🔵Making honey with a long hive!

heights cayman reynolds and we are going to pull honey from this horizontal hive it's a or a long hive a lot of people have asked me can you make honey with them and we're fixing to find out i've given some of you all an update but now we're actually going to pull the honey out of the hive and i've got gloves on in this video because when you're using this method it's really nice to have a set of gloves it is a little late in the evening and we also have people that say that my bees don't use a lot of propolis or b glue and that is not the case as you can see i have a propolis b glue trap right here and they are going to town on it now one thing between the last time we were in this hive and now i had to pull three frames over here towards the end because the last bit of the flow was so strong and this hive was just packed with honey i had to free up a little bit of space for them to be able to put the new nectar but it was just a last little surge and we are going to start pulling pulling pulling let's just go ahead and yank this one off as well and there's a few things that we need to make sure to leave behind one being the queen get all those bees in there all right now begin i am going to take these frames shake them off and put them into some jester nuke boxes and a hive butler over here so i'm looking down so this is one that we put in it's got a little bit of nectar and some bee bread this isn't that much we're gonna leave this for the colony right here i can tell these two that i put in they did not end up working hive beetle 100 points for me all right and now let's just go to this frame see where we're at full of honey that's what we want right there and they've capped it most of the way the general rule of thumb is if it's 70 percent capped you're good sometimes it can be completely capped and still have too high of a water content and sometimes it could be like no cappings at all and still be okay that's where a refractometer can be helpful people the other day were asking me where they could get a affordable refractometer i'm going to leave a link below for that we've used it for years and it's it's great so i am going to take this frame and drop it into here there's a couple bees still on it but that's okay i will take it into the b house and we'll brush them off or you could do it right before that's usually what laura would be doing back when we used to use this method all the time and another good frame of honey all right so we've got a box right here you can see there's already bees flying around there's a dearth of nectar this is five full frames of honey so that's excellent right there we're just going to shut that up and make sure the entrance is shut on this colony yes it is or that a box of honey so now that is good to go and we're just going to keep going through here this time of the year when there's a dearth of pollen and nectar if we pulled this off during the honey flow it does make it a little bit easier to rob the colony to remove honey so to speak because they're preoccupied this is late in the evening i've already been stung once and that's it's pretty normal this time of the year for us in tennessee mid-june bees get a little bit more um aggravated because they just don't have work to keep them busy so there there's more defensive bees but we are getting some gorgeous looking honey out of this colony absolutely awesome looking crop with the three frames that i pulled out plus what i'm going to get out of here there's 14 left that i'm gonna pull and if we condense those three that i pulled out into two that's 16 frames we're gonna have about nine gallons of honey out of this colony and so honey's just a little under 12 pounds to the gallon so we're going to end up with a hundred pound harvest now there's things that we need to do because we're entering the toughest time of the year for our bees and we are just going to do the same thing over and over and over again you can use a fume board if you want to see how a fume board works to help remove your honey supers i'm going to leave a link up here i haven't tried it with the long hive yet i imagine it will work but i figured i'd just uh shake today we want to make sure that our bees going through the dearth period never feel nutritionally stressed you're like well cayman you're removing all their honey we're not pulling all of it but we are pulling a good bit of it and some beekeepers feel like we're taking too much we do have to feed them if we take as much as i'm going to take but it's all right we've got to make a living these bees will be just as healthy with us giving them feed as leaving them honey i know that's going to upset some people but bees do very good off of feed it is a lie that bees get sick on sugar syrup and it's not good for them bees are built very different than humans sugar demineralizes our bodies bees run off of sugar whether it be natural or the granulated there are some beneficial things to nectar but bees do very very good off of sugar syrup and i've got another bee that's letting me have it all right that's another box oh yeah these nuke boxes can be handy for that if you don't want to take off a whole super trying to save your back a little bit so that's 10 frames and now i've got this hive butler box right here i guess i probably should have started with that it's a little bit messy from where i was using it recently but it has slots down in there where we don't have to worry about the frames bumping into each other and messing up our nice honeycombs what we don't want to take is frames of bee bread that is critical this time of the year so we're just going to do that all right they've already started eating a little bit away at the bottoms of these closer to the brood nest that's a little bit of a bummer but bees gotta eat too we are just dropping those in then we're going to get to the brood nest over here in a minute and we i got a couple things that i want to implement you're like cayman what about all this space over here well the honeybees are going to decline the rest of the season it's natural we don't have any more big pollen or nectar flows so that's to be expected they don't need as much room and they're not going to be drawing a bunch of combs over in here look at all these bees down into here all right this is the last frame right here that we're gonna pull from this hive and you see again where they've eaten a little bit towards the bottom right there and the edges there's still a good bit on this frame so if we had a harvested probably about a you know a week to 10 days ago i'd say we'd have gotten about 110 115 pounds of honey i'd say with all the trimmings they've taken off so far it's going to be right around 100 pounds thereabouts all right we got this loaded up here that's 14 deep frames plus the three that we already took and just look at that robbing going right there i hate robbing with a passion now we need to leave enough stuff for the bees themselves when i came in here the other day to check to see if i needed to pull honey i dropped this pollen patty so you can see they're working on that right there do they need that no but i go ahead and give it to them periodically throughout the summer you see how i've broken it up created more surface area that way we don't have to worry about small hive beetles quite as much this is a strong colony they're able to bully the small hive beetles they're also able to consume it quite a bit quicker now this frame over here i've checked it it's solid honey this frame is a good bit of honey with some bee bread we're leaving those let's check these over here on the edge oh i see some good frames of cat brood and all these frames here there there there all of them have nice cappings towards the top so there's still a good bit of food in this colony check out this frame i marked it the other day and this is what bees need to go through the summer look at that frame of bee bread right there that is vital to a colony being strong through the dearth period they're going to use that to raise brood off of they can't raise brood off of sugar syrup or honey they've got to have that protein so if there's not fresh pollen they've got to have reserves so this hive's in good shape i'm adding this protein to supplement that a little bit are you good laurel all right sorry there's a couple angry bees getting late in the evening now we got two four six eight ten eleven we are going to shrink this hive considerably down get on down in there bees and we are going to take this frame that's got b bread and some honey scoot it up here this is an empty comb right here yeah a little bit of nectar in there not much yeah there's definitely some nectar a little bit of honey in in here so not much though a lot of bees in this hive and now we're going to take some of these combs right here that i brought with me and we're going to drop them in and smoke ourselves laurel you want some smoke smoke follows beauty there you go and now just in case they start feeling like they don't have enough room i'm going to throw a couple frames of foundation in there as well and i'm just going to leave that open you see in springtime that would be a nightmare they'd be all kinds of comb we're in our dearth period here in tennessee they're not going to be drawing that out this colony is going to continue to shrink this colony's already shrank quite a bit over the last two to three weeks i'd say it's dropped in population by at least 10 percent we don't get good pollens after the end of may really it starts really shrinking down quite a bit so we are going to put this back in place we're going to come back here soon and check and see what the mite populations are we'll do a video on that now we've got a frame feeder this is a mother lode 2 gallon frame feeder made in the usa i was able to get this for 575 in bulk and i say it was made in the usa this thing will probably last you a couple decades at least all right stick that right down in there and try to get all these bees crowd and now we are going to feed do the bees need feed right now not quite they could survive on what they have but this will help them continue to go forward we don't again we never want our bees during the dirt to feel like they are getting a little light on resources so two gallons of this will definitely help this mother load feeder has grips on the side and they shouldn't really need the floats but i like adding the floats it helps a little bit and that's a good bit of syrup i would come into your colony so what what about summer management we're not having to worry about swarming this colony is not swarming on us from here on out unless we do something crazy like shrink it down real tiny and just feed a stupid amount because we're in a dirt so you know some of you you'll have to change that because you're in your your honey flow but as far as management i'm going to come in here every two weeks we got to be in there so what are we gonna do for management this time of the year it's different we're not gonna have swarming issues you know like we were in springtime you might be in a different area your honey flow's just getting started up there in canada or whatever but if you're in the south we're in our dearth period our bees aren't going to want to swarm we got to contend with robbing we want to keep our bees strong so when that fall flow hits hopefully it does they'll be able to take advantage of it we're going to get into these colonies every two weeks and i suggest you do the same if you want to get in every week that's fine just do gentle small inspections but we want to get in every two weeks to make sure they've got enough nutrition they want to make sure they have a good queen that's performing well and if we don't have a queen or a low quality queen that we can get a new queen or do something the other thing that we want to watch out for is mites and that's all we're doing the rest of the season long keeping them strong great queens dead mites good nutrition works like a charm that's what happened to this one this year all right so now we're just going to put the inner covers back in we have all kinds of honey to extract and we'll do a honey extraction video soon so i really appreciate you guys following along with me on this horizontal long hive from horizontal beads i'm going to leave their link in a couple other links below for some of the things that i'm like this hive and i've got this one over here we'll be doing a video on soon that has six compartments with the several different mating nukes in it so there's a lot of ways you can keep honey bees it doesn't always have to go this away but the bees need to be healthy whichever way you go that sounded kind of weird thanks for watching this video and we'll see you in the next one

Channel: Kamon Reynolds - Tennessee's Bees

Views: 40,043

Keywords: beekeeping, beekeeper, honeybees, bees, Kamon Reynolds, honey, How to install a package of bees, How to install a nuc, package vs nuc challenge, how to make honey, beehive, provap 110, Tennessee beekeeping, Tennessee beekeepers, Package of bees, swarming, swarm, swarm control, queen cell, queen cup, swarmtrap, swarm trapping, how to make a swarm trap, swarm trap, bee cast, long hive, horizontal hive, horizontal beehive

Id: bwRkFH4d9E0

Length: 16min 45sec (1005 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 27 2022