How to HARVEST HONEY and WINTERIZE BEE HIVE! Documentary

it's about 80 degrees today and then tomorrow i think we're gonna have the high in the 60s so today we're out in the bee yard we're going to look into some beehives with our friend dr leo here he's the natural beekeeper from the ozarks of missouri correct and i'm founder of horizontal5.com a website devoted to natural beekeeping that gives you free plans for building horizontal hives like that and a lot of free advice on how to get started keeping this naturally yeah and you guys have probably followed us along in the series that we've been doing this year and we're at the end of the season now where we're going to be looking inside the hives seeing what's going on with the honey if we're going to be able to get some honey from our hives and also making sure what we leave them will be enough to get them through the winter uh that's correct and there if you know anything about how conventional beekeeping is done you will notice that harvesting that late in the season by mid-october now here in missouri is very unusual but it's actually the most bee friendly way of harvesting honey because uh by delaying the harvest until this point of time we make sure that bees were well fed during the entire summer if there was the dearth if they couldn't harvest in the fields they always had a reserve stockpile in the hives to fall back on during the summer and now that is the very end of the season we know exactly how much we can take from them without compromising their safety during the winter so patience is a virtue and i love it i love it several other reasons why i like harvesting honey late in the season is there there are significantly fewer bees here now than they were two months ago and the ones that are here in the box because of the very cold nights they already start preparing for the winter and go into the brew chamber forming a cluster so much less disturbance significantly fewer bees and not only that the honey that was there during the summer had all the time to ripen and to be much higher quality ready to be extracted now than it would be if it was or in the middle of the active season so actually like wine the longer you let the honey stay in the hive the better it is yeah because if you look at what honey is it's nectar processed by the bees they don't just evaporate moisture from it to turn it into honey they also add enzymes to it to work their magic and the longer you leave the honey in the hive the more complete the process is see there already learning stuff and we're just getting started you know still another reason to the this time of year you can do the honey harvest the final check of the year and winterizing all in one visit right again minimizing disturbance if we were to do it earlier we would need to come back to the bee yard to winterize the bees but here we can do everything right at the same moment as describing keeping these with a smile book and also in keeping these with horizontal eyes the two classical books on natural beekeeping and fives like this one yeah and i mean honestly if you guys are just hearing it i know you're like wow that just makes sense all right let's see what we got okay this story of this hive is an artificial swarm or as they call today a split from another colony in this beard we made two colonies out of one so this is just a baby colony that started earlier this year and is probably about three months off at the moment when you work with the smaller hives like that in the fall many times you don't have any or much honey to take but this is normal this is just the beginning of them being established as a colony and there if they don't have any honey for you in the first year that's that's all right uh they will gain strength fill the entire box and then have a lot of honey to share in the polling don't make up for it all right uh as with any horizontal hive where you start the inspection in the portion of the nest that's away from the open entrance here the open entrance is on the right uh on the wall opposite us so i cracked this divider board that was in place to limit the volume of the nest for this first year smaller colony and even just removing it you see how much properties they deposited here and this is wonderful when a colony produces a lot of propolis it keeps them clean hygienic and they're much healthier i always try to add more frames with wax foundation than i think the colony will need because if you add too many at the time of the harvester you just have extra frames you can remove but if they run out of room uh they may start swarming again or you will be missing out on honey production so it's very normal for you to see the last frame that was foundation not even worked on now the next frame we see there is construction and they started drawing out their foundation and also fill it with honey oh and look at that all these small high bills many beekeepers are very much concerned about the presence of these pests in their hives but you know what i noticed in the same emperor you may have a colony that may have a hundred small high beetles on just one frame and they keep going strong for year after year so they know how to coexist with this pest and another colony that may have significantly fewer of these small fabulous may actually collapse because of the infestation which tells us that it's not about the absence of the bad guys it's about the strong immunity of the hive that keeps sir it's go it going a rule of thumb that you want to leave depending on your climate anywhere between 30 and 50 pounds of honey in the horizontal hive and it's very easy to estimate a full frame this size it's called the lens frame when full of honey it's eight pounds between eight and nine pounds so if the frame is partially filled with honey like this next one you can just estimate that this one is probably between three and four pounds of honey again we see a lot of small high beetles but we do not see any evidence that they are causing disturbance to the colony the bees are hoarding them if there is any larvae or egg surf produced by the small fabulous bees are able to clean them out so yes we have a lot of small high beetles but we do not have a problem with that and this is by the way true about the bromides this colony certainly also has varroa mites but there are many bees of the local stock that can live in the woods without our resistance know how to overcome bromides on their own without our help look there is a bee being hatched look there is a bee hatching many beekeepers if they open a beehive this time of the year we would be concerned to see no eggs we see how some of the capped brood with the last bees are emerging but no fresh eggs doesn't mean you have no queen no it actually means that if you have a local queen she shut down the production of eggs on time producing more eggs this time of the year here in missouri mid-october would be too late they will be producing brood that would hatch when there is no more flowers around to forage on so locally adapted queens and this is a colony that started with the local queen caught as a swarm here in mid missouri they know when they need to shut down their egg production it saves them resources and a voice producing workforce that will have no useful work to perform later in the fall and during the winter there are the original frames that we transferred from the length straw 5 into the lens 5 and as you can tell the bees have assimilated it they fill it with honey and nectar and in the falling spring they will continue building out the empty spaces on this frame making it completely into a lens frame again the reason we converted it from the length or conventional american frames to the lands is that the lands is are five inches deeper than the langstroth and the extra depth is very beneficial for good overwintering because the bees have a lot of honey reserves above them and they're able to move up during the winter consuming these reserves it's more secure this way than being on a shallow frame where they can run out of reserves in the middle of the winter and then starve the bees have connected two of the frames partially with the all comb so we'll separate that and there i have no concerns for this colony because they have lots of capped honey they also have lots of nectar and bee bread this is the fermented pollen the space and the frames and they have plentiful empty cells under their honey and nectar on which they can harbor hibernate i will just rectify this another frame and there you know unless you're shooting a youtube video with ag and stacy you don't really need to take the frame out completely because you can estimate the weight just by holding it by the shoulders and i could tell that this one is probably five pounds of honey without pulling it out of the hive today it's 80 degrees so we are not disturbing the bees and we are not compromising the microclimate and the nest by pulling the frame out completely but it was if it was chile if it was in the 50s you would try to pull frames out of the hive as little as possible so the bees can conserve as much of the heat and the brew chamber as they can this is a kind of the frame that makes ideal for wintering you have a ribbon of honey maybe half of the frame eight inches above and then empty cells below where the bees can cluster and then move up gradually consuming the reserves during the winter the reason it's beneficial to have the empty cells below is that there the bees will actually go head first into these cells packing them as tightly as possible in order to share the heat the most efficient way with their nest mates so frames that are completely full of honey from the top bar to the bottom bar actually not very good for wintering and can be safely removed it is not a very good idea to pull honey that the bees may need for wintering and then for the spring build up but at the same time it doesn't make much sense to liver in the hive the honey reserves that they will not make any use of during the winter these are extra frames that they have no way of consuming can only attract moisture and become moldy during the winter so if you come across a hive that has lots and lots of honey it's actually a good idea to pull the excess honey before the winter sets in okay and the last frame just as the last frame on this side is just foundation the bees will not need it during the winter and we'll remove it so we can limit the volume of the nest thus limiting the amount of volume that the bees will have to heat i'll just shake the bees off and swipe them off and put aside because this uh split was made relatively late in this season we won't take any honey from them but if the split had been made there a month or six weeks earlier then we were able to make it then quite conceivably we would have extra honey to pull this time of the year very good here's another frame of foundation that we're removing a little propolis on the sides they start welding the sides together they do that right often yeah and especially in the fall is they're preparing uh for wintering so what we'll do here is because there is relatively little honey on this frame we can actually remove it leaving frames that have a very small amount of honey is not good for the winter because whatever bees are on this frame may run out of stores and then experience duration all right so we're pulling this frame out and we're leaving the remaining seven frames for the bees to winter on it's very important this time of year if you remove a frame that even has a relatively small amount of honey on it not to leave it in the open these are still active but there is a little honey flow if any in nature so bees from other hives may be attracted to the smell of freshly pulled honey and come here investigating and potentially start robbing this hive so the moment you pull this out of the hive put it in a box this is a swamp trap that's no longer used as a swamp trap this time of the year and cover it very good we are ready to winterize this colony so now that we've removed the empty frames and one frame with honey we are ready to prepare the bees for winter it's very simple to do with horizontal hives there are no multiple boxes for you to shuffle around all it takes is taking this divider board flipping it over so that little small legs are at the bottom creating a crack under the divider board and putting it in place after the last frame the reason for leaving the crack at the bottom of the divider board is to enable the moist air from the brood chamber to go into this empty chamber during the winter and then gradually rise under the roof and be vented out through these vents in the roof this is very simple setup that allows to prevent excessive loss of heat from the blue chamber you will see in a second that it will be very well insulated but at the same time this bottom ventilation will carry all excess moisture out of the brew chamber preventing mold or other undesirable consequences of moisture buildup and the last step in winterizing the bees described by george the laganza in keeping these on horizontal hives is to put a pillow or any other insulating material i'm using a pillow case stuffed with natural wool cheap wall if you don't have sheep wall go to the pet grooming business and ask them for some dog hair or whatever wood shavings any material that will keep the top of the frames are warm is beneficial i would avoid putting styrofoam here because styrofoam is very good insulation but it would trap moisture with the pillow that's filled with wool what will happen some moisture will be coming through the top bars during the winter but because this can absorb moisture and also wick moisture away from the nest there will be no mold between this pillow and the top bars if you were to use styrofoam it would become wet and grow mold for you so put this pillow there there if you don't have access to wool some people just go to a thrift store and buy some old clothing made out of wool and cut it and create a kind of a blanket to go over this portion and that's it then we cover everything with the top and in lanes horizontal hives the top has a lip that keeps it propped up by three inches over the top bars of the frames this means that there is a pocket of air all around this sir pillow and this pocket of air allows the warm moist air that sucked under the divider board to rise to the top of this attic and get vented out of these holes preventing moisture build up again with this very simple setup we achieved two most important objectives for the winter first to avoid heat loss and we do so by giving bees a well insulated beehive this is a double wall model that has a one and a half inch of natural wool in the walls and we also put this pillow or blanket on top of the frames to conserve the heat that rises inside the brood cluster and number two objective is to pervade prevent excessive moisture building up and condensing inside the brood nest that would create very unfavorable conditions for wintering and we accomplished this by leaving this crack at the bottom of the divider board and providing for unobstructed bends in the top so that moist air can escape they're all tucked in for winter and if your husband has a hairy back you could just shave his back and use it in there too a lot of people go to the beauty parlor in the neighborhood and you could also use hair uh sweep it up off the floor and they'll be glad to get rid of it isn't it yeah in the old days they were also using straw yeah it doesn't have to be contained in a pillow case you can just put a shingle of straw there and then the spring just brush it off that's it now we're gonna go out to the pasture and see what's going on in those hives love it here we have two horizontal hives one is the classical land survive with narrow and deep frames that mimic how beastly the nature and the other one uses the conventional american langstroth frames that are nine inch deep and as we go through these hives i'd like to uh draw attention to the different ways the bees put honey in these two frames okay we open the top and we start with the frames that are farthest from the open entrance what you can also do if the hive is still active by putting the palm of your hands on the top bars you can feel if there are any frames where there is a brood being reared because they will have high temperature this time of year you won't have much brood produced anymore they're shutting down for the winter so i feel that all the top bars here are pretty much the same temperature but when active brood rearing is happening you could really feel the warmth from the bars where brood is being produced just as with the other hiver we added many more frames of foundation than we thought the bees will need if they run out of room and there are no frames of foundation they will just start building their honeycomb from the lid of the hive making it difficult to remove so these frames they don't need for the winter i recommend removing them from the hive leaving them there may lead to this wax spoiling during the winter there may be some moisture condensing on it some mold forming so if you can take it out and put it in a dry cool place it will conserve these frames much better than inside the nest another reason for doing so is that you don't want to leave too many frames for the winter for the bees to take care of and to heat they want to be snug there between the walls of the hive and the divider and too many frames are would create a volume that there they won't be able to heat so cold air will be circulating all around them we want to avoid that again i draw attention to this beautiful properly that they're depositing in preparation for winter this is a natural antibiotic and the use of propolis by the bees not only helps them seal the cracks and prevent any drafts of our cold air circulating in there but it also kills germs and viruses there in the hive and usually this last frame that they are working on will only have a ribbon of honey on top but this is very beautiful wide capped honey that we'll be able to remove because again you want to leave frames that have quite a substantial ribbon of honey on top otherwise if you leave them with a frame that may have say a couple of inches three inches four inches on top then the bees that are cluster under this honey may run out of food before winter is over so frames that have a small amount of honey on top are better removed from the hive [Applause] again do everything you have to do to avoid rubbing we're going now slower than we normally would be better you don't want to leave hives open for an extended period of time this time of year again because bees are active there are no flowers for them to gather honey from and the smell of honey from a hive being opened can attract robbers so any frame containing honey the spool from the hive must be put in a box and the lid must be replaced at once this next frame shows the ideal arrangement of honey and empty cells for beast or winter on this is honey on top and anti-cells below if you were to look inside a nest inside the tree in the woods this is the arrangement you will see honey on top and empty cells underneath and this is a heavy frame beautiful so half full on one side and two thirds full on the other side with some nectar underneath too so we look at the other frames and potentially we could even pull this frame for us after making sure they have sufficient reserves for the winter and for the for the spring again it's important not just to leave them what they need to survive during the cold months but also for the spring for example if you were to leave this frame in the hive they won't touch it during the winter they will have enough on the other frames but if the spring weather isn't favorable for foraging it's too rainy or too cold they would have this reserve there to consume during this inclement weather so it's a very good practice to be living bees with enough food not just for the winter but for the first month of the spring like we need to poo we often think that bees are making honey for us but this is not so honey in the first place is their own survival food and they need this food for lasting them through the winter it's not just sweet stuff nutritionally it's much better than plain sugar and this is why the practice of taking all of the honey from the bees something that many beekeepers do and then feeding them sugar syrup instead in the fall is something that compromises their health they are more likely to have their ear the processing of sugar in the fall will weaken them and they will have to spend their their resources that are required for lasting the winter on just turning the sugar water into something that would be palatable for them so i never do that i don't recommend that you swap all of the honey for sugar water because nutritionally these are very different things if you treat your bees with respect you need to recognize that honey belongs to them first and there you can certainly help yourself to whichever surplus they don't need and won't be able to consume on their own go through the hive more quickly during this fall inspection you may slide several frames at a time and there the three frames here the two-thirds on each frame are filled with honey so that's heavy six pounds of honey on this one again leaving bees too much honey for the winter is not a good idea either because honey is very heavy and it can absorb a lot of warmth that they need for the brood nest so because honey takes a lot of heat to heat up you don't want to leave bees more honey for the winter than they actually need so any excess honey that they're not needing for the winter we can safely remove during this inspection again a typical hive in the climate of the midwest in central missouri here would need between 30 and 50 pounds depending on the strength of the colony and the bees tell you themselves how strong the colony is and how many frames they occupy for example if you were to open the hive and you see bees only on three or four frames or this time of year you can leave them on these four frames plus one full frame of honey on each side if the colony is much stronger and the bees occupy six or seven frames this is how much you leave so there is no ballpark figure you need to move look at the strength of the particular colony a very strong colony needs more honey obviously than a very small one i've sometimes successfully overwintered swarms that arrived in the last week of august by only giving them one frame of honey from another hive even this small amount was sufficient for them to all winter because this was a very small colony okay so we're finishing our inspection and as you're going through you're just making a mental note of or how much honey is on each frame you can also take a pencil and just write on the top bars how much time you think there is on each frame and this way summing it up you will see how much of this honey you are able to [Music] remove here we go we start removing the surplus honey again any frames that have only a small amount of honey in the top we need to remove because if the bees cluster on these frames they are likely to run out of these small stores on this frame and then they may starve on this frame so we're looking at frames that are at least five six eight inches of honey on the top to leave for the bees for the winter so this one has a little honey on one side and more nectar here and no honey on this side so this we will remove to dislodge the bees you just need to shake them or take the frame on your one hand and tap it with the other hand like that and then the remaining bees you just swipe down and again as fast as possible put this frame into a container and close the lid here's another beautiful frame we can have for ourselves we're brushing these off and it just shows you why harvesting this time of year is so much less disturbance for the bees and they're a much more pleasant experience for the beekeeper there are rarity few bees there the ones that are still in the hive are now occupied with their preparations for winter so you opening the nest and pulling these frames of honey does not elicit this violent response that you would have if you were to open the same box just six weeks earlier [Music] of course as as you are looking at these frames or make sure that you are not removing a frame that still has some unemerged brood on it but that's another beauty of harvesting late even if there was any honey on one of these frames or a month ago by now it's completely hatched so even frames that originally had some root of them can be safely removed late in the season the length start frame that was converted to the lens the top part completely filled with honey [Music] so if you come across any com like here that spans several frames it's called burcom or brace comb you can just break it off or cut it off and there you need to remove it from the hive now because the longer you leave a wavy or irregular comms inside the nester the more regular the frames will become as the bees continue building out these frames so if you remove a wavy piece of comb like that then chances are that when they start rebuilding it they will rebuild it in a straight line down uh we need a bucket or something to put these pieces in okay good so we had to go back to the kitchen to uh unload the frames from the frame box now we are back to complete harvesting from this hive and move on to the next one let's move fairly quickly because we don't want this hive exposed and open there too long this is a beautiful frame for you to have in deciding which one to take you also look at the amount of uncapped nectar on the frame so this one has more uncapped nectar and this one has less cap on cap nectar so these are two candidates okay now here is the transition we are looking for a full wall of honey is normally yours to keep except one frame like that on each side of the brood nest and the cable and the frame like that that has empty cells in the bottom and plenty of honey on top is what you would want to leave the bees for the winter okay so this is theirs and these are theirs too and this is more of the frames that we are leaving with the hive again if you're sliding the frames back together giving a few puffs of smoke prevents the beast from being crushed between the frames and if you don't have a divider board handy yet you can use a frame with foundation as a temporary divider board or even as a permanent divider board in warmer climates and then you put your pillow on top of the frames being winterized and we're almost ready to close the lid we'll take this frame and you know if you want to be very conservative uh we could leave this frame there but uh the frames that we left in the hive are so full of honey that i think we can safely pull this one and leave the remaining ones the bees for the beast of winter i think we can safely take this one too and leave the remaining frames for the beast to winter on ready the good thing is double check if these vents are open sometimes bees may cover them with propolis but for winter you really want this surf open so that the moist air can get out of the hive we're done instead of dividing boarding this high we have a full sheet of foundation one other thing you will want to do before winter sets in is to replace this sheet of foundation with a piece of plywood with a gap underneath if you experience strong winds where you live certainly put a few heavy stones on top of the cover or ratchet strap it to the high body to prevent the lid from being blown over during the winter we are done with this one on to the last hive of the day this is what's called a horizontal langstroth hive it uses the same kind of conventional american frames that you would have in your vertical hives but here all of the frames are on the same level it has many benefits including avoiding heavy lifting so as you will see today during the honey harvest instead of picking up boxes that may be 50 pounds each all you do you speak out individual frames that are not going to break your back because the length of frames have cracks between the top bars these cracks are so that these can go into the next box up in vertical hives in a horizontal hive you have an additional layer of planks to cover the top bars and contain the bees these cover boards are not necessary in a lands hive like the one we looked at before because in the lanes hive the top bars of the frames touch after when these are placed in the horizontal cavity they have the tendency of creating a brood nest at the open entrance and storing honey away from the open entrance which makes it very convenient at harvest time because you can open the portion of the hive that's away from the open entrance and that's where you will harvest most of the honey during real harvest you don't really need to go into the brew chamber the brew chamber is where the bees will store honey first as they prepare for winter so if you have any honey in the frames that are far from the entrance you can be totally sure that there is also high in the frames closer to the entrance so you don't have to dismantle the nest uh we demonstrated it on the other hives to show you how the bees are have worked during the summer and how much honey they have in the hive at the time of harvest but during the real harvest time all i do is i open the hive like this exposing the portion away from the entrance and i pull a few frames of honey leaving 10 15 frames depending on the size of the colony in the long lengths of high for the winter and the rest are mine to keep as in the other hive the very last frames would be foundation and foundation that's partially drawn uh the bees will not fill the full box with honey if it is a colony that was as this one split early in the year that means that we already took another colony of it and this hive next door is a sister colony that started from this one if we didn't do if we didn't do that then very conceivably they would have the entire box full of honey but between the two of them they probably produced as much or more honey than the one colony would have produced if it was not subjected to artificial swarming okay here is some construction some nectar in these frames and this is the kind of the frames that you normally do not want to leave inside the hive for the winter because any bees that might cluster on small frames like that would be trapped there by the cold and after consuming a few drops of honey and nectar available on this frame they would starve even though the name of the hive is horizontal hive the bees are not really supposed to be moving horizontally during the winter this is where the very deep lands frames come in preferably you want to keep these on the frame where there is enough honey in the top of the frame so they can only move up on that frame during the winter to reach the reserves moving laterally from one frame to the other is something that bees can only do if the temperatures are high enough so do not leave them the frames that do not have much honey to sustain them for the winter so we will remove the ones that just have foundation it's a windy one okay so here we come to the honey frames this is a nice heavy frame but you can see that on this side two-thirds of the frame are not sealed and on this side probably half of the cells are not sealed that means that still nectar that was not fully transformed into honey so frames like that are best left to the bees if you have others that are more fully capped this one has less nectar in it again these frames can be extracted we will show you in a minute you just have to spin nectar out first before uncapping the rest of the frame uh we need that part again what is it there is a frame missing there oh we missed that we were trying to make sure we had it all good all right here is a surprise there was a frame missing in the middle of the other frames i don't know how it happened but when it does happen the bees draw the calm from the cover boards or from the lead but then this comp cannot be easily removed as any other com that is within the frame and we need to do some surgery here taking it out brushing off the bees smoking the bees off and basically scooping out these sir calm and replacing it with an empty frame often afterwards okay when you discover that a calm is like that it has to be surgically removed then the biggest problem is not with actually having to remove the honey uh with your hands rather than just pulling up conveniently a full frame but the fact that this time of year there may be robbers lurking around looking for honey from other hives to steal this is why any removal like that needs to happen fairly quickly so we need to make room okay this frame has partial honey and there no uncapped nectar so i will just pull that one brushing off the remaining bees and putting this frame out of this reach okay here is another big frame full of honey that we will remove and then we have this comb that's not attached to any frame that we will harvest so when you do that have a bottle of water ready because you may need to wash your hands after that quickly so the bees are not attracted to you too much so you need to remove the attachment of the comb to the wall and realize that after you do that it will start sagging you need to give this a bit of smoke there but not too much otherwise or your honey can pick up some of the some of the smell of the smoke okay shaking off the bees swiping off the bees putting the piece of calm in a be tight container quickly washing your hands and doing it again with the remaining part of the comb after giving another puff of smoke i just slice it open or i just did slice it to detach it from the other frame a brush of the beast look how beautiful all right and this is it so this uh com that was built without their attachment is now removed and let's look at a couple of more frames oh yeah look how big and thick and heavy with honey yeah we're taking that you will see that some of the cells here still have just nectar they are not capped but because this frame is so thick it's a good idea to remove it and replace it with there a frame that would be standard with if there are any bees still remaining on the frame don't worry about it once you are removing the frame and your kitchen they will fly to the window and you open the window and fly they will fly out so they'll be able to return to the high so here's another frame with just foundation we're not leaving anything like that in the middle of the brood nest for the winter because again this on a frame that's not sufficiently provisioned with tiny run the risk of starving see all this calm how the bees build and connect with different frames together this is another reason why i prefer the layen's frames on the lens frames the top bars touch and there's a nice ceiling of our boards inside so the bees very rarely build these are burkom or brace calm or bridges of calm inside the lanes frames in a langstroth hive this is very common occurrence and when this happens you need to cut these connecting pieces of brace comb with a knife before sliding the frames apart [Music] cutting this connection first prevents a bigger breakage when you try to pull the frames out so we take this frame too the next frame is also attached to the previous frame with some are brace comb so you are cutting this attachment before pulling these frames apart and when you have when you shake the bees off it don't shake it vertically down because you don't want this honey from the wound to drip on the bees so hold it like that so the bees are free and clear of the honey and then brush them down after giving them a couple of pops of smoke another option hold it firmly with your hand and tap it with your other hand and this is this and this hive and like the laying side uh doesn't need a pillow are above the top bars because this top has three and a half inches of wool already inside so after you're done with your harvest you just replace this cover boards in case you guys didn't hear it he was explaining that on the long horizontal hive box here you don't need to have the pillows on top like this one uh because it has the all the walls up in the lid unlike this one here so just in case you guys couldn't hear because of the wind it's pretty windy out here today it is but what nice weather tomorrow would be like 60 degrees that's why it's so windy it's blowing in the cold front and done run stick a knife in it right so we also used here is the hive butler you guys might probably might have seen this on our videos before it works really good with the vertical hives those uh shorter frames like we used in the long horizontal high box there but they don't work um on the new boxes with the deeper frames i think they're working on some kind of a fix for that but these are pretty handy all right let's just do it all right guys now we're in the outdoor kitchen we kind of set up a little bit of of our uh tools and materials uh so we can kind of get this process going with you guys this is a spinner um here's a hot tip for you guys if you guys are new to beekeeping and you're getting into this stuff and you're gonna be getting your equipment don't make the mistake that i did the first spinner that i got the extractor only fit a certain size frames make sure you get a spinner and extractor that can accept multiple size frames because you guys might start beekeeping one way like i did and then end up in another way and then you'll have different frames and then you'll have a spinner that won't work and so i was able to pick up this one through dr leo's website horizontal hive.com make sure you guys check out that for all the free resources plus things like this so you guys can purchase to make your life a little easier it's a stainless steel a drum well balanced and you know i don't have any electricity so it's we got to hand crank it around here i have 45s and i still don't have an electric car extractor because it's so much fun doing it my children stand in line waiting for their turn to turn the candle yeah you know another thing about the extractor some people ask do i really need to invest in the extract if i only have a few hives of course you can just take a knife cut out a piece of calm and crush and strain it through the cheesecloth but this is really something you need because in addition to harvesting honey you are emptying the frames of honey and this ready-made frame you are able to give back to the bees the following spring when they need to expand and by giving them something that's already built out right you really accelerate the whole process the queen can go laying eggs in that frame straight away until waiting for another month until new com is being built so this is not just for extracting honey this is for freeing up the frames that you can return to the hives to accelerate their development in the following year yeah otherwise you have to start all over again and make all that comb again so you're just cutting out all that process yeah and you know another point about the extractor is or don't see it as an expense it's more of an investment right because extractors that i made in europe are so high value and they hold the value so well that you can use it for 20 years and then if you ever need to resell it you'll get about the same price for it as what you originally had yeah so this one's pretty easy to use it's pretty straightforward and we're going to get into uh putting some frames in here very good this is my favorite setup for holding uh frames while you're uncapping them it is a special tray with a lip and this is the uncapping rack that their clips to this tray and this way if you ever need to move it the whole assembly can be moved together and there are all the cappings and honey that will start dripping during the uncapping process they fall in here and they're contained so you you're not walking in all of these stains of honey on the floor of your kitchen right so not only that but with this very simple setup two people can be sitting at a table on both sides uh doing the uncapping so before we actually start on camping i wanted to draw your attention one more time to what we saw there in the hives so this is a typical lance frame uh in for horizontal hives originally in europe so it is narrow and very deep much deeper than the uh american frame and notice how on almost all frames there would be honey in the top but a few empty cells underneath this is very important for be successful over wintering because if you were to leave this frame in the hive the bees will be able to cluster in these cells and then gradually move up consuming honey now what we see on the standard american frames called the length straw frames this is called the deep frame but compared to the 16 incher deep lens frame this is only 9 inches deep and see how here bees practically have no room to build their comb with the empty cells right and on a frame like that they will be forced to cluster between the frames full of honey uh which are is are not optimal for them they cannot go into the cells to cluster and create the thai cluster for saving uh the heat and the winter so just to be clear you guys so you're understanding when the bees are on here they they have nowhere there's no refuge there's on this flat surface but back to this one here when they get cold all the bees will line up and get inside of these cells all next to each other and then that will cause them to have their body heat and everything and then they'll start working up the frame together just so you guys can visualize that they'll actually go inside of this comb and be inside of there so that's kind of cool so when frame like that was being developed in europe in the 19th century the scientists actually went and looked there in how bees liver and bee trees in the woods during the winter and they realized it was extremely important to have the depth of the frame that's deep enough to have honey on top as food but empty cells underneath for them to cluster yeah and there of course american beekeeping today uh often uses two boxes one on top of the other but then there is a gap between one frame and the other that these have to bridge so for example if you have two frames you can arrange them like that in two boxes but then there is this gap when i hold it with my fingers and for a small b that's only 7 three quarters of an inch long this two inch gap between the frames may be too much if it's very cold for them to crawl in so the farther north you are the more beekeepers may lose their bees through starvation in the lower box when there is more honey on top right because of this gap with the european lands frame there is no gap so bees have access to the honey at all times right okay so i wanted to point this out and it explains just why in the old books beekeepers who compared both of these designs for horizontal hybrid keeping they were always coming to the conclusion that the extra depth of the frame is very beneficial for successful overwintering right all right so the uncapping process is very straightforward you can use a knife or you can use the special uncapping fork this is my tool of choice it's much slower than the knife but it gives you more control especially if your frame is not uniform and some places is deeper and others it's bulging out with this you can follow the shape of the frame taking off these cabins and even though it's a slow process i really have no desire to speed it up because i just enjoy it you start uncapping it and you appreciate the beauty of honey and the diversity of it each frame will be slightly different one will be orange inflate in the color there there will be pale yellow some others will be much darker but i just like this process of exposing the honey prior to extraction if you are the tips is that the temperature of the calm is best between 80 and 95 degrees this is when it flows out of the friendly easys right that's why today was ideal it was and save these campings because we use them as our uh a natural alternative to chewing gum see when this camping is removed it's mostly wax but then there is some honey in it so we just put it in jars and save it and there then chew it as chewing gum you of course you could eat the chunk of calm but there would mostly be honey and a little bit of wax here the proportion is mostly wax so for chewing this is better than calm honey and then also you'll have different tastes too because you have different tastes from frame to frame absolutely actually in a long hive uh b start putting nectar near the open door first and as you're removing the frames in the fall it's almost like reading a book backwards so you are looking at their frames or that were filled a week ago five weeks ago two months ago so you're going back in time and depending on what was in bloom the frames will look smell and taste differently one of the most important precautions during honey instruction is to not eat too much honey yeah because it starts running and dripping and there if you keep licking your fingers it can be a sugar overdose before you know it don't ask us how we know [Laughter] and kanye like you know other things are uh that a very powerful source of nutrition they are best used in moderation right because it is really possible to eat too much yeah okay another trick with this if there is a little bit of a calm that's recessed instead of trying to dig it out you can just scratch it off like that and let's do that okay this side is ready and we flip it over and do them capping on the other side going from the bottom up when you go from the bottom up then this kind of steel cap that's not there running over your fork as much right and until you guys actually get your spinner you could actually do this process and then just let it drain into a dish or this tray and then transfer it you know until you can get your spinner put together yeah but it's a very slow process be prepared to spend probably 12 hours on each side right and you need to maintain a very warm temperature in the room for for the honey to flow yeah also it's very beneficial to do the extraction as soon as possible after removing the frame from the hive because there are many kinds of honey depending on the plant that the honey comes from many kinds crystallize or become very thick fairly quickly right so if you allow this frame to sit and already be too late the honey may be already partially crystallized and it won't come out of the frame uh in an extractor and if it's hot outside or even when it's called outside for example it's been in there no because of the kind of the plant that contributed nectar for example rape rapeseed produces this kind of nectar that is initially liquid of course but becomes our solid very very quickly so do not delay too much right and another consideration is that uh when this frame was inside the beehive the beast could protect it they could remove the larva of the small habitals and the wax moths the moment you remove the frame from their care it's no longer protected by the hive so if there is a wax mod that deposited an egg there you may not see the egg but under favorable conditions that means the absence of bees and the warm enough temperature it will hatch and then the world there will be this larva crawling about and destroying the comp this is another reason why you want to do the extraction fairly soon after removing the frame from the bees and i know this one's going to sound kind of elementary but i'll share a story with you too so you could think that it's not so elementary maybe don't do this procedure outside we're inside the outdoor kitchen with a in porch we're like in on the screened in porch so nothing can get in here one of my amish buddies uh he took all of his frames out of his uh box his vertical box brought his supers over and he set him on his picnic table outside of his house and he had to go get a few things together and he got caught up inside the house and no kidding within a little bit of time he was gone by time he came back out to get the frames going they had already robbed everything and took it back to where he just brought it from so you can't do this outside in the free air you have to be in an enclosed area all right here's another comment you see how on this frame 75 of the frames are kept but others are not capped that means that these are cells still contain half honey half nectar there is a special tool that can measure the moisture content but instead of being say 18 as in fully capped honey it could be something like 20 or 25 percent uh if you are extracting honey for your personal consumption and if you know that you'll be able to store it in a cool place i don't worry about that much or nectar being there because honey even if it has slightly high moisture content because of this partially kept honey can only ferment if it's warm enough right so if you're thinking of storing this honey in the warm place for a whole year then definitely you would need to only extract the capped honey but if you can keep it in the refrigerator or in a cool place and you are not planning on keeping it a year in my household it just melts away in a matter of weeks after extraction uh then i don't worry about this additional nectar there right now if you wanted to separate it a very simple way described in keeping bees on horizontal highs by george the lands you put this in a spinner before you do the uncapping right and you very gently uh turn the handle and you spin the frame without uncapping it because this flows much easier than honey it will come out of the frame you flip it and take out any nectar on the other side and then you do the uncapping so this way you can take all of the frames that have substantial amount of nectar in them spin them out gently then you'll drain this nectar and then you'll do them camping and extracting off honey percentage that's why i was just going to ask you about draining the nectar you want to make sure that's cleaned out of there before you put the honey in there yeah yeah man you guys getting all this a lot of information and we're just extracting honey who would ever thought it and you notice this positioning here this is veteran positioning you know he's got the right angle that is normally yeah but normally i would be sitting yeah sitting in front of it because when you have very hundreds and again you know there are special tools that are heated with electricity they really speed things up but then you're exposing honey to very hot temperatures which is detrimental to honey and there there are some mechanical things with knives that rotate and move but i just like this meditation of sitting there and thinking about the bees and the miracle of sunshine water and air coming together and creating this magic of honey right and what's also magical is that once you consume the honey the process is reversed to make the honey that means sugars and the honey it takes sunshine for the energy water for ho2 h2o and then our carbon dioxide co2 and they merge together through photosynthesis to make sugar now when we eat it the process is reversed we have released energy and their co2 and their water gets released so it's exactly the opposite process of how honey is formed so for me sitting there and just on camping honey you're all immersed in this fragrance of fresh honey around you and it's also just partaking in this big mystery of or this never-ending cycle in nature of things being formed ripening and being consumed and returning to the source only to be formed again you know another thing i love about connie as a form of let's say animal husbandry yeah is that way there um many other uh forms of animal husband rape can be cruel or it involves killing of the creature to take meat even egg production and their milk production still involves breeding them killing off the males etc so with their bees and harvesting honey it's really cruelty free method if you use natural method right because here we are only taking what bees won't be able to consume themselves some people say oh i don't want to take any honey from the bees because i don't want to stress the bees i only want to keep bees for having pollinators around but you know by taking this honey from them in the fall and returning the empty calm in the spring you're rendering them service yeah because they wouldn't be able to consume all of it themselves anyway and if you didn't harvest this honey in nature it would be consumed by some kind of predators or parasites like wax moths and mice and small hive beetles and again removing uh the calms that the bees don't need for the winter also means decreasing the volume of their nest so they will be more snug there for the winter that means less volume to heat less to protect so it's a win-win when i exp explain to one gentleman who is a vegan he doesn't eat any animal products right or concerns for animal cruelty when i explain to him how i keep my bees and that i only take the surplus that they have to share without ever taking more than they can or give up and i never feed them should he that i think with this kind of for beekeeping i can eat honey yeah well these hives are stationary that doesn't he doesn't feed them sugar he only takes what the bees are can give of themselves without compromising their winter reserves so yeah there is no cruelty to animals involved right and we're smiling i wanted to show you this frame when doug and i were transferring bees from a length stroke hive with these nine inch deep frames to the lanes see what they did in the lands exactly what they want to do in nature they filled the whole part uh the top part in honey and they left empty cells underneath so even though this was the original langstroth frame they did want to extend it down with empty cells for wintering and there some of you you may think that frames that do not have wires in them are not extractable but let's do this frame to demonstrate that as long as there is attachment on the top and on the sides you can extract honey even the frames that do not have wires running through them all the way top to bottom right and also look at how different this honey is the previous two frames they were bright yellow in color and this is much darker because probably this is later nah late season time when asters are in bloom and golden rods it produces much stronger tasting and much much darker honey right and of course here it's also deposited in cells that had been used for brood rearing so the cells and the wax themselves have become darker yeah and their honey from frames that are dark like that can only be enjoyed from beehives that are not treated with chemicals that's very important because this dark color of the calm comes from brood rearing and in conventional beehives the brew chamber where the bees are rear they brewed is the place where beekeepers put chemicals to kill varroa mites and small high beetles and other parasites so if this was coming from the brew chamber of the conventional hive it would not be fit for human consumption right because of the repeated exposure to chemicals that get absorbed into wax and end up in honey too but because this is coming from completely chemical free bee hives we can safely enjoy this very flavorful honey from the very dark frames interestingly the dark calm in itself has a certain flavor too so it lends to the nectar and honey deposited in it a flavor of dried fruit so this will be very intense flavor of prunes and there are dates and dried pears and this is the kind of honey i grew up eating as a child and one of the reasons why we started beekeeping after coming to the united states is because we couldn't find anyone selling dark home honey to me this is the most delicious part of the of the honey production another reason why it's so superior to light colored honey is that the brood chamber is where the bees deposit a lot of pollen right because pollen is their source of protein and what they use to give to the larva to grow the larva into adult bees so dark home honey like that from the brew chamber will also have pollen cows through the roof right which is definitely good if you want to get a hold of your seasonal allergies in your local area yeah you know we determined it just by putting a drop of it under the microscope and comparing honey from the brew chamber to honey that just this transparent er honey that's been filtered and taken from light colored calm the difference in terms of the amount of honey was one to 300 this had 300 times more pollen in it than the light colored calm that has not gone through the brew chamber and did not have any pollen deposited in them almost black it is and you know each comb literally will taste differently we once came across one calm that was black and it tasted like chocolate it was only one time it was such an unmistakable taste of chocolate it was extraordinary and i like tasting honeys from different parts even of the same hive to appreciate the diversity of different flowers that contributed to this richness again it's not something that you would get in many conventional honeys that are monoculture honey they may be good honeys but they may be clever or orange blossom or alfalfa and not much else when you have your hives stationary everything that blooms within two mile radius of the hives ends up contributing to the honey so nutritionally it's superior and the flavor is also much more complex like her expensive french wine you know another comment about the calm you're extracting the dark comp is much sturdier than the freshly built yellow or white color it looks like it and just the physical appearance it just looks thicker it is thicker and stronger and and the reason for that is that there are these are spin cocoons there when they're transformed from a larva into an adult like all insects and the layers of cocoon risk force it so that means that when we extract very.com we can go high speed and there is less risk of breakage than when we extract our virgin fresh white calm okay so this is how the universal extractor is loaded as doug explained the basket in this barrel is made so that you can fit any size of frame right there lance frame or length still deep frame or six medium frames all of them go here so the proper way of extracting it is to go first at a slower speed if you were to spin it very fast what would happen is that the honey would be removed from our the side of the cone that's facing out but all of the honey that's on the inside of the kong would still be there and there with you going going very fast it would there be putting pressure and you can have it blow out so the the what do you mean blow out blow out that means when the whole calm just flies off yeah yeah i was just making sure so they understood yeah so see if if we're extracting this side first it comes out but the comb is still very very heavy because the other side is fully loaded and while the other side is fully loaded we cannot go at high speed because it would start pushing through and can actually blow out the kind of come from the frame so for this reason we need to go on one side very slowly and then after maybe a minute of gentle turning like this and a minute as an approximation because it depends on the temperature of the calm and also what flowers contributed to the nectar because some honey is a much thicker than others just naturally right okay so go for a minute on one side and you can already see all of this rain showering from the frames to the side of the barrel and then going down and then after a minute of gentle turning you stop and you reverse the frames you take them out see how this one is partially emptied there's still some honey in there but they're a large proportion of guns so now we flip all frames over and then we'll start spinning slowly and then fast again now that we're doing that there is no weight on the other side to push out the calm out of the frame so eventually we can go much faster [Applause] and in addition to the quality of our manufacture of the machine what helps avoid vibration during extraction is loading the frames of approximately the same weight yes then this way it will be well balanced and even though here we didn't uh really match them exactly you can see how with this universal lanes extractor it's so stable it's not like you need to spin and then the whole family is holding it together so it doesn't dance around the floor we have the other spinner on the palette with rubber knobs on the bottom and we'd stand on the palate you just kind of keep an eye on it and you'll be able to see when it gets emptied out actually now you can even feel it by how easy it starts going right see this side is completely empty and we didn't have to go too fast right and this is what i like about these extractors where the frames are positioned so that the force of rotation takes it out perpendicular to the uh to the movement right there are many extractors where there comes a position like that like rays of the sun there it takes a much higher speed and that means high risk of breakage of the comb because of all this force here uh it extracts very quickly but very gently so that the combs rarely break yeah and that's exactly how the other spinner was too it had slots really quick quick so here's another one see there are no wires in this lower portion but it's there without any breakage okay now i flip it over to the original side and we can complete the extraction of this load at fairly high speed if you listen to it you can actually hear the sound of rain and this is the sound of droplets of honey hitting the wall of the barrel as they fly out of the calm such a nice sound says winnie the pooh now it starts to dance a little bit because for demonstration no the reason for that is for demonstration below the two kinds of frames this one that was converted from langstroth has additional wooden framework here this this is why the weight is not the same as in the other frames right but this is about it so if you look at it it's a little bit moist but that's sir how it should be and then almost all honey is out and ready to be poured out either straight in your container or to be filtered and then bottled later you like to drain each time you do a spin or do you let a couple spins go then drain or how what's your preference uh i really like draining it straight away because this captures the diversity of it for example if i were to drain it now and then bottle it after it goes through the filter it will be one flavor right or just this three or six frames right if i were to put third or strainer yeah this in a bucket so your hamburger is sieve so the honey drips through here and into the bucket so if you keep extracting until the whole bucket is full of course it's more convenient right but then all of the flavors would be mixed together and even if you look at the different frames you see that they look different the flavors will be different yes so the smaller the bench you're extracting and bottling the more diversity of flavors you're actually able to capture i see so you would definitely try to bottle this right off yeah and actually you know the only reason you are doing this with straining is that when honey comes out of this valve and the honey first goes through the filter into this bucket and then you use this bevel on the bucket for actually pour it into jars the only reason is that the honey in the barrel may still have small bits of wax there right that detach themselves during extraction well truth be told it may also have an occasional small high beetle or wax moth there so when i boil for my personal consumption i just pull it straight from here into a jar right because i don't mind some flakes of uh wax eventually floating to the top it's almost like cream on top of your pot of our yogurt but if you are using it for sale a or long-term storage or you just don't want the small habilis or something else ending up in the jar then using this sir arrangement with the double sieve made of stainless steel never use aluminum right because aluminum actually can react with honey and contaminated with aluminum uh and you don't want aluminum in your diet in this quantity so stainless steel sieve and the bucket some people frown on the use of plastic because actually honey can also react with plastic right but it depends on two factors temperature and length of time that it spans there right so for example i never store honey in plastic containers long term i still use a bucket like that for bottling right but ty ends up spending them maybe half an hour and then it's over if i were to store honey i would only store it in stainless steel or glass containers that's all we do we just use this for the initial process and then everything goes in glass and that's food grade plastic too you know it does matter a little bit but yeah well this is the whole setup don't extract too many loads before you drain it because as the level of honey keeps going up in the barrel right if it interferes with the rotation yeah and then you have a big mess all your frames are covered in honey yeah yeah so you want to open this up and let her go so make sure this one is closed right close tightly liquid gold there he goes and one thing you guys are going to want to do is keep an eye on this if you get to going too fast that'll fill up and it won't drain through there fast enough and then you'll really have a mess so you guys got to keep your eyes on this stuff as you're working with it that's nice it is you know so many producers want to produce more and more and more and yes you can produce honey by the time but is it still as pleasurable as having it on a small scale it is not i read the book by famous european uh honey farmer who was are producing many tons of honey every year and he said i will probably not have a chance to admire the bees until i retire from the business because he was just so busy doing all of this almost factory manipulation moving bees around in large quantities i just like the whole process that gives me a smile it's slow it gives me enough rewards to feed my family and have wonderful food on the table and share with others but it is just all filled with enjoyment which is very important for me yeah i find it a very convenient setup i get these stainless steel racks from spain and they're just wonderful for small scale production and uncapping if you wanted to you could even clip them to the top of a 55 gallon drum and have all of the campings are fall in there to be later separated from honey and melted down for wax [Music] those are at horizontal hive.com as well correct thank you yeah i i use any piece of equipment myself for a number of years and if i see it's great i start offering it on horizontal.com this is how we started using these extractors uh we imported them for our own use first and after using them for several years and seeing how sturdy they are and well balanced and matching all sizes of frames we started offering them for sale on horizontal hive.com which is also where you guys can get all your free plans for the swarm catch box which you guys are going to want to start your build on over winter so when spring comes next year you guys are ready to go out and get your swarm so you're not out there buying those nukes we've talked to you guys about all this stuff so make sure you're paying attention i make a little winter project making your swarm catchers i i agree and not just the swarm catchers i'll say five yeah you gotta have a hole build the five or by five now yeah because are when swarms started arriving it can be quite overwhelming that's right some people think oh i'll maybe catch one or two swarms but what if you can't stand storms it's not out of the ordinary for people to catch more swarms than they have swamp traps that's why there's the down time in the winter is not really downtime you're just getting your equipment together thinking about how you're going to expand where you're going to put new hives what the swarms are looking like all the while you're enjoying your honey all right or the anticipation of having your own kanye last next year [Music] when the frames are fully extracted you have several options one option is to put them out for the bees to clean out the other one is to put it inside the beehive for them to lick it up so if you put it outside do it towards the end of the day because the bees become all excited and they become so excited that it may actually trigger robbing of one hive trying to break into the other term because they are all feel the frenzy of this free honey being exposed somewhere and they start investigating other hives whether they can get even more there so if you do it late in the day they they have enough time to lick up the frames but it doesn't give them enough time to launch into this hive robbing behavior [Applause] this be a good time with this like we're doing this october extraction that's another reason why you want to leave these out there if you can to have them feed off of it is because they're limited on their food supply already in it they are and actually the frames that have been what's called dried by the bees will store better through the winter because with every last drop of honey removed from it brightly bees they will be dry and there is no chance of mold growing on them when you put them into storage right you don't necessarily need to dry the frames by giving them to the bees if you have dry and cool place to put them in right but if the temperatures will be high or the place may not be bone dry it's really good to have these frames emptied of honey completely and still another reason why late uh extraction is so beneficial is that around this time of year the wax moths and small high bill uh start their slowing down so when these frames are free of honey you are no longer concerned about their wax mouth or small high beetle damage if you were to extract the frames in the middle of the summer this is at the peak of small hybrid activity and then after extraction you have to worry about preserving the frames uh so they are not destroyed by wax moths because the night time temperatures get are cold enough in mid october here that these insects are become pretty much inactive i don't have to worry about them potentially destroying these frames so that was it for those uh there are two more in that cooler there okay so yeah what a difference uh from combing the dark stuff to combing this blonde stuff here this just flakes right off real easy the camping still have a flavor of their own and it may be such a distinct flavor that for a very long time it was believed that bees put a little bit of venom under the campings to keep honey fresh they probably do not do that but campings can have some very very unique flavor to them sometimes they start their uh like giving a tingling sensation to a tongue as if you ate some echinacea or spearmint finger [Applause] so if you guys are going to keep a couple hides you know you're going to get some of your neighbor friends over and you guys are going to have a little hive spinning party and that way you can get a little help because it's good to have a little help and then you'll also uh you know make some friends and give away some honey and maybe even educate folks about how the bees operate and why they're so important to us so maybe they stopped putting chemicals in their yard and killing their bees with roundup just a thought it's a very good thought actually lance in his book are keeping business horizontal hives that was written in 1892 the first edition he was suggesting the same thing always gives you give your neighbors jars of honey yeah and then they won't mind being stung all right for all you suburban beekeepers out there so you will see what i'm doing here if you missed any of the i'm camping during the first go then after you spun it out you see some of these cells are still kept so you can uncap it right there and scratch all the cappings and give it her another spin and they it to fully extract these cells that have been sealed so you will see this extracted dance now but this is because we're getting to the end of this extraction with laying frames and we can no longer match them all by weight yeah and also these frames that have the wooden framework from the length of frames they have heavier than the others anyway when you're extracting frames that are all the same size and you match the weight there is no vibration whatsoever so when you're keeping bees with a smile you can do the happy dance all right this is don yep down [Music] this side will give a spin on the other side when the other frames are ready do we have more that's what so when you are down to the last frame if you only have one or two you need to use a frame that you already extracted just as our counterbalance yeah so put it back in and finish the extraction of these frames again don't go too fast first because it's your job to gently remove honey from one side before switching it over to the other side and then going at full speed otherwise you may damage the calm in the process it's just flowing look how dark it is and when you're at the end of the extraction you can just tilt the extractor forward a little bit yep so you get it all there's just something about it i wonder winnie the pooh likes itself so now we actually uncapping the deep length trough frames that you will find in our almost all conventional american beehives you can use the same rack by just hanging them on the same times like on the fork and you do them capping and you put them in this universal extractor that can hold three frames like that without you having to swap out the basket for a different size well we've shown you guys the whole process we started this year we caught swarms we divided boxes we walked you through hive inspections now we're drawing honey showing you guys all this stuff and hopefully this is really helping you guys uh you know get into natural beekeeping leave those chemicals behind and so we can develop a stronger strand of bees nationwide make beekeeping great again but if you guys have any questions about this any things that we're showing here miss try to answer them uh down below and i always get with dr leo and we try to answer some questions as a matter of fact someone asked a question and they wanted to know if they didn't want to keep bees um you know and they plant the flowers you know they can't really have a box what else could they do for their bees in their area besides just planting the flowers well planting the flowers in one thing and the other one is if you get one of these swamp traps on the tree and you catch a swarm you don't have to necessarily transfer them into a bigger box you can leave them in a swamp trap even right there on the tree for the winter you'll just put some additional insulation around the box to keep them warm but it can be almost like providing a birdhouse to the birds you can fry the bee house to the bees and this is important because in many areas it's not the absence of flowers that's the limiting factor it's the absence of the big trees with hollow inside they've all been logged out so bees are desperate for some cavity and that's why they go into homes behind signing and buildings but this is not secure because many times people want them out they call exterminator for firms to take them out but you can give these a good home just by hanging one of these swamp traps and the swamp trap again is this it's in the car already yeah it's just a box that we put together uh that basically is like a a beehive but really small just so that swarm can find a place to move into and feel secure and then you'll just go on about moving that into your permanent home but we showed you guys how to do all that so make sure you watch those videos over the winter especially so you can keep bursting all this stuff because when we hit spring next year you guys going to be excited about beekeeping yeah and i agree with dog you know there is this feeling of completion when you harvest honey but also understand that this is the beginning of the new season right with all of this calm that we got extracted and empty for the bees that's the foundation of them flourishing in the next year that's right of course they could do without that but they would need to build things out from scratch when you give them the new calm that's already been built and emptied of honey in the spring the queen can start laying eggs in a larger quantity they can start storing honey and your operation becomes more sustainable and thriving and before too long instead of the problem of keeping your bees alive as most beekeepers concerned is today you start having the problem of having too many bees which is what exactly what happened to us this year we ran out of uh might have any more hives to put them in we had we could have split like seven eight nine times just this year but we just didn't have the housing for them so it is true what he's saying we went from trying to fight to keep him alive to leave him alone the hands-off approach natural beekeeping to having so much abundance and because winter is such a good time for making plans for the next year i'm teaching the laster two-day beekeeping class of the year it will be uh in southern missouri in kabul missouri all information is horizontal hive.com it is october 24th and 25th 2020 and there if you want to attend i know it's a very short notice but you can get 50 of the registration fee with coupon code off grid off grid one where the two words doesn't matter and it's october 24th and 25th 2020 and this coupon code is only good for this last remaining workshop of the year that's full two days doug attended it a week ago and reported in one of his other videos but it's a comprehensive program that walks you through the entire cycle of be life through a year starting from catching swarms all the way to extracting your honey marketing your honey restoring landscapes and creating better habitat for the bees all topics are covered there during two days and of course it includes a visit to my apparis and we'll be looking inside the horizontal hives will be pulling honey so everything you've seen in this video today will be also part of this program october 24th and 25th and again you can register on horizontal hive.com and get 50 of the registration fee uh using the coupon code off-grid it's a one-off deal thank you yeah we had a great time last week a lot of great information a lot of great stories a lot of made new friends saw a lot of you guys there so hopefully you guys will get some tickets the nice thing about this one too is it's the end of the year class so we're going over how to store your frames and everything for winter because there's a little bit of a trick to it you don't want to come out of winter and in the spring with your hives infested with wax moths and eggs and larva so it's really important to know how to store your stuff properly over winter yeah you know the easiest chemical free way of storing your calm is preserving it in cold temperatures right even if there is some egg uh of wax mouth here what small habit it won't be able to develop during the low temperatures and in the spring when it could develop you already give it back to the bees and they will clean it out man i could smell that i just hit a pocket or something can you smell it or you probably smell it at all i just hit this little area right here and it just was like a farm honey smell it can be intoxicating i don't i'm [Laughter] imagine if there was a test on of honey concentration in your bloodstream there was a legal limit on that then i'll probably have to stay here for a week dog before it airs out we'll notice that now that we switched over to the deep laying straws frames we're still able to put them into the same extractor they go on its side like that on their side like that and they go into the middle of each compartment in the bucket and then as you start rotating it's exactly the same process of first emptying on one side partially and flipping them over and going faster on the other side and then completing extraction on the original first side seriously guys don't be tempted to just keep eating this honey the whole time you're working on this stuff you will want to don't do it oh yeah you know when i sell my honey from horizontal.com i need to include the note please consume in moderation it's like the fermenting stuff a lot of people like that here and they start to eat it for the first time and they're like whoa man i got an upset stomach i had the runs the whole nine you know well you know when we bought our first jar of sauerkraut from a local granny in the countryside of russia when we lived there we we finished the one gallon jar in the first evening between my wife and me [Laughter] it was that good yeah [Applause] so so see when all the frames are identical like in this load of our length frames i'm going at full speed you cannot see the individual frames that's rotating so fast everything is blurred but there is absolutely no shaking in this universal extractor and i'm telling you guys that is a big deal because for years we used the other extractor and that thing would wobble and shake all over the place no matter how hard i tried to level out the frames whatever i did it just shook so that is something and i would also like to mention that doug actually purchased it from horizontal at home he did pay his money for it oh yeah so it's not like he's telling you it's a great thing because he got it for free i think most of people that watch our stuff know if i'm telling them it's good i've bought it and used it that's for sure or you could just hear all the we have some bees on the screens trying to get in and we also have some bees that we brought in with us that are trying to get out that five gallon pail that we have at the bottom there is about halfway filled up and just think about that we barely actually in in honeybee you know measures we really barely took any frames or had anything to deal with and we're gonna walk out with you know five gallons of raw natural honey and the bees will still have plenty for themselves and everybody wins yeah this is why when you compare your harvest from your natural hives with the neighbor beekeeper who is feeding her these or his bees are uh sugar syrup you cannot compare your numbers to theirs because are these are two very different products right they might get more but it's going to be less quality yeah and the bees are suffering for it every year they're producing or buying i mean uh more new because the bees didn't make it over winter i mean we went through all these same cycles that you guys are hearing i mean this you know at least i did probably dr leo was a little more hip well i started there with their local swarms from the get-go right so i never had this heartbreak of seeing colonies die after being a thriving or nuka package in the spring right all right well we barely made that by the hair of our chin chin chain one of the other uh no no molly one of the other tips i'm gonna give you guys is try to keep all your beekeeping equipment together in one spot if you guys notice uh dr leo while we're working the bees he has this handy dandy little bucket that he carries around with his hive tool and a smoke material and a smoker and all that stuff but also be mindful of where your extraction equipment is your strainers your buckets you're going to put it into make sure you have all that stuff ready because the last thing you guys want to do when you have open comb and all this stuff out and all this going on is like delays you want to make sure everything's running smooth that you can get get everything uncapped and get it into your proper receptacles uh before the bees and everything else gets worked up around you yeah and if your spouse starts noticing the puddles of honey on the floor of the kitchen yeah just give her or came a jar of honey to compensate but you're other eye dog and again we are showing you the completion of the year that started with catching swarms or then dividing them then now harvesting honey and this is something that each of you can do it doesn't require a special skill that you need to go to university to get it's something that people were doing for centuries and thousands years without specifically labeling themselves a beekeeper right and all of these simple beekeeping techniques they were describing two wonderful books on natural beekeeping one is keeping bees and horizontal hives i translated this one from french so it's available from horizontal hive.com and the other one is the best seller on natural beekeeping approach keeping bees with the smile by the russian author lazuden that explain in greater depth or all of the techniques that we demonstrated throughout these videos this year plus some and if you if you would like to learn more again there is this workshop coming up october 24th and 25th 2020. if you can make it there then there is usually more in the spring and more in the fall so i look forward to seeing you at some point there and again great if you want to buy some honey i sell my honey on horizontal.com too but beware of you being able to do it yourself and one year from now you are you will be able to enjoy honey from your own days and don't forget he teaches you guys how to market your honey so when you go look at his honey on his website it's expensive because it's the best all right and don't forget these hands-on classes guys i mean you guys can watch these videos and it's a ton of information and you should have your pins and papers out and you should be writing this stuff down getting those books as references but the hands-on class the questions that came up at the class a lot of stuff i told you guys in the last video there was questions i hadn't thought of or even even you know thought of and so to hear them asked it really started sparking some stuff so when you can get into the hands-on class and be there and learning and asking questions while you're doing it it really makes a huge difference so if you can sign up for his class that's great he has more classes next year so if you can book them uh maybe next year and also he'll be at the homesteading live conference in august in hannibal missouri he's a speaker there and we usually have a great crowd and it usually sells out every year so check out his website horizontal hive.com again there is a 50 off discount for this workshop only yes october 24th and 25th 20th 20th just for you guys you did that just for you guys okay and uh you know check that out check out horizontal hive.com the events tab uh you can go to homesteading live conference and just try to get your hands out there next year and and start thinking about getting physically at these places where you can learn from your mentors hands-on okay as always thanks for coming out and yeah welcome partner by the way i didn't mention the call the code is off-grid of course yeah software together that's right and we'll have all that down there first comment in the video underneath the video in the description box uh the link to his website and the coupon code so uh but it's a five hour ride for him as you guys can see the sun's going down we're always cramming these videos in for you guys we got uh successfully harvested our honey we'll be putting that up in the root cellar actually and uh stay tuned for more exciting videos and if you guys have a question ask them down below i'll get with dr leo we'll try to hash them out i always try to come back to the comments sections thank you very much thank you for really helping getting the word out yeah i really appreciate it and i wish all of you best of luck keeping these with a smile that's it and we'll see you guys at the class in kabul missouri you

Channel: OFF GRID with DOUG & STACY

Views: 685,330

Keywords: Off Grid with Doug and Stacy, Doug and Stacy, Doug, Stacy, Off Grid, off the grid, off the grid living, off the grid homes, off grid living, off grid cabin, off grid with Doug and Stacy, off grid solar power system, off grid house, off grid homestead, off grid solar, homestead, homesteading, homesteading for beginners, homesteading off the grid, natural food recipes, holistic health, holistic living

Id: 9wIdMgoIWDM

Length: 124min 26sec (7466 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 15 2020