400+ Pounds of Raw HONEY: How to Harvest Honey 🍯 🍯

hi everybody Brandon brandsby's here so it is late May 2023 so my favorite time of year so this is the time of year where we pull off a lot of honey so I'm here with what I call David and Goliath so David it's got two boxes of honey here and Goliath we're gonna take three here we made a lot of splits this year we didn't get as much honey as we wanted but with that we did make a couple production colonies so we are gonna get some honey we're gonna pull it we're gonna kind of show you how we go through it so step by step here we'll show you a little bit of how um our honey process works so hang with us before I'm cutting to have these hives look all right so we showed you the three supers we're gonna leave them a box of honey take a fill out of deep into medium we're gonna do something similar to this one let them keep the medium and take two boxes of honey look at that beautiful wax and honey on top of these boxes all right so we're gonna extract some honey the biscuits we try to use didn't work very well so we went with the manual leaf blower to get these beads out of these supers you can see them trying to fly back to their honey all right so we got the honey off next steps how to get these cappings off to get the honey out so we can put it into the extractor so there's two things I like to use there's a hot knife looks like this you can plug it in it keeps it hot so it's easy to run across and then when the comb is not as drawn out there's a scratcher we can also use um basically just go across it either way just scratch the cappings off and it allows you to basically spin or extract the honey out so I'll show you what this looks like when you the one you want to use a hot knife versus a scratcher so for here you can kind of see um these are one of the A-frame boxes so look how far out there they pull this now I like to get this about even with the frame so you're going to see us remove a lot of this wax but on this side I might not be able to get in there to completely pull this off so you're going to see me use probably the scratcher a little bit on this side so I started to go ahead and cut this off but then I want to show you how it works so I'll just resume and show you how this works so we'll grab this hot knife and we'll get nice and close here so you can see this just go through and just completely Cuts this off here foreign motion it's hot comes off easy it's our cappings bucket so it's nice and simple so that's basically how I like use that now there's a couple things I missed here but nothing significant where I need to use a scratcher at all so I'll flip it around and show you what this other side looks like so that side is nice and easy so I think if you don't have um if you don't have frames drawn it's pretty hard to get those thicker frames because that's that's like an A-frame spacing for in the box so this is more of a 10 frame spacing so I'll show you what this kind of looks like here so maybe it'll run smooth maybe it won't take a look here hey never mind maybe I won't need to use the scratcher because this might just come out just fine yep so this comes off nice nice and easy get all the cappings in there and if you get closer here you can see a couple of spots that it missed so see this is not uncapped so you can just take this either scrape it like this or dig under it to kind of get that off either way you want to go through make sure everything hasn't been uncapped or like the edges here gets uncapped as you uncap it how it looks wet within itself and into the capping's bucket next we'll actually put it into the extractor so we'll stand up here and we'll come around see what this looks like so we kind of extracted some honey already so but all you gotta do is now it's uncapped put it in we have a four frame extractor it's pretty nice you put it in here and then you turn it around you can fill four in so that's one frame we're gonna put four in here and show you what's next thank you with the cappings off you can see the center if you just the hunting out filling the bottom so basically just slings the honey out fills the bottom the extractor okay so we spun and extracted the honey next steps filtering it so with our honey basically or with any honey you want to filter out The Unwanted wax and on one B parts so that just basically gets it down to the honey itself and for us personally we keep our honey raw so we don't heat it up we like to keep those enzymes antioxidants and nutrients value of the honey so there we go cheers [Music] about 100 pounds and I want to stop and talk a little bit more we showed you one one or two cappings here of how to uncap it so basically what I want to talk about is these are ideal frames right so like if you have uh if I could even lift this up my hands are a little slippery if you have fully capped frames like this then there's no doubt about the honey content right because it's obviously all um evaporated uh the condensation's down or as the water contents down there's no question about it but say you had 75 of a cap or you had um like 75 85 and you had a little bit of open cells here in the middle then you can always use a refractometer just to make sure that it's below the 18 or close to 18 water content uh if they have it capped already then there's really no question about it a lot of times as they start to put the extra wax on it on the outside you can see the cells starting to shrink as they start to cap it because they dehydrated basically the honey to get it to 18 or below a lot of times or a lot of a lot of times people they use um fully capped honey with a little bit of open cells because the below 18 percent above 18 Blends they make around 18 but again if you're worried about it being below 18 content you can always use a refractometer test it out and then go from there so we'll show you what this looks like here if you really want to but I'm just going to re-emphasize the fact that these are again A-frame spacing so you can see on this how far out this is on this now they kind of kept this shorter but this is kind of A-frame spacing so we'll see what that looks like oh sorry these are like they're more than 10 pounds a piece and these plastic foundations are a little wobbly um it's not like the wood see how they wobble a little bit in the while you hold on to them so we're just gonna use this hot knife here and we'll kind of show you what this looks like again so you'll see a little bit of sizzling there we kept this pretty hot but cuts it pretty good now it is A-frame spacing now I'm going to get this down to regular spacing again so that way when we go to put these back in to get 10 frames in they go right back to normal so see nice easy you even cut the sides off if you want look at that cuts it like butter real simple I'll turn this around I'll show you the other side so ah again not too bad and then sometimes they do make uh it's called honey bread or they put honey and pollen together at the bomb a couple of cells you can see it a little darker it's just because they have a little bit of pond and honey mixed in with it after they cap it um it's pretty regular to see that so we'll go through another one here very simple now this is the portion where you either use the hot knife at the bottom or you can use a scratcher not a big deal either way but again you can see this in here so the black cells there's a couple in there again they put pollen at the bottom put honey in it basically makes honey uh their honey bread it's not a big deal so okay well once this gets unspinning we'll put this in so we'll continue with the process and on we go with day one wrapping up we're basically going to get a a poundage of how much honey we got today we can see right there about 40 pounds in that bucket by itself we're gonna add this up go one bucket at a time we're pretty happy with what we got again I mentioned the beginning of the video we made a lot of splits this year so that really hurt or hindered our honey production but we made a couple honey production hives so we got we got to get them out of honey I'd say here I think we're getting close to 200 pounds for the first day not bad something we can work on in the future is making more honey production hives keeping our hives healthy we just made a lot of splits just to maintain numbers and then next year we're gonna go for a big honey production but this year here you can see racking up the 181 and then I think this is last bucket 181 plus 44 so close to two over 200 pounds of 225 as you can see there so not too shabby for day one all right everybody day two of extraction so first day we got about 200 pounds of honey not bad for how many splits we made I was actually kind of impressed we're about a little less than halfway 200 pounds Honeys I'm happy with that and I just want to say if you're not trying to draw a comb out or you're just here for the honey do not put your honey in deep supers because I always forget how heavy they are because when we're trying to pull a couple of these off they're about 80 to 100 pounds a piece and again if you're here just for the honey small medium size is where you should go because it does not feel good when you try to pull off a deep box so we're actually I would take a couple of these off and uh which continued with our day two process thank you all right let's take a look down into the second honey super here while they're attending every frame of this box as some gorgeous looking frames they put out a bunch of them we didn't do A-frame spacing in this but wow okay well we're gonna see how this turns out we took two boxes off this is a brand new box we put on here and with a good wax foundations I love Premier foundations look at this far outside frame draw on this look at that that's an owl side frame here they have this drawn out perfectly on both sides now it's not fully drawn out yet but that's a Tenth Frame on the outside and they're pulling it like that that's insane to me it's like let me just break to the middle here look at this every frame is drawn out in this box Premiere foundations double wax actually got triple wax wonder how far I'll draw on this all right let's fast forward we'll take the honey over all right Honey's off not too shabby we're gonna uncap it put in the extractor and then filter it out here something small I want to mention um while you're getting your honey so there's a couple different types of cappings here so you can see the newer white cappings that just means it's new they haven't had a chance to walk on it yet and you can see a little bit even the honey might be a little lighter it just kind of depends when you look at this wax it's just either it's been over wintered it's wet cappings or they just had a chance to walk on it too dirty to the comb so this could be dry cappings and this could be wet cappings but you can see a little bit darker pieces in here um a little bit of white capping is a little bit had a chance to dirty the wax on the outside so all is the same when you get the wax off the honey itself so foreign step two uncap the wax step three put your uncapped frame into the extractor when it's done pull it out dry it up look at the Honey at the bottom step four in the process filtering the honey again this honey actually looks a little lighter than the day one honey I think the day one honey is the majority of clover honey this looks like a little bit of Wildflower here and there but photo of the honey good we'll take a look at it and we'll head to our honey room that we have all right but this wraps it up for our 2023 spring honey Harvest so you can see all the buckets here these are all this is all raw honey we didn't count this this is a box of medium um we used to extract that we have two um buckets of raw cappings we still have to filter those that's fine we still have about 400 plus pounds of raw honey here so you can see looks good tastes good um the water content in these is about 14.5 to 15 percent uh we test it with a refractometer just just to make sure I guess it was capped you can see throughout the video but I don't know I just like to make sure so everything just looks good here again 2023 Harvest 400 plus pounds of raw honey how awesome is that so um thanks for all along the process if you enjoy our videos learned at least one thing hit the Subscribe Button as again it's our first year journey I can't appreciate you guys enough um seriously means the world so subscribe hit the like if you have any questions leave them down below but otherwise I appreciate you guys thanks for watching see you next time

Channel: Brandon's Bees

Views: 3,709

Keywords: How to Harvest Honey 2023, Honey flow 2023, Nectar flow 2023, Spring honey flow 2023, best way to harvest honey 2023, extracting honey 2023, extracting raw honey 2023, filtering honey 2023, filtering raw honey 2023, harvesting honey 2023, honey extracting 2023, honey harvest 2023, how to harvest honey 2023, pulling honey supers 2023, 2023 spring honey harvest, spring honey flow 2023, best way to harvest honey, honey production 2023, Collecting honey 2023, beekeeper 2023, bees

Id: MRaUQP55uNg

Length: 14min 5sec (845 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 11 2023