When to Harvest Your Honey for Beginning Beekeepers

so how do you know when your honey is ready for harvest hi i'm doug the bee guy and today we're going to figure out just that question let's go to the apiary and figure it out so the first thing we have to do is to pick a hive to check in this apiary they all look to be doing pretty well there's lots of bees coming in and out we got a pretty good flow going on so i think we'll just pick one of the ones that has three supers on it to see if they have honey all the way up in the top this looks like a good one got quite a bit of the uh quite a bit of uh activity down there go down there and pan that down and see we're going to go into these top top super maybe the next one depending on what's available lots of bees up top here that's usually a good sign smoke you probably don't even need it because the bees are pretty happy today it's about 72 degrees partly sunny it's been in the 90s here which is very unusual for us this time of year but this year it's been one of those hot ones reminds me of when i was a young child and living here and one of the reasons i moved away to new mexico for 17 years because i really like the humidity that much so i'm looking down in here and i can see [Music] lots of white wax and some of the honey is capped so this will be the perfect one to look into to see about if the honey is ready to harvest so what happens is the bees bring in the nectar and they fill the honeycomb with the nectar and they process it by putting it in each of their mouths back and forth and put enzymes in and do all kinds of different things to it and then they start evaporating the moisture and nectar is 82 water and 18 sugar and pollen and yeasts and other things and that's what becomes honey the 18 so once your nectar is down to 18 percent moisture you can harvest it and stay honey without any problem trying to pull this out it's quite difficult because it is welded in there oh i see because we had comb on the bottom it's dripping now they're going to be crazy because there's honey dripping everywhere all right so let me bring this up toward the camera so you can see it so what we're looking for is a frame that is about 75 to 80 percent capped and so you can see this one is i would say this is one is about 30 caps you got this part here and then the rest of this is uncapped now there's honey in there and if you take it like this you try to shake it see it doesn't come out so that's probably ripened honey and they're gonna cap it and that's one of the ways you can test it if it's toward the end of the season and you need to get your honey off because it's getting cold you can do the shake test it's not 100 scientific but usually if you can't shake that out you're going to be pretty pretty pretty good and again we're looking for more like three quarters and that one's again about about a third maybe a little bit more than a third so this one we wouldn't take this one especially this time of year they're just working on it let me put this one over here to the side and pull another one the other thing you can do instead of guessing or using the eighty percent seventy five percent frame full rule is you can get something called the reflectometer i'll put a picture down here and i'll put a link down in the description for one and that little device basically you uh let me shake the bees off of this one this time and again see i'm shaking bees and i see no liquid of any sort coming off of this so that's telling me that this is ready and they are getting it down to the right moisture content which is 18 and they are capping it so what they're doing is they're filling these cells up the last amount that they can and then they're going to cap them and so again this one's about exactly the same as the other one i would say this one is 30 percent capped but got some pretty good honey in here and probably in another week they will have that all capped and ready to go so if you get yourself a reflectometer you just take a sample of this honey out with your finger your hive tool and you can put it in a jar or you can put it right on the reflectometer you put it up to the sun and there's a little gauge inside there and it will tell you if your moisture content is below 18 it'll tell you exactly usually what it is in a range and then there's digital ones that will actually tell you exactly what it is and uh that's kind of what you do let's go down here one more super and see if we can find one that is a hundred percent capped or pretty close just so you can see what it looks like and then you'll know that your honey is ready to harvest one of the reasons you don't want to harvest honey that is not either kept 75 to 80 percent or has a lot of nectar in it or is not the right moisture content depending on how you're doing it is that if you get too much moisture in your honey your honey can actually ferment just like beer or bread yeast and beer bread and all the other processes that vinegar that tend to ferment that's what your honey can do the reason is there's a lot of sugar and there's a lot of yeast inside of the honey there's natural occurring yeasts in the world and they're all out there on plants and on animals and when the bees land on stuff they get these yeasts on them and they uh put them in honey and so that's one of the natural things in honey that's good for you that's one of the reasons you don't want to heat your honey too high because you kill those so they're basically they're your probiotics they're your yeasts and different enzymes that are really actually alive but they're suspended they're in suspended animation in the honey so they don't they don't eat the sugar and they don't they don't turn it to alcohol they're just kind of suspended in there but they are so alive so once that moisture content gets below or gets above 19 or 20 percent wow that's heavy you would think that that thing was full but it's not must be getting old once that moisture content gets above 19 or 20 percent your honey can start to ferment even though you've harvested it you may have bottled it and it'll start to get a funky a funky cloudy look and a real funky smell which you know fermenting stuff has that funky fermented smell i don't allow us to explain it scientifically so that's what you're trying to prevent and that's why we have to figure out when our honey is ready to harvest that's the whole point of this whole process otherwise you just go in here whenever you wanted to even if it wasn't capped you take it out you spin it and life would be good and you wouldn't have to worry about it all right let me get a shot of these girls here see if i can get a close-up of these girls eating this eating this honey off the top so i just pulled this open and they're all going to eat just a few minutes they're gonna eat all that honey and put it back if you left this open for about five minutes you'd come back and it would be all gone they would suck all that honey up and that's how quickly they can work especially when you get closer to the robbing season right now there's a huge flow on so there's no robbing but if there's robin going on they will try to get that honey as quickly as possible so that they don't start the robbing frenzy all right so let's put this back here where it was and we're going to continue on trying to find a frame that is three quarters of the way at doesn't look like there's any in this one they're just starting to cap it crack this other one and see well this other one this one on the outside possible nope we're still capping those so let's try to get this one on the outside corner out without making too many of them mad they're already mad but this is just the nature of the thing here normally i would just take this whole super off blow the bees out and not worry about it but since we're messing with each frame then they get kind of mad even though it's nice out all right so we got this one pried out this one is a must be a really nice comb that they like this one is actually dated on the top most of my combs are dated and this one is 2009 and this is the this is the year that i started 2009. so let's shake off some of these bees again just like before i'm shaking it and there's nothing coming out so that's telling me that the honey is pretty close to 18 moisture but it's not capped yet so again to recap what you're looking for is 75 cappings or more to tell you that your honey is ready to harvest without using the device and again this side is the same it's not capped but if you shake it nothing is coming out so i would say like i said before another week and this honey will be ready to harvest it'll be mostly capped what they're doing now is they're filling it more so they're taking more honey and they might have it in a different frame somewhere that is that's the right moisture content they know what the moisture content is so that this stuff won't ferment in the hive and it'll last all winter so they know what that content has to be because it's in their genetic code and so once they get it to that content they move it so they might be moving it from one of these other supers up and then filling it they move it up they move it all around they might be moving it from the center to the outside they do all kinds of stuff with the honey they don't just take it to one spot and leave it i just want to get these bees down so i don't crush a bunch of them but i'm not smoking down into the i don't want to smoke too much down into the thing i don't want to smoke my honey put too much smoke on your honey you can funk it up a little bit i don't want to do that it's the downside of having high hive stands and lots of supers luckily i'm 6'4 and i can lift it but if i was this one up here it's going to be tough because you know your shoulder and everything you can do it but it starts to uh [Applause] if you blow on your bees they don't like human breath and they will uh they will abate let's check one more hive real quick to see we can find a frame that is three quarters full now this one they're just starting to work on we just added this one in that video if you saw that video i'll put it in the card up on the top about how to know when to add another honey super and we just added this one i believe was uh seven days ago maybe not quite seven days so let's just take a frame out to see what they've done in seven days this was a totally empty honey super it was drawn comb it did need a little bit of work it was a little funky i think there's a few frames that had some wax moth damage and obviously they wanted they wanted to polish it because it had been stored over outside over winter and so what they usually do is they polish it and get it all get it all ready this will be a good so so on this one a couple of drops of nectar came out but for the most part this is they're carrying this but you can see it's not ready they just have this much on the top full of honey and then there's actually some pollen in here which is interesting which must mean they don't have enough space down below to put the pollen because the queen is restricted below she can't get up in here so there's some pollen in this honey and that's what happens they'll probably eat it if not it just becomes part of the honey and it goes in there so it'll get filtered out and some of it will be suspended which is one of the reasons that people use honey for their allergies but you can see how much they did in a week not even it's been six days since we put this on look at that they cleaned it they they drew it out just a little bit more and they filled about a third of it or a half of it with nectar which is actually honey because this is heavy and it's not coming out so that is actually honey and that's how quickly the bees can do it when the flow is on i've seen them fill one of these and cap it in 10 days when there's a serious serious and this one's not a super big hive so it doesn't look like i'm gonna find one that's three quarters of the way full so i'll insert a picture here here's a great picture of what your honey should look like when it's 100 capped i hope you have great success in finding out if your honey is ready to harvest until next time be extraordinary you

Channel: Doug the Bee Guy

Views: 17,419

Keywords: when to harvest your honey, doug the bee guy, beekeeping, beginning beekeeping, beginning beekeeping videos, when to harvest your honey for beginning beekeepers, is it honey yet, when to harvest honey from hive, when to harvest honey, honey moisture content, honey moisture meter, refractometer, barnyard bees, kamon reynolds, bruces bees, honey harvest, beekeeping 101, honey bees, frederick dunn, david burns, jeff horchoff, harvesting honey, honey bee

Id: WxY2cMdB_TE

Length: 17min 20sec (1040 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 11 2021