscis in the holes to gather the syrup.

It causes a vacuum. It's like pouring gas out of a gas tank without the vent open. The gas pours out very slow. Syrup water is even thicker so it greatest a tighter suction.

Salty Dog: yes you can and it generally works fine. However you should take extra care to make certain that you have seated the jar deep into the opening against the screen. Otherwise, the bees will not be able to reach the holes with their proboscis. I have tried both screened and unscreened holes. I prefer to leave them unscreened, but screened has it’s obvious advantage.

Correct. I guess I did not consider that because I always have some laying around and can be repurposed. The hive body over the jars is not necessary, but I recommend it to prevent robbing in the event you do not have a tight seal where your jar is seated.

That was the last harvest I made without one. You are very correct.

I don’t create a lot of wax with the Simple Harmony Farms uncapper. I am sure I would consider it if I had a chain uncapper. Also, I have never actually seen a wax spinner in action. Does the honey come out clean enough to be bottled or does it still need to be strained?

Andy: I am not a physics/science guy so I will answer the best that I can. The holes are very small. Also, the contents are a fairly viscous sugar/syrup solution. When you turn the jar upside down, a vacuum forms in the jar and the sugar syrup does not run out into the hive. Another reason I recommend buying these lids instead of making them yourself. You want to make sure the holes are the right size.

“17 dollars, but that price wii vary” what a difference a year makes.

@@patrickmccalman207 I have a similar set up but I do not invert the jar through the hole.I invert it over a couple of laths. Quite bit of syrup runs out on top of my board. I am sure the bees probably clean it up but I don't know the outcome when it runs down on the frames. I am just stating out so I may be concerned for nothing.

it will only come out when the bees want it, its called a vacuum.

Tom: you have to watch them really closely. A 4 frame Nuc builds up quickly. I am usually taking them off within 3 weeks or supering them with another 4 frame Nuc. Mated queen works best, but introducing a queen cell works well too. I don’t recommend it, but I have allowed the Nuc to raise its own queen from eggs and larvae. But they need to be packed with nurse bees to try that. Still iffy, but I got mated queens out of it.

Thanks WR. Yes, you definitely need to be very aware of your climate and you run a risk of trying to get too early of a start. My hives are located about 10 miles north of the Florida line, so I can typically start very early.

Thank you! Glad you liked it

simpleharmonyfarms.com/uncapper

John: Yes. The new queen less hive can (and will) make a queen. But that is not the way a would have liked to do it. Last year, I timed it correctly and made a starter/finisher hive and grafted queens that were timed for the Fly Back Splits. So I had queen cells that I had raised that I placed into the Queenless hive of the fly-back split. This worked well for me. This spring snuck up on me though. I had lost 3 hives to swarms before March 1, and I had to go ahead and do my Fly-Back splits early. I did not have the time to raise queens. So the queenless hives of the Fly Back splits raised their own queens via emergency cells. It works, but not ideal and not the way I prefer to do it. I have since grafted queens that are currently being mated in mating nucs and I should have about a dozen by April 3. These queens will basically be "spare parts" for any queen problems I have with my production colonies. The spare queens that I do not use, will be graduated to 5 frame nucs and then, if still not needed elsewhere, I will make a full production colony out of them. That is my plan. But things rarely go as planned for me. Hope this answers your question.

Hi Patrick, Thank you for your reply. I forgot to thank you for the great video, it was very informative. I initially wrote to you because this method has interested me for a while and it's surprising how little is written about this simple, effective, and flexible method. I figure that it can be used for building comb, swarm control, swarm prevention, or increase. I wrote to you because I'm considering using it for increasing my apiary this year. I like its simplicity; once the queen has been found, she gets moved right back to the original location and the field bees take care of her while everything else stays at the new site...a no brainer for a hobbyist like myself. No worrying or looking around for eggs and larvae, just let the bees sort it all out themselves. In the past I've tried walk-away splits and have had mixed results because as a simple backyard beekeeper, I don't have access to an outyard to move my splits to. My recipe for the splits was two frames of food, three frames of brood, and a couple extra shakes of nurse bees. I than left the bees to make a queen but many of the bees would often drift back to the parent colony and the nuc would then just piddle along not doing too much. Other than its simplicity, what I find so attractive about this method is the nurse bees make the queen cell and from what I understand, nurse bees are better at doing this than field bees. After I perform this split, my plan would be to feed them, wait for 7 days, and then open up the hive to look for queen cells to make up nucs with. I know emergency cells are not considered to be as good as swarm cells for producing queens but since I don't graft, I thought that this might be a suitable alternative. A friend of mine who comes from Europe told me that this is the preferred way to perform a split with beekeepers. In your opinion, could this be a viable way to produce quality queens for a backyard beekeeper like myself? Thanks for your time and attention. Be well, John Gallagher

Mike: Nucs go on top. I use the board primarily according to Method 1 detailed in Wally Shaw's paper on Snelgrove the many uses of a snelgrove board - Welsh Beekeepers ...www.wbka.com › wp-content › uploads › 2013/06 › The-Many-Uses.... Shaw does not discuss the use of nucs. That is a modification to his paper. The manipulation can be done with both a single box or two nucs. I think this is why I also talked about putting a deep ON Top of the board. If you have a particularly strong hive, with lots of resources and bees, those are prime candidates for placing 2 nucs on top. A weaker hive that you want to split may warrant only a single box. As to the queen rearing portion of the manipulation, I will refer to the Wally Shaw article. There are many options.

Thank you. Definitely Lauri's recipe.

Bee Bob: This is going to be a long response. Sorry in advance. I had the exact concern that you did last year. That was a relatively small run (58 frames) in the last week of August. I put the frames back on the hives for about a week. The bees “cleaned them up” but the faces of the comb were wavy. So, they sort of built them back, but I believed they were largely ignoring their supers because there was no flow and they had no incentive to make wax and build back. So I pulled off my wavy super frames for the year and waited until this year. This season I ran a total of 310 frames through the SHF uncapper in two pulls on June 2, 2019 and July 7 2019. (1,200# of honey). I put the combs back on the hives after both pulls. Within a week each time, the combs were repaired and the bees back in business storing nectar. There was no wavy or half-built out comb. When I saw this, it made me going from really liking the product, to loving it. I have a theory which I cannot prove so take it for what it is worth: The “blades” of the uncapper do not sever the wax from the comb. It seems to crush and displace the capping while leaving it in place. I believe (and I have believed a lot of things in beekeeping that have turned out to be false) that when the frames are returned back to the hives, the bees can chew these crushed-but-attached capping with their mouthparts and reuse the wax to rebuild the damage caused to their combs. IF . . . IF . . . IF . . . This is in fact the case, that is an ENORMOUS amount of energy and food stores saved by not having to create all that new wax for repairs. I have now uncapped over 360 frames with the SHF uncapper. I am a bigger fan today than when I made that video almost a year ago. BTW, I do not know these people (SHF people), have never been contacted by them, and I paid full price for the uncapper. Never received a dime. Just a beekeeper trying to work out a bottle neck in my process. My uncapper now waits on my extractor (opposite problem from the problem that was solved by the uncapper). So my next purchase is either a Maxant MUTT uncapping tank, or just buy a second 18 frame extractor to speed up the process. Sorry for the length. Happy beekeeping!

@@patrickmccalman207 Awesome! Thank you so much for the information. I've seen one type where the person hand cranks the frame through but has to do it numerous times to crush the cappings. That thing was over 1200.00. A bit too pricy for my operation. I use a friends certified facility which is basically a shed. Not a lot of room for uncapping using a knife. Also, I have to take all the cappings home that day and drain it for the next day. This will rid me of that aggravation. I guess the only negative to this whole thing is no beeswax for candles or other wax products. Big deal. I've got a hundred pounds of wax sitting in storage for when I actually start making candles. So, to your long and very informative response to me, I'm leaving a positive response to you. I've also subscribed. Thanks again.

Extract a couple thousand pounds of honey using a capping scratcher and get back to us on that...

@@larrybenedict4984 Good point Larry, but most of us don't extract thousands of pounds. Maybe in a lifetime.

Jim Cole Good point, but some of us do. And those that do may not find a chain decapper at $1000+ so economical either.

It’s worth at least double that amount

I was kind of wondering about that too!! Ha Ha, Woof Woof!

dewrusmas Thank you for the link. I had not heard of a Morris Board. It seems to have a metal slide component and is used for queen rearing. Looks like a blend between a double screen board and a Cloake board. I think various types of division boards existed back into the 19th century. Snelgrove's book was originally published in 1934 and his board was designed for swarm prevention. My intention is to use if for increase while diverting foragers back to the production hive. I just found an article on the Morris Board and look forward to reading up on it. Thanks for the link.