$1500 of Honey from 1 Hive of bees!

i'm cayman reynolds and in this video we are going to talk about queen excluders there are many beekeepers who say that they are actually honey excluders and they honey production can encourage more swarming there's some truth and some false claims about that we're going to show you this entire colony as we break it down and you can see for yourself how well they work why we use them and i'm going to explain more at the end of the video the different ways that you can use them i think this colony made 150 pounds of honey all right let's get into this hive and see how much we have eliminated honey production using an excluder this year smoke the bees down you can see we have a brand new comb intermix with some older combs it's nice to get a couple foundations drawn a year this way per box you can do more than one but that's uh that's pretty good right there i'm liking the look of that frame this box is completely full and many people ask us why we have so many boxes on it's more simple when you have hundreds of colonies to just take them all off at once if you have enough supers you can do that and thankfully we do this is an old kelly box that was painted and wax dipped so this thing will be around a while oh yeah well one box of honey now here's a box of foundations nothing but foundations what i had originally in that box right there was two i had eight old combs and then i put two foundations in there i came back probably ten days or so later and pulled one of them out because it's better to have nine in a honey super so they're easier to uncap and i took one of them that was drawn put them into this box with the rest of the foundations and since they had comb that was already started they'd accept that much better and start drawing the adjacent box rest the frames and foundations very well so this was completely foundation at one point and as the french say voila i think that's how they say that not that it really matters watch me be corrected now by the french so two mediums of honey oh yeah this is one of our queens that we raised last year i believe that she was a queen cell dropped in july and now here's our second full box of foundation once they started drawing on that box we added this one and oh my goodness i know this is getting a little redundant here but these honey excluders are just really killing our honey crop this year all right let's see if we can find something a little different spice it up a little bit all right i probably need a smoke underneath this one oh goodness all right now we're to a deep box this is where i you got to really get out the uh the wheaties let's see if i can space this out a little bit this one is not completely capped but there's a lot of bee bread in here and so what we would do in this situation is we would take this and we would harvest this and as soon as we're done extracting this would be a frame that gets used for a brood comb because that b bread is very important during our summer dearth so let's check and see if i think i've rotated a couple of the ones on the edges in the center but yeah as you can see look how full that is right there a little bit of some darker honey in this batch it was one of the first boxes on though so perhaps there's the early tulip poplar down in there yes let's just see if we have one more box and i need to add a box while we're doing this as well all right definitely want to grab it this way wow this is our most recent box that we put on what a honey flow year it has been and that is full of nectar definitely darker than some of the stuff above i'm not 100 sure what it is there's so many plants around here that are contributors but some gorgeous views of almost clear honey to amber looking honeys down in there you can see look at the cappings over here and then look at the cappings just right over there oh my goodness i've got to take a bite of those all right so what we're going to do now and if you're wondering what's around my neck by the way it's just a little fan system right here and just helps keep my face cool been using them for a little while now i just can't believe it this was supposed to be the extra box they weren't going to fill up it's been just such a great honey flow year [Music] what a great queen this gal has been so he's gonna look down in here and see what's going on a little bit and there's one of her patterns right there lots of bee bread over in here but she's laying some really good patterns all of our queens are starting to gear down a little bit we are coming upon the dirt there's a little bit of nectar in here but by and large the pollen diversity really diminishes early june and we're almost in july now and that really retards the queens wanting to lay as hard when there's not a whole lot of diverse and a lot of quantity of pollen coming in they start slowing down a bit which is fine it's very normal for them to do that here in tennessee and i'm very happy with this girl what a champ and for the size the colony is very easy to get along with and what i'm going to do is take this box its foundations but a couple of these were partially drawn by another colony and once we yank all the rest of these off if they have drawn them out fantastic i imagine they'll start drawing them a tiny bit but what they do not draw when we take all these honey supers off the harvest will have no honey left and we will feed this colony and get them to finish drawing this out because comb is gold and then you're like what what are you going to do with all these that are filled up with sugar syrup well we're not going to harvest that for honey for sure but the bees will eventually eat it and there's multiple things that you can do some beekeepers over winter with mediums on their colonies or you can extract it out and feed it back to your bees at a later date when they may need it but combs are very valuable and especially if you're a new beekeeper combs help you produce big honey crops they help keep your colonies from swarming as easily you can make splits a lot easier so many different things so that's really not what we were talking about so let's get back to the topic at hand is it right to call these things honey excluders i don't think so it is a tool just like a bee suit i wear a bee suit quite often you see it in about maybe half of my videos and this one i didn't think it was necessary i'm only working one hive if i was working through a yard of 40 or 50 colonies i'd probably throw one on there's a lot of variables when it comes to tools and beekeeping an excluder is very useful not only for honey production but for other things like if you're trying to find your queen in a double deep box you can throw an excluder in between and then when you come back a handful of days later you can see where are the eggs in young larvae so you at least know that she's not either in the bottom box the top box so you don't have to look over as many frames that's one of the reasons why we use this we don't have to worry about there being any brood in these honey supers right here we don't have to worry about hunting the queen down in the honey supers there's a lot of advantages but there's also some disadvantages i would never use a queen excluder on a colony if i only had foundations to add on top alone bees do not like going through an excluder when there's not comb above so if i was needing to draw comb i wouldn't use that excluder until the bees started drawing comb on the foundations once they've committed to drawing two or three combs then if the queen's up there or you're not sure you can gently shake all those beads down into your lower boxes or box and then put your excluder on and then put your box but once they've started drawing some combs up in here and started depositing nectar or any other type of thing in those cells that is their space and they have no problem going through the excluder to deal with that once you have drawn combs like many of these supers they had the older combs in them you just throw those on and they're very good about going up there and occupying them so just like every tool in beekeeping pros and cons cons and pros but that's what our videos are for to kind of show you why we do things and also maybe help you not listen to some of the negativity on a great product i remember back when i said i would never use a queen excluder i remember when i used to say i would never do a lot of things and you know my wife is usually right but a couple of my buddies urged me to use queen excluders about seven or eight years ago and i can manage so many more colonies in the same amount of time because i know where the queen is i know where the brood is to make a split from is from i know where all the honey's at and i can manage my colonies so much more efficiently and that saves us a lot of time so thanks for watching this video if you have any comments on excluders or bringing in the big honey ask laurel i have no clue no seriously leave it below

Channel: Kamon Reynolds - Tennessee's Bees

Views: 51,055

Keywords: beekeeping, beekeeper, honeybees, bees, Kamon Reynolds, honey, How to install a nuc, package vs nuc challenge, how to make honey, provap 110, Tennessee beekeepers, Package of bees, swarming, swarm, swarm control, queen cell, queen cup, swarmtrap, swarm trapping, how to make a swarm trap, queen excluder yes or no, queen excluders for bees, queen excluder or no queen excluder, raw honey, organic honey, beekeeping for dummies, beekeeping channel, honey bee, honey bees

Id: zYJD3nH-SOM

Length: 12min 36sec (756 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 01 2021