Honey Extraction - Spring 2023

foreign [Music] good morning everyone it's June 10th here in Kentucky and we are getting ready to pull supers for honey extraction so this is one of the most exciting times in beekeeping this is when all the hard work throughout the year really pays off so I figured I'd bring you guys along for the ride so you can see how we do the process so here we go okay we'll go ahead and get started here everybody does extraction a little bit differently it's personal preference as is 99 of beekeeping um my dad and I made some these fume boards is what I use there's all sorts of ways to get bees out of the super there's bee traps where you can put those to come out here the day before you put those underneath the super the bees go down but they can't get back in so that's one way you could literally trap the bees out of the super but that takes time and I don't know what kind of a success rate it has I've never tried it um there's other methods but the one that I prefer at least the one that I've been using is called a fume board so this is just uh one inch by two inch Pine that uh I cut up made and then the top of this is aluminum and I spray painted these black on top actually black all over and then there's felt piece of felt that I glued on the inside that you end up spraying the honey Bandit on there's like honey robber honey Bandit there's different solutions out there I've had pretty good luck with this honey Bandit it's really stinky stuff that the bees really hate I don't think it's that bad I put it in a spray bottle so that you can spray just it doesn't take many sprays maybe four five six sprays on this felt to me it smells like Cherry floor wax is what it smells like but the bees absolutely hate it and you can put one of those on top of the super and leave it there for about seven ten minutes and the bees will completely evacuate uh it gets over well over 95 97 percent of the bees out and then for the rest of the stragglers I just use a blower and end up blowing them out which you'll get to see on the video so we'll go ahead and get started on the first Hive here try to keep my water in a shady spot started somewhat early in the morning I wanted the you really want the Sun to be beating down on top of the fume board which is why you paint it black and why it's made of aluminum because it'll really absorb the sun's rays and it heats up this felt that's sprayed with the honey Bandit and really helps push those fumes down into the hive I don't know what kind of honey we're gonna get on these four I know some of the ones down there have quite a bit of Honey on them but we'll just we'll just see as we go I got some extra frames because I may end up cherry picking some frames and my plan is to put if one of these supers is full and one of them's not eventually I want to put one wet super back on all of these highs because we're still somewhat of in a flow here in Kentucky so I want to maximize the amount of honey so I'm going to put a super back on I'm not I'm just I'm not going to treat for mics yet uh cross my fingers and hope they do okay um but yeah to be determined on that it's already warm out here in the standing it's Undead I know it's gonna get even hotter so I got my dad out here helping me today he's gonna as I pull these supers off he's going to uh put him in the back of the UTV for me and keep them covered I don't think it'll be much of an issue today but if you if you do this like during a summer pull when it's getting pretty dirty out and there's a lack of available food sources you can set off a robbing event pretty quickly where bees will just pounce on that honey that's out here in the open and so we cover it with bed sheets and drop cloths to keep the bees out of it while I'm extracting so take a look at the first one I think this Hive is I have two hives that I know of at least last I checked were queenless I think this is one of the queenless hives I don't anticipate a lot of Honey coming off this one yeah I don't see a lot here I'm gonna take a look at this middle frame and see what we're looking at now see there's some honey in there but not much so this this super I'm just going to set aside and I'm going to give it back to the bees and check the one on the bottom and see if it's ready to pull yeah this is pretty light there's some honey in here but not much to be concerned with now this definitely has plenty of honey in it so we'll go ahead and uh get the bees out of this one so I just kind of sprayed a fume board here with the make sure you get it all the way around I'm just doing small squirts and then you just set it on top speed leave a little bit of the corners open so that air can circulate and I can already hear more in there so I'm going to leave this on here for about 10 minutes while I'm doing that I'm going to move on to the next one were you asking a question dad oh this side has a bunch of ants that got up in it it's always fun having to deal with that yeah they definitely don't like this stuff they're certainly complaining in there it almost sounds like the queenless roar that you get I've been meaning to uh dust the bottoms of these cinder blocks with uh diatomaceous earth to kind of help it helps keep the ants down uh doesn't hurt the bees it's not a chemical it works as a as a physical kill it cuts the exoskeletons of the ants it ends up killing them that way of course the bees aren't crawling on the cinder blocks so it doesn't hurt them in any way oh but normally I don't have many issues with ants but this year's been worse than normal oh yeah definitely some good amount of Honey up here to knock those bees off somebody told me that if you see this on your on the top uh super if you see all this uh comb it means that you lost out on some honey you should have had another Super on top I don't I don't know if there's any truth to that but this sounds good go ahead and set that comb aside and the first one I go a little heavier the subsequent sprays you know since the smell is already well in the felt you don't have to spray as much and you can't overdo it you don't want to I mean you don't want to drive the bees out of the hive you're just trying to get them out of the super force them down while we're waiting I'll bring the camera over here so you can kind of hear them roaring foreign they're not big fans of me doing this obviously here [Music] and I hear more in there honestly it sounds pretty similar to like the queenless Roar I pouring out of the hive so that's how you know like you didn't overdo it can you smell it Dad yeah it smells like that cherry floor wax is the best way that I describe it but we just leave them sitting on there see how the bees are really trying to get out absolutely hate this smell and they will they will get out of there and it forces them down into the next Super and then you pull this one cover it and then so on and so forth so it takes a long time to get through I think I have 22 supers to pull this year last year I only had like eight yeah I got 120 pounds last year off two colonies just two colonies so uh who knows what I'll get this year but I'm I'm pretty excited we'll see I don't think it's been a great honey crop I heard people down south are really complaining it's like one of the worst years they've had in like 50 years maybe down in Georgia Florida area I think it was Florida um I think the Suttons are down there too and I know Rick's been posting a lot of struggles that he's been having with getting a honey flow this year so some of those commercial beekeepers it's it's been pretty bad for them the backyard hobbyists like us you know it's if we get honey great if not it's you know not gonna say it's no big deal but it's not it's not gonna affect us like it does the commercial folks operators so it sucks you know when you're when you're uh when your business is insects and as heavily dependent on Mother Nature you really don't know what you're gonna get so okay I'll put the camera back on the stand here and then we got just a couple more minutes on that first one and we can start to pull our first super okay hold on to those for me dad please quite yet I'm gonna be blowing these out here in a minute let's scoot this one down because this one's going back on the first time you know with really large colonies which I generally don't have since I have single brood management if you've got like although I do have one over there that has four supers on it if four super stuffed with bees trying to push all those down into one single deep that's going to be a problem so I'm gonna have to make sure that I leave at least one super for all those forager beasts to have a place just to hang out and not get pushed down inside The Brood area which can really be an issue just kind of interfere with everything the nurse bees and the queen are trying to accomplish down there so it's just an assessment that you have to make as you're looking through this to see how full that brood area is and you know do you need to just give them another Super just for space purposes not necessarily honey purposes getting warm out here you know I got all this red clover out here and I haven't seen a lot of bees on it unfortunately I've seen bumblebees on it and I think that's the general census from beekeepers they don't care for it that much somebody was saying though once it gets cut down or the first crop or red clover comes up uh it'll come back shorter and smaller and then the bees are able to forage on that easier right now I think red clover just seems to be too big and I don't know if they can't get their tongues down in there to get the nectar out or why they don't prefer it but they're all over the white clover that's in our in our yards but they haven't really touched from what I've seen this red clover they did early on in the spring but I haven't seen them on it recently oh yeah I'll go ahead and uh show you a frame here thank you there's some dark honey and it's not fully capped you see it's only capped up here but for being spring honey this is dark and looks like some of this stuff is about 50 capped or so so we'll be sure to check the moisture content but you can also do the shake test wherever you shake this as hard as you can and nothing comes out at all like that like literally nothing's coming out that's a pretty good indicator over 90 chance this stuff is good I mean it just it looks thick too you can just tell the difference between honey and nectar and it's not runny um so this is going to be some delicious Liquid Gold here I'm sure of it all right let's get this ready to pull dad you ready with the cloth I'm about to blow the rest of these bees out and then I'll carry it over to you so I'm going to go ahead and start on the third one because I'm going to pull this off and put it on the next one and just keep going in kind of an assembly line is how it works all the bees are pretty calm today you know especially for stealing all their honey there's a couple frames in this one I'll probably cherry pick it and then it'll be one of the supers that I end up putting back on the hive what I may do is I may go get a tub and put these these frames that are full and exchange them for the frames that are less full I don't know I'll figure that out in a minute but I'm going to trip over that at some point okay let's go ahead and get this first one in oh it's pretty heavy oh boy let's blast these bees out that's probably 30 40 pounds [Music] [Music] I don't know [Music] I'm certainly not going to suggest that the bees love that but it doesn't really hurt them yeah obviously they don't love that but the reality is it doesn't really hurt them it just blows them off the comb and they they come back to the hive this colony's got a lot of honey in here as well so definitely taking uh extra spares so I'm gonna put this uh super right back on again really my focus on this colony is to get it to re-queen itself it uh It's been a it's not been easy foreign down 13 to go all these stupid ants you know that they answer more of a nuisance as long as the bees are able to guard the area they'll keep the ants out I still find them really annoying and I try to help the bees as much as possible I used to have if you watch some of my earlier videos I used to have these moats down here that the uh cinder block would sit in water but the plastic busted and then it was like a mosquito harvesting sort of production um and I didn't really want a bunch of mosquitoes back in here helping them survive and flourish so I ended up just getting rid of them I'm not sure that's down I think it is yeah it is good all the ants are running out the ants get up underneath this melamine in here yeah they're definitely almost out of this one that's the way you just keep systematically working down and that's why it's nice to have two fume boards because while I'm working on one Hive this can be working on another so it keeps it more efficient keeps it flowing better this definitely has a lot of honey I think this is going to be a pretty heavy super here go ahead and get this one off oh yeah same that's a good 40 pounds take a look here yep lots of Honey there get this back on keep them down below the rest of the bees out of this one [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] all right [Music] [Applause] foreign [Applause] three hours later okay we're back in the shop we've got four supers pulled off those uh four hives uh pretty stuffed quite a bit of honey in these uh one super I had to take back it actually still had some brood in it that had not emerged yet so gonna need a little bit more time on that so we've got the extraction set up here's my uh vivore extractor it's a four frame extractor you can hold four deeps or four shallows works pretty well used it last year worked great got the honey gate uh double screen stainless steel filtration and then putting it in these Tractor Supply BPA free food grade buckets so I've got several of those I use this Pierce beekeeping uncapping tub and this Pierce hot knife that plugs into the outlet gets super hot and I use it to cut the comb off and then all of the cappings collect in this uncapping tub the honey will drain down through the stainless steel grate and then I can pour it out here and then last year there was still there's a lot of cappings that get honey stuck in the cappings and it just wasn't falling through here so I went ahead and bought this um press stainless steel press hi peanut my daughter just walked in she can come over here say hi for the camera and so I'll put all the cappings in here after the honey has drained down and I'll go ahead and press this and try to get the last bit of Honey out here and I'll send it through the filtration you want to say hi can you say hi say hi Isla how does the B go good job okay so yeah that's that's it I'll I'll take you real quick through the operation um first thing you have to do is test the honey I've got this refractometer just off Amazon works pretty well I calibrated it yesterday using olive oil so I know it's spot on um and then I've got the labeling and everything else we'll get ready and then of course all the bottles there uh for the for the honey to go in once we're ready so I'll go ahead and take you through uh a couple steps of the process you can see how the extraction works first thing that we're going to do is pull these frames individual frames out of the super and that's this year I think I said in other videos I only use nine frames so you see how much fatter that comb is which is really nice makes it a lot easier when I pull the frame out I'll show you it makes it a lot easier to uncap or at least I'm guessing it's going to make it a lot easier first year I've done it so let's go ahead and get started okay so here's the first frame you can see it's mostly capped different color there is depending on what the bees were foraging on and you can see it's pretty thick comb there not as thick as some of the others but um we'll go ahead and test this one make sure that this super and the Honey are good to go but like I was saying before if you just shake if it passed the shake test there's a good chance that it's going to be fine foreign I generally just take a little bit of honey oh yeah so this is the tool here um you just put a little little bit of Honey on top of here make sure it covers the entire surface and then you can look through here over at the light and you really want the moisture content to be around 16 17 somewhere in that range anything over I think it's 18 or 18 and a half you have to be careful it could end up fermenting in the bottle and the Honey will taste terrible so you really want to make sure that it's dry before you end up extracting it otherwise you know you're going to pay for it later so if it does end up being too high all you have to do is uh end up just putting these supers right back on the hive is all you have to do all right just make sure that there's enough honey like I said you want to cover the entire surface I don't really want to get any wax cappings on there I'll just kind of smash that down make sure that it's covered and I'll just go over here and check it out yeah so this is reading at about 15 and a half to 16. um and what I end up doing is I just take samples periodic samples throughout the process while I'm extracting so I'll take two maybe three samples from each super and that just ensures that again I I don't want to bottle any honey where the water content is too high so we want it's good thick bees and the weeds honey so how long has this been plugged in damn you know probably about 10 minutes 10 minutes and this process takes a while I mean you know you can count on spending a full day or two doing your extractions because it just takes time to get those supers off the high takes time to set up if you don't have a dedicated honey house uh it takes time to get everything set up and uh but it's worth it pays off in the end so this uncapping tub has a screw on top and all that does is it helps you hold the frame in place as you use your knife here now with this being a little bit thicker this time it should and it is cutting open a little easier I don't think this knife is completely up to temperature yet so I'm having to he's a little bit of Grease here that beautiful so on the edge here I'll just take the you want to make sure the top of those cappings are uncapped obviously you won't be able to extract it in the uh in the spinner centrifuge I don't have a scraper but this is where I think you know using this hot knife in conjunction with a scraper really pays off because then you could just kind of scrape the last bit of captains here once this knife gets up to temperature it's a little easier all right I think most of it's open foreign they had just started drawing so this is one of the frames towards the very end of the super so it's not going to be loaded all right I'm going to go ahead and just transfer it over and you want to make sure that it's facing outwards because this uses centrifugal force so you want the honey facing towards the outside because that's what it's going to get that's what it's going to sling against the outer walls here let me go ahead and grab another one it's a holiday it's not plugged in so nope as a professional homeowner you want to make sure you plug the knife in I thought it wasn't hot at all but uh there that makes sense that makes a lot of sense I'm like this does not feel hot uh so look at the difference in the color on this one while we're waiting for that knife to actually get hot so you can tell the different flows the different pollens uh sources of nectar that were coming in that's some good looking honey and again oops shake it nothing comes out pretty good indicator that you're good to go let's try this again wow amazing how much nicer that is how much easier that is when you actually turn your knife off so now I can feel the heat coming off of it too definitely easier when the knife is turned on but these these cappings is really how we as beekeepers get a lot of our wax is during the honey extraction process I mean yeah you get some wax here and there when you're doing inspections but where it's where it really uh where you really start to get a lot of it is when you start to harvest the honey foreign see the difference in colors too all right that one's pretty open that will give me a paper towel please go ahead transfer this one and you really want to try to balance your uh extractor meaning you want equally weighted frames on each side so when it spins it doesn't shake doesn't shake too bad on you go ahead and grab the next one now we're starting to get into the pretty thick ones for the cone so it should be easier to extract there's some open honey there hasn't quite been capped yet what I'm going to go ahead and do is I'm going to go ahead and test the uncapped honey just to make sure again everything's on the up and up I probably tend to over test but I really don't want the honey to have too much water in it again a few of these cells if they're gonna blow out of a honey there okay really you can almost tell just how thick it is I mean when you've been doing this long enough it's pretty easy to tell really thin honey between really thick honey is just more runny all right and as expected the uncapped is a little higher so this was coming in at about 16 to 16 and a half which is perfectly fine so we're going to go ahead and extract this I like to I like to have mine you know 17 and a half or less is really where you want it coming in at I think some people bottle at 18. you can I just think you're you're starting to flirt with trouble there okay get this next one going awesome definitely a messy process uh try the extractor here all right one more and then we'll get spinning always find a difference in color amazing it's wild to me depending on what they were forging on to determine the color yeah that's cool all right let's get this one in the extractor foreign bolt my extractor to the floor to because it does it does have the tendency you want to shake if it's in Balance um think of it like a washing machine during the spin cycle uh if the clothes aren't evenly distributed it'll start to walk on you and bounce and so this is kind of similar so before you spin make sure you have everything in place make sure you have your bucket on the floor uh make sure that your filtration which is just two the only thing that I use is it's not really filtered this just keeps any parts and wax cappings out but it's just two stainless steel mesh um filters that's all it is and it's a pretty fine mesh on the bottom this one's a little thicker just sits in on top of itself and that's the only filtering and that lets all the pollen and the honey and the enzymes flow on through but keeps any B parts or anything else that you would likely not want in your honey out now your first few extractions you can leave the the honey gate closed but one word of caution you don't want to get the honey too full in here to where the bottom of the frames in the spinner is hitting the honey that can damage your motor so you really want to keep your honey gate open as you're extracting after the first three or four extractions it's not a big deal on the first one because the honey is not high enough yet so um so yeah that's it just make sure that your Lids closed turn your extractor on and you want to start slow you know there's no rush to this and you want to you want to slowly turn your dial up and the Honey will start flinging out if you go too fast straight from the beginning you're going to increase the instability you want to slowly increase it let the honey sling out if you want to take it off the tripod yeah you can push here thank you and then you can see that one and you can already see the honey starting to accumulate on the wall on the sides of the walls there so I'm slowly increasing the speed here still a little unbalanced because that one frame in there was lighter than the other three but that's what happens if it starts getting uncontrolled like that you just back off so I'll turn it down now and quite a bit of the honey has come out of the one sides and so now I'm going to rotate the frames and turn them around and that should help with the balancing too bad you can't smell uh smell this from home but it smells amazing in here so that's kind of what it looks like when it's slung out and this other side's empty so that's really where kind of the weight issues are coming from the imbalance issues but that's fine once the honey starts coming out of the other sides of these that'll really help and then I'll rotate them back again so that I can really sling the other sides at the top speed for a few minutes foreign [Music] go ahead and turn this off we'll get the other side spun and then I'll show you all um when we open the gate what that looks like so I'll show you here in just a minute okay so we have slung several frames of Honey through the extractor and you can see all the uh nice Golden Honey at the bottom that's drained down from the sides of the extractor here and collected in the bottom and you can see the honey gate there so it's starting to get it's actually almost over the honey gate so I'm going to go ahead and open this and show you okay what this looks like we start to strain the honey and get it into the settling bucket this is the fun part and then it will slowly filter through that double stainless steel mesh any of the wax cappings or bee parts or anything else will stay caught they'll start dripping down into the bucket bucket you can tell it's thick honey because it hasn't even started to drip yet there it just started that's how you know it's thick there it goes so once all the honey is extracted and these buckets are filled up I let the bucket sit for a few days to settle what that does is it lets all the air bubbles that are in the honey down here flow to the top then you can kind of skim that off it's just for cosmetic purposes just doesn't look good to see a bunch of bubbles in your honey in the bottle so generally like to let that settle and then go ahead and bottle afterwards so I'll show you the final process once I after a few days and this honey settles and I get ready to bottle it I'll show you what that looks like

Channel: Bees in the Weeds

Views: 4,693

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Id: yIVUONkaeco

Length: 49min 40sec (2980 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 21 2023