Abstract
Marigat in Baringo County is among the ASAL areas in Kenya where most residents engage in honey production as their major source of income. Honey producers in the area keep their bees in the indigenous hives and others occur in natural colonies. Traditional methods are mainly used to harvest and process honey in the area. This is because, the honey extractors available in the market cannot be used to extract honey from indigenous hives and natural colonies, due to lack of frame attachment to the combs that firmly secure them during processing. Therefore, this research aimed at developing an extractor with honeycomb net buckets within the system to firmly secure honeycombs harvested from these hives and colonies. The extractor operates by the principle of radial motion of the net buckets loaded with matured honeycombs. The net buckets are spun to rotation by utilizing the energy produced by human operating the machine. The rotational effect produces the centrifugal force that triggers the flow of honey out of the comb cells onto the extractor wall. As the centrifugal force increases, the rate of honey outflow increases until the combs are empty. The mass flow rate of honey was found to be , which was equivalent to . The estimated amount of power required by humans to operate the extractor was equivalent to for a period of 5 years. The extractor was found to be 99.83 % efficient.
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