Seasons Are Changing | Honey & Berry Harvest | Wild Alaska

[Applause] it's a lot of drones i'm gonna shake it well this is not where i wanted to be at 8 pm in the early to mid parts of august robbing our own hives of honey but we kind of were making this last minute decision we wanted to pull some honey from our hives we have three beehives and it's our third year beekeeping i should have done this a few days ago we have some serious rain in the forecast in fact it rained all day yesterday and so now the girls are actually eating their honey and it's making this very challenging we're only going to be pulling three frames an entire tee so we're almost done it does look really good though so i'm working on the third box right now they had a fourth box which was intended for honey and i had a queen excluder separating that one but they never really went that much into that fourth box so most of their honey is down here and i'm just gonna be replacing those frames with some other foundation that i happen to have [Applause] a little bit of a beating on the frames there we go right we got what we came for it wasn't easy and we're headed back inside because the rain is coming right now may have noticed one very important thing and that is that our honey is not really capped or barely capped and that's just a result of the season unfortunately i thought it was going to be a really good honey season and it wasn't all three hives are doing amazing it just wasn't that good year good of a year for nectar they have really good pollen so we are going to be trying something inventive our house with the wood stove gets really dry really really dry and we're going to try to lower the humidity and pull the moisture out of some of their honey so we can extract it and eat it we're going to set this box up in our house we're going to light a fire have it going for the next few days and keep a fan going around it well it's been just under three days and we are ready to extract our honey from our three frames we've had our fire going on and off the last few days and kept the humidity under 50. usually it's under 30 percent so it's at about 30 right now now these frames i'm pretty sure they were uncapped because our bees were planning on adding to them they're not quite full and or because they were using them when i pulled them out they were on them eating it so that also indicates that when you go to extract honey we've never done it before but i've read you want the honey to be capped or you want the honey to be basically ready or ripe is what they call it and it's usually like under 18 moisture level in the honey so one way you can tell if your honey is ready is you can do like a shake test where you shake it pretty pretty vigorously and if anything comes out that means it's not rape yet but ours passed that test even when we pulled it three days ago so letting it sit in here has really just been precautionary but we're ready to get started on extracting it we had the pleasure of picking up this sweet extractor very excited we got it used from a gentleman that was a beekeeper of course and it is a massive extractor it's much bigger than i expected in fact it fits nine frames medium frame so i don't actually have nine for medium frames but we have three which is great because it will balance this machine out when we're cranking it it's a manual one so we're gonna hand crank it that's what we wanted this is actually a really cool one too because it's radial and so what that means is i can get honey from both sides without having to pull it out and switch the frame some of them aren't designed that way so this is a neat one i feel like in the future this is gonna be a great thing that we have i've cleaned all this equipment out already and we've got one five gallon bucket with a spout i don't know the correct name for that we're gonna put that right in front of this one's spout we've got two filters these are the ones that the gentleman used and so he just strained it twice with a smaller and bigger filter we're gonna do the same thing and hook it up right on that five gallon bucket pretty much ready to go so i think i'm gonna be getting the frames in there so when we picked up this extractor um the little plastic shields were broken so we're either gonna order new ones of those or if we we're gonna run it and if we don't need them then we're just not going to get them the benefit to having an extractor is we get to save the comb so the foundation that the bees have drawn out um the honeycomb and that's major up here in alaska for them we don't want to damage that at all there it goes hopefully we don't damage it do you want me to spin it don't spin it out of control okay you want to hold the other side for me i don't know yeah we're gonna give this thing a go you gotta push this handle in to get it to engage and i believe a little ball bearing sits in the bottom of this thing and we don't have one in there so i think we need to get one but this should work and we got it sitting on a piece of plywood so we don't scratch the floor up my tip to you from what i read is start slow okay like don't try to just get wild um start slow and like see how things go there goes and if it this is crazy there's like a vortex coming out of there man i'm scared i feel like it's gonna yes do you see the honey oh whoa yeah it's coming out you feel that maybe we should get the shield for this hey hey yeah you're kind of spraying on my arm look at that where's honey oh yeah there's honey coming out oh it's dripping all down the sides should we open that little thing yeah but i just don't know if we're gonna have that much we may have to end up uh spatulating out yeah it is like making the whole house smell like honey like like a winnie hunt windy honey sorry it's making it right yeah it's making it like super windy and then it smells sweet golden oh i see a ton of honey in the bottom wait what's that you gotta you gotta engage it you gotta push this in and then go there's actually a lot of honey in the bottom oh it's dripping out the thing okay you ready now i see what you're talking about that is a little heavy we need that bearing in the bottom i need to like bolt it down the floor somewhere this is so funny maybe we could wash clothes with this thing when we're done so i would think using a knife like this no they're going to rebuild them anyways well that's they are going to need repair so though that's really good honey the little parts that were capped that the bees capped on their own um arrow just went through with a little fork and a butter knife and scraped them so we're just gonna spin them again and get the rest out i don't know if it's dripping out of there yet it's not dripping out you can see it it's in the spout right in there hopefully we'll have it coming out here soon we're not expecting a lot we didn't pull we didn't pull a lot from them so we want the bees to overwinter again but we're hoping we get like a quart maybe of honey it'd be awesome i mean it'll be the most honey we've ever got from those bees so one more go well i'm not going to clean it i'm going to scrape it with a spatula that's bone dry it's super light wait wait oh yeah that's what it looks like yeah you got it out so we're going to give that back to the girls and they'll they'll clean that and fix it i'm sure they're going to like it with your saliva all over it they clean that up i'll clean it up for them but they'll clean it up too you can put those back in the nook if you want to drip [Applause] look at all that in there oh that's quite a bit of honey it's exciting for us it's dripping out yeah look at that there it is honey for more bees it's really cool it tastes really good um there's like nothing on it yeah i just put that in the deck on the side okay the spatula is my absolute favorite kitchen tool because just when you think you don't have anything left there is always more left and there's actually a lot left in this case oh it's guzzling out of there it's going down there now oh my gosh it's gushing out [Music] [Music] we got this bad boy cleaned up we got all we can get out of it and we're gonna put this up on our table and see how many pints we get oh yeah yeah yeah i'm thinking hold on tilt it i'm thinking under four or four now that i see more oh my gosh look at that beautiful color that's amazing i'm thinking exactly what i was thinking two quarts i'll take it man we don't need much more than that just to you got a bunch in here it'll fill that up can i get the spatula yeah well ariel called it uh when she had those frames she was thinking we were gonna get two quarts and that's exactly what we got so we got two quarts or we got um we got in pints so we got four pints they're filled all the way up this stuff is gorgeous i'm not gonna lie four this is this is probably a really good amount for us especially to start off with i mean we still use regular sugar but it's going to be really nice having this honey well i think we're both pretty excited about harvesting this honey hopefully it'll be more in the future august is a absolutely crazy time for us we're so busy trying to wrap up before the fall there's a lot of canning and gardening to do we've been doing a lot of foraging hunting season is just around the corner and we've pretty much been fishing like all summer building so it's like a last hurrah i feel like is august there's one thing that we still have left to harvest and that is wild blueberries and we checked our spot that we like to go they are still a little bit unripe we're gonna wait a few weeks and head out there and bring you guys along we will catch you when we head to the mountain [Music] my [Music] uh [Music] so um [Music] um oh [Music] [Applause] um [Applause] well the time has come we are ready to go pick some blueberries we're headed to the mountains and we're gonna see what we can find let's go [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] man great spot here we came here about uh two weeks ago and they weren't ripe yet but just on the drive in these bushes look like they're loaded with nice ripe blueberries so we're gonna see what we can find wait there old man you're getting help down hey hey go get em go fun come on there you go pup run around oh yeah all right airport gotta eat them too huh have you ever seen anything more handsome than that that's bo my show dog all right it's time for a compare off i think you won but i'm not done picking no you gave me i got quite a bit but you did give me a handful well i don't know if it's gonna work but i saw this trick a long time ago actually i've tried it and it kind of worked it's supposed to be windy when you do it and it'll clean the leaves out of your blueberries it's not windy enough no it's not when you know that didn't work at all doing pretty good i mean look at the size of some of those blueberries oh this one's even bigger i mean nice blueberries there you go picked it yourself there's an insane amount right here so this time of the year is really good for berry picking it kind of varies on the year obviously this year we're out here a little bit early i usually come in september but we're right out here at the tail end of august and it's a little bit cooler you can tell the berries have just gotten ripe and they're falling off absolutely delicious and i didn't really know this until we moved to alaska but berries do really well here it's known for all their wild berries so many different kinds in fact we are picking from a variety of blueberry wild blueberry plants and even huckleberries and i don't know how to tell the difference there's different kinds there's some short ones tall ones and sometimes the berries are a little bit of a different color too as you can guess they are absolutely delicious i have yet to find anything compare to them that we can grow these ones just have so much flavor and they are awesome it's quite time consuming to pick them so i'm really glad we got some time this year to get out here and pick them i think we're gonna keep picking for a while and then go back to the side by side and have some lunch four for one man these are loaded this is awesome makes it a lot easier to get a bunch when there's a lot on each plant i mean look at this look at that i'm probably need that big one so you can probably tell by my pink lips that it takes a while for me to collect them because i pretty much eat most of them but we love having these things throughout the year last year wasn't a very good barrier year but this year more than making up for it this is going to be great wow that's a lot oh my gosh that's so heavy that's probably eight cups at least that's extremely heavy wow that's a lot of blueberries so beau likes to stick around us because he gets blueberries bandit is a maniac and he likes to look for the little arctic ground squirrels and dig holes so he's he's gonna be exhausted tonight i know i've been eating a lot let's go eat lunch smoked salmon we got sockeye salmon this is last year she got a couple cans of that left and we got coleslaw from last year this stuff was awesome perfect snack for out here on the go almost dropped your fork okay look at that that's good well lunch was delicious and i just wanted to mention that you can find the berries that we're picking you can find them a lot of places in alaska in fact you can find them at much lower elevations down where we live but we like to come up high to the mountains or the alpine tundra and find them up here they're usually very prolific and i think this is where the bears like to eat them as well oh damn it i think like this although a good hunting day i think it's a little warm for them midday you know me they probably come out early in the mornings and the nights on these days you have like three cups that's like four or five cups that was a lot yeah you i've never it's a good hillside right here oh he just came from the top of that mountain i mean running down that mountain where daryl's working us out here today it's one of those things with her when she starts picking blueberries she will not stop so we've been out here for hours i got the blueberry fingers to prove it uh but it is it is getting semi-dark i'm actually not sure what time it is it's probably like seven o'clock at night and we're probably a good hour from home so we're gonna pick a little bit more make ariel happy and then we'll head home we have nice big hole this is the most blueberries we've ever picked at one time so it's gonna be nice well i think that is a wrap got a lot of berries here uh a lot of leafs in eric's bucket but that's a lot and i'm thinking it's maybe over two gallons even awesome i cannot wait to take these home we've already got a fun little meal planned for them looks like bo's done for the night as well it's getting a little bit colder out here the sun's down over the hill the hills around here are really neat at this time of the year they change and they like turn these really awesome colors everything's green in the summer and then it goes to yellow like a golden stage too as well and then finally red so you'll get this really pretty red on a lot of the plants right before winter and that's a sign that winter is going to be here before we know it those are my final hands we've got to find bandit and head home what's that call to santa blueberry uh trans from eating so many okay you [Applause] it almost tastes like blueberry cheesecake for some reason i taste all the spices yeah i thought it was gonna be too many blueberries but it's not i think it's sesame oil blueberries

Channel: Simple Living Alaska

Views: 350,391

Rating: 4.9688287 out of 5

Keywords: off grid living, living in alaska, homestead alaska, tiny house alaska, off grid cabin, cabin in alaska, homestead off grid, tiny dry cabin, tiny cabin alaska, life in alaska, garden alaska, greenhouse alaska, gardening alaska, living off the land, off the grid alaska, harvest alaska, wild alaska, wildlife alaska, bears alaska, salmon spawning, beekeeping alaska, honey harvest, self reliant alaska, growing food, food for the year, preserving food, blueberries alaska

Id: JDB-PWuSXKM

Length: 31min 2sec (1862 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 08 2021