Honey Harvest, Stripping Honey Supers Off the Hives

well good morning everyone it's Barry's best honey honey being the operative word here today and I do bees today hopefully we're doing some honey [Music] so folks today is July 1st and it's actually a cool morning it's only like 75 degrees so that's beautiful but it's so humid so stinking human body sweating yesterday I went ahead and got everything together for the most part a few little things to do this morning I need to uh get the trailer hooked up um I got two people coming uh Eddie who's a viewer he's been asking me to come over and help with stuff and and learn and I can surely use his help on this and then Steven y'all remember him from the videos he comes he's helped me before I'm gonna try and get Eddie more involved as we get busier during the assessments but uh just hadn't been busy so this is his first time coming over so because I got two people coming I'm not going to be using the hive lifter today I will be using it in the yard in town um because I'll be by myself I really bought that thing to move Double D's but also to help with Harvest um but I don't use V escapes and that's what it's really designed for so it's not like it's a uh you know I had to perfect my way to use it with honey supers and I have and it helps me out but if I can get some help out here and we have to have it done quick and before the heat sets in that's what I do uh but we have to get this done early we also have to be quick because of what I'm seeing right here all these old frames I put out yesterday to make some room and as you can see we got bees scouring these frames that's why we're going ahead and not waiting that long to pull this honey I was gonna wait a little longer this year but you know what it's over there's no more nectar coming in I know Mr Ed pulled his a couple days ago I think he's actually even harvesting today just him and a few people to flow it's looking like for everybody I'm talking to they're down about 75 percent on production that's about the number I've come up with easy round number but these bees are ready to eat and ready to Rob it's over so we got to be quick so we don't have a bunch of robbing and we have got to beat the heat with the humidity and then that heat it's been in the hundreds the heat index has been well in the hundreds only about 98.99 yesterday and when it cooled down about 95 I came out and got all this stuff ready fume boards got it all out so I'm gonna hook up the trailer kind of get everything pre-positioned should not take us long with two people we will strip everything pretty much down to doubles and singles man I'm fogging up and uh that way we're done and they'll be ready to be treated soon some of them I will leave if there's some boxes on there that are uh that you know are half filled and no cappings whatsoever uh we'll leave them I am going to pull some uncapped honey I checked some the other day and uh I went out to the hive grab some Alice and put it in a bowl walk it through the humidity over to the hunting house and it was at 17 17 and a half uh so I think it'll be fine we're gonna end up pulling some that's uncapped but uh there's gonna be a lot of boxes that probably don't have much in them if they're completely empty they're coming off if they got a little bit I'll leave them for now and get them another week or two or when I do assessments and I can always leave those out and feed those back um because they don't want to leave supers on I want to get them down to where they're going to be ready to be treated we're going to be using APA guard this year got to be real careful on the heat with that how much you use but uh yeah we're gonna try and get them stripped down today um and we're gonna see what we get hey it's gonna be exciting that we're getting something I'm happy I'm excited about it I'm I'm looking forward to it and then also in the yard in town I know I've got um about five to six good boxes of honey so that's that's a good thing um again everybody's down everybody's down at least in this area so we shall see let me get busy let me get everything ready for these guys so I'm not wasting their time um because they're gracious enough to come out here and help and I do not want to minimalize their time that they're putting in to come help me all right here we go well there folks we've got everything on here we got some fume boards uh I got my smoker lit I got these deep boxes and I got some drawing comb in these what these are going to be is when I pull some deep frames oh it's stuck in there good but anyway you get the idea I'm going to um there's several out there that the entire box is full of honey and what I'll probably do is pull four frames from each maybe even five and then replace drawn in the center and that'll be fine that gives plenty of room for them they still have stores and don't forget we should have some sort of nectar coming in starting September mid-september so for those colonies that um that we leave some of the supers on which will be very few there'll be uh partial Fields just very very very partial field because anything that's half or better I'm taking it um and even if it's not dry enough after by drying I'll I'll feed it back but anything we do leave a few of the supers on uh we we could possibly get some honey in the fall I got two folks here helping me we got Eddie down there he's a viewer from local and where you live Mandeville Mandeville I said Covington earlier he's from Mandeville but he's got hives down the road over here um not far from here and then of course y'all remember Steven his video is actually going out today of going through his colonies and y'all met him at the yard in town the fume boards aren't going to work as good in without the sun shining on them but that's just how it has to be down here because uh we can't wait till one o'clock to do this or we'll die out here oh all right all right folks so what we're going to do is I use fume boards you all know I'm not telling you how to right he said how I do video y'all know that too I'm showing them how I do I'm showing y'all how I do and y'all see me before do this and so many beekeepers use it and it's a fume board now when I first started using fume boards I never read the directions and here's a reason you never think you're getting to be that big of a beekeeper where you don't listen to beginner beekeepers Dirk was over here explaining fume boards to me he said Mike is supposed to leave him crack I said no no that ain't so he said yeah he said I read a direction he's a new beekeeper right he did the right thing and read the directions so never discount somebody just because they're new uh he taught me something and it works much better so I put the fume boards on I leave a little crack in them and we fume them out so I do use a little smoker to begin if you want to pop that cover real quick I throw a little smoke to them just to get them out of my way but this Hive I don't think has much honey but I see enough Captain there that's good enough for me like one or two frames that's it we're gonna take it this fume board has already been treated I stick it on like so and I'm good to go and then I assume the next one and that's how we do it is there a Little Smoke to them a little Beetle action going on some bees guarding some honey let's see what's in here yeah this has got a lot of uncapped stuff Let's uh hold on just a minute pull that back off real quick I want to see what this looks like real quick I didn't spot check this one I don't think yeah see like this is empty it's just got a little bit in it we'll take that um if you look this is what a lot of people are seeing right now in their colonies so what we do is do a shake cast the old school way there's a little bit of nectar coming out just a little bit of honey it's pretty thick yeah that's pretty thick stuff I can dry that down so that's kind of what we're looking at so we'll take this one too they're not bringing anything else in they're not going to cap it most of it's cap like that anyway so we'll fume it out and take the whole thing all right go ahead let's look at this one this will be this one may not even worry about fuming let's look pretend it first it's an empty this one's empty I think you know what I did with this one I might have just given them spaces to give them something uh verify all of them so this one here what we'll do take this one completely off set it off to the side it's empty this one's got honey in it and I suspect the bottom one's got honey in it this is the problem we don't have much of a flow you got to go through every dog on Colony kind of see what you got normally I just sling fume boards across everything but we got honey here so that's good and the bottom one so this one's full but as I was saying earlier videos these outside ones are not normally after Talos these will be slap full but you can see these are hazy a little bit of cap so I'll show you heavy one and uh in town well there's a heavy one there when they're full with nine frames they're super heavy all right we can fume that one so all we're going to do is fume we got a fourth fume board yeah all right that's all we're doing folks and then what we'll do is we'll uh blow the bees out when I get closer to the Brew box I'm telling Eddie and Steven how I blow the bees down Kenny uh showed me that when he was doing it I have extracted Queens a couple times I want to blow down to push her down in case there's a problem I don't sometimes she'll be up there for whatever reason and you may think that's not so but I've extracted Queens actually pulled one out of my extractor put her in a cage and brought her back out to a colony at least I made him mad we gotta smoke them down the lid stuck that happens all right let's see what this one's got it's nailed it first let's see what this is this is kind of what we're gonna have to do is just go through each one and see yeah this one's good uh a lot of uncapped stuff oh yeah these aren't happy bees all right let's fume this one but again only this many frames are full no they're not wall-to-wall like they normally would be all right we're gonna fume we're gonna let them set for a little bit and then we're gonna uh pull them off and start stacking on the trailer we're gonna go through these each of these stacks and start leapfrogging once we get going and we'll see how it goes [Music] thank you foreign [Music] we're still fuming guys we've got everybody down to doubles this one here when we shook it was just full of nectar I'm gonna leave it for now that super I left on that single just because they need space everybody's pretty much down the doubles we're wrapping these two up here we're gonna pull some deep frames out of that that was my cloakboard box where I built Queen cells so I know the top is all honey and then we're going to move to the next stand those boxes are stacked they're pretty much none of them are full like there's at least outside frames that aren't full or aren't capped but there's a lot of them so if we can get a half of that we'll be doing good there's just not a lot of honey in these boxes and like one of them is just all uncapped very very light but I'm gonna dry it and we pulled some here that are completely empty which I knew and these boxes are to replace deep frames that we're getting ready to pull so that's what we're doing still hard at it got another stand to do and then we'll go next door and then uh and then we'll be done we're going to take a break here in a little while get some water all right so we stacked up some supers mind you those are not full supers but the bees have found them we got to get them on in the honey house uh we got some that are actually empty supers there's nothing in those they'll get put out for the bees to finish out any nectar that might be in them just a little bit and then I got a box half a deep full of deep frames uh we'll pull that in once we get these in we got to get a couple hives back there there's like three supers and then probably another five next door and then that'll be it and we're getting hot and wore out so here we go let's get these in good foreign [Music] let's see all right folks it's now 11 A.M we started around 7 30 to 8 and it's 11 and we've got all the boxes in as you can see the bees are buzzing the doors they're Gathering up we didn't have much of a problem with robbing until we got done with that first set of stands then it began to really pick up a lot of bees on the Windows we'll get those funneled out soon but I'll take you inside and show you what we got we got quite a few supers but they're by no means are are they full half a dozen that might be close to full so normally they're full side to side so as you can see we've got um super stacked up in here and they're drying now and there's probably about 45 45 boxes in here but now again they're not full uh we're gonna be funneling bees out of the windows here pretty soon because all the bees that we couldn't get out are on the windows but I have a way I take the screens out and open them up and um I let them out so we'll get the lights off and we'll get them all over here but and we're gonna uh we're gonna see what we come up with with honey I mean if half of that's honey we're sitting good uh you know it's not a a normal Harvest but it's a it's going to be a decent Harvest plus I got about five or six good boxes in town and what I do now is I go and get a shower and take a nap so folks here's my setup of course I put shims on the bottom down there okay um so we get airflow through the boxes I put a box fan on top a lot of people do this it's pretty common I started doing it about four years ago and I run just a regular household dehumidifier like I showed you a minute ago that's on 40. that's what the room is holding right now I will switch this AC unit over to dry mode like I said a lot of uncapped stuff in this we shook the randomly shook the frames and a few we ran across shook out just it's just like water so there was there was nectar out there so that won't go in my honey uh some we shook and we'd get a drop or two and you could run your hive to across it and it was real thick so that was just honey coming out so I got a refract time we're all run I ran some the other day it was 17 to 17 and a half um just running just under 18 in the hive uncapped half the cells were half full so that's kind of the uh the goal is to get below 18. I'm gonna get a couple more fans though uh out here I got one other fan I can put out here but then I might go buy another box fan I do have another little fan I can put on top so I'm gonna get everybody drying at one time so we can get this stuff out and uh go from there after what we saw this year I'm pretty excited all right folks so you saw what we got in there you saw how I'm gonna dry it down just like everybody else does I'm gonna try and get it dried down we'll go Case by case on each frame um if it's in the tire box uncapped I'll check half the frames make sure we're good and uh we'll move on with it but I don't want to put a lot of uncapped in there because I don't want to have any problems with fermentation but as long as it's the right percent I'm really not sweating it so but it's been a good day it's been hot it's time to go um these guys have been in immense Health y'all know Steve y'all met Eddie today it's good for me because they help me immensely we we got this done it's uh only 11 o'clock and we got it knocked out and this would have taken me forever to do it by myself and I wouldn't have done them all y'all saw what happened to me last year and uh I'm not as young as I used to be but it helps them too because they get to see how other people are doing things and maybe apply to their big yard so it works out everybody helping each other it's a good thing to go and go work with somebody and work your bees and see how they're doing it uh and see how and go to another beekeepers and see how they're doing it because everybody has a little different trick of the trade and so uh that's what they did today but it was a huge help we got a I did count in there we got about 45 boxes or so about 43 I think so we're gonna see what we come up with I'll let you all know we'll do a video on the extraction and uh and we'll uh we'll show you what we get so what'd you think about it Eddie it's hot and he got a little overheated on us we had to send him in let's send him sit him down for a while but it's not worth uh killing yourself over but uh we got almost the whole back stand done and then we all started really feeling to eat about you Steve what you think the simplest way to say it it's human and it's tough but it was a great day bees were great I really enjoyed it thanks for for inviting me Mike oh yeah and he did say in his uh he's got video um yeah Pea Ridge honeybees he's starting some videos and he's logging his season and his uh beginning all right guys but look I'm gonna let y'all go I appreciate all y'all watching always appreciate your support it's Barry's best honey I'm Mike and I do bees with Stephen from Pea Ridge honeybees okay hey a man a few words y'all have a wonderful week and may God bless you we'll see y'all later [Music]

Channel: Mike Barry

Views: 6,331

Keywords: beekeeping, bee hives, queen bee, queen, swarm, comb, honeycomb, brood, honeybees, honey, hive stand, bee suit, veil, hive, hives, hive tool, smoker, pheromone, hive beetle, varroa, mite

Id: ZJobjSACIwU

Length: 19min 36sec (1176 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 08 2023