[music]
Hi everybody. We're here today to talk about
harvesting honey.
We've talked earlier in another video
about how to super the hives.
We're at the mid to end of July here now starting to
think about harvesting our summer honey and in this
area we harvest honey typically late
July and then again in mid-September.
So our goal is to have all these boxes full of honey
by the end of July and then we'll super the colonies
again after we harvest this honey.
We're going to talk about three different methods of
harvesting honey: one is using a bee brush,
the other is using a bee escape,
this is called a Quebec escape board,
and the last one is using a leaf blower,
which we've modified and shortened it up
so that it can work as a bee blower.
You'll see that in action in a moment.
So we are going to harvest the honey from this hive
here, let's just see what's inside.
Puff a bit of smoke at the entrance,
set the lid down upside down a good step away
and we'll peel back the inner cover.
Lots of bees, not a lot of honey up in
this box here.
I'm looking down and I don't see cappings here,
I just see open cells, so that one is not ready
to harvest, so we are just going to cover it
back up again and set it off on to the over turned lid.
Well, we'll look in here. Wow that looks fantastic.
Lots of capped honey down in here.
It's capped right over to this outside frame here,
so this one is ready to harvest.
So the first method using a bee brush what we do
is we loosen up a number of frames
and then we can take those frames out
and it's quite easy to brush the bees off when the
surface of the comb is capped, but we just it's
kind of flicking motion like this.
We flick off like that, we avoid long sweeps
because you kind of role the bees and
crush them.
Periodically you need to run this brush under water
to wash the honey off otherwise it gets
quite hard.
So there we've got one frame with all
the bees removed.
Of course we don't want to take the bees with us
when we harvest the honey.
We're then going to put it into a box
that has no frames in it and cover that up
immediately.
When we are harvesting honey one thing we have
to be really conscious of is robbing.
If we are exposing a lot of honey
the smells are there and if the bees
aren't getting much nectar they'll come and
start robbing this honey, so we keep it covered
up as much as possible to keep the bees from
getting it back in there and once robbing gets
started it's very difficult to stop it.
But you just go through frame at a time, brush
the bees off, look at that beautiful capped
honey there and then covering it up as we
move along.
This takes a considerable period of time but if you
are only dealing with a small number of colonies
it's a perfectly adequate way to harvest honey.
Just brushing the bees off like so.
That's enough of that you get the idea there.
What we are now going to do is talk about using a
bee escape.
With a bee escape it's a two-step process.
We have to take the honey supers off the hive,
put the bee escape on, put the honey supers
back on and then we come back in several days.
The ideal time is about after two days.
The cooler the evenings are, the better it works
because the bees move down at night to keep
the brood warm and the cooler it is
the more of that action there is.
So set all of those supers off, every one of
them is full,
pry it out of there.
You can see how I am setting the supers
on kind of a crisscross pattern here
so there is very little contact and you are
not squishing many bees.
Now what we are going to do is we are going
to take a honey super that was extracted
last year.
So it's empty, the cells have been extracted
and that'll give them some space
to work on, then we will put our bee escape
in place.
The screen side goes down and we
have arrows here to indicate what's up
just so that we can see once the supers are back
on make sure we've put this on the right way.
It only works that way around.
Then we just set these supers back in place.
Just brush a few bees off there.
It's very important once you are using a bee escape
that there are no holes where bees can get in.
Once the bees move down through that and go
through the bee escape they can't get back up
so there is nobody home to protect this honey.
If there are holes here robber bees could get
in and steal the honey and there's a lot of fighting
and dead bees and so on so you don't want
that to happen.
So what we use is painters' tape to paint
any cracks that there may be and we make sure
the inner cover is on good, there's no upper entrance
at all and that will be fine.
So we come back after two nights and then we can just
lift the honey off the hive and take it into extracting
there will be no bees present.
So that's that method.
The last method I am going to show you is
using a bee blower
and what we do with that
is take the honey off the hive.
The top box wasn't very full so I'm not going to
harvest that box.
And then we get a leaf blower going
and we blow in between the bottoms of the
frames and we turn the frames like pages
of a book so we can blast the bees out.
Once that's done we just haul the honey away.
So we'll get this blower going and show you
how that works.
So we've removed the honey from this hive
and now we are ready to give it more space.
This box here came off the hive and it was
only about half full so we'll put that back on.
And it's mid-July so there's still lots of honey
going to be coming back in.
So we'll give it an extra box on top of that
and now that's supered ready to go for the
late summer crop and we'll add probably
another box there for the fall flow as
well and just harvest all this honey in the
mid-September.
When we harvest honey in mid-September we use the
same methods, a brush or a bee escape or a blower,
but at that point we are not giving them supers
to fill we're leaving them just with their
brood chamber and we carry on with the
fall management then.
Thanks for watching. Happy honey harvest.