Beekeeping Extracting Honey, How To Tell When The Nectar Flow Ends

today i'm going to show you how you can tell the difference between a hive that's involved in a heavy nectar flow and when the switch turns off and there's no longer any nectar flow and you need to start feeding so many of you have asked me how do i know the nectar flow is over i've got a simple way i'm going to show you how you can tell it is a beautiful morning i'm david burns east certified master beekeeper good to be with you again for another beekeeping video got some freshly cut flowers that i pulled out of the garden for the video this morning for you i got my cup of coffee ready uh for coffee time later got the french press with the great coffee thing over here today we're going to look at some cool things in beekeeping i'm going to show you the progression of a frame that we put into a five frame nuke box and how quickly bees can pull that out and what they do with it and how many days it takes to do all of that that'd be fun to look at amazing stuff i was hoping i could do the day-by-day progression of that frame and i was doing pretty good until about day three and what happened was day three we were inundated with storms on day four on day five on day six thunderstorms rain i couldn't get in there but uh i kind of put together as much as i could going in there as often as i could but i just couldn't pull off the day-by-day uh filming of that frame's development i had to miss a few days so anyway we'll take a good look at it also what i'm gonna do today we're gonna go out to the hive uh that's really doing well i've got a couple of hives that are just packing the honey in and we're going to pull off a couple of frames of capped over honey and what i want to do today also for those of you that are new to beekeeping and you've never extracted honey or you don't know if you're doing it right i'm going to show you the simple way to do it there was a time when i had all the big equipment you know i had a 60 frame radial extractor that's a it's a beautiful bird but it's it's it's really loud that's what mornings are that's why mornings are so great for the songbirds but this big radial motor driven clutch driven 60 frame radial extractor was i had also i had a cowon uncapper and uh it would you could put 10 frames out of your super right on a rack and chains would drive motors would drive them motors would run knives that would slice them open and then they would just go off and baskets would collect the cappings winches would pull the capping baskets over i mean and pumps would pump the honey into a 500 gallon tank i enjoyed all of that immensely don't get me wrong but boy when it comes to beekeeping it all boils down to the simplicity and enjoyment of opening up those caps on a freshly sealed frame of honey and that is so fun so i'm going to show you how to do that i use a little block of wood like this and i i put a drywall nail screw actually through the middle here and cut some notches you don't have to do all of this but it just makes it easier for me and that way i can actually put my frame right here then it kind of rests on this screw keeps it from falling over and then i i don't use hot hot knives i used to use heated uncapping knives but i don't do that any longer i started using just these knives that are serrated like this we call these cold knives i don't like the taste of burnt honey uh sometimes the heated uncapping knives they're supposed to kind of cut and melt the wax here comes an airplane i live in the country it's supposed to be quiet but uh i don't like the heated ones they they seem to melt the wax and the wax gets more into the honey uh and so i love the simple ones if you you know if you have less than five or six hives uh you you can use the simple equipment like this a little two frame extractor and and that will serve you well but i like these uh little extracting knives they're serrated so you can just slice open those cappings what the knife doesn't open up you can use a scraper like this it works really well to open up the caps so in theory if this is all new to you all you're really doing is taking a capped over frame of honey it needs to be sealed or capped over really well you know 80 percent that way we get the right moisture content under the caps if you do it before it's capped over you'll get too much water the the nectar isn't dried out enough that's why it isn't capped over yet and once you extract it and bottle it you'll actually have fermentation later on after you bottle it and that's not how you make alcohol but it does have a similar reaction it starts to ferment and it really tastes more like vinegar and your customers will be mad at you so don't do that wait till it's capped over good so anyway i'll show you how to do that we'll have fun doing that we're gonna do it this morning before the bees wake up because once they wake up and scouts come out they'll smell our operation of honey being extracted and they'll go back and tell the hive that there's honey on a picnic table and they'll take us over so we're going to sneak that in there before they start going and then we'll have coffee time afterwards that'd be cool so we got a lot of cool things planned uh let's go ahead i'm going to suit up and we're going to jump into some hives start looking at stuff all right so what we'll do is just grab two frames that are pretty much capped over we'll trust that the frames in the middle here are the ones we're looking for probably all right let's take a look it looks good to me on this side capped over kept over we got one beetle floating around in the middle there uh let's take one more out though uh the bees i'm just gonna sweep them off with a b brush because i don't i'm just wanting to take two away i'll smoke the hive here a little bit and then just brush the bees off that way i don't have to really do much other than just brush them off all right looks pretty good got all the bees off of it let's kill that beetle darn it let's smoke it and let's get one more frame out and i don't i don't want to take the frame next to that one oh you know actually what i'm going to do let me show you this is cool i'm going to see how long it takes them this is july the 23rd as you can see here i'm going to see how long it takes them to actually draw this foundation-less no foundation i'm going to see if they can draw this out as of june i mean sorry as of july the 23rd it's a little late in the season but let's give it a go um be interesting all right now we're going to pull another one out and we're going to replace it with a frame that has a tiny bit of drawn comb on it but not much so let's go we we don't want to put it next to this one well we could but we're going to space them out a little bit so let's check on this one over here so nicely drawn out capped over on my side is your side all the way capped over oh yeah it is it looks good capped over on both sides isn't that beautiful wow this hive is a gigantic honeymaking hive let's brush these bees off gently uh it's more of a flicking motion than a brush brushing motion you're kind of just flicking them if you get a good skill if you become kind of talented at flicking bees off of frames you don't really bother them too much but if you brush them and you roll them and drag them and then you can kind of irritate the bees so what we're going to do now i've got a frame here that's partially just got a little start of a draw on it so we're going to put that over here and that'll give them something to draw out and maybe fill up yeah this is a frame we're going to cut the cappings off first we'll just do one i've got two you have to do two if you have an extractor to balance out the extractor but look how beautiful that is this is what every beekeeper lives for it's just a solid frame of beautiful tasting honey underneath those caps one thing i'll show you it's pretty smooth on this side not perfect but smooth a little more imperfect on this side a little more bumpy bees just do that i don't know why who knows right all right so let's go ahead and i'll show you how i like to extract it and i'll just show you how i go about doing it beautiful morning dove uh what you want to do is sort of use the wood uh the top bar and the bottom bar on this frame as a guide for your blade now this is going to change based on how far out your wax is drawn out if it's really drawn out really far you're wasting too much by using the wood you're cutting off too much honey you kind of just want to open up those caps if that's possible now the cappings are going to fall into this collection uh tub here and we'll run those through our strainer get all the honey out and use those uh in the future but so no nothing is lost anyway and so it just makes it a little bit easier to extract the less wax you have in your honey so i start about right down here and i work my way up because i can't really get my blade there too well so i'll just rock it back and forth like this and try to slice off just a thin layer of wax and you can see how what that looks like i hope it's in camera so i've opened up all those cells and here's the wax that was covering it and i'll just let that fall into my bucket and isn't that beautiful i just want to eat that oh i think it's so beautiful now let's continue on down the frame back and forth i'm telling you these cold knives work so well they really do and you can tilt to the blade to let that wax fall off fall down into your bucket and i'm trying to stay just a hair above the wood because the frame's a little bigger there all right very good wow let's see that quite didn't open up there let's go a little bit more and here either this would be a good example i'll show you i think i can open that up with my knife but what you want to do if it doesn't open well uh because of a little divot or something in the in the wax you can use this scraper these are great all of this stuff we sell in our store if you're interested but look at that that's ready to be extracted and that was very easy it wasn't very messy we were we were really careful with just cutting enough to open up those caps let's do that again on the other side again you don't want to do this outdoors where bees are flying or every bee in hill valley will show up here my bees are still it was a cool evening and so they're still in their hive it's early in the morning again this is going to be a good illustration of what to do when the comb is kind of bumpy and lumpy right and be careful with your fingers you don't want to cut your fingers so what i'll do i'll just try to uh go just above the cappings or you know just barely get down into the wax just enough to open up the caps and this is really good anything that i can't really open up with my knife i'm gonna use my scraper and so now let's just go ahead and go down the frame keeping your blade tilted out at the top will allow the wax to go ahead and just fall off if you tilt it the other way or the frame the other way the wax doesn't fall into your bucket all right that was good so that was quick and good now he might look at this and say okay there's some stuff david that you missed yeah that's what our little scraper tool is for a little bit down here open up all the caps a little bit here that's the little divot there that we need to open up the caps we're just opening up don't scrape too much don't scrape down in and tear the wax up because you can put this back on a hive and they'll start filling it up again really soon all right beautiful and you'll notice a little more dark spots there that can be because at one time they had a little pollen in there and it stained the actual comb underneath uh where the honey is there but that's fine all right there you go that's how you slice open your frames in our next video what we're going to do a future video i'm going to show you how to spin the honey out and then we'll see how much honey we can get out of two frames that are the medium-sized frames but some of you may be wondering or you'll probably ask me you know what is this stuff on top here i can tell by looking at it every bit of that is propolis and then you'll ask me you know do you scrape the propolis off do you do you clean that up yeah i really don't i learned a long time ago when i had a lot of hives that it wasn't worth my time but propylene's or propolis you can pronounce it either way it's really good it has a lot of benefits so you can actually scrape it into a ball and use it and so if you want to harvest that propolis by all means you sure can if you look in the bucket from us just what we scraped off you can see some of the beautiful pieces of wax the cappings these are called and you can drain the honey out i usually will let these sit in a strainer over a five gallon bucket and then the honey kind of drips out and then i take the cappings and wash them out in five gallon buckets to get all the honey out and then i'm left with wax and melt it down so i just wanted to show you though how beautiful it is look at this that's just a slice of heaven it was like wow you know honey and wax together and i just had to eat this i eat part of it anyway and you taste the honey mmm get honey on your hands wow i i won't swallow the wax i've heard you can it's just roughage little thin layers of wax was soaked in honey i mean gosh look at that wow it is so sweet [Laughter] wow okay so what i've decided to do is start with a brand new uh frame and i'm not gonna add any wax to it because that might be an advantage an unfair advantage that not everybody can do so what happens when you just put a frame in that slightly wax from the company after 24 hours some wax is being drawn out the wind is blowing on it and this is side one 24 hours okay this is side two and the queen is laying eggs and the queen is present on this frame 48 hours after putting the frame in drawn out queen on it laying eggs on side two 48 hours later this is day four day three was too stormy to go in side one on day six nectar at the top a little bit of eggs at the bottom but no developing larvae i don't think today i want to show you a frame that we've been watching over the past few days and a new frame that i put in there on monday so as you can see we have a frame that was put in here on july the 8th and one that was put in here on july the 20th today is the 23rd so the new frame has been in there three days so let's just take a peek see what we got let's start with the newest one first today is thursday this frame was put in here on monday monday tuesday wednesday thursday just three little short days and look what they've done we put this in us uh just a brand new comb nothing special and it has eggs all over do you see the eggs so in three days they drew the comb out and filled it with eggs three days people wow all right let's look at this side oh same thing again beautifully drawn out all filled with eggs i try to hold it still so maybe in the edit room i can show you the eggs better hope that works out i don't see the queen on it let me look again usually you see the queen where there's eggs but no i don't see her we can leave that out just for a second while we look at the next one the other one that we're going to look at is one that we've been watching put in here on july the 8th and now it's the 23rd that would have been 21 days ago i wanted to demonstrate how we looked at it uh just a little a few days ago we looked at it and it looked like spotty brood because they had not capped everything so i want to demonstrate how what it looks like once they cap it over so that you'll know that was not spotty brood but they had just not capped it all over yet so we've got into it before they capped it this should be a some solid brood on this frame all right indeed it is i'll let the sun hit that so we looked at it when it was not all the way capped over and it looked like spotty brood but you can see they had just not capped it over so that's a good brood pattern those are the things that i wanted to demonstrate so in just a few days uh they kept it over now it's that's july the 8th now this is july the 8th when we put it in as an undrawn foundation today's the 23rd that's 21 days 20 21 days later we've got good capped over brood uh that's that's just awesome to look at gosh here is a good nectar flow the amount of bees flying in and out and you can see the nectar flow starting to uh be reduced now not as much as the other video well i hope that was helpful for you to learn some things about bees observing what they're doing in the hive how fast they can pull out frames make wax lay eggs make brood fascinating then we got into some honey extraction i hope i taught you some cool tips for that and now it's coffee time so i hope you'll stick around and let's do the french press thing look at this this is the most enjoyable time of the morning pushing down the strainer and then now we pour the coffee wow look at that look at the steam coming off wow i do like milk in my coffee a little cream i guess a lot of people don't i'm not man enough to drink it straight i guess hey please subscribe if you haven't subscribed to our youtube channel i want to encourage you to do that please subscribe we're hoping to get 50 000 subscribers by the end of the year and we're slowly headed that way so i appreciate you subscribing click on the bell so you can be notified each time i make another youtube video and beekeeping to help you so much i do want to encourage you to know that these videos that i make are not everything you need to know about beekeeping i just can't do that on youtube but you know a lot of you are not going to go into the details you're not going to stick around long enough for me to share all the details of beekeeping that you need to know that you learn at beekeeping classes such as my online courses you're not going to be a good beekeeper i don't think in my opinion you're not going to be the best beekeeper you can be if you just look at youtube videos here and there you do need to take a solid class in your area or one of mine somewhere get the foundations of beekeeping down or else you're going to be frustrated in beekeeping even after taking classes you can be frustrated so i'm just showing you bits and pieces of beekeeping to help you you know like you can certainly if you were wondering how in the world do i extract my honey how do i open those caps up you can watch today's video and know that but today's video will not help you know how to keep all the mites out of your hive or how to build up bees of winter physiology to get through the winter you know all the things that you need to know so do take a class either in your well you can't take one in your area can you darn everything is still shut down well you're going to take one of my online courses okay they're available here's the link go to my website by the way while you're on the website i think if you click under contact us you'll see an area there where you can get our address because i am still drinking out of the same coffee cup that melanie sent me that says i'll croak without my coffee that was nice of her to send this i'm going to keep drinking out of this coffee mug until one of you sends me another one with a different name or a different picture on the front of it so you can get our address send me a coffee mug and i'll feature it on the next youtube video this is the only one i've gotten so far so we'll keep drinking out of this one and sold something new shows up in the mailbox okay that's great hey i want to mention today and talk to you a little bit you know when i when i speak with you i always try to encourage you i i think all of us benefit so much from people that are positive people that have a good attitude about life and people that are encouraging and that's the kind of person i want to be to you and everyone i meet i have my down moments don't get me wrong but i try to stay up i don't want to be a doubting debbie or whatever that is i forget the term downer debbie downer maybe uh but i want to be positive you know i'm the glasses half full kind of guy not half empty and that means a lot to me so i spend a lot of time in my day with people i'm involved with and i try to really encourage people make them laugh make them enjoy life and and that's what it's all about you know the mind our mind can really benefit us or it can really set us back have you ever noticed that throughout your day that your mind is always saying things there's always something going on in your mind i i find it fascinating that our mind never goes away with talking to us i mean we're always hearing that i know this sounds weird but this is true don't tell me it's not but we always hear this voice in our head don't we it's uh we think it's us of course but you know what did that person treat me that way for what does that letter mean what's the implications why why is it raining when is it going to be clear and when is it going to stop raining will i be able to pay that bill what if i can't pay that bill what am i going to do what if i lose my job what if i get old and i don't have any friends and all my friends are dying and i have to live alone and uh what you know your mind is just constantly talking like that and when it talks like that and and it's a lot of negative things it focuses on worry and negative things it's not good it's not good at all and so a lot of times what we try to do is we make ourselves busy we try to do things that are oh i don't know external stuff to take our mind off of all of that we don't want to hear that clutter all the time but i i think there's a way that we can get a handle on our mind and we don't have to listen to our mind say that i mean when you look in the mirror doesn't your mind say oh look there's gray hair i mean how did i get gray and and then your mind is saying you're old you're going to die you're going to get sick and die and all that you know you're just constantly hearing from your mind but it doesn't have to be that way uh i i shared with you a few days ago that we can change the way that we think you can look in the mirror mirror and say to yourself wow look at me i've lived this long i i need to get a an award or a certificate because i live long enough to be gray and uh or you know i don't have to worry about what's gonna happen tomorrow i i'm gonna i'm excited that there is a potential of tomorrow and whatever happens is going to be good you have to begin to discipline yourself not to constantly listen and let your mind beat you up your mind can really be a bully and you can really be bullied by your own thoughts and you have to take control of those thoughts you have to really work on um kind of breathing and saying i'm not going to be swallowed up in negative thoughts today i'm going to be positive i'm going to be happy here's one way to look at it we're on this big planet spinning around in this big universe right and no matter what we do we only have so many years of life and then it's over why not be happy i mean you're going to be on this planet on this spinning planet in this universe for so long and that's that's it so why not be happy why not enjoy it okay so you know instead of trying to buy your way to happiness or instead of trying to change your external circumstances to be happy just start focusing your mind on away from negative things stop listening to the negative chatter that your mind keeps filling up with and just start focusing on positive things bees help us realize that i don't think bees everything about negative things i really don't i mean they are they're always going about their activities they're not bothered it seems by negative thoughts they're just out there enjoying flying in the sky gathering nectar bringing it back to the hive working together as a single organism a lot we can learn from bees just enjoying their day look they only live about 35 or 40 days and then boom they're gone they're not sitting around worrying about when they're gonna die are they gonna die in the next flight they're not worried about are they gonna be attacked by a bear they're not sitting around worried about oh what if there's not a nectar flow what if we can't get through winter what do they do they do what they do they enjoy just going back and forth and doing their thing as enjoying getting nectar from plants pollinating and fertilizing flowers and orchards and plants and so maybe we can learn from the honeybee that we need to be just enjoying our life going about why we're here on earth and enjoy that and not worry about what could possibly happen and stop listening and being distracted by the negative thoughts in our mind all right well that's good good enough all right good to see you again again i hope you've enjoyed the video today always love your comments so please give me any comments and i'll try to respond as best i can i i apologize i cannot some of you asked me very intense and detailed beekeeping questions about your hive and all that you need someone that you can actually mentor with and a mentor that can guide you through the details because i just don't know the background of all that the whole background of your hive your location where you live what your climate is and so on you know you get that speaking of mentorship beat team six gonna take a few more openings some of you have joined recently uh actually you have been joining by the groves and that's nice it's so nice to meet so many of you i'll leave a link in the description about be team six where i can become your personal beekeeping mentor you can call me and text me and email me if you have questions and pictures and doubts about your hive if you're worried about it and your mind is like i don't know if i got a a queen i'm i'm so worried about my hive i'll calm you down first and then we'll deal with your hive okay so that'll be in the description below as well as links to my online courses finally i want to let you know that you are going to need to start feeding your bees as soon as the honey flow stops in your area keep feeding your bees and you need to put in amino bee booster you need to put in additives that we sell here like protein powder and honey be healthy don't just think there's enough in there you need to feed them and then i will be telling you about my winter bee kind that we've sold for many many many years all across the country so many thousands of beekeepers depend on the winter be kind to get their bees well fed insulated and ventilated through the winter and i it's a little too early to talk about that they do go on sale though in about seven days at the filming of this video august the first right now if you look at them online so many of you have said i want to buy one it says sold out that's only because um they don't go on sale until august the first so they're going to say sold out up until august the first and on that magical day when it the clock strikes 1201 a.m on august the 1st you'll be able to purchase your winter be kind those are going to be shipped out later in the year once the weather cools off across the country usually sometime in november late november sometimes but it depends on how fast it cools off can't ship them in hot weather they're perfect for bees they'll melt down and be a disaster in shipping so we have to wait and ship them in cooler weather so anyway i'll uh i'll put a link down below too i guess for the winter be kind so you can get ready uh for august the 1st be sure and subscribe again 50 000 i'm counting on you i'll see you next time you

Channel: David Burns

Views: 39,084

Keywords: Beekeeping, apiculture, david burns, honey bees, honey extracting, honey harvest, honey in the morning honey in the evening, how to start beekeeping, nectar flow, honey, straining honey, extracting honey, when to harvest honey, beekeeping 101, beekeeping for beginners

Id: 0l5Ba4K4QVk

Length: 34min 22sec (2062 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 25 2020