hard time pouring.... please help...

[Chef Isaac]

Seems like everytime I take a 5 gallon bucket of honey and pour in into the botteling bucket, I make a big mess. I do not want to stand there and wait for all the honey to come out but when I try anything else, it makes a big mess.

Anyone have any tricks?

I know they sell the set up that can invert the bucket over another buckets...

anyone ever try this?

Any advice or suggestions???

[David Stewart]

Not trying to be a smart #$@ but have you considered a honey gate installed on your bucket? Draining is much easier than pouring....

David

[livetrappingbymatt]

bought a gizmo from brushy that holds pails to drain into 55s,that works well.
bob

[dcross]

Have it warm!

One hand on the handle, one on the bottom of the pail, dump most of it out. When the pail is light enough to hold with one hand, stick two fingers in where the handle attaches and crouch down and use a spatula in the other hand to clean it out.

[Chef Isaac]

Guess that would be an easy way dcross!

David: Not all buckets have honey gates. The main bucket I use to pour into the bottles does have a honey gate on it however, the other buckets do not so when I want to pour honey and fill orders.... and if needed, I take a honey bucket, pop the lid and pour it into the honey bucket that has the honey gate in it.... make sence?

[dcross]

I've had a lot of oppurtunities to practice that technique with "cheeze"

[Hillside]

When it's time to get new buckets, try the square 60 pound containers. They can be fitted with a honey gate. The honey gate screws on the regular cap threads, so you can have one honey gate and use it on any number of containers. It's very nice for a small operator.

http://www.mannlakeltd.com/catalog/page68.html

Other suppliers have the same kind of setup.

[Chef Isaac]

hillside:

stupid question but do you extract straight into the container? The container seems like a nig plastic jug, eh?

[Curtis]

I use a stout spatula and scrape the sides. Makes for fast clean up.
Curtis

[Dan Williamson]

Chef,

Last year I used the square jugs. Here's how I did it.

I would put a 5gal bucket with double sieve filter on top and open the extractor gate and give it a rough filter. Then I would take the 5 gal bucket of honey and pour it into an uncapping tank (Mann Lake). The bottom of the top section has excluder material which I would wrap in nylon filter cloth and then pour the bucket into there and let it filter.

The bottom of the uncapping tank had a honeygate and I could fill the square jugs. I got the square jugs (also 5 gal) from Dadant with a honey gate. When one jug is empty you move the gate to the next one. I used it for about 700lbs of honey last year. I moved to a bigger set up with honey pump etc this year but my old set up worked pretty good.

The pail holders that fit on the side of buckets etc are the only way to go... sometimes it takes a while for the honey to drain and its a pain to stand there and hold them.

If you have buckets, you can buy the honey gates that fit the buckets and install your own. Its always nice to have several around.

Personally I'd go the square jug route with honey gate. Extract into your bucket with honey gate and then set it up higher so you can fill the square jugs with it.

[Hillside]

hillside:

stupid question but do you extract straight into the container? The container seems like a nig plastic jug, eh?

Hardly a stupid question!

I think you could extract directly into the cube, but there wouldn't be an easy way to screen the honey if you did that.

I extract into a regular five gallon pail. A honey gate is fitted into the pail and I use one of those pail shaped screens on top. I have two pails like that, so I extract into one while the other is draining into the cube.

The cube containers that I use have an air valve up by the handle, so when you are draining honey out, you can open the valve and everything flows nicely. Also, because they're square, when you stack them on a pallet, there isn't any wasted space between the jugs.