Second Year Beekeeper Honey Harvest -- 125+ POUNDS!!

[Music] the two different types of honey so beautiful [Music] hello and welcome back to Sage and stone Homestead it is still really snowy and cold out so we are doing an inside job today we have 28 frames of Honey to spin out and according to my calculations it should be over 100 pounds of honey which is going to be more than five gallons so this is our first time using our honey spinner it's a hand crank so we're going to be learning together today I do have a frame or two of open honey one of them I had in the freezer and this one's been sitting out so this one may have actually dehydrated a little as it sat for a few months but I want to check both of these open frames just to make sure that the moisture level is where it needs to be because most of the time the bees will leave the honey open if it's not at a proper moisture where it's going to last forever so we need it to be 20 or below preferably it's 19 or below in order to spin it out and have it for long-term storage if it's not at the right moisture content I am just going to feed it to the bees when they start flying again so this little tool is called a refractometer it's really awesome and apparently you're able to test milk with it as well as honey I have not learned how to do anything with milk but for honey I'm just going to put a good Gob of Honey on this window here close it and then I'm able to look through here like a little spy glass and inside of it is a little I guess it's a scale of sorts that lets us know a few things about the contents of the window and one of them is moisture content so I'm just taking my Chopstick here and basically lined this window we are below 19 I'm gonna try to show you there goes it goes see that so this Frame this is safe to add to everything else most of the honey frames though they have been fully capped which means the bees know that this is of the correct moisture and they've capped it over for storage so in order to get the honey out we have to remove the cappings and we have a couple different tools for taking the wax cappings off and I think we're gonna have to use the uncapping scratcher because they haven't really built the comb out enough to where I think my uncapping knife is going to be really helpful but I might try that first let's see foreign [Music] that's why we have our uncapping tank here so all the extra honey that does run down is actually going to land in a collection bin underneath and so we'll be able to get all that later oh am I scraping it all off look at that so some people heat the knife up and I don't know if this is why okay with this you can use it one of two ways from what I understand you can actually scratch at the comb like this or we can pick it off the whole goal is to be able to maintain the honeycomb that the bees worked really hard to create so that I can spin the honey out and then reuse all of this comb in the springtime see it's taking it off a lot nicer like it may be somewhat more tedious but this I have the patience for I think so when we stick this inside our honey spinner we're going to want to angle it properly so that when the frame is spinning all of the honey has the ability to spin out so the bees actually angle the comb slightly downward and it was in The Colony like this so you want to be able to angle it to where it's going to spin out this way if that makes sense [Music] wash your face let go of it like that yeah that's good but now we gotta flip it and do the other side yep honey flies off hits the side on the inside and then runs all the way down to the bottom and eventually we open the honey gate and it pours out into the strainer well that is significantly lighter wow look at that yeah in this Frame I just scratched instead of picked off the sheet of wax so we're gonna see how well this one spins out [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] this one is really cool now that all the cappings are up you can tell the two different types of honey that the bees have made with at least two different types of flowers is Honey's darker here and the bottom honey is obviously lighter isn't that neat this here is the one that I scratched instead of lifted off the cappings it didn't do as well with getting all of the honey out and I don't think I like how much wax that it leaves in the honey for my strainer to strain out I have a 300 Micron strainer down here and it's taking its sweet time so this whole process might actually take us a little longer than we expected but that's okay sun is still out all right foreign [Music] [Music] knife that has a serrated edge and it seems to be working a lot better foreign [Music] [Music] foreign foreign [Music] I know there's a lot of people who like honey in their coffee and it's not something that I have been able to get behind yet though I do keep trying because supposedly you need to try something 20 times before you can really decide whether you like it or not so I would love to know if you like honey in your coffee and if you do how do you prepare it because I haven't found a way that I really enjoy yet it seems to be just a little bit too floral for me and it seems like the flavor of the coffee and the floral qualities of the honey just don't meld nicely for me anyways so after all is said and done with those 28 frames that we spun out we actually didn't end up doing all 28 I believe it was 26. one of them I just really wasn't sure about the moisture content so I'm just going to feed that back to the bees and the other one had some finger digs out of it so not that long ago we actually hosted a whole bunch of homeschool kids here and I pulled out a frame of honey and let the kids just have at it and I kind of forgot about that so we obviously didn't want a little kid finger honey you know in the in the big batch so we did not spin that one but all in all we got this five gallon bucket all the way full plus three and a quarter gallons over here out of let's say 26 medium frames and that is astounding to me one of these weighs about four pounds so I need to do a little bit of math to figure out exactly how much poundage we got out of this particular honey Harvest and that doesn't include the honey harvests that we have had in the past where we did a little bit of crush and strain earlier in the year and we also did Harvest right around two and a half three gallons out of our flow Hive super so we have already given tons of Honey away and we're going to be keeping this five gallon bucket for ourselves and keeping this up for sale for the locals what took such a long time is our strainer that we have up here really has a lot of wax buildup in it and I think that it just oh it got kind of bogged down you see it all in there but I am going to be able to take this wax and the wax from the cappings and render it down and I plan on trying to make beeswax candles out of it I have made plenty of salves using beeswax and salves and candles are basically where my brain stops in coming up with ideas so if you have beeswax ideas I would love to hear about those as well because we've got plenty of that so beautiful beautiful dark color really surprising that's not too bad all I did was coffee cream and then honey I might be I might be turning my my ways around with honey in the coffee and if you're like me and you're starting to get spring fever now that the holidays have passed us I'm gonna put my swarm catch playlist up here because there's some really awesome swarm catches up there that I think you'd like to see

Channel: Sage and Stone Homestead

Views: 28,621

Keywords: homestead, homesteading, farm, farming

Id: X8gY9jjJ85Y

Length: 10min 57sec (657 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 27 2022