Historic: Manuka handling 70 years ago...

[NickWallingford]

I came across this article from a 1954 NZ Journal of Agriculture that describes the features of an "up to date" honey house for extracting manuka honey.

Extracting manuka honey in 1954

It describes most of the home-fabricated equipment used to warm, prick, press, strain, pump, stir - and it draws heavily on the engineering expertise of CR "Roy" Paterson. The article refers to a number of other, more specific, articles that appeared in the few years prior. They give more detail about each piece of equipment being used in the process.

Articles referred to in the main article

 

[John B]

Good practical advice for the times. I have actually use one of the rocker prickers which was made from a curved piece of wood with I would think over 100 nails sticking out. It was time-consuming and not easy to use and modern prickers are a huge improvement.It was definitely not pretty or up to modern health standards.
Mostly we just used manuka still in the frames for feeding hives in the spring But when we did want to extract some manuka we would sort out some frames with white wax and using a steam heated hand plane,scrape them right down to the foundation followed by a quick spin in the extractor.
While at a beekeeping conference my father was once abused by another beekeeper for selling that rubbish manuka honey for the same price as good clover honey.