How to Harvest Honeybee Pollen

hey everybody I just got done doing a little bit of trimming around the Beehive here and I thought that this would be a good time to show you about the pollen collector that we have on this now this is still it's about 7 a.m. in the morning here and the bees are still a little sleepy which is why it makes it nice and easy come out here and you can see all I do is I come out here and there's the mulch that keeps it down right by the entrance but then I trim back about a you know was about four feet and then let it go crazy from there but anyway I digress I can do all that early in the morning without agitating the bees well this is the pollen collector here this is the tray that collects the pollen and then around the other side there's a false wall and you can actually change this out you can take this wall out and put it to the other side this is a pollen collector made by man Lake if you keep bees I'm sure you know of the company man lake and I believe they call this a superior pollen collector but the way it's supposed to work is there's a very thin entrance right there and then if you can see it around all the bees there is a there's four different holes like portals circular holes above that and the way it's supposed to work is you put these plastic tubes inside of those holes makes it so the bees can't go in that way and then that forces the bees to go in through the small hole which forces them to pass through a channel of hardware cloth that takes off the pollen and then they can crawl back out through the tubes and the directions for Mann Lake say to take the tubes off two to three days per week to make sure that the bees get enough pollen but what I have found is that since I am doing this for my own use and not for any sort of commercial production that I can leave the tubes off entirely let the bees pick which entrance they want and I still get a ton of pollen look at that that's yeah weak there's less Saturday we put this on so that's one week worth of pollen and there you go we can we'll take that out and put it in the freezer and store it that way until we use it for medicinals or throw it in some cooking or whatever we decide to do with it but I thought that that was a good little tip to show that you don't have to put those tubes on at all some of the bees will still go through that flat opening and you can still get the pollen one thing I do wish man lake would change about this design and something that I will probably do on my own in the future you see this this is an eighth frame and I've got the bottom riser on it which has the 45 degree ramp I really wish that that had a bigger entrance landing even if you look at just a regular landing board going up to here where it's flat you have so much more space for all those bees and over there you've got this little perch it almost looks like it's supposed to be a birdhouse or something so I really like to see a bigger landing board now if you put this riser you put the the riser underneath that you could but I mean look you're already getting another shallow super-sized depth out of that and then you go put this on you just keep right raising that beehive higher and higher and I don't think anybody really wants to do that so I'm thinking at some point making my own little 45 degree wedge just with some triangles and attaching it directly to the front of that and I'll just cut out a bit of a rectangle in the middle and let it slide under and around the platform they've already got so I hope that was somewhat interesting and thanks to all of our patrons who make projects like this even possible based on the a little over wasn't an ounce I'm going to say it wrong I'm going to say it wrong I think last time we got what did we get I can't remember well I'll put right here on the screen the weight of what we got out of here and you can kind of look in the future and see just how much you might expect to get out this is a colony that is in ten frame mediums so they're the six and five eight boards 10 frames wide and they're currently I'm going to call it two and a half brood boxes deep because that third one there they've just started laying out so you know pretty well established colony and give you an idea for how much they're producing in about a week without the tubes on at all thanks for watching we'll see you next time bye

Channel: J&J Acres

Views: 128,552

Keywords: J&J Acres, J and J Acres, LDSPrepper, Learn Organic Gardening at GrowingYourGreens, GrowingYourGreens, GrowVeg, Voodoo Garden, Praxxus55712, Wranglerstar, homestead rescue, last frontier, how to harvest honeybee pollen, mannlake superior pollen trap, Superior Pollen Trap, mannlake, mann lake superior pollen trap, mannlake pollen trap, mann lake pollen trap, WW-215, WW-210, harvesting pollen, honeybee pollen, pollen harvester, mannlakeltd.com, mann lake ltd, mann lake limited, man lake

Id: TjtislrM6J0

Length: 5min 50sec (350 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 08 2017