Radial Extractors
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A radial honey extractor spins honey out of both sides of the frame at the same time. (Photo by Charlotte Ekker Wiggins)
Radial Extractors
August in North America is when beekeepers start sharing capped honey frames among their bee colonies and extracting the extra frames to bottle for use and/or selling.
One of the tools beekeepers use is a honey extractor, a barrel-shaped gadget with a basket where honey frames sit before spinning to easily remove the stored honey.
Over the years, I’ve observed beekeepers have a hard time distinguishing between the two major types of honey extractors: tangential and radial.
Here’s an easy way to distinguish between the two. Radial, in the photo, is like the spokes of a wheel with the frame edges facing outward. When the frames are spun, honey is quickly removed from both sides.
A tangential extractor has the foundation facing outwards. To extract honey from both sides, the frames have to be turned once so that the honey will be spun out of both frame sides.
These honey extractors come as small as two frame extractors up to huge commercial ones that handle dozens of frames at the same time.
They also offer the hand-cranked versus the motorized options.
What you purchase depends on how many honey frames you expect to extract every year.
