Tip of the Month
Richard Wahl
Many hobby beekeepers strain their honey into five-gallon buckets with a bottom faucet for later bottling. Allowed to sit for a day or two, any bubbles and even very small bits of wax, will float to the top. When sitting flat on a counter surface there will be a point where those surface bubbles or wax begin to flow through the bucket faucet and into the honey jars. This honey “foam” does not affect the honey contents of the jar but does not have the most appealing appearance when sitting on the top of the honey. In order to get all but the last pound or two out of the bucket without surface foam I have used a tilting platform before the honey surface reaches the top of the bucket faucet opening. We reserve the last jar or two from the bucket for ourselves and all the jars for sale are free of this surface foam resulting in the top of the honey appearing as clear as the rest of the jar.
Needed for assembly:
- Two 1 ft. x 1 ft. pieces of ¾ inch plywood
- A two-foot-long piece 1½ inch x ¾ inch pine board
- A two-foot-long piece of 3½ inch x ¾ inch pine board
- Wood glue
- Two dozen ¾ inch brads
- Two 2½ inch utility hinges with flat head screws
- Four 2-inch wood screws
- One basic cabinet handle (optional)
To make this tilting bucket platform, I purchased a two foot by two-foot piece of ¾ inch plywood from a local big box store. They often carry sizes smaller than the standard four by eight-foot sheets. I cut this two by two-foot sheet exactly in half in both directions resulting in four, one by one foot pieces which is just perfect to make two of these tilting platforms. The remaining instructions result in one tilting platform. I then found a two-foot piece of 1½ inch x ¾ inch pine board in my scrap box from which I cut the corner angle holders and the one-foot-long smaller riser. From the two-foot 1½ x ¾ inch board cut two pieces with 45° angles at both ends with the long side measuring 4½ inches. These get screwed to the top one by one foot plywood board as front bucket braces. The wood screws will need to be counter sunk a bit to get a good grab on the plywood. A bit of good wood glue will also help secure them on the bucket platform corners. Cut the remaining piece to a one-foot length and this becomes the smaller riser.
A two-foot piece of 3½ inch x ¾ inch pine board, also left over from another project, was used to make the spacer cleats and the wider riser. Cut a one-foot length from the 3½ x ¾ inch board and this will be the taller riser. The remaining one-foot-long piece will need to be ripped into seven one-foot-long pieces just under ⅜-inch-wide strips to use as spacers on the upper and lower pieces of one by one foot plywood. Two of these spacers are brad nailed and glued to the bottom front and rear edges of the top plywood platform. The remaining five pieces are glued and brad nailed to the top of the underlying plywood piece with the first spaced 2½ inches in from the front. Since board widths can vary slightly from piece to piece, use the 3½ inch wide riser as the spacer when nailing each subsequent spacer strip on the bottom board. If you are using new wood, you might wish to let it dry out completely for a month or two as there will be some shrinkage which will hinder a tight fit when using the riser at a later date. Hinges are fastened to the top and bottom plywood pieces to make the top movable while still attached to the bottom piece.
A basic cabinet handle can be added to the rear of the top plywood square to aid in tilting the top board (see photos on previous page).
As the exiting honey reaches the top of the faucet, begin tilting the bucket by moving the riser nearer to the front spacers. Initially the smaller riser can be used until much less of the honey in the bucket remains. If tilting the bucket too far with the taller riser too soon, the bucket may tip as its center of gravity is shifted too far forward for the degree of tilt being used. Using this tilting board, all but the last pound or two of honey can be removed from the bucket without the surface foam ending up in the top of one of your honey jars. And those second two pieces of plywood were easily made into a second tilting board which was given to a beekeeper friend.
Richard Wahl
Richmond, Michigan
