Stealing a QUEEN BEE from a ACTIVE HIVE! Oldest way to extract HONEY

all right all right welcome back to the homestead we're going to get right into it dr leo's here we have to do our inspection you know we uh opened them up after winter we looked around what was going on and uh we took the hive the horizontal hive here that we had and we switched it into the lanes it lands horizontal high that's right from the langstroth horizontal hive and all these plans and all these hives we're talking about are at horizontalhive.com dr leo's back and so we did that first inspection and now what we're going to be doing is seeing how the broods looking um make sure they got enough frames to build on there and that they're not getting crowded and stuff right that's correct and you know i'm right this moment getting emails from your viewers and some already catching swarms in the boxes that set out on the trees and others are asking questions okay i'm not into climbing the trees can i just buy a package of these because it's more convenient so now at the beginning of this video i really felt it was urgent to get that point across that of course you can start beekeeping in any way but you need to realize that the commercial bees that you buy in package form are the semi-domesticated uh kind that completely depend on you for their survival you need to feed them you need to treat them against the parasites etc so please realize that what we are doing here with doug is only possible if you are working with this disease resistant low constraint of bees yeah that's true a lot of people are asking those questions why why don't we tackle the mite problems when they see us open up to some of these hives and we let nature take its course the bees will work with the hive beetles and other things in there and clean them out get them in and the strong hives will survive i mean that's just the way it is in nature yeah okay yeah so we're gonna open this up right here we're going to see what's going on we're going to kind of walk you guys through these steps and if the hive is strong enough right now it's possible we can even split that take a queen a new queen that's being formed and then put her into another hive over there and that's another way you guys can uh with your beekeeping make money for your homestead you could take a hive i think last year when we started opening these up we were getting four or five queens maybe getting going i could have split seven eight times last year i think he said so you know there's you just got to pay attention to everything and keep visiting them a little bit and kind of watch their pattern stuff and one thing we can notice right off the bat is the hive is really active they're really doing good they took the transfer very well we've had some cooler days we even had snow if you guys remember and uh today's probably one of the hotter days um and we've had probably one or two other hot days since the last visit with dr leo he's getting a smoker ready here and so they're really doing pretty good i think so we're going to see if they're going to need a few frames and whatnot so yeah and i still got these broken ribs so i'm going to be moving a little funny here you got it oh my am i there you know when doc told me that he had an injury and he was not able to go into this hive and add more frames i was concerned that the bees might run out of room and i'm glad that we are doing this here today before they started building their honeycomb and the empty section yeah that's what you were worried about yeah yeah but this amount of activity is wonderful you know if everything goes well we'll look at how much brood they have there and because doug wants to increase the number of hives if we have at least six full frames of brood we might be able to make two colonies out of one that's called artificial swarming in the old books or it's called their split today so this divider board helps to decrease the volume of the hive early in the spring when the nights are still colder and the colony is still smaller and there you need to move it side aside and add more frames before they run out of room and yeah look at that they are running out of room you see honey nectar on the top you see drone brood here so all of these cells that are capped with their cappings that look like sandpaper and that are sticking out and bulging out like bullets these are male cells with drones inside so when the colony is starting to invest energy and reproduction and raising a lot of drones that means first they have the resources and the strength to do it and second they may start preparations for swarming too right so when i open the hive i have a crayon with me and i'm writing on the top bar what i'm seeing this way after the inspection i can take a look and there see exactly how many frames of brood honey reserves drone brood any queen cells that i'm seeing so on this one i write d for drones the last frame is a frame with drawn brood and it's very very heavy and the next one also has brood and honey and drone brood on it so i put b for brood and we kept moving more brood more drone brood wow very strong colony you know when i see that much brood during an inspection i started paying more attention to whether we might have some queen cells these are bigger cells that look like peanuts and this would mean that the colonies are on the brink of swarming they're raising a new queen and there once she is ready to hatch the mother queen will leave the hive with half of the beast to found a new colony so two full frames of brood and lots of drone brood uh i see some drone com that goes across several frames and we'll have to correct that so i'll just take this drone brute for now and put it aside we're able to put it into one of the frames or and secure it there so it's not wasted but it's really preferable to have all frames are straight without any pieces of comp that connects several frames together this way how you can manage the hive quicker and with the less disturbance okay this frame is brewed again and brewed is eggs small larva and the cells that look like our sandpaper covering where the larvae are being transformed into adult bees like this another thing you want to pay attention to during a spring inspection this is may first is whether they have sufficient reserves this is honey and nectar once they start rearing a large amount of brew during warm weather they go through honey and nectar and pollen very quickly and if the weather becomes rainy or cool they may run off the reserves or very quickly so just because winter is over do not assume your bees cannot starve they might so if you are planning on splitting them first you need to make sure there are enough bees there is enough brood and there they have sufficient reserves to sustain either the expansion of the nest or in the artificial swarm or a split another beautiful frame of brood usually when visiting a hive i don't really try to find the queen because the presence of plentiful brood is evidence enough that there is a queen and the queen is in good health but uh if i find the queen today we will just put her in a separate box and this one left without the queen will raise themselves the new queen so we will accomplish what bees will want to accomplish through swarming only without losing the swarm and without letting them leave their box but will accomplish the same as they would accomplish in nature creating two colonies instead of one the prospect of finding a queen in a colony with maybe 30 or 40 000 bees on it may sound unrealistic but the thing is that she is only likely to be on certain frames if the frames are full of honey and cat brooch is not very likely to be there she will be found usually on the frame when there are empty cells and the ones with freshly laid eggs because this is where the queen would be roaming and depositing eggs into whatever cells are available for her the queen big and beautiful this time of year finding the queen may be a little bit more complicated because there are so many big drones around but with some practice you will be able to distinguish her so we found the queen and we are putting the queen in this box and we will uh take it into the woods there to the other decorated five handle the frame with the queen carefully and cover it so the bees do not escape um this time of the day uh it's around two o'clock it's very good to make these operations because the forager bees are outside the hive on the flowers which may it makes it easy to find the queen and it also makes it easier to estimate how many bees are really the house bees if we were to take many of the frames here at the end of the day or early in the morning and move them to another hive just a few hundred feet away what will happen is that at noon during the warm part of the day the foragers will leave the box even if you moved it but they will be coming to the original location now when i'm taking frames with their bees and their brood and the beast that on the frames are the ones that are not foraging yet so they will not desert the new hive that you put them in they will stay put there and eventually the brood will hatch and the population will recover and the whole high will get repopulated and the queen will be there so you will really have two instead of one i'm so confident we can split this colony today without damaging them or compromising their vitality because for a successful artificial swarm you want to have at least three full frames of brood for each part the one that's left behind and the one that you're splitting and now i'm not even through the entire box and i already see seven good frames of brood if we did nothing the colony would uh become more and more and more congested as all of these cells are being emptied of the bees new generations are being born and then at some point they will be so crammed there that half of the bees and the old queen will leave um to found a new colony so in a sense what we are doing today is a kind of midwifery you are assisting to the birth of a new colony and i very much think that it is still part of natural beekeeping because we are still doing what bees are trying to accomplish on themselves they want to have more than one colony they want to be fruitful and multiply and there they'll achieve this even quicker and more securely with our help when you do the uh split if you found the queen like we did and put her in a box you need to be absolutely sure that you are leaving some eggs behind in the hive that will have no queen the bees will need three things to raise new queen they will need resources and they have plentiful honey and nectar and pollen here they will need plenty of bees to nourish the broad and nourish the new queen while in the cell and they also will need to have enough bees to heat all of that so they also need an egg to raise the queen from so here i see there is a very nicer frame with eggs you can barely see them at the bottom of the cells and i am not just mutilating the cells for no purpose when you break the bottom section of the cells containing eggs or tiny larva in this manner it makes it easier for the bees to transform these cells from worker into queen production mode so on this one i write e for eggs and i know that this frame needs to stay behind because this is what will give rise to the new queen in this colony and this happens very quickly uh two weeks from now they will have a new queen hatched uh give her a little bit more time to get fertilized they're going on the mating flight with drones and then one month from today doug will make an inspection and he will see new brood and new eggs from the newly raised queen and this brings across the importance of working only with local bees one more time because if doug was surrounded by other beekeepers who brought their bees from the south from completely different climate and also bees that have very low level of are disease resistant then his newly raised queen would mate with non-local drones and her adaptation will be compromised and all her progeny won't be as healthy and vital as the previous generation was do you have any other beekeepers within the mile of you that you are aware of doug we are it okay lucky you all right more eggs and more broad and more broad than this last one all right so we have our basically 10 frames of brood and lots of reserves and eggs and everything the colony is really really really strong we'll have to instead of one in 20 minutes time okay so now what i do i take frames they have a lot of brood and lots and lots of bees but preferably not too much drone brood because it will be more difficult for a small colony to support a lot of drone population so make sure that the frames you are taking uh have lots of capped worker brood the ones with the cappings that do not uh stick out like bullets so this one so let me take this in this frame and we have the queen there and we have one frame of these and this is number two and this is number three and i'll take one more and this is really plenty now also realize that the colony that you are creating will have few if any foragers so uh make sure that you are giving frames that are heavy with honey so that while new foragers are being produced within this new colony they have reserves to get by so i'll take this frame it's really really heavy for this colony because they will keep her bringing pollen and nectar from the field but now that they won't have broods to feed until the new queen starts producing three to four weeks from today um that means they will still have a lot of nectar coming in and we need to give them some extra frames to deposit this nectar in so we are putting this in there actually [Music] one and with this level of activity dog can also comfortably add their three or four frames with foundation right now and there remember we had this piece of drone brood arm that was built regularly so we'll just embed it into one of these frames so it's not wasted you press it into the wires and of course you will sacrifice whatever cells are against the wires on the other side but this way it will be embedded in the frame which will make management more convenient and the bees will keep building more calm around that so that next time you come it will all be incorporated into a bigger frame if you have rubber bands it may be helpful to secure it with rubber bands another technique described in keeping bees and horizontal hives by lay ends is to run a couple of strings of stainless steel wire like this whatever you can even just a very thin thread to help or hold it in place will work but just even pressing this cone so that the wire goes into the middle of the comp and holds it while the bees will be busy repairing it and there reconnecting it with the frame will be better than doing nothing and leaving it at the bottom of the hive okay also if you have construction like that the bees were running out of room and they started building on the divider board it's really desirable during this high visit to trim off this comb you can do it especially if there is no uh brood in there just nectar so you take it off and if they start doing it it is indication that you're late with giving them off frames so let's trim this off and replace this this is optional at this time of the year already because it's may and the weather will be nice and warm but i like minimizing the volume of the nest for the colony that sustain the split because their population will be reduced once there is no queen to lay more brood and produce new generation of the beast and here how they're starting to buzz that's one indication that they feel the queen is no longer with them they determine whether the queen is there not by her smell and when they're being disturbed like that and all of a sudden the smell of the queen starts going away uh very often you will hear the bees producing this high pitched buzz where is our mommy but i promise girls we wouldn't be doing it if we were not confident you can get a very good nice queen to replace the one that we are taking 200 feet away alright that's it for this hive today so and i always put a stone until on top uh to make sure that the gusto wind doesn't uh topple the hive and doesn't expose the frames to the rain rock on redelivery to complete the transfer all we need is to transfer the frames from that temporary box into this hive and this is the one that didn't survive the winter because if you remember in previous episodes there was a mouse that we got into here early in the spring and the bees might have absconded so you scrape the bottom and make it clean for the new colony to move in there is no reason to try to make it like squeaky clean removing every single bit of it the bees will clean up what you have not one other reason to remove this waste from the bottom of the hive is that part of it is composed of wax small pieces of wax that fell on the floor and if you were to leave it like that here then small have beetles that thrive on small beads of pollen and cocoons and any brood they can find inside the hive will create an infestation into this layer of bits of wax at the bottom of the hive the only reason really we're cleaning this out ourselves is because the colony did not make us through the winter if the colony was strong it would have taken care of all the cleaning duties themselves the previous high we visited today doesn't require any cleaning at the bottom because the bees are there and they have special undertaker bees that are doing pretty much what i'm doing now another reason why you do not need it squeaky clean is that some of these impurities are bits of propolis this is the antibacterial resin that bees collect on trees and other things in nature and the presence of propolis helps them sanitize the nest and keep it free of disease and also uh gives the new colony that we're installing here a nice smell that's welcoming them and telling them you have a new nest that's been previously occupied by these you are at home so we opened one entrance and we just take the frames and we put them straight in here in the same order they were taken from the previous hive with all the bees and everything in there and i try to take two frames that at a time this way we minimize disturbance another alternative for you would have been to take these frames and put them into the new hive that is on a garden cart and just roll it from our there in the pasture to here on a garden cart then it would save you this uh additional transfer of the frames into the box and then from that box into the permanent hive at the same time though it's going to be a bumpy ride it would be i agree so i'm taking a look to see whether the queen might be on the wall if i find her i will grab her and put them her in here if i'm not finding her i will just shake all of these into this box and this will complete the transfer okay done the reason bees are not really starting to fly agitatedly is again when we take these frames in the middle of the day most of the foragers are away from home on flowers collecting nectar so the bees that are on frames now are the young bees that do not fly yet outside the nest this is why they behave very calmly they stay put on the frame making this kind of transfer and what's called artificial swarm or split very easy there is more detail on this procedure in keeping bees in horizontal hives book and also keeping bees with a smile 2020 edition if you guys will notice a big difference when you're working your bees when everybody's out foraging then if you try to get in there early in the morning or late in the afternoon when everyone's returning from home or just leaving it's a lot more copacetic to work with your bees then so don't forget now i got four broken ribs here uh so dr leo's gonna go on with this uh talk here but we want to talk about the difference i guess between the honey that we're producing here on our local farm versus something you might purchase at a grocery store maybe even at the farmers market even at farmers markets because it's not guaranteed that the honey you are getting is really really good as you will see during the next 20 minutes wow and then on top of that we're going to show you guys an extra way that you can use or a new way you can use or just another way you can use to extract the honey from the frames and it's called a press so we're going to break this down real quick for you guys we're gonna take something under the microscope it's pretty cool and we're gonna break this down so you guys know the real honey versus the fake honey right so to speed so to speak or let's say conventional honey yeah um you saw how in the bee yard we were giving to the bees the frames with the empty wax honeycomb with no honey in it this is the comb that we expel honey from using the honey extractor you can look up one of doug's previous videos when we were spinning out these frames the honey comes out and the wax is intact and you can give it back to the bees so not only you get honey harvest very quickly but also you have all of these frames to give to the hives when you are increasing the volume and then making two other ones so it's very very valuable to remove honey from the calm without breaking the wax however the most ancient way of harvesting honey is pressing it and squeezing out honey from wax calm and today this is most efficiently accomplished with a stainless steel honey press like this one i first saw it in europe and i was thinking why do they do it because they're destroying the wax calm that they could give back to the bees but after tasting the honey that was produced on the honey press like that and comparing it to the extracted honey i just realized why people do it today even though it's more labor intensive so if you have any kind of honeycomb that you don't really need to give back to the bees because it's very old or because it's irregularly built or for example duck is converting from length trough hives to laying high which is a different frame format so he has a bunch of frames that are they all style or let's say the conventional style and he is not going to use them again with his bees so there is really no point in extracting it because he is not giving it back to the hives so what you can do instead you can press this honey in a honey press like this so the big difference is that when you spin a frame like that in a centrifuge called honey extractor then the honey in the cells will come out after you scrape them open however each frame will also contain what's called bee bread this is pollen fermented by the bees and they're used for feeding their larva and the queen and queen cells and producing royal jelly and it's also super valuable human nutrition again bee bread fermented pollen so this bee bread that you will see in a second is so thick it's not really flying out of the cone when you spin it but when you press it in a honey press both the nectar and the bee bread and everything else that you have in the frame like that is being squeezed out so 100 that has the maximum level of nutritional value and i would say flavor too if you have frame that has beeswax foundation or no foundation at all you can cut everything out with a knife and put it in the pot and mash it with a potato masher if you have plastic foundation like on this frame then you just scrape it off with a spoon and put it in a stainless steel pot one trick for doing it quickly is to do it in a very warm room uh 80 to 90 degrees preferably then honey is flowing easily and wax is very malleable and soft so everything goes very quickly now look at this powder the orange stuff here and the speckles there this is the pollen that i was mentioning look out here so now all of this pollen has been scraped off and will end up in the jar that will be pressing so the pollen count of this honey that's squeezed rather than extracted is through the roof there's simply no comparison when i was a little child this is the kind of honey i love the most the one that has lots and lots of this deep bread and it's called b bread for a reason it's really satisfying to eat like bread it's very very dense uh very nutrient rage to the point that some people cannot even eat bee bread because they get allergies like from our vitamin overdose i can eat a lot of deep breath no problem yeah as you're scraping down the calm see all these bits of orange or yellowish paste there is more here this is bee bread the bees packet into the cells here is more and more oh it's a mine of the bread look at all of that this is the most valuable nutritionally speaking part of honeycomb and we are capturing all of it by putting it into the honey press rather than trying to extract it so these collected from flowers obviously look there's more some frames will have more bee bread than honey on them and then they mix it with nectar and they ferment it using the same processes we use for making sauerkraut yogurt even the bacteria involved in making bee bread are the lactobacteria we have in yogurt and once it's fermented it becomes a probiotic too if you are looking for honey that would have a high pollen count then the pressed honey will be your honey of choice but beware you cannot just get that kind of bee bread from any kind of hive most of the bee bread is being deposited inside the brew chamber where the bees are here they are brewed and in conventional beekeeping this is the part of the hive that is being repeatedly treated with chemicals so if the frame like this one was coming from a commercial hive treated with chemicals then the bee bread would have very high toxic levels of our chemicals i wouldn't recommend using it for human nutrition even bees suffer and may die from our pesticide exposure when too much of it is being accumulated in the bee bread you know i've never used the plastic calm in my hives but ironically today plastic calm is not the worst of the options because the beeswax foundation commonly available on the market has such a high level of pesticide residue in it if you have plastic on at least it will not be transferring all of these or chemical pollutants to into your hives all right this frame has no plastic foundation and you just take a knife and you slice it all and put it into that pond try not to run your knife over the wires because it would dull it uh when you keep this naturally like dog does uh no sugar feeding no uh treating against parasites no chemicals in the fives then this uh honeycomb from the brood section can be used for human food unfortunately if you have any commercial agriculture within two miles of your beehives the bees will still bring some of the pesticides residue but you know today they find ddt and their antarctica and the whole world is no longer what it used to be at least if you are not putting chemicals yourself into the hive of course the concentration will be not as high as with conventional beekeeping that repeatedly treats the brew chamber sometimes up to three or four times a year all right that's why a lot of regular vertical hive beekeepers never get into the bee bread is because they're always working on the supers up above and there's never any chance and we're always like you say treating the bottoms or never really minding the bottoms that much because we're always after the the supers up top with the honey and also now this comb looks dirty it's black and unappealing but it's ironic how the things they don't look perfect and white are actually the most nutritious look at the whole wheat flour right or white bleach flour right you know in the old days people were eating healthy whole foods if it was grain it was all crushed and milled together right and ground together capturing all of the uh nutritional value when people started separating things to make them look nice right we have now picture perfect apples and let's go in there for now white sugar and other unnaturally clean looking products that are devoid of the nutritional that's right so this brown calm is where most of the nutrition is if for any predator like a bear breaks into the hive they will go after the dark one first that's right and unfortunately there is no way uh you can taste it other than maybe getting a jar of honey from doug okay don't go anywhere all right but uh it is very very different from conventional fans all right so after you've cut the comb put it in the stainless steel pot and it doesn't have to be stainless steel it can also be animal but stainless steel is so much better um under no circumstances use are aluminum utensils when processing honey because it can react with honey and will leach into honey so the aluminum concentration there will be very high and then you squeeze it down with a potato masher until it's this one big mess of wax and honey then you're ready to press it the honey press i use is a stainless steel throw out do not use any presses that have a paint on them because this develops so much force that this paint will start flaking and peeling and getting in your honey so the only maintenance really needed is to put one drop of any oil uh in there to graze the vault and just wind it up [Music] this is made in italy and i've used several dresses and this is the one i like the most it's also available from horizontal hive.com if you would like experience the pleasure of pressing your own honey and getting the most out of your honey and the bread that the disco okay so it seals backward and then you are ready to start loading this basket with the canyon that is squeezed or that you cut [Music] you can go two ways about pressing it one is just loading everything into this barrel the other one is to put the cheesecloth or nylon sack there i prefer putting no filter there this way most of the bee bread being squeezed out is not caught up by the filter and also if you were to use a nylon bag after you compressed everything and there is just wax left it will create such a thick and solid pancake at the bottom of the cylinder that it will be difficult to take out hey shut up [Music] see how it's coming out already you put it back and then you just wind it down of course this press can also be used for praising grapes or apples for making cider or your own juice and i like her bolting it to a piece of plywood and clamping the plywood there to your table top this way you don't need to drill into the table top but it is very stable now look at that if you put if you look closely at what's coming out you notice that in addition to the honey being squeezed out there are small bits of wax and also small beads of orangey paste being squeezed out this is b brand and even the honey itself that's now flowing into the jar look how thick it is and how many quote-unquote impurities it has at honey shows they judge honey by the purity they look at it through uh you know at light and any small bits of uh bieber then it would actually disqualify it but that's what makes honey whole food is the presence of high amounts of bee bread pollen in it [Applause] i need to grab another jar you already feed him yeah there is the signs up and everything oh and i prefer not to filter this honey when it comes off for the press i put it straight into the jar if a small bit of wax gets in there it will eventually float to the top and if you don't care for it you can scoop it up and give it back to the bees but i i like the jars that have a little bit of beeswax and bee breath floating on the top that's very special like cream on top of [Applause] yogurt [Applause] so and even looks like it's fermented it's very frothy nice [Music] [Applause] okay and they say seeing is believing of course the flavor of the honey and its nutritional value is something you'll be able to feel yourself when you compare the press honey to the extracted one but i wanted to show you just how much pollen gets into the honey that's produced on the honey press instead of just being spun in a centrifuge and filtered and sometimes even microfiltered before it ends up on the supermarket shelf so i borrowed my daughter's microscope and she was horrified she said dad you will have honey all over my microscope i won't be able to use it anymore i promised i will be very careful so you take slides and you take a drop of honey just a very small amount and you spread it here and then squeeze it out squeeze all the air out and just press it between two slides and then it's ready to go [Music] into the microscope and we'll see what we see so this is the kind of very simple analysis of pollen count in honey that you can pay a special firm to do for you but also if you have access to a microscope it doesn't have to be something very fancy just a basic microscope or with 100 magnification will be enough for you to see how much pollen you have in your sample of honey so what i'm seeing here and we'll try to capture it on the camera too is when you look down you'll see dozens and dozens and dozens of specks of pollen in a tiny drop of honey that we've just pressed from doug's honeycomb okay we've seen that there are hundreds and hundreds of uh specks of pollen in there and for comparison i bought some organic honey that i i just picked up from a supermarket and let's look at uh how much pollen this organic honey from brazil has same thing you take one little drop spread it on the slide and press another piece of glass on top of this one [Music] [Applause] and then it's ready to go under the scope [Applause] [Music] and what i'm seeing now is that there is almost no pollen there there are a few granules here and there this big as an air bubble but see where there were lots and lots of these grains and ducks honey you do not see a single grain of pollen here if you shift your field of view back and forth you may find one the small black ones are impurities like dust it's not pollen oh here's some pollen but see there now this is now these are air air bubbles this is not even pawn you know when you examine a drop like that long enough you will find some here it is so now in the center of the slide there is one speck of pollen but compared to what you see in dogs or sample this is of course maybe 100 times less and now for comparison i wanted to show you my bee bread honey so here we used everything that was on the frame honey and bee bread everything mixed together and already in every single drop there are hundreds and hundreds of draw grains of pollen captured but at home if i see a frame that has a lot of pollen in it i actually will press this frame separately to maximize the amount of bee bread that is squeezed out in a jar and then i bottle it separately and then it's even thicker than the one we produced from dux frames because this would be maybe 20 by weight b brand so when you take a drop of this or b breath honey where you pre-selected the frames for the maximal pollen count before even pressing it then so when you press honey from the frames that were pre-selected for the maximum amount of b bread they have then the results is such that you see a carpet of specks of pollen all over the slide look at that next time dog does honey harvest i will encourage him to segregate the frames with lots of bee bread and take these frames and press them separately from other frames containing a lot of honey this is how you can obtain honey that looks like this see this carpet of our these grains that look like uh millet spilled over there this is all paul and paul and paul and paul and pollen the bigger ones are um [Music] bubbles of air but all of that sand is uh pollen granules again compared to the commercial honey you got from the store you would be scrolling the slide like that and you might see one or two specs but here you have hundreds and thousands in uh one tiniest drop of honey pressed from the bread frames this is why ironically you know this is the most expensive quote-unquote honey that i produce but this is the one that is actually least expensive if you look at the nutritional value and not at the price per pound or per ounce and this is the one that i call bee breath honey and this is the one i sell out of first because people are looking for the maximum nutritional value in their honey and the highest pollen count understand that a small jar like that as you've seen on this slide will have actually more pollen in it than maybe a 55 gallon drum of conventional honey from a supermarket sounds crazy man where do you guys get any of this great bee information other than off-grid with duggan stacy with dr leo here on youtube and facebook i mean you guys probably never even heard of this stuff before this is stuff regular beekeepers just aren't telling you so in this video we stole the queen out of our active hive we put her in an all new hive they're gonna hatch out a new queen cell and create a new queen over there so there's no swarming so you guys can stop swarming and actually just make it real easy and transfer that's the other thing if you guys are doing the swarms and catching your swarms that's cool but don't remember if you catch it you have to plant it right where you catch it or you have to remove it to an area and then bring it back after some time with the artificial swarms that we just did we were able to just grab the queen take everything over to the new hive and that made it super duper convenient and also it's safer for the bees the survival rate is only 25 so by making the artificial swarm you're actually helping bees propagate with much less risk than what they would have through the natural process it's good stuff man i hope you guys are really liking this stuff hitting that like on the way out you know you like these videos like this information and let me know in the comment section have you ever even heard of bee bread or this honey press have you ever heard of someone pressing honey so leave those down in the comment section below it's always good to kind of gauge people that are interested in this what kind of information they're getting and where from and then how they're using it so it's always cool that you guys share with us so and you know in the old days this was common knowledge yeah uh the book keeping bees and horizontal highs was originally written in 1892 and it talks about the presses and their the better quality of honey that you obtained by pressing rather than expelling it was all known to everyone 100 years ago but then got forgotten when people started valuing the low price of food or larger quantity of food production over the quality today everything is turning around and people want to have highest nutritional value in their foods so all of these old ideas are coming back not only that but in one of the future videos we'll talk to you about making mead i'm not alcohol drinker myself but mead is an amazing drink which captures the diversity of flowers that the bees collected so just for the central pleasure of tasting 20 different wildflowers in the gulp of the meat uh it's uh wonderful to make a small batch yourself so lance was explaining right that pressed honey is much better for meat making because of the very high um content of bee bread in it right so if you add no additional yeast then the natural east and b bread will start the very slow and smooth fermentation and also because these yeasts will be unique to different kinds of bee bread and different hives the flavors of your meats will be different on every batch right so that'd be good a lot of you have been asking about the meat we carry we've been covering a lot of this beekeeping stuff but we have not touched on the meat i'm not a big alcohol drinker myself either so it's like not in our wheelhouse but because you guys have been asking for it we want to show you guys how to do it so yeah so it's coming yes and then the technique that we use today for making two hives out of one is also in lane's book keeping these horizontal hives and in raising honeybee queens again the moment you split a hive in two like that they were raising a queen it's not something that's very complicated this is the first step towards becoming self-sufficient in your beekeeping you may not be willing or able to climb into trees to collect your swamp traps every year and you don't have to once you have your local superior survivor stock that you collected from the wild and the while maybe wild colony is living even in a city in somebody's house then you can start doing artificial swarms yourself and never have to buy these again ever and also you could use that technique also to make nukes right could you use that and then sell those as well nukes are very expensive people buy them and then you're providing local organic kind of taking care of natural bees uh to your area as well exactly instead of them buying packages from elsewhere from another ecosystem right it is not having adaptation to your winter your local blooming pattern of plants you are saturating the local environment with the local adapted genetics of the piece so if you start splitting hives like that to sell your surplus base then your rendering be is a great service too yeah and your community so yeah again make sure you guys are writing this information down we have this whole playlist all you guys have to do is hit that first one it'll walk you through all this information every video we try to touch on different aspects of beekeeping and answer some of the questions you guys are dropping off in the comments section and before we get out of here today too i want to put it we're going to do a giveaway of a jar of the bee bread honey this one uh a smaller one smaller one yeah a smaller one but i'm going to package you guys up i'm going to give away two of them i'll split a quart down half and i'll send out two as long as the video gets 50 000 views in 24 hours and 5 000 thumbs up right because this stuff is really valuable this be brad and we want to send it out to you guys so make sure you guys hit that go hit that like button subscribe to the channel if you haven't subscribed before and follow along on some more bee adventures this year dr leo will be out kind of heavy this year with me because i got busted up ribs i can't lift this stuff i can barely manage the camera but we just want to keep bringing you this information throughout the year because we're doing it in the stages that you guys are going to be beekeeping at so this is right now this is you can go out and do this pretty much depending on where you are in the country but you can go out and do this right now so all right you can right now is the great time to set your swamp trap out and catch your own swarm oh yeah there are free plans on horizontal hype.com for building your own song trap or you can build uh get one already built heavy duty and hanging on the tree and attract your local swarm of bees at no cost rather than a box like that which will pay for itself with the first one you catch so and also i will be at the duggan stasis uh studying conference sir the first weekend in august yep uh also i teach two day be keeping classes at my homestead in missouri if you'd like to come registration is now open for june 19th 20th this is the solstice weekend 2021. um if you are watching this video later the updated schedule is on horizontal hive.com where you can also find these books get a lot of free plans and free information on natural beekeeping and if you'd like to press your own bee bread honey these italian heavy-duty stainless steel presses are available there too this is the one i use myself for years and i highly recommend because uh the kind of honey you produce as the two lucky people will discover by getting a pair of honey from dog is not something you can buy anywhere from anyone yeah and all we did up to oil this up here was we just put some uh 30 30 weight uh motor oil right there on there no i'm just kidding it was a extra virgin olive oil so it's some food grade oil up there and you're in business that thing worked really smooth so a little less to clean up as well i might add versus your big spinner but everything has a purpose right sometimes you're doing the bee bread and then sometimes you're doing the regular spinning you know all this stuff is investments and you could turn this into a great hobby or even an income for your homestead so make sure you guys hit the thumbs up visit horizontalhive.com the link will be down below for all the free information books and all that stuff and then check out his schedule he'll be at the homesteading live conference and then hosting his own stuff and then we're still going to try to work out the first workshop here at the property for you guys uh for 2021 on beekeeping and i think we're going to target that towards the fall right absolutely i look forward to it yep so we'll see you guys on the next video you

Channel: OFF GRID with DOUG & STACY

Views: 160,329

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: 91PSl9lskH4

Length: 62min 35sec (3755 seconds)

Published: Thu May 06 2021