My first year's honey harvest: 49 Pounds - from start to finish

all right so the day has come for us to harvest honey so this is our super honey box that is on this is our hive number one and we're going to be taking the the individual frames out shaking the bees off as best we can then we're going to be walking over a little ways away brushing off any bees that are remaining and then tucking them inside another box and covering them with the towel and then we're going to be taking all of those frames that are full of honey over to a friend's house to actually do the extracting and we'll take a video there so we'll do a few frames on the video and then take them and then we'll take the video when we actually get to the extracting part what so this is a frame full of caft honey all white so I want to first bring the brush down here brushing here not hard okay here maybe I'll give you them to brush fighting you do the brushing them still quite a few bees on here I was hoping the shaking would take a few more off but yes okay all right we'll probably just show a couple of shapes since it's not probably super interesting just watching a shake bees off okay we've shook all the bees off of the frames of honey and we've got a full box on the bottom and then on top we have half of a box so as you can see there are the frames of honey oops we got to be trying to get in there they can smell this so I'm going to turn this off and we're going to head over to the honey house alright we're in our friends honey house there's the frames that we pulled out we got in here with no bees and I'm just going to do a quick scan of the equipment that is the extractor it spins and it gets the honey out and then when the honey's by centrifugal force spins out it goes into that bucket and that's the capping table where we cut off the wax capping out ready to begin alright so this is one of our frames actually where the wax caffeine's are a little bit outside the edge of this wood frame they're built a little bit out which is ideally what we will get to next year when they build it out a little more and so it makes it a lot easier to use to extract it with a heated knife which is what this is so this is you can see it's kind of bubbling the honey that's on there so what you do you ready looking serious so you kind of just set it on the edge you can slide it all the way up and it just takes those wax caffeine's you can tell it's a little bit uneven just takes the wax caffeine's off the outside and that falls down into the bucket there is somebody that falls with it but that will actually go through this filter and come out the bottom so we can actually extract this honey out as well the hot knife just kind of slices right through takes the caps off the outside like when it gets near this the top it doesn't do as well so that took most of the wax off then the honey starts to drip out we'll do the backside now which is a little bit further in we have to use a different tool for that this sometimes will work a little bit this actually is looking will get a little bit of the wax cappings off it started today it again understand still yeah so use that as much as we can and then we have this little comb that you use to kind of just go under and pry it off a little bit this was the start at the top for Dawn very sticky business so just about got all the wax cappings off of this frame and what you what we try to do is leave so inside underneath these the wax cappings is the honeycomb that's all filled with honey and we try to keep as much of that honeycomb preserved in place so that they start with all that honeycomb at the beginning of next year that they don't have to rebuild the honeycomb and so we tried you try to just take as little of the wax cappings off as you can to preserve the honeycomb underneath and then once this is all spun out we'll actually put it outside and let the bees clean off the remaining bits of honey will store the this frame over the winter and then you put this in their hive at the beginning of next year and they've already started with honeycomb that's already been built out underneath here and after we spin extract these will do well video a little bit what they look like after the honey has been extracted out you do finish just this last little piece and then this frame is ready to go in the extractor and what's fabulous is it tastes really good all right you wanna show sector whoops yeah so what we do is we flip this upside down so it stops dripping this goes inside extractor and all this does is spin at a high speed Carolyn there I'm doing it the right way ironing this one alright so you can see we have six frames two four six in the extractor we're just going to start it a little bit just to see how balanced it is actually that's pretty balanced because it's not wobbling very much so we're going to start spinning there you can see our first batch of money out of the extractor and they recommend that you flip the frames flip positions just to make sure that they get really good and spun on both sides so we'll slide those over they're a little harder to get in than we expected here man although these are much lighter than they were when we put them in here they're pretty heavy with honey when you first put them in so now they're much much lighter but still a little bit of honey in there so all right so this is what a frame looks like after the honey has been syn extracted out of it I'm just going to grab it up close so you can see all those little honeycomb cells and they are empty you can see we kind of made a mess of it right there that's probably Ricky miss Jake but these look great and I think that's what happens when they're out built out a little bit further and you can use the knife that just gets a nice clean cut on the other side whereas the ones that we have to use those comb that little comb and dig it out you can see it just doesn't come out quite as good but this frame will get left outside the bees will go in and clean up any honey that's in here to the point that they'll be really dry and then we'll put these downstairs and when we put them back in the hive next spring the bees will actually fix all of this where the wax is kind of messed up they'll just use the wax and repair it and then they'll start building it further out this way so that next year we'll be able to use the knife on most of it all right all right so I just wanted to show where after the honey comes out of the extractor you can see it's still dripping just a little bit then what's in the bottom of there are just pieces of wax that have kind of spun out and what's difficult to see is that that's actually a really fine mesh filter so it's catching all of the wax caffeine's and pieces of wax and then the honey is draining through into the bucket underneath and then you can see there there's a pour spout that we can take the bucket we'll take it home and then fill up our honey jars with that and then I also wanted to show kind of what's happening in here you can see in the bottom of there the honey that's in the bottom of that bin so the wax terpenes already got Troy's arm in that picture the wax drippings from taking off the caffeine's are going through they're falling into the bottom bin and you can see that that's not a very fine filter it's catching just the big pieces so there will be wax pieces in the bottom we will take the honey that's in the bottom container and put it through this same filter here so we'll pour that honey into here and filter it through that mesh filter so this is considered a for what's called a 400 mesh filter they have 600 400 and 200 400 is what most people do if you're going to take honey to to the State Fair or something like that to try to win an award the judges typically like the honey to be crystal crystal clear and so you would use a 200 filter to get it even more finely filtered but most people feel like 400 is enough and and you still get some of the pollen and other things in the honey that help with the allergies there's a lot of people who eat local honey because it helps them with their allergies and so people feel like with the 400-level mesh strainer or filter that you get a lot of those properties stone and it doesn't strain out the good stuff in the honey so we are just about done we're in our last two frames we'll run those last two pieces through the last two frames through the extractor and then we'll add to this video at some point as soon as we start putting them in bottles that's when the exciting stuff comes and oh it just is so good I could just drink it right out of the spigot mmm yummy yummy all right part of the part of the cleanup process is getting the honey off of the frame so that you can store them hopefully it's close enough that you can see see if I can zoom in a little bit way anyway if you can tell there's a lot of bees on those colonies I mean on those frames cleaning them up you just set them out here about 30 minutes ago and they clean it up and take every bit of honey off and you take it back to their hive and reuse it here's a little zoom you can see how many bees are just on that one frame and we when we drove up in the car just a minute ago they're just bees everywhere right now flying around so cleaning up the honey just another shot of the robbing of the cleaning up of the old hives and I wanted to zoom in a little bit what you can see is if you look carefully that when there's robbing going on can you see all the wax down there that's falling off of the frames it's because the bees don't take any care when they're robbing to be careful and so they literally just kind of rip it apart a little bit so this is going on a couple hours and as you can see it's still going on strong so it seems a little bit calmer than it was earlier but I just wanted to kind of show you that that that wax that's just literally that they're just breaking off the comb that's falling and you can see there's a lot of fighting going on too so that's what happens when they start robbing all right so this is what it's all about filling up the jars with the finished product this is pretty exciting stuff so here we go liquid gold Kepler and there you have it one and a half pounds of delicious honey okay the last step of the cleanup process is we took our wax cuttings that were off of the frames put them on a cookie sheet and we're letting the bees clean up the wax so they'll remove all of the honey off of the wax and then we'll melt it down so there's what's left of well it's covered in bees and then we also had from the wax cuttings there was a metal grate that the honey falls down so you can collect the honey but the wax stays on top but obviously there's some residual honey and we've left that up for the bees to clean up also so they're just about done with the frames but I think because we put out the new sources of clean up that we've attracted quite a few peas again so just continuing with the cleanup process kind of fun all right here's our final product we've got just about 49 pounds of honey and in the little canister over here in this right here that's that's a the all the wax cappings that we cut off that the bees cleaned out today so it's all free of honey and we're going to melt it into a wax cake but pretty exciting our first year we're done and 49 pounds okay we're getting to the next to the last step melting the the wax cuttings so as you can see we've collected all the wax cuttings from our recent work and they're pretty dry and fluffy after the bees of clean plus we have some per cone that we've taken off some of the pies before what we do is we have a little framed in screen filter we put it over this glass bread pan and then you use a towel to filter it so we just put the towel right on top it out and we take some of our wax cuttings and we put them on there and in retrospect we might have built a little bit larger of one of these but you know you can do that on the next run so we'll do this and then it'll melt it will filter through the the paper towel and end up being really nice clean honeycomb or actually lapsim wax so we'll put it into our solar wax heater which I made I just basically took a styrofoam cooler and painted it black and it has cut out a spot for the lid so it works like that and we'll just put it right on top and put everything in and put it out in the Sun and then check in after it's all melted after we do a couple of rounds of it okay I just pulled the final melted wax product out of the solar wax melter which is right there and what you see after it all melts down is the residual mostly honey probably in this case is left on the filter and you're left with a golden actually this color is kind of different I actually brought out the one we did from the other comb and the other ones quite a bit more yellow you can kind of see the difference in the color so the wax cuttings are more of a mozzarella cheese color instead of that golden color so that kind of surprised me anyway that's the end of our honey harvest so the final wax product

Channel: Brook Hill Honey - Mr. G's Honeybees

Views: 1,413,267

Rating: 4.6473155 out of 5

Keywords: honeybees, honey, harvest, solar wax melter, beeswax, robbing

Id: ovVk3-zLaI0

Length: 21min 34sec (1294 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 23 2016