How To AVOID THIS!

hey y'all welcome back to VW Family Farm this video is a bit different we're going to show you a problem we've encountered so this video is going to be us harvesting honey from our honey bees but it's not going to be your typical video this is not just a vlog of showing us doing this or whatever we're going to show you something that we've been dealing with for a couple years now what I want to show you is how to avoid this if you can this is crystallized honey as you can see it's lighter and color it's basically turned to Sugar it's it's not liquid anymore what we want to do is show you guys how to instead of having that problem wind up with this as your result beautiful liquid honey as especially if you are wanting to have your honey raw to preserve all the health benefits you can maybe you're selling it whatever the case may be you don't want to sell crystallized honey there's uses for it you can use it as a starter for honey and different things but I don't know about you I don't want my entire batch of Honey to be crystallized so let's get started okay isn't this cute we're over here we actually only have a couple beehives here at the house um all of our bees are in our County they're in close proximity but they're not all right here at our house which is actually pretty good because if you can see right over there there's our Market it's and this is kind of their flight path so it's okay that they're not all right here but we saved one here because we wanted to show you guys this if you are trying to avoid crystallized honey or honey problems in general it really starts at The Hive when you decide whether or not you're ready to harvest your honey so Ben knows a whole lot more about this than I do he's going to kind of talk us through what he's looking for to see if the honey is ready for us to take it and harvest it and how much we're taking and all the things so I'm going to give the hive just a little bit of smoke kind of calm them down a little bit Give a Little Smoke up top woo that's beautiful so what this is is a fume board uh I spray some kind of cherry smelling Beast stuff on there that they don't really like it so what it does is it pushes them down to get away from that smell you got to give it a little while and sun's not quite up there yet but the sun is supposed to heat the top of this to make that fume the fumes of that stronger and that will push them down but we'll just give it a little bit cuz something else I need to do over here is I've got a nuke box here from a swarm I need to transfer them over into a full High real quick so I'm going to do that while this is working while he's doing that let me just say a couple things Ben gets messages quite regularly about bees people wanting um to come learn and all those things and hopefully one day we we've talked about having some classes we really hope to do that we've not pulled that off yet but if you're wanting bees you're you're Desiring to get into bees really it's kind of one of those things get you some equipment and then get started and you kind of learn learn as you go you're going to encounter problems just like with any other farm animal you're not going to learn everything there is to know until you kind of get in there and get your hands in and start doing it um Ben did have a few people that when he encountered something he couldn't figure out he could call but a lot of what he learned he learned here on YouTube we have B videos we have B playlists there's a lot of channels that do they're not necessarily the videos that people put out and then just take off right off the bat but they're those videos that have good content there's so much you can go and watch um that's good educational content and that's that's what be videos are to me there's really no way to make them like dramatic and like super duper exciting but there's so much good information out in the form of YouTube videos if you're wanting to start bees you can almost learn everything about bees on YouTube so I would say don't be afraid of it just jump in there and get started and also another thing Ben spent a lot lot lot of time on bees when he first started in fact he worried about him he lost sleep over him he wanted to do it all right and all those things but over the course of time he's kind of relaxed and yes if you don't pay a lot of attention to them they could leave they could get problems but I don't think we give bees enough credit that they can take care of themselves um you're trying to give them Optimum conditions because you want to keep them in your house but they also are are self-sufficient I mean they wouldn't have survived this long if they weren't so it's not something you have to be super stressed over it should be enjoyable yes it's work but it should be an enjoyable work all right that's my pep talk for today okay so Ben got the stuff on the fume board from Central beekeeper Supply it's here in central Arkansas um you can get it from man Lake online and there's different forms of what you can use um more natural ones and so we think they're down he's going to go ahead and now I always run uh Queen excluders on my honey supers just because I don't want the queen up in there laying I want clean looking comb and I don't want no larvae in there when I'm getting ready to harvest and looks like I'm going to have to buy a new box if you're digging into that they got it glued down there yeah so they didn't all come out as you see there's still a few coming out but what I'm going to do is set it off here get it in the direct sunlight get this thing warmed up and these are forager bees that brings the honey in so they know right where their hive is they'll go right back to it so here we are in our garage we're about to harvest this honey uh one thing that people run across and do wrong this doesn't necessarily make it crystallize but Ben was telling me it makes it f ferment so that's that's a bad problem too is not having their honey ready to be harvested so Ben's going to tell us a little bit about that so when you're there's two ways to do it in my opinion you can either buy a device that tells you how much moisture is left in the honey or you can go by roll of thumb on a frame if it is 80% or greater Capp that is all of this that means it's dry enough that you can Harvest so he's going to try to show you one that would not be ready the one you saw obviously was it was like 100% capped but like he said you're looking for 80% so it doesn't have to be 100 like he just showed you but the bees are very very intelligent they take care of themselves they they really don't need our help but we're super thankful for them but if they don't cap it there's a reason they're they're only going to cap it if if the moisture content is right and all the things are right they're not going to cap it if it's not ready well I was going to say that generally speaking on the outside of the honey super is going to be your less cap frames but even this one I mean it's like 98 99 there's a few that's not capped but both sides of it there's there's the lacking part of not Capp so I'm I'm saying this Frame is 95% capped so we're going to get busy if we run across one like what we're talking about that's iffy or that definitely doesn't need to be slung in the honey Slinger we'll show it to you guys as we go along that does happen uh we bring a super home and we Harvest most of the frames but then there's a frame or two that we're like yeah we're not putting that in there so we just put that you know over with the ones that we do sling and it'll just go back to the bees okay before we get a bunch of hateful comments about how Ben is cutting off the cappings let me just say we have done this a long time we've tried multiple different ways he's actually using a little tool over there right now that looks like what I would use as a pick when I had my hair perms back in the 90s but it's actually pulling the Caps off um so we've done that we we've used a heated knife I don't know Ben what all have we used pretty much everything out there right right they've got a roller with spikes on it that kind of pokes holes in it but then a lot of the wax you'll sling that out and it'll clog your filters up right so I hope y'all could hear what he was saying um but we've tried them all that all have pros and cons this is just the way that we've settled on it seems like the way we've done it the most and a lot of people be well that looks so wasteful you're cutting off so much blah blah blah what we do is that container he's cutting that into we will actually let that strain and drip as well and we will get almost all of the honey out of that and then we're left with the wax so we'll we'll dump it out of here over into this and you can see it's got little holes in the bottom of it and it will drain out of this one into the bottom one down here and then we'll drain the honey out yep so that's just the little homemade that was cheap um just little like rubber made totes that you can get anywhere Walmart the dollar store whatever um we just he just drilled a hole and then you can get those little spouts he was showing you at any be supply place online or most be supply stores so we're going to get to slinging and we will tell you um a little bit later on what we're doing and and kind of walk you through what we're doing so maybe you can learn something new from this process so if you're harvesting honey for the first time and you're trying to guesstimate how much your honey super will turn off so if all of your frames are full and we are running a 10 frame and this is a shallow honey super you can get mediums and and I mean you could use a deep box I guess that would be very heavy but if you're using a shallow super like we are each frame will turn off a quart so if you're running 10 frames four quarts to a gallon that's 2 and 1/2 gallons for a shallow honey sipper so this right here is a frame that I wouldn't Harvest this side is questionable about your 75 80% with that side right there I would call more like 50% so that's one we're just going to put it back in the Box give it back to the bees so just a couple cool facts about bees one worker bee will gather the nectar in her entire life to produce about a 12 of a teaspoon of honey in her entire life and just think about a pint of honey it takes over 1,00 bees to gather enough nectar and pollen to produce that and that's not to mention all the other bees in the hive that do various jobs like building comb protecting all the things like that so there can be tens of thousands of bees in every Hive I think it's something that we take for granted the work bees do and all the things bees do for us you think about all the things we eat and you think well I don't eat plants well you eat things that eat plants and bees help make those plants grow so really if bees go away it is a pretty catastrophic thing for our food supply chain so we have got our honey straining right here out of our Slinger down into some buckets we've got a fine stainless steel strainer we've got a coarse stainless steel strainer actually those are opposite we've got the coarse and then it flows down into the fine and then it goes into a plastic 200 mesh strainer so this is being triple strained we actually don't filter our honey I don't know if I've misspoke that earlier in this video but but we strain our honey um we try to leave good things in there but there's a fine line and that is the whole gist of this video that's the thing that we've looked into that we are finding we are going to have to kind of modify our practices and change we were leaving too much pollen or you might call debris it's not really debris like trash that you might think of but all those things that get left in Honey are the things that are good for you but there's a fine line because we were leaving too many and causing our honey to crystallize pretty quickly it's an easy fix you can slightly warm it and get it back to more of a liquefied honey state but you have to be very careful because if you're going for raw honey for health properties you don't want to just boil your honey and kill everything you're kind of defeating the purpose so we don't want to be you know facing that again we want it to just come out of here be strained be 100% raw and be bottled and go to people's homes and stay that way so I want to encourage you if you're having in this trouble look at your look at your straining system how fine of a strainer are you using you might want to try a finer strainer till you find that right balance for you that keeps your honey you know in its best state and not crystallizing um that's what we're giv a go and we really think that that is going to work this summer so that's where we are the honey is looking gorgeous yeah we've already done almost three supers down here we've got five more to go we've done way more than that before but we are in probably the wetest spring early summer maybe that I can ever remember we're still trying to get our first cutting of hay done which is wild we should have been done before now and we should be having the second cutting growing everyone here is in the same boat if you will but um that's also affecting the honey it's affecting everything so here we are we didn't get as much you know honey harvested because it's not capped but that's where we are we're trying to do the the best we can with what we do have and so that's modifying our straining system I hope that that helps you guys out and that's something you might could look at if you're having the same problem and your honey's crystallizing pretty quickly um it it just eventually does happen usually but it's never happened as quickly as it has started happening to us so that's why we're trying some different things let me just also throw in it has to do with the sugar content of the nectar they're Gathering because so you can do everything that you can you can do everything right and it might still crystallize on you sometimes I mean you're dealing with nature you're dealing with animals insects um it's just there's a whole whole lot of factors here so if yours is still crystallizing you've done everything don't be too hard on yourself it's still very good it's still a very awesome superfood look into ways to decrystallize it just use it as it is it's still very good um when you put it in things and it kind of warms up just slightly it's still Works beautifully so there's there's so much you can do make cream honey whatever the case may be I will catch you guys later hope something on this video helped you got to get back to running the Slinger I'll see you on the next one thanks for watching and God bless so I don't like running 10 frames I actually do have 10 in this one but when you get them in there and they start gluing everything together there's just there's no room to work so generally speaking I try to run nine frames in a 10 frame box it just makes getting the frames out even with the the bees down in the deeps I like running nine down there that way if I need to pull out a middle one not worried about as worried about uh hurting the the queen and it looks like it tears your frames up trying to get them apart you can [Music]

Channel: VW Family Farm

Views: 3,383

Keywords: vwff, vw family farm, #vwff, #vwfamilyfarm, arkansas, central arkansas, arkansas homesteaders

Id: dL-Pti9PBbA

Length: 17min 10sec (1030 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 09 2024