During the meeting held on 18th September at the office of Assistant director of Agriculture of Welimada in Badulla, it was discussed to initiate the second phase of the Bee keeping support project. The Agriculture Instructors of the respective divisions, the Assistant Director of Agriculture, the Secretary of the bee keeping society, the Manger -Special Project of CBL and AGSL officials participated for this meeting. At this meeting, it was decided to conduct set of training programmes to improve the skills of bee keeping farmers in particular to extractions of bee honey by using the honey extractors that have been provided to farmer groups under this project.

Honey extractor is a simple instrument developed for the purpose of extracting bee honey, it has two main parts; rotating device and the container. The container is made out of either bronze or galvanized sheet. Rotating devise which is designed to load with honey combs, is mounted in the centre of the container and extracts the honey while rotating due to centrifugal force in to the container. Since honey combs are loaded with the frames in to the rotting device, they remain intact during the extraction. The honey collected in the container during the extraction process can be taken out from the out let tube connected to the container. At a time, four honey combs can be loaded into the rotation device and can be extracted the honey within 15 minutes. This device is very useful equipment for bee keeping farmers to produce quality bee honey in a productive manner.

Beekeeping Traning

The traditional method used for extraction of bee honey is a destructive method as it crushes the honey comb in the process. In contrast, the newly introduced extraction process with the extractors does not cause any damage to the honey combs and can be reused for the production. Therefore the new method will be advantageous to shorten the production cycle and will be more productive. The farm ers will be given proper training on colony division techniques in bee keeping which can be applied to increase the number of the bee colonies as well.