Becoming a Beekeeper - Day 1 till Day 365 - my first Honey Harvest - 1 year of Keeping bees

where do you start with a hobby like beekeeping there's one thing keeping a pet animal there's another thing keeping 20 to 60 000 little insects in a box in your garden I was very confused I didn't know what to do and I and I searched how do I keep bees and slowly but surely I worked through YouTube's video content on beekeeping and I also read some books and learned a bit and I and slowly the world of beekeeping became smaller and I learned a little bit by a little bit and I became a slowly more knowledgeable and I felt like you know one day I can see this becoming a reality package in the post foreign the learning process begins one of the biggest steps that helped me start beekeeping was joining the local B Club that's right there's a local Club for beekeepers you you can join them and be part of this community of of odd human beings who are obsessed with bees and it allowed me to get in contact with loads of other local beekeepers who live near where I do so that was really useful I went on the club's Facebook page and I introduced myself I said my name's Alex I haven't kept bees before but I really want to uh if anyone can give me any advice or help then it'll be much appreciated I had one lady who commented and said oh I've got an old beehive you can have it if you want if you want to get started and then I had another guy get in contact saying that he actually had some bees that he could give me I was being given a beehive I was being given flipping colony of bees I couldn't say no and so my beekeeping Journey began just there I've just hopped in the car and I'm on my way to a fellow beekeeper's house who has very kindly offered me the parts required to set up my first ever beehive right then let's see what we've got because the Beehive I was given had previously been used by another colony of bees there was a chance that there could be some diseases so I got a blowtorch and basically went over the whole thing just burning everything off so that there was no chance that any diseases would be able to get into my new Colony when they were brought in it was time to set up the Beehive first goes down the floor it's like the floor of your house and it has like an open mesh floor which means that ventilation can get through but unwanted pests can't actually go up and up into the hive next goes on The Brood box this is basically where all the baby bees are raised so the queen will be laying all the eggs in this section the main nest of bees will be in The Brood box area there's a bee on my camera I think it's not happy with it please don't get mad and sting me within this brood box goes some frames now frames are basically the man-made equivalent to what the bees would naturally build say if they were living in a hole in a tree they would build these frames of wax that they use to create their cells to lay eggs in to store honey to live basically and the frames are what US beekeepers give to the bees to give them like a head start I'm in the car again and I'm on my way to my local beekeeping supply store and I've got to pick up a few bits of equipment just picked up the stuff from Payne's bee farm anyway I'll get home and set everything up I've got my frames from a local bee shop and I spent a good few hours assembling them basically they were a lot cheaper if I got them flat packed rather than ready made so I got a hammer got some screws and I spend a few hours putting frames together foreign after doing this for the last hour is that putting the wax in is the hardest part and slowly ease it in it feels so nice to hold right here we go got another 9 10 frames to make I don't know whether I'm looking forward to it or whether I'm a bit nervous about actually holding these full of bees it will sure be an experience and there we go that's frame making done for the day and here we have frames with foundation in ready to put in the hive you know I've got a what's called a queen excluder now this goes on top of the brood box but it's only really necessary I suppose when you've got a honey super on top so a honey box and that stops the queen coming up and laying her eggs in the honey and the queen can't get through these holes but the work of these can and then on top of that goes something called a crown board a crown board is basically a lid but it actually has a little hole in now this is to allow you to put a feeder on top where the bees can come up and feed you'll see that a bit later on but on top of the crown board then goes the actual roof like a proper waterproof roof this is what keeps the elements out and stops anything from getting in like rain or animals or stuff like that I have got to redo that uh roof got an extra waterproofing on top because yeah this one's really falling apart but I shall do that before the bees come beehive pretty much ready got the B suit it's got this sort of head thing which makes me look like I'm doing fencing right let's stop messing about and go get the bees [Music] I don't care about beekeeping this is I'm all about the the smoke are burning how cool is that so I'm in the garden I'm just checking that everything is ready for the bees to come in yeah everything's starting to feel a lot more real until now I've just felt really confident and sure that this is a really good idea and a fun thing to do but now the idea of 20 000 insects trying to sting me flying around my head starting to uh not sound so good my negative thoughts are kicking in that's for sure I'm pretty nervous right it is just past seven o'clock in the evenings starting to get dark now which means the bees will be starting to go to bed they'll be going back to the hive where they are at the moment the guy who I'm collecting them off will probably lock them up and then I'm going to go and get them bring them all back here and relocate them in the garden [Applause] I'm not nervous I'm really really nervous well this will be the first time I've actually had a pet since my pet rabbit that probably passed away maybe four or five years ago now I'm on my way to get bees that was one hectic drive through Brighton saw a bike a motorbike hit into a normal bike and saw some guys having a fight and it's awesome drunk ladies and uh it all happens down in Brighton that's for sure okay so basically you've got one two three four five frames in there there we go all I would say to you is enjoy have you got some antihistamine cream um I've got flipping thousands of bees in my car right let's get home safely I brought the bees back to my house took them out my car brought them into the back garden and plonked them on the stand I had made so basically it was getting late and I and I couldn't see anything and so I waited until the following day before I actually transferred them into the hive well I slept really badly last night thinking about the old bees in the garden I'm busy later on today so I need to get to work and uh get them out of the transport box into the full-size hive there we go I don't want to get stung you see some I'm doing all necessary precautions to avoid it I've tapped my jumper into my trousers trousers into my socks I think I've done that so tight it's not going to let any blood through my head [Music] so I took the frames one by one out of the transport box into the hive until I had all of them in the hive frame one in place oh my God look at that there's the queen there's the queen there's a queen do you see the queen it's got a white dot on its head you see they've built the comb completely off where the frame is which isn't good because it'll make it look really hard to get off get out of the box in the future and that was the process of getting the bees from one person to me and now I had bees in my garden crazy okay I can't believe it well currently one frame to go but we've had a bit of a problem because there's just so much of this comb which they've built where I kind of don't want it I just took off a massive piece because if they have it coming like right off in this bit here then the frames can't go together properly and it makes it hard to inspect and lastly goes in this board there we go we've got the five frames in there of the bees that Stephen gave me yesterday they're in safely I know the Queen's in there she was on that frame I think first morning beekeeping I was really surprised by how calm the bees were like in my head I was thinking these bees are going to be mad I've just taken them in the car put them in a new place that they're not familiar with and and they I thought they were just gonna go crazy at me and sting me but no they were they were super calm really chilled out and I had a brilliant experience actually of my first day beekeeping it was it was very chilled out and a lot less stressful than I first thought it would be all right he's slurping up all the honey that probably is on my hand from whilst I was trying to get that comb off so I've got the crown board on and on top of that I need to put a feeder just to give them a helping hand whoa I need to take a breather my heart has been Racing for the last 15 minutes whilst putting the bees in the hive but they're in there the roof is on they've got some food that was exciting though bees are awesome honestly they are they're one of the coolest animals goodbye my new friends see you soon so how does a honeybee Colony even work well honeybees work kind of differently to many other animals in that they are known as a super organism they need to work and function as a whole rather than individually you need the queen you need the worker bees and you need the drones which are the male bees you need them all to work together in order for them to be successful and reproduce and and create more colonies in the future so you've got the queen she has the main aim and goal and job of laying eggs then you've got the worker the worker as it's very well named simply works very hard collecting pollen and collecting nectar to bring food back to the Colony and supply all the other bees with with food to eat the worker also does lots of hard-working jobs within the hive as well such as cleaning out things cleaning out cells and looking after the queen as well then you've got the Drone the Drone is the male bee very important to have a male bee within a colony because this bee is what mates with the queens and means that you can have more bees quick update from the garden and the bees looking happy actually not really sure how you know of a beer is happy but they've been very busy on this sunny late Summer's Day they've been out foraging quite a lot and I'm just having a nice little watch of them what a way to spend this Sunday afternoon eh right then bees give you some smoke let's see how you've been doing looks like they've been eating some of the food oh wow they've nearly had all of it well looking inside the feeder they're having a good munch quite a few ants in there on a frame inside a beehive you have many hexagonal cells and these cells are used by the bees in many different ways firstly the bees can use them to store food in so they would store nectar which in turn would turn into honey they also use the cells to store pollen which is another source of food high in protein so that they can feed that to the baby bees which need lots of protein the cells are then also used for actually raising the young so the queen will lay eggs inside the cells and then the bees develop inside those cells and then the bees emerge and come out and live in the hive so the cells are incredibly important and have many different uses on that frame we've got lots of stores at the top and the smoke actually really helps get them away from the top of the frames and down looking for their honey whoa this one's whoa of bees there's the queen one last frame to check honey stores they're just drawing out the comb on that side so you see all of that that's all stores that'll be the honey or the sugar syrup that I'm feeding them and they've they've sealed it up ready for winter there's brewed at all stages which means The Queen Is Alive I actually saw the queen they're laying there's quite a few bit more honey stores it looks okay I think so I got my bees at the end of summer it was I think end of August and so this is sort of the end of the beekeeping season and we were going into Autumn and there's a number of things you need to think about when you're going through Autumn and into winter time because bees primarily like they are most active and they are doing all their work in the summer and when it's warm when there's flowers that they can forage pollen and nectar from and so they need to prepare for the winter and as a beekeeper you need to give them a helping hand and make sure that they are ready to go through maybe a six month period without being able to find many flowers and food to eat so there's a number of jobs I had to do firstly I had to make sure they had enough food because my colony of bees were quite small I received them towards the end of the season they hadn't been able to spend much time foraging they didn't have many stores or food available to them I had to feed them and I fed them with a mix of water and sugar it's very simple I just got some sugar put in a saucepan and then added some water to it mixed up made sure it was all dissolved and then I put it inside a feeder which was then placed inside the hive it was placed on top of the crown board and there's a hole in the crown board so that the bees can go up through that hole and then feed on what is called the sugar syrup the bees will take this sugar syrup down into their hive and then store it in the cells so that then they can use it later on like throughout the winter when they when they need it also going into autumn and winter I needed to check whether my bees were healthy and this means basically checking for diseases checking that the bees are okay and happy and healthy because I'm a very new beekeeper I found being able to identify what a healthy Hive looks like I found that very hard from my eyes I looked at them and I saw that they were eating the food I was giving them they looked healthy they they didn't show any definite signs of illness which which is good but there was one thing I did have to check for what is considered the biggest threat to honeybees and that is something called the varroa destructor might now it sounds pretty scary it's a little mite which lives on bees as a parasite and it's I believe it sucks the blood out of bees and if there are lots of them in a hive then they can basically destroy the whole colony and all the bees die this sounds pretty bad but it's very common for bees to have this varroa Destructor might as I had to check my ones and see if they had them but how on Earth are you supposed to see whether your bees have this tiny little microscopic Mite on them well I talked to the local bee club and they suggested I do something called a varroa might check and this basically involved making a square board of wood my cutting skills aren't too good oh yeah there's my Square bit of wood oh boy that's satisfying that that's so cool oh I feel so good about myself I made a bit of wood that fits in the correct place I also never ever thought I would be making a might trap it's one of the most peculiar things to be doing but it's all for the bees I want them to survive the winter I painted the board white so if any mites dropped down onto it they would show up better then I also covered it in Vaseline to make the Mite stick to the board I have just slid in the white board that I painted underneath the hive in a few days I'm gonna have to pull that out count how many mites I find if there's any there and depending on that number I will have to treat the bees with some sort of treatment so that the varroa might doesn't take over the colony and kill them all five days later and I took out the board and I took it into some good light used a little magnifying glass and looked very carefully and I only found I think two mites and now this is considered to be quite low for that time of year and I talked to some other beekeepers and they said yep you don't need to worry about it at the moment but do keep an eye on it because varroa mites can reproduce very quickly and then become a problem so basically at that time they were fine and I didn't need to worry luckily I was very pleased about that my bees didn't have a bad case of varroa disrupter mites but the mites aren't the only problem for bees getting through the winter there's a chance that they starve because there's not as many flowers about in the winter and if it's cold the bees don't go out of their hive so they basically need enough food inside they need enough stores and that is why why I had been feeding them plenty of supplemented food to get them through even if there weren't any flowers about so the starvation thing I I had kind of covered I I hope that if I kept feeding them then I wouldn't have that problem weather can be another thing that you need to think about because bees have to keep the inside of their hive nice and warm I believe they have to keep the nest area at something like 35 degrees C which is mad when you think about it so even when it's like minus temperatures out here they have to still keep that inside Nest bit that warm but they also don't deal with damp dampness very well oh look at it it's soaking torrential rain hope my bees are okay just been worrying about them constantly oh look at it all damp and wet does make me worry I really hope they're okay so to combat The Damp and the cold I decided to put some insulation inside the hive I simply just cut a few sheets of things called kingspan insulation people would use it for housing and stuff like that so I cast a few bits to shape and then place them inside the hive either side of the frames so that I hope that it would just help trap in some of the Heat and give them some extra warmth in case it got really cold [Music] December came the winter setting and there was now not much I could do now beekeeping is a spring summer and Autumn activity and in the winter because they have to keep the inside of the hive so warm you can't really do much you can't open up the hive in the middle of winter because it will let in all the cold air and let in the dampness and that's really not good so as a beekeeper you you have to just sit on your hands and wait and hope and cross your fingers that they're gonna be okay and and you just got to put some faith and trust into your bees you're still in there I knocked and then I could hear them all say come in you know on a serious note I heard them all start buzzing when you knock on the side of the height they all like start buzzing don't know why but they do it's the middle of winter and I'm very happy because my bees are still alive there's an awful lot flying today and I think they're all flying about because it's so warm it's about 15 degrees out here 15 degrees C which is ridiculous for the time of year recently we've had a lot of mild weather but it's also been incredibly damp and wet and that has worried me a little bit because one of the biggest causes of bee Colony deaths in the winter months is because they get wet and they get damp on the inside of the hive so I'm really hoping that my old wooden Hive stays strong and stays waterproof there's not a great deal you can do throughout the winter but there's something which beekeepers practice called hefting now hefting is just a process of lifting up one side of the hive and just judging making a guess on how much food stores they've got inside the hive if it feels really heavy it means that they've probably got plenty of food if it's on the light side then maybe they need some more when I checked a few months ago it was really heavy like I could almost I could hardly almost lift the hive off the ground hmm it's definitely a lot lighter than when I checked in like October time there's still a little bit of weight there so that I'm pretty sure there will be some stores but I will give them some food to be certain that they have some something to eat it's interesting actually how you can notice the the difference in weight just go down throughout the winter you have to change the food that you give them so in in this summer and the Autumn I was giving them like liquid sugar and water mix but in the winter they stopped taking that down they won't take down that liquid feed and you have to feed them the fondant so I'm going to give them some of that today probably and I haven't been stung yet since I started keeping these bees so that's pretty cool maybe today will be the first day there's a first for everything that is a block of the baker's fondant so basically just pure sugar and you can see that they've eaten away a hole there and I think I'm going to cut a hole in that and then place a new block of that on top like that so they can eat their way through all of it and have plenty of food I'm gonna cut a hole in that on top and now they got double decker food it's like a like a sugar Burger and you may think it's kind of strange that like I've got bees and I'm just like just feeding them loads do you think that's like the opposite of what you're meant to do which is then feed you with honey but I need to give them plenty of supplemented food because they were such a small Colony last year when I got them now I didn't feed them the chances of them dying would be very high so the first winter this winter that we're currently going through I need to feed them quite a lot to make sure they've got enough food but then next winter hopefully I won't need to feed them because they would have collected plenty of food throughout the Summer and Autumn and then they'll be able to live on their own better see what I mean what I am right now is my parents house and they live in a beautiful place with a nice Garden it's right next to the forest and Countryside and I was thinking recently about my living situation into the future because I've got to move out of the flat that I currently live in I've got to move out of there in August because that's when my tenancy runs out and I don't really know what I'm going to do next I've got ideas that I might live in a different country for a bit I might get a van converted and travel around the world and do something like that but then I also think that maybe I could do a deer with my mum and dad where they let me live in their house free of charge in return for me making honey for them doing the beekeeping and then also gardening and growing lots of vegetables and food that I can then cook up for them so they're basically going to get a full-time Gardener chef and beekeeper in return for giving up just one bed and a bathroom hmm I'll have to check that with them I haven't asked them about that yet but Mum and Dad if you're watching maybe that could work let me know lots of possibilities lots of exciting things could happen over the next year so we'll see time will tell look at that out here I'm wearing a jumper not a coat and the sky is blue and everything's nice and spring-like the butterflies look at that oh I feel like a reptile waking up from winter hibernation it feels awesome and I'm looking over at my beehive now and they're so active and they're bringing in loads of pollen and it's really exciting and very very soon we're going to open up the hive and do our first inspection of the year I'm really excited about the next few months because in the beekeeping calendar lots of things will happen firstly we might have to deal with a swarming Colony this is basically where one beehive one colony of bees reproduces and splits into two and also hopefully I really really hope that at some point this summer or Autumn we get some honey Harvest and uh if that happens then I will be a very very very happy person I've never seen anything like this in my life let's try and get this swollen down from the tree two beehives now in the garden my name is Alex and last year I decided that I wanted to try and keep bees so I became a beekeeper my first main challenge as a beekeeper was helping my bees get through the winter time these are kind of warm weather animals so for most of the winter when it's cold the bees just stay inside their hive and they live off the reserves the food that they've collected throughout the previous year but of course my bees were a very small Colony I got them at the end of last summer and so they didn't have many stores they didn't have much reserves so I had to regularly top up their food throughout the winter and make sure that they had enough sugar to survive I fed them with a mix of sugar and water I just mixed it up dissolved it and then put it into a little Feeder in the top of the hive and thankfully I can happily confirm that my bees survive the winter I'm about to open up my beehive for the first time since last September and see what it looks like in there I'm quite excited because I'm not really sure what to expect but we're going to check that they're healthy and there's still a queen bee I have got my smoker a hive tool and also some other bits of equipment because my hive is very old and it's slowly falling apart but today it's really warm and I can check the bees for the first time this year I'm coming in bees so you need this thing called a hive tool because the bees create something called propolis or they collect it from I think tree sap or something like that but they use it to glue shut all the holes so you need something like this to open it up basically you can hear it kind of cracking cracking open see how they all just go down I'm going to take out these first frame coming out it's so warm in there I can feel the warmth coming off it ah no I got stung on my finger ow ow no that's really painful no that's my first thing from these bees on the first day of the year that is incredibly painful why did you do that bee can you see in that corner there's loads of colored pollen there's quite a few different colors it's so cool wow so beautiful this is a chess cam camera by the way in case you're wondering what this thing is around my um chest I got stung on my finger and it really hurts like it's seriously painful it's like burning there are so many bees in here it's kind of crazy I guess that's what a beehive is right it's a place where lots of bees are I kind of want to be stung somewhere else to ease the pain of that place whoa look at that they've built an awful lot of comb down near the bottom there's so many more than last year this one's feeling heavy Ah that's where they're storing the food this Frame is so heavy so it's got all the food on it I haven't seen the queen yet but there must be a queen here because there's so many eggs go away B go away that one weighs like two three kilograms one last frame to check and once again it feels really heavy yeah heavy with stores of Honey or food that they've been storing that I've been giving them I'm gonna put in some new frames because there's so many bees in there that I need them I need to give them more space put the new Crown board on top foreign can you see how my finger is bigger there oh well that's all part of it I guess if I'm going to take the honey they need to fight back in some way yeah it's actually bleeding like that's how deep this thing Stinger can go I was overwhelmed by what I saw there was so much stuff to look at I didn't know what I was looking for I didn't know what was healthy what wasn't what I didn't really know much because I haven't been keeping bees that long but there were a couple of things that I saw and I knew I had to do something about them firstly I saw lots of comb that there that the bees had built underneath the frames now when in a beehive you've got these wooden frames and and you want the bees to build all their cells along those frames you don't want them to build them underneath or further off the side or on top you want them to stay on the frames but yeah they've built lots of Comb on the underneath of the frames and I didn't know whether I should remove it or whether removing it was a bad thing I also saw a number of Queen cells now Queen cells are basically the cells where a new Queen is born you've got worker cells which are very small it on the frames then you've got drone cells which are the male bees that will be born and they are slightly larger they have a little lump on the outside and then you've got the queen cells which are the largest of the cells and this is where a new Queen will be born now I know that you can only have one Queen in a colony of bees so I had a feeling I would have to do something about this the next day I went out into the garden to have a look at the bees and I saw something pretty exciting I just noticed so many bees outside goodness there's bees everywhere [Music] they must be swarming right I want to know what they're doing they seem like they're on a mission to do selling yeah I think they're swarming as I watched them over the next half an hour they didn't end up moving anywhere they sort of just slowly went back to the hive I I was very confused by this I don't get it the bees just have suddenly calmed down like five minutes ago there were bees like all around and then suddenly they act they're acting like normal again I don't know what just happened I would describe it as like a half swarm it's almost like they thought about swarming and then didn't it's very strange after getting a bit of info from some local beekeepers I learned that the main thing I needed to do right now was give the bees some more space the bees had just filled up the box completely there was no more space for them to lay eggs there was no more space for them to store honey they needed more room this will explain why they had built the comb underneath of the frames because they'd run out of space to build more comb and also it'll explain why they had created a lot of these Queen cells also called swarm cells because they were planning on swarming soon so I picked up some equipment from the local bee shop and started putting together more wooden frames for an extra box that was about to go on top of the hive so on a beehive you've got the bottom box called The Brood box this is where the queen is this is where Queen lays all her eggs and The Brood are raised and then the boxer I was making up was to go on top of this one what is called a honey super now that is just simply a box where the honey will be stored I've got a box full of wood some of this which is called Foundation it's basically wax and these are going to be used to make frames that the honey will be made on it's like putting together an Ikea flat pack furniture set as one frame this will be full of Honey hopefully frames by putting this box on top it would allow lots of the bees to go up and start drawing out the comb on these frames and basically it'll just give them a lot more space so we're going to put this on which is a queen excluder and only the worker bees can go through this Gap the small holes in this board on top of that we can put the new frames a few days later I was lucky enough to have a visit from a local beekeeper and I hoped he could give me some info and maybe feel a little bit more confident with what I was seeing and what I needed to do next we opened up the hive and what we saw were a lot of Queen cells so the bees were definitely planning on creating a new Queen so they could swarm and create another colony of bees so what exactly is swarming well most animals you get two of them a male and a female they mate and then you get another animal in a beehive you've of course got the queen bee which mates with the drones the male bees and they make lots of bees within the hive but then you've got actual Colony reproduction which is where a colony of bees actually divides and splits into two So within the Hive on the frames the bees create Queen cells for a new Queen to be born and then once the Queen's cell is capped over and ready to have a new queen bee being born the old Queen of the colony the the original Queen plus a load of the bees that are flying go out of a hive and they find a new home meanwhile in the original Hive a new Queen will be born it will go out and mates with drones and then come back and keep that colony and that Hive going so in simple terms swarming is how a colony of bees divides and reproduces now as a beekeeper you don't want really to let them swarm you want to control it if you just leave the bees to it they will eventually create a new Queen the old Queen will fly off and find a new home and you will lose them forever and if you can catch them or use a controlled method of swarming then it means you can divide your one Colony into multiple so what did we do about all these Queen cells because we had to do something we went through frame by frame and actually destroyed every single queen cell we saw this might sound destructive but all it was doing was delaying the swarming process I didn't have any equipment to have a new beehive at the moment I didn't have anything ready to get going with that and and it would have been a matter of days before they swarmed and I would have lost them so we were basically buying ourselves Time by removing all the queen cells we found because the bees will only swarm once they have a queen cell which is ready for a new Queen to hatch out of over the next few days I was told that if they want to swarm for definite they will then create more of those Queen cells and be making a move to yeah make make another queen lastly we took the Beehive and we moved it a couple of feet to the right basically just to create space for a new beehive which was going to be just to the left of it so you can do something called an artificial swarm an artificial swarm is basically where you take the old Queen of the colony put it into a new box with a load of the other bees and make them basically think that they've swarmed you're splitting the old queen with the original Hive where the new Queen will be born and you're making them think you're making them feel like they've just warmed and they've found a new home and so you don't have the disaster or the the mess of loads of bees swarming around your garden or in someone else's Garden or in your chimney or anywhere else where you don't want them because swarming bees can cause a little bit of Havoc I've heard so an artificial swarm is basically just a controlled method of splitting up the hive when the bees are planning on swarming so this was my plan I bought some new equipment my honeymaking business is expanding I just bought a new hive my car is a multi-purpose transport vehicle sometimes used for sleeping in sometimes used as a passenger vehicle and also used to drive beekeeping equipment around it's important to sterilize new equipment because you don't want any diseases being brought in so I just yeah use the blowtorch and went over the whole thing killing everything off so that it was all sterilized I'm just getting ready for the new colony of bees I've just made up 12 of these frames getting ready for the Swarm control so the day came my plan today was to do an artificial swarm I was really nervous I didn't want to get anything wrong there was a a process you need to go through to to make this work and I was pretty worried and then I looked in the garden that morning and I became even more worried because I was too late to the bees they had already decided to swarming the bees are swarming oh yeah we want to catch the Swarm we don't want to lose them and make it at any time fly away and choose somewhere else to live this box is ready to put amazing I'm also gonna need this box here there are so many beads oh I could use this scaffolding to get high enough well that's gonna be impossible to move a saw this okay so the bees are up there I think we should be able to do this [Music] we're gonna attempt to catch swarm out of a tree with a ladder and a saw and a box let's go here goes oh my goodness I've never seen anything like this in my life so what we're gonna have to do is cut the branch and try and bring them down and hope that the queen is in the middle of them and then we're going to put it into that box just there there's bees all over me [Music] that's a small with bathe in the tree I gotta try and get them down and put them in the box I'm not wearing a bee suit Alex is and he's telling me to film The Bees whilst they swarm there's literally bees everywhere right now they look really angry I'm hoping I don't end up getting stung I think if I cut there then I'll get the whole lot down I have never seen anything like this in my life so that's the main bunch of bees this is the new box it's going to go next to the other one oh my God I just felt one guy on my face wait so you're gonna end up with two beehives well there's a there's obviously a new Queen being born in there and then there's my old Queen should be inside that the one with the white dot on it I know right it's they're going over there where yeah there's like there's loads there as well which means the queen might be there so I'm gonna try and just get as many of them in in here as possible are you kidding sure let's mean I can go crazy no it's fine so now there's loads here I don't know maybe the Queen's on that there's still a few up there I'm just gonna get as many of them as I can [Music] okay [Music] oh that's the queen I see it I see it it's just it's in the box it's it's right here the one with the white dot the one that was originally in that Hive is just here you see it just there that's the queen that's where all of these bees are trying to get to yep she's on my finger she's in the she's in the new hive okay now hopefully she stays there and chooses to call that home that's the one that I saw in that box only a few days ago that's crazy that's mad when I first started beekeeping my idea I had in my head of it was that oh I'll have some nice looking beehives in the corner of the garden they'll pollinate the flowers I'll go out once a year collect a load of Honey put it on my toast in the morning and simple as that I certainly didn't have in mind that it would end up with me up a ladder trying to catch a massive ball of bees and put them into a new box I sure didn't expect that oh wow you haven't heard of bees on your head I know just on your head at this point I think if I even got stuck with Felix because of the adrenaline well you're the one wearing a massive suit at it yeah I probably won't get stuck I'm stood here with a t-shirt absolutely terrified you're actually doing a better job of uh staying calm than I am and you haven't even got a suit and I'm allergic to beef yeah for people to be the worst place for me to be right now foreign so many up there whoa they're an awful lot up there this is mad I don't know exactly what you're going to do but because they haven't got any food or anything in there I'm going to take out a frame of food from here and also a frame of open cells where the queen can start laying eggs because that's what you do when you do an artificial swarm you give the queen somewhere to lay eggs in the new box and also some food so I'm going to attempt that now this Hive currently doesn't have a queen I wouldn't have thought because they're currently in the process of making a new one okay so this Frame I think I will put in the new hive there's no Queen cells on it there's lots of space for the Queen to lay I'm gonna replace it with a new frame on the end there's no Queen cells on there so this Frame will also go into this Hive so they've got food foreign [Music] one two three four five six seven so this Frame if we remember correctly should have the Queen's cell yeah so that is a capped Queen cell so that's where the new Queen will hatch out from foreign [Music] that was the most stressful days beekeeping I've ever had I don't know this is helping but I'm trying to get them to go in into the hive all these other ones that I haven't managed to catch yeah that's it go into your new home honestly go in there you'll have a good life yeah that's it follow each other that is one of the or two queen cells that I took out I believe I had to take out all of them but one so that they don't send off another swarm I think that's me done for the day I just messaged a local beekeeper told him what I did and I'll see whether he thinks it was the right thing to do or not honestly I read some books about it and I kind of thought I kind of got the gist of what you need to do but I don't know if I did everything correct so we shall see I'm gonna lead them to it for now and hopefully the Swarms stay in the new box and don't decide to leave wow that was fun I'll just run you through how Alex's apiary looks at the moment because we've got two beehives now the one on the right is the original one there are a lot of bees flying in there I think most of the bees when they swarmed they they stayed in that Hive um because looking at the entrance of Hive number two on the left there's a lot less flying out of there in Hive number one we are currently waiting for a new Queen to be born once the queen is born then it will fly out mates with male bees in the local area and hopefully fingers crossed that Colony will be good and then on the left-hand Hive we have the queen bee which was previously in the right hand box so the one on the left is the Swarm that I caught out of the tree and I'm pretty happy they decided to stay and they seem pretty good who knows where this beekeeping Adventure will lead me next I'm hoping that the next episode will be May halves thing some honey if I end up getting any honey this year let me know in the comments below if you'd like to have some because I think it'd be quite cool to share it with the viewers of this channel three weeks ago my bees swarmed it was probably the most exciting day of my life there were thousands of bees flying around the garden and then they ended up clustering in like a ball around the tree and my job as a beekeeper was to basically try and capture them and re-home them in a box I grabbed a ladder and an empty box and I shook as many bees as I could into that box hoping that the queen bee was in there because the queen is the one that's leading this this journey are you kidding sure that's mean I can go crazy no it's fine it took me a few hours but eventually I had things under control I had the queen bee and loads of the other ones in a new box so now I actually have two beehives in the left-hand Hive is the swarm of bees that I caught out the tree and within there is actually the queen that used to be in the right hand Hive because when they swarm it's the old Queen which leaves so left hand Hive has the original Queen the one with the white dot of paint on its head I know that because I saw it go in there that colony of bees on the left should be good because they have a queen they have worker bees and they are a fully functioning Hive however the right hand Hive I'm slightly more skeptical because a colony of bees needs a queen and when I last checked them they didn't have a queen because the old queen left however they were in the process of making a new Queen I knew this because they had made this queen cell this larger cell where a new Queen would be born from when a new Queen is born it then flies out the hive and then goes and mates with male bees it then flies back and then once it's mated it is ready to start laying eggs and the colony is fully functioning again however when that Queen is born and flies out it might get hit by a car or it might get slapped by a human who doesn't like bees so there's a chance something can go wrong and then without that Queen The Colony will just slowly die because there's no bee to lay any eggs if there isn't we might have to do some other complicated stuff like join the two beehives together or buy a queen from an external Source like buy a new Queen and then introduce it to the hive but fingers crossed we have a queen in there which is laying eggs and and it's all good but I mean I don't know we're gonna have to jump in and find out and that's what we're gonna do now when I light my smoker I normally start it with some birch bark birch bark is like one of the most flammable materials and it's just the perfect Fire Starter so I take some of that off a tree in the garden actually pop it in the smoker first like that and then after that I put something like string or pine cones on top I went to the forest last year and I just collected a whole bag full these are I think I believe they're Scots pine cones but apparently when you like a smoker you should just use anything which is natural and if you're wondering the reason for the smoker it's because when you spray the smoke over the bees they think that there's like a fire the bees prepare for this fire by going into their hive and eating lots of Honey because if they need to move home they they need lots of honey in them to to have the energy to start a colony somewhere else because they're full of honey and because they're busy going to find the honey they are less likely to get aggressive and less likely to sting you that's what I've heard anyway so I'm basically getting a decent fire going in the smoker so that there's some hot Embers it's going really strong now so I'll just pack it full with as much as I can fit in ah no I got smoke and my face ah and I can pop the lid on and there we have a lit smoker and that should smoke for about half an hour I've got a yellow pen you'll find out what that's for a bit later I'm gonna put that in my little pocket I've got this device which looks kind of interesting but you'll also see what this is for later I've got my hive tool to prize open the hive I'm gonna put these gloves on which I realized the other day aren't bee proof ah shot now I got stung on my finger so they obviously don't work I just feel a bit safer with them on and I've heard that the bees are sometimes less likely to sting because it doesn't feel like skin and then I'm just tightening up my wrist thing here so that no Bees can get through right let's check the bees okay hello bees hello I'm coming in we are looking for a new Queen I should mention this box here is called a honey super so in here is where the honey is being made and I can already see that they've drawn out some of the frames we can have a look at that a bit later oh my goodness this box is heavy I think we might have honey in there already so this is the queen excluder this thing stops the queen from coming through foreign these bees are a little bit angry nothing on that frame nothing on that frame oh yes there's eggs I can see eggs there's a queen in there I see eggs that's great I wonder if we can find the queen though how it up am I ever gonna find this queen you think it would be impossible okay I don't think the queen is on that frame so where'd you even start looking it's just like there's so many bees it feels like I'm never gonna find this queen I know there's a queen in here because there's eggs ah it feels like it's just gonna take me hours it's not the end of the world if I don't spot her today but I'd like to do something where I I Mark the queen with a with a yellow pen and it will make finding the queen in the future a lot easier [Music] you can see all that pollen in there all that colored stuff that's all the pollen that they've been storing and that's the food that they give to the baby bees because I believe pollen is very high in protein there's a b there actually you can see the pollen on its hind legs there's another one over here as well you can see the yellow pollen so cool no sign of the queen oh I see the queen I've just seen the queen and it's so obvious wow there's the queen she is only a few weeks old wow look at that beautiful and she's the one laying all these eggs they should go down and then now I can lay this blah and then I need to trap the queen in there okay so I've got the queen she's in there okay so I've got a pen and I've got to do a DOT Comet base comment I know this isn't what you want but it's gonna help me there's a yellow dot on the Queen's head we've done it okay now I can lift that off so now as you can see the queen has a yellow dot which means we can find it a lot easier wow nice that was pretty much all I had to do with this Hive find the queen check that she was laying eggs and Mark her with a yellow pen so I can find her easier in the future that's really cool I can put this Hive back together now and uh leave them to it let them make more honey oh that honey box is heavy let's have a look inside the honey super see what's going on in there most of the frames look like that there's nothing on them oh wow so you can see that one they've actually drawn out the comb see all this this is freshly drawn out comb which they will then store the onion oh we've got honey that side there's not much this side they've actually capped it over no flipping way we've got honey all this here is honey which they have capped that is epic wow I was not expecting that that is so cool and all these bees here are doing all the work oh and we've got honey on this Frame as well this Frame is the heaviest look at that all the white stuff at the top is stuff which they've capped over and then if I show you the other side you can see they've done quite a lot there and the rest of it you can actually see the the nectar which is which is being prepared and turned into honey oh no way that's amazing but that is so cool to see that they're actually making honey and at some point this summer if they fill up the frame we can then take the frame out and and eat it there we go time to check Hive number two I don't really need to check anything in particular in this hive um I just wanted to see whether they need more space but I don't think they do because they they haven't filled up every frame this Frame you can see they've got lots of stores of honey in there I can see quite a lot of eggs in there lots of brood which means that the queen is laying well oh I see the queen next frame just see how white dot so we've now got a queen with a white dot which means it was born last year and we've got a queen of the yellow dot which is means that it's born this year so in my beekeeping book there's a section on marking the queen so if the year is ending in two or seven so this year is 2022 so it's ending in two I Mark the queen yellow and that's just a way that you can sort of know how old your queen is what year it was born and it's just a handy way of finding the queen as well because it has a bright dot on its head and then next year it'll be red and then green and then blue when I set up this Hive a few weeks ago there was just two frames I think and that was it and they've actually worked on drawing out all the other frames so they can use them for raising their young and also storing food in so yeah this is all brand new work that they've done you can see that around the edges is the honey or the stores of food and then in the middle you've got the baby bees being born pretty mad and then that's that side is similar thing as well look at all of that that's all food which they've stored so a few days ago I had a bee disaster about two three months ago in March might be swarmed and I managed to catch the Swarm out of that tree up there so that's the main bunch of bees and I managed to put them in a new box so I ended up with two beehives split from one but the other day I was out traveling in the USA out the country and I get a text from my mum saying there's lots of bees in the garden and she sends me a photo of like oh no that Bee wants this thing and being chase around the garden by my bees no no I need to put my suit on my mum sends me a photo of so many bees like probably like twenty thousand all grouped around a bush in the bottom of the garden and I saw it and I was like well I'm about 3 000 miles away right now I can't really do anything mum and dad do fancy putting on a bee suit and catching them and they didn't like the idea of that so that evening the saddest thing happened and they left they flew off into the open Wilderness and probably found the new home I might not ever see those bees again so today I want to check the hives find out which one of them swarmed and what the situation is because if they swarmed it means that one of my old queens is gone and they should be making a new one but uh we're gonna have to open up the boxes and find out and I also want to check up on how much honey they've made the worst thing about losing thousands of bees is that you've now got thousands less worker bees making honey for you so our honey crop is gonna be a lot less this year but let's look inside the hives oh yeah let's see what we got going on that's a big spider it looks like there's a lot less bees in here than there was before these could have been the ones that swarmed oh wow they've eaten all their stuff what oh no a few weeks ago when I checked I thought I had loads of honey [Music] I'll show on the screen now what the frame looked like before wow look at all that honey and now you can see there's no honey in there at all and that's because they obviously didn't have enough nectar the foragen for the last few weeks and they've eaten all their stores there's something called the June Gap where there is a gap in flowers the bees don't have anything to to get nectar from so they have to eat their reserves of honey and that is what has happened my hive which was very heavy full of Honey a few weeks ago has now got nothing on it so things aren't looking too great they've literally eaten everything there is nothing left it's just all gone it's Madness wow that's disappointing there's still a little bit of honey in there but not much yeah the whole box is just completely gone of honey did not expect that so what I've really got to check is the bottom box to see if there's a queen in there no Queen on there so there are quite a lot of these which are queen cells and inside there is a larvae which means that is going to turn into a new Queen hmm so yeah this is the hive which is missing the queen I've not seen any eggs either there is a cat Queen cell so a new Queen will hatch out of there in a matter of days so we need to destroy all the other Queen cells that only one Queen is born otherwise they might swarm again [Music] there's still lots of bees but imagine when like before they swarm there would have been like twice as many one Queen cell two queen cell another queen so so that one with the yellow spot that I marked has now gone that's really sad I've got to only keep one Queen cell otherwise they could swarm again so right now I'm gonna just destroy all of them but one there is a queen cell there are all the queen cells which I destroyed they must be like 12 of them each one of those has the potential to turn to a queen but if they all hatch at the same time they'll either fight each other and kill each other or they can end up swarming again so there could be lots of different swarms and we lose more bees so there's just one in there right now gonna check Hive number two this one should be simple there shouldn't be anything wrong with this hive same old story in this Hive all the honey is gone they've eaten it all wow I thought we were getting honey this year now it's looking very unlikely I wanted to check that the Queen's still okay in there what oh I think they both might have sworn oh my goodness I don't know what's going on just here is a queen cell which a beer has come out of so this Hive is definitely swarmed and there's a new Queen in here it's a really complicated and confusing there's another queen cell which a beer has come out of there so there's there's been multiple Queens been born hardest I've been away and I missed it all the queen that is in here is not laying yet because there's no eggs [Music] foreign [Applause] couldn't have really had any worse news the bees have eaten all their honey so we've got none and both of the hives swarmed whilst I was away on holidays so we've lost so many bees So currently we've got no Queen in that one they're going to make a new one soon there's only one Queen cell so that should be all good this Hive I don't know what's going on there were loads of Queen cells all which had been opened which means that Queens had hatched out of them have probably lost a load of swarms and there's a queen hopefully somewhere in there I'm gonna let both hives just sit for a few weeks now and hope that a new Queen is born and the colony is working again so yeah what a more painful bit of news to come back to after being on holiday just show you've got to kind of be on the ball if you want beekeeping to be a success whilst not everything is going particularly well for my bees I have been lucky enough recently to visit some other beekeepers a couple of months ago I visited a Guy in Wales called Griff him and his family live on a farm and they have I think between 150 and 200 beehives and he started with just a couple and he's turned it into a business like a proper beekeeping business he sells his honey he he harvests crazy amounts of Honey each year he sells wax candles lots of other bee products and also he sells everything to do with beekeeping beehives all the equipment and tools that you need to go beekeeping and seeing him was a massive eye-opener that that beekeeping although is a hobby for most people it can be turned into a business he took me for a drive to go to some of his aceries where he keeps all his bees and then I had a tour around the farm so we saw the room where all the equipment is stored and then we went to the honey house where all the honey is processed into jars and then we took a walk in the shop where he sells all his stuff like it's a proper Warehouse I even bought some honey off of him I bought a whole frame of honey and uh yeah that was really tasty I took it to my friend's place and we we ate it for dinner it was it was really good and it definitely inspired me to to kind of have that as a little aim in the back of my head like I'm Gonna Keep beekeeping and learning as much as I can and maybe one day it will turn into something more and maybe I'll be able to sell copious amounts of honey and candles and stuff like that in the future anyway back to my bees because it's been a couple of weeks since the confusion of not having any honey there anymore and also both my hives swarming and losing loads of bees I went to check on them this morning and things are looking a lot better I actually started making notes so I've got this folder where I put down notes of things I see in the hive so I can keep track of what's going on before I would look through the hive and because I didn't note any of it down I would forget what I had seen so in here I've put down notes of whether I've seen eggs or larvae or queen cells or anything of Interest which I need to remember so I checked Hive number one which is the one I put on the the right hand side the original colony that I had to start with good news is is that they are starting to fill up the frames with honey again this one's feeling quite heavy oh that's a nice surprise that is what I'm talking about one whole side of the frame on the other side it's a full frame of Honey like this because it's all capped it means it's at the right moisture level to take it like I could if I wanted to take it all now and eat it on toast but I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to wait till more of the frames are full and then take it all at one time but yeah that's pretty damn cool wow and although they have made a crazy amount of effort with all their honey it still didn't look too great on the The Brood box the box below where the queen should be and all the eggs and The Brood because there were no eggs and no larvae which means there hasn't been a queen present for a number of days this isn't too good because you need a queen in a beehive to to lay the eggs there were a couple of Queen cells though which means they they are trying to make a new Queen there's a queen so just there which looks very ready to hatch so the end has gone really dark I've got to make sure there's only one Queen cell I once again knocked all the queen cells down apart from one so only one Queen is born and I'm just going to have to wait maybe a couple of weeks for that Queen to hatch and then mate and then I'll check it again I'm a bit confused with Hive number one because I checked them the other week and I also I did the same thing I left just one Queen cell I checked again today and there is still like Queen cells like there should have been a queen which had been born and made it but I don't really know what's going on anyway Hive number two slightly different story they were filling up their super so they were filling up the honey honey box on top which is cool there's obviously lots of flowers about at the moment and they did have eggs there's the queen and we're gonna Mark you there we go we've got a new Queen and she's marked that's good that's very good there she is she's laying eggs which is good they're making some honey which is also good yay I'm so glad we've got one Queen at least look at that a whole frame of capped brood see this one's healthy this has all the components needed for a functioning Hive of bees I've number one still no Queen present they're bringing in lots of Honey which is good but I am slightly concerned and I'm gonna keep an eye on that Hive over the coming few weeks to to hopefully make sure they are both good so things are looking a lot better than they were especially on the honey front I did not think like they could bring in that much nectar so quickly but on my recent walks that I've been doing each day I've been seeing so many flowers all of these flowers here are blackberries you can see the Blackberry is even starting to form on that one but these are Apparently one of the top sources of nectar and honey at this time of year and we not only get the honey from this we then get all the blackberries one of the other flowers that beekeeper is going about is this it is white clover in fact I read a book recently about good honey plants like good plants that bees get lots of honey from and clover was up there with like the top flowers in the UK like most of UK honey is apparently from these little flowers here we're gonna see how this summer goes hopefully we can get some honey from my bees this year foreign [Music] because inside these boxes is the equipment I need to extract and harvest the honey from my beehives I've been working towards this moment for the last 12 months [Applause] stay tuned to see the whole honey extracting process [Music] this is a honey extractor you can see in there that's where the frames go and then you can spin the frames round that shakes the honey out you might be wondering why I have invested in this sort of equipment I could have just you know borrowed a local beekeepers equipment just for the very small amount of honey that I have to harvest well it's because I've got Big Dreams and high hopes for the coming years when Alex's honey turned into a multi-million pound business all jokes aside I don't have a clue what this thing is oh no it's the legs three legs for the extractor okie dokie there are a few other helpful tools when harvesting honey and that's what I hope to find in these other boxes bucket and here I've got a couple of different sizes of like sieve so the honey flows out the bottom of the extractor with loads of wax mixed in it then goes through this sieve into the finer sieve fills this out as much of the wax and solids as possible leaving this bucket full of hopefully very nice clear honey now I'm a little bit obsessed with knives and I've just bought myself a new one but this is the first time I've ever bought a uncapping knife this thing is for uncapping the wax that covers the honey on a frame it's a serrated knife which makes it easier to cut with and you basically just cut the cappings off and then the frame is ready to put inside the extractor so there's all the tools for extracting honey now comes the hard part I've actually got to go into the beehives and take the honey off and extract it one year ago I started keeping bees I didn't have a clue what I was doing but beekeeping has been one of the biggest learning curves one of the most fascinating projects I've ever worked on and it's also been the most long term project it wasn't a simple case of getting these and quickly getting some honey I've had to work with the bees and look after them in such a way that they are healthy enough and strong enough to produce some extra honey for me to take it sure hasn't been easy in the spring all was going well I managed to divide one Hive into two hives and then I went on holiday which was a really bad idea I went on holiday from May to June and that is prime swarming season so I got back home from holiday to see that most of my peas had actually left and swarmed meaning that there was a lot less honey in the hives and there were a lot less bees to make more honey so the honey Harvest that I'm going to do today is so much smaller than it could have been if I had known what I was doing but that's all part of the learning process I guess next year we won't have those problems and we should get even more honey so today I'm going to take off some honey from the hives bring it into the kitchen where I've got all the equipment set up and ready to do my first honey extraction ever I'm so excited that top box here is really light like there's there's hardly any honey in this one there is plenty of honey in there so let's just take a look and see how the frames that oh wow so this this is what we're looking for this Frame is full of Honey or not completely ideally it would be right to the edge but it's mostly full now something I was wondering quite a lot about is how do I know that the honey is ready to take out you don't want to collect an apple from a tree when it's not ripe yet and in the same way you don't want to take the honey off the hive before it's turned into proper honey but otherwise the moisture content can be too high and then it can ferment because basically honey is just nectar with the with much of the moisture removed now when you see the wax cappings like this the bees are basically telling us that it's ready to take they've kept it over ready to store and it won't ferment so this whole frame here I can take this from The Hive now of course I don't want to bring that whole box of Honey inside the house with all the bees in so there's a few ways you can remove those bees there's something called a a skateboard or clearer board and it's basically just a piece of wood with these little devices where the bees can go one way but then they can't get back the other way so you put it underneath the honey box the bees go down and then they can't get back up so it basically clears the super of bees now I only have two hives to deal with so I'm probably just gonna take the frames out that I want to extract and then Shake as many bees up as I can the Swedish beekeeper who I saw uses these a lot to get lots of the bees out and then he actually uses a blower to get the last of the bezel which is another interesting way of doing it thank you I just took that honey into the house where it is be tight because obviously when you're carrying around a box full of nice sugary sweet stuff lots of bees can find it and cause all sorts of problems so I put it in the house lock the doors yeah just so we don't have bees going all over that honey it's safe I've got it I feel like a bear I've just stole my honey and now I'm trying to keep it safe so this Hive here that was the original Hive that I got that's where I put my first lot of bees in but when they sworn and I caught them at the tree this swarm went into this box and this box has actually ended up doing I think better than the original one they just seem to be working harder don't really know why look at that I can already see there's more bees in there so that one's got a bit of weight not massive and this one's also got about the same there's quite a lot of friends which haven't got anything like this so I'm just going to try and separate them and just get one box which has got full frame okay whoa there we go we've got two boxes of honey in the kitchen right let's take a little Gander at some of this honey interestingly every frame is a bit different for example this one they've cut lots of Honey around there but then they've stored pollen in this bit here so they haven't got any stores inside there I can hear a bee inside and it's the same the other side and then some frames are just so incredible look at that that is just beautiful oh this is really heavy as well this is my uncapping station this is the bucket which all the wax captains go in and this little thing that I was made goes on top the frame of Honey rests in the hole and then I can scrape off the wax cappings and they'll just fall off into the bucket and then the honey frame goes inside here this bucket can go underneath and then these are a couple of filtering sieves which got over the bucket I've got a couple of tools to uncap the honey this is an uncapping knife you simply slide that along and cut the wax off but then sometimes you miss bits and this is an uncapping Fork you can just scrape across the cappings break them open so that then they will come out of the extractor shall we extract my first frame of Honey ever there we go everyone Alex's first frame of honey and then there's like these bits on the corner which haven't been broken open so I'm just scraping them and I can spin this around and then this can go inside the extractor [Music] it was possibly the most satisfying thing I've ever done this is a three frame extractor so you can put three frames in it and it's now full so I guess it's time to do some spinning I messed up a little bit I realized if you spin it too fast then the comb actually breaks yeah I managed to ruin one of the frames that's what happens if you try and spin it too fast foreign [Music] just a wet frame of wax see that at the bottom that is honey now I've got to do all of those this can go back down there good we're gonna do something quite cool with that later on so I've realized each frame kind of has to be dealt with a little bit differently because this one the comb extends outwards of the wood which means I can cut it with the uncapping knife but some of the frames they are built kind of inwards which means that uncapping though doesn't get to cut them off which is why I have to use the fork yeah I can't cut that so I have to use the fork to scrape the cabins out [Music] that is just so satisfying look at that it just feels amazing smells amazing it is just totally amazing these are awesome and I'm so glad I became a beekeeper last year because it's given me so much enjoyment and the reward that I'm feeling now is just ridiculous I when you work towards something for a year I guess the longer you work towards something the better it feels when you finally get there this is such a rewarding fulfilling feeling harvesting this honey that I've been waiting so long for and this is probably one of the best looking frames that's Epic so the extractor is getting quite full of Honey now so at the bottom you can see the the frames are actually touching the honey when it spins so I need to undo that valve and let some of it into the strainer oh my goodness that is my honey watching this honey flow out of the valve is just the most mesmerizing incredible thing ever [Music] laughs so now both these boxes are full of really wet sticky frames and instead of cleaning them up myself what I'm going to do is I'm going to put them back on to the beehives and then they will collect all the drippings and then store it back up again very neatly so I'm going to open this valve and while I let it drip through and filter I'm gonna go in the garden and put those boxes back on the hives we're gonna put the wet honey super on top of the hive lid so the bees will take all the honey that's dripping off of this and put it into their boxes below then once these frames are cleaned by the bees I can then take the boxes off and then put them into storage for the winter so what am I going to do with all these wax cappings because there's quite a bit of honey in the bottom and also just a load of wax that is very useful for many things such as polishing your shoes or making candles or rubbing on your surfboard so you have more grip there's many good uses and I want to I want to get that out of there [Music] foreign [Music] bits of propolis and pollen and we don't want that in there so I'm going to melt it down again and then strain it through a t-shirt [Music] I've just realized as I'm straining this wax with this takeaway tub that you get very little wax compared to honey but this little tub here that'll do me [Music] [Applause] [Music] there's a bucket of honey and that is pretty heavy [Music] what that that's all pure honey that is all pure fine Sussex honey and all of that came from one Hive uh to oh you drained both of them yeah poor bees today I've managed to get hold of one of the UK's finest honey critics no fishing YouTubers oh yeah um yeah he's just a fisherman and he has some weighing scales because I want to see how much honey we've got because it's something to brag about you know when I go down the pub and see my mate that yeah harvested do you know 200 kilos of honey from my bees 200 kilos I know we're gonna find out oh 12 13 12 and a half my bees make 12 kilograms of honey that's the most satisfying thing ever yeah oh it's amazing honey is incredible okay Carl it's time to taste it you can see why Bear Grylls climbed up that mountain than like hacked into the highest to get at Honey because it's really worth it what actually is honey it is nectarian poo no I'm glad it isn't this is just necta which has been dehumidified it's gone through the bee though hasn't it the B has taken it in the other side and then it no that is it but takes it in through the for its tongue yeah and then it puts it back in the cells like in the frame and then they flap their wings over and pass air over it to evaporate the water so it's nectar without any water in it it's got 19 moisture content there's not very much water no no it cheers Carl here's your honey oh you're actually giving it you can you can have the first jar because you are my brother now I want to give everyone who has been following Along on this beekeeping Journey a jar of my honey but unfortunately I don't think I'm gonna have enough and first I need to prioritize friends and family let's start filling these jars foreign that one's for the grandparents uncles aunties [Music] and this one is gonna be for a girl that I really like [Music] honey and we haven't even [Music] there you go Dad oh wow it's yours is that honey I think so I think it's funny Alex honey are you honey amazing that's lovely it's good isn't it it's all mine it's all yours as you can see the hives have now shrunk down I've taken off the supers and there's just the brood box underneath that is the box that they will live in in the winter the winter months are a rather quiet time for a beekeeper there's not a huge amount to do I've got to of course check that they've got enough food over the course of the next few months and if they don't then I can give them some sugar syrup or Baker's fondant which is a solid form of sugar I have checked the varroa destructor Mike levels basically they're a blood sucking mites that can cause a colony of bees to collapse if there's too many of them but uh luckily there's still not a serious level or not high enough that I need to give them treatment at the moment but I will keep an eye on that and I've just got to make sure the hives are waterproof and make sure that they are free from The Damp and the cold I think this winter I'll do some planning for next season I've got to decide where I want this beekeeping to go because I could expand this beekeeping project I could have a few more hives meaning I get a larger honey Harvest which means I can have more honey to sell I've just got to find some people who are willing for me to put some beehives on their land because my dad doesn't want any more bees in his garden so if you happen to be in the Sussex area and you wouldn't mind me putting some bees on your land drop me a message uh head over to my Instagram or email me let me know because it'd be quite cool to expand this beekeeping project and have some more bees I suppose the good thing about beekeeping is that the next few months and over the winter there's not a great deal to do which means I can do some more traveling and go on holiday and I've got some really exciting things planned very soon I'm going to travel around Europe in my van I want to go to Switzerland Slovenia Austria Germany and hopefully many other countries then from November onwards I'm basically living in Austria I am renting this Hut in the mountains it's in the Austrian out it is the most beautiful place I actually went there last Christmas for five days and I loved it so much so I'm gonna go back there I'm going to challenge myself and see how I fare at living in the mountains and living in isolation I'm hoping friend and family will come in join me for a little bit but yeah it's gonna be it's gonna be an interesting time this winter and then next spring I'm hoping or my plan is to come back to England and focus on the beekeeping again because the beekeeping season sort of when you have to be around focusing on the bees is from sort of March through till September so I'll probably try and stay home for for that time anyway thanks for watching the video hope you enjoyed watching my beekeeping journey I will see you next time foreign

Channel: Just Alex

Views: 2,474,422

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Id: 3Knyzo3ugnU

Length: 103min 7sec (6187 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 01 2022