BEEKEEPING LEARNING CENTER > EQUIPMENT USAGE, EXPERIMENTATION, HIVE PLANS, CONSTRUCTION TIPS AND TOOLS

Hive Melter / Sterilizer (bench-top)

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ZombieDaveIsVampireBill:
Hello all, this is my first post to this forum. I am a bee keeper of 3 years now, and have been learning a lot and refining the way i do things.

I am writing this post because I have had a problem with wax moths and having to clean out hives for reuse. Doing this by hand is a real pain, so I have done some research into a better method, and I think I have come up with something  that suits me a little better than what i have found so far. I have take some inspiration from youtube for some designs using steam, but I have not seen a post HERE yet for a general "hive melter/sterilizer".

My design differs from others I have seen in that it uses a hot air gun rather than piping in steam. And it is a little smaller. For my setup I have taken a heat gun for wire-shrink-wrap, but a hair drier would work just as well. my design is a little smaller than the one in the link, but it has the advantage of being able to run inside on the bench top while i do other things.

With my design, I can melt 1 or 2 hive bodies at a time, and can bring a box temperature to above 220F in about 20 minutes. The comb all melts and the wax runs down the sloped floor and out the drain hole. I have insulated the bottom with spray foam to help keep the heat in. Plastic foundation will melt and be destroyed, but usually stays behind and do not contaminate the wax. I do however end up with plenty of grubs mixed in with the wax, so I boil the wax afterwards to help clean it up a bit.

The other possible advantage of a heat gun over steam is that you do not expose the wood to high levels of damaging moisture, which might in the long run add a few years of life to equipment.

Apologies I did not think to take any pictures until i had the melter mostly assembled. I also did not take any of it in use, I will add more pictures the next time i need to clean out some hives.

little john:
Welcome to the forum, Z-Dave.

There's an anti-spam precaution here which prevents photographs from being displayed by newcomers - hence the blank sections of your post (in my browser anyway - Firefox).

For anyone who wants to see these photographs - a workaround is to click on 'Quote' as if you were going to reply using that format, when the links to 10x 'imgur.com' pics will be displayed.  Simply copy and paste each link in turn into your browser to see them.

Dave - an excellent idea - thanks for posting.  I can immediately see that existing solar melters could easily be modified to incorporate a heat gun, should it ever become necessary to recover wax or clean frames 'out of season'.

Many thanks for posting about this technique - it's a good one.
LJ
 

BeeMaster2:
Welcome to the Beemaster Z-Dave.
Looks like a good idea, I like it.
Jim

BeeMaster2:
By the way, your photos are showing up on Mozilla Firefox.
Jim

divemaster1963:
it's showing up on my standard brouser also. i have windows 10.

john

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