Delicious honey will soon be made at Washington State University’s Honey Bee & Pollinator Research, Extension, and Education Facility in Othello after a large equipment move.
The WSU pollinator research program continues to move equipment and materials from the Pullman campus to the Othello location, the latest being the honey extractor. It’s a large piece of machinery that separates honey from the honey combs.
“It took a lot of work getting it disconnected and loaded up,” said Brandon Hopkins, assistant research professor in WSU’s Department of Entomology.
The extractor consists of four main components bolted to the concrete floor when it was installed 20 years ago, Hopkins said.
The machinery was disassembled, loaded onto a wooden structure to support its weight, and trucked on a large trailer for the two-hour journey west. It’s now at Othello, awaiting installation.
“We still have to make some decisions,” Hopkins said. “We’ll ideally cut a giant hole in the concrete to install a heated pump. We never had that in the original location, and it’s a standard piece of equipment for honey extraction. It will definitely make the process easier for us when we’re collecting honey.”
Hopkins hopes to have everything in place by the time the team begins extracting honey next summer. The team moved the equipment after they finished bottling the 2021 honey.
The honey is extracted once or twice a year when the bees fill boxes of honeycomb. The team removes rectangular frames of comb, leaving some behind for the bees. Frames are spun at high speeds in a centrifuge, extracting honey. The new heated pump allows gravity to do more of the work, as the honey is pumped higher to filter out impurities.
The new building has more space and is closer to a large population of WSU bees and important pollinator-dependent agriculture. The team has about 200 hives near Othello. The extractor will have its own space and won’t get in the way of other experiments and work being done, as it did in the previous location.
Honey is sold at Ferdinand’s Ice Cream Shoppe on the WSU Pullman campus, and online. Proceeds support the bee program, allowing students to work as they learn about bees, and funding infrastructure that allows research to happen.