Honey Harvest 2019: 188 Pounds!

so welcome back everybody the time has finally come this is always a very exciting day around here it's some pretty hard work but it's always worth the end result but today is honey harvest day it's time to get the main harvest off of the hives now we did smaller harvest earlier this year we got about 30 pounds and the reason for that was we had run out of honey at the house and we just had to have some honey so we got into the hives and just got some to get us through until the main harvest now earlier this morning I'll put a link to the video of this but earlier this morning I came out and I mowed and trimmed around these hives and that upset the bees pretty bad it's been a couple of hours since that happened I hope they had calmed down I hope that they have had a chance to get out and start flying around and foraging but right now is kind of a tricky time because they're gonna dearth of birth means that there's not a whole lot of nectar being brought in it's also hot the heat can agitate them as well hopefully right now though they've calmed down a little bit but the only way to tell is to get into the hives and see what we can do so let's go ahead and get our suit on get started and see what we can get so I certainly hope they have calmed down since this morning I'll put a link to that video and y'all can check that out if you want but man I tell you what I stirred them up like you wouldn't believe earlier this morning so I certainly do hope this will be a pleasant extraction here it could go both ways unfortunately we'll make sure we put some smoke on them to keep them good and calm this high of this box has got about three frames in it we will snatch it I'm not gonna really harvest around and pick around much today I think I'll just yank the boxes off and take them to the house and then I'll bring back the only partially filled frames later I think that people ask me why I put smoke on these bees or what am I putting on the bees it's just smoke this is a mixture of pine straw and leaves and grass clippings and really whatever I can find around just laying around it keeps them calm supposedly it tricks the bees into thinking that there's a fire so they load up on honey and once they load up on honey they get kind of transy and keep some comet also that smoke also disrupts the alarm pheromone and makes it more difficult for the bees to communicate an attack with one another so we'll take this one there's some Brut in it but it'll come out not a big deal but that frame has got quite a bit of honey on it and we'll take that and see what we can get out of it but the problem with trying to take frames and have honey on it like this you got to make sure you don't have the Queen so what we're gonna have to do is look through this particular box and make sure she's not in here so to find the Queen you just kind of glance over the frames and try to find the Queen that has a big bigger abdomen than most of them I'm not seeing her on here these bees all look like worker bees to me she also moves a little bit differently on the frames so if you can just see anything out of the ordinary you'll end up should end up finding the Queen it does take a fair amount of practice the as frames like this one that kind of make it all worth it this is a monster frame I bet there are is I bet there's five or six pounds of honey on this one frame alone so we're done with that hive let's check on this one I hope that the camera picks this up okay it's usually pretty easy to see how full a box is he can just kind of look between these frames and see a good bit of white cappings and if they've got to give it a white cappings usually you can just yank the entire box with a fair amount of confidence that's a good example right there you can just see those Camping's and they've got Camping's it's probably ready together now in this box there's quite a bit of fair amount of honey but there's brood also so in this case I will try to just kind of extract around the brood nest because I just hate to leave all that honey in there just because there's some brood there as well this time of year you have to be particularly careful and try to do this fairly that's a nice one look at that one look at that that is super nice but this time of year you have to be particularly careful to try to do this quick as you possibly can because that's a nice side but we'll leave it alone because there's a lot of brood on that side because the there's a dearth there's not a whole lot for the bees to go get so having these hives open bees from the other hives could very likely start smelling the honey from these hives that are open and it'll trigger robbing behavior which is just when bees from the other high mean it's exactly what it sounds like bees from other hives go to other hives and steal honey and that is not a good thing because bees are so vicious and so vicious it's not the right word pieces are so bent on having honey for themselves that they will really stop at nothing and sometimes it actually kills both hives when that when that happens we're done with this we're going to close this high so I've got pretty high hopes for this next home this is the largest time I've got I think and it seemed to be pretty healthy bees so we'll just see see how well they've done something you've gotta be cautious of is black widow spiders love the little cracks and crevices that are on the outside of beehives so you have to be really cognizant of stuff that's hiding up under the top and places like that because you can get yourself into a lot of trouble I'm not paying attention so that last box kind of met my expectations there was two good boxes on there full of honey this is one of the boxes that we moved from my parents house earlier this year so I don't know what's going to be going on in this box and we're going to check on it of course you've got to be careful to make sure that the bees are left with enough for the wintertime because honey is obviously your best bet as far as overwintering bees you can use sugar you can use corn syrup but you're never going to get anything as good as honey to make sure your bees have plenty of food yeah I can I'll take a few of these I guess we'll leave the rest for them looks like a pretty well pretty well-developed bucks I think we can just take this entire thing yeah it's pretty good all of those seem to be pretty similar we'll take the whole box guys there it is let's go get the honey out of here and see what we got alright guys so we're back at the shop and I've got all the honey in here and as you can hear I made a mistake when I was getting these boxes I usually extract around the brood nest this time I took entire boxes and I didn't have to child getting the bees out so I've got quite a few of my friends and here with me I know there's several products I know people use blowers to blow the bees out I know that there's be gone and different stuff like that to run the bees out of the supers before you get them you're gonna have to look into that a little bit for next year I guess and I've got a typical setup here I've got honey yeah I'm a little extractor I got my table and yeah let's go ahead and see what we can do I'm pretty excited this is probably the most honey I've ever had [Music] so guys here's something kind of interesting this is a really good way to tell whether you're in a dearth or not like I said earlier a dearth is a time of year where there's not any nectar coming in it's usually in the summertime up into the fall there's a short flow in the fall in my area but a few months ago when we extracted the 30 pounds of honey we didn't have this problem at all but now all I have to do is set these boxes outside and the bees will come from the hives which are probably five hundred yards away right now and they will clean these right up in a short amount of time but you can see they are they are wearing it out they are they'll have these they'll have these frames cleaned up and ready to go back in the hives very shortly [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so that does it for the frames of honey what we need to do now is drain the honey out of the cappings that we cut off of the frames and this is only a part of the cappings that came off I've been kind of draining it here and there just to make room in this bucket for more cappings but what we need to do now is take this bucket full of cappings and drain it through this through the strainer what I like to do is take a knife and just kind of make this into a slurry almost I'll take my own capping knife and my big happy knife and I'll just cut these up real good and make it into this nasty slurry right here that you see and once you strain it through the strainer here it comes out pretty nice but I'm really curious to know exactly how much is in here I've got an empty bucket here so we can kind of start from square one and you know let's go ahead and dump these in here it takes a while for them to drain let's go ahead and dump them in and see how much honey we can get out of these cappings so what we'll do is just will dump some in as much as it can possibly take and then we'll go do something else for a while and come back later and see what kind of results we get then we'll dump the dry cappings out of here and start over until we don't have any left now there are better ways to do this there are uncap there are capping spinners available on the market for this very purpose they're pretty expensive so don't plan to get one I think their bags you can also buy for your extractor this works pretty good I've actually thought about making some kind of a bucket for the screen the bottom in it for this very purpose and I think that would probably be the best bet because I could put a lot of cappings in there at one just let it sit and drain for a while but yeah we'll leave that for a while and see what it looks like we'll come back in 30 minutes or an hour and see what happens so guys my intention was to come back in like 30 minutes or an hour and see how well this a dream but you know how life goes sometimes it is about there's a 10 hours later at this point so it should be pretty well drained right now let's check and see what we've got a few bees in there unfortunately but can't be much about that it looks like I did a pretty good job I'm gonna dig some of these bees out before we take a good look at what we've got in here something y'all can see this but just from that one straining of whoo nice training of those wax cappings through that basket there is about 5 pounds 4 to 5 pounds if you include the weight of the bucket so we got 4 or 5 pounds of honey just out of that that bunch of campaigns that is really good I've got some more let's go ahead and put put the rest of them in there and see what we can get so to put that in some perspective I don't I don't sell a lot of my honey we keep most of it for ourselves but when I do have extra I will sell it and I usually charge about $8 a pound for the honey so to put that into perspective if I got 5 pounds out of that one basket of strainings I mean that's $40 right there so there is a lot of value left in these wax cappings that you absolutely got to get out because if you don't you are literally throwing money away and Plus on top of that you can take this wax and I may do a video on how to render wax because I need to do that soon anyway I've got a bunch of wax built up in previous years and I'd like to do a video on how to render your wax down into usable usable material so look at that in that great but the wax has a lot of value as well and if you want to see a video about how to render your wax and make it into something pretty and usable I let me know in the comments on that but let's let this drain for a while and we'll do another wait and see what we've got so I've got about about 8 pounds total that includes the weight of the bucket let's go ahead and finish this off that'll allow the bucket to drain also all right so it's been I'm not sure an hour I would have two hours something like that should be pretty well good enough and it looks like that was probably the end of it let's weigh this and see what we've got so that says about 50 notes there's about 13 pounds and if you subtract the weight of the bucket you're looking at probably 11 to 12 pounds of honey something like that so 11 to 12 pounds of honey in just those cappings so and there's actually probably more in there but with my two the technology that I've got to really can't get any more out but that's pretty good you know you're looking at 80 to 100 dollars right there that was trapped in the end those capping so yeah it didn't go to waste thankfully so what I'll do now is I'll put these wax Camping's into the bucket and then this bucket is going to have to go in the freezer for at least 24 hours because invariably they're gonna be two or three small hive beetle zin this mix right here that will get into this wax they lay eggs their larvae will hatch and it was just completely ruin this whole batch of white cap things and there's a lot of wax in here that can be rendered out into something usable so you always have to put these cappings or I always have to put these captain's in the freezer just to make sure that everything is dead in there that does it for harvesting honey let's get our buckets on here check our weights and we'll get a total and see how we did this year so that's about we'll call that 32 to account for the weight of the bucket we'll call that one about 33 to account for the weight of the bucket we'll call that 153 we'll call that 113 and we'll call that 150 so all told that's 181 pounds I have already given away a whole two quarts of honey and a gallon of honey is 12 pounds so we'll add 6 pounds to that and then we'll add 1 pound because I had to put 1/2 pound in my house because we were out so that's 188 pounds of honey this year and quite a bit of wax as well so I will I'll take that that's pretty good plus the 30 pounds we harvested earlier in the year has several videos back we did a harvest and got 30 pounds if you want to add that that's 218 pounds for the year so I'm pretty happy with that let's go get these boxes back on the hives so guys that's all I've got for this video I really appreciate you watching this video I think that was a pretty good harvest for this year I probably could have dug through these hives and found another 50 pounds or so of honey just by extracting around the brood nest and it's really taking a lot but I wanted to make sure I left enough for the bees normally I don't leave enough for the bees for the wintertime and I end up having to feed them sugar water and I just don't really want to have to do that this year it's kind of a pain and of course it's enact some extra expense where's the argument can be made that sugar is cheaper than honey but the counter argument can be made that honey is much better for the bees than is the sugar water the sugar syrup so I'm just trying to leave enough for the bees this year make sure they're healthy through the winter time so that's kind of my reasoning as far as that goes but make sure you hit that like button before you get out of here subscribe if you want to and I will see y'all next time thank you for watching so this is how I prefer to clean up the mess in my shop which that was a big puddle of honey right here I mean you're not going to extract honey without making a massive mess but there's a pool of honey that was up 100 the Abunda the extracting table all I do is I open up the shop doors here and I just let the bees come in and they will they will just get the job done I put the extractor and whatever bucket that I don't need on the side and they just come on in and they they get the job done and after they leave they won't be hip drop the honey left in this left in this shop let's look at this bucket over here and see what they're doing I always got you always have to remember to notice have to remember to put some sticks or something in there for them because bees are bad to drown themselves on any kind of sugar subside sugar water or honey that doesn't have that doesn't have sticks or some kind of floats in them but yeah those bees will have this stuff cleaned up in a few hours and I they'll have it dry and be sticky anymore they do they do a phenomenal job of it

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Views: 827,128

Rating: 4.8491602 out of 5

Keywords: fall line ridge, honey harvest, bees, honey, beekeeping, honeybees, honey bees, harvesting honey, fall line ridge honey, homesteading, homestead, hives, beehives, amazing, raw honey, harvesting raw honey

Id: fnuiZ1h52zA

Length: 27min 39sec (1659 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 13 2019