Hello, I am a hobby beekeeper in Southeast Louisiana. I have been keeping bees for 12 years now and decided to create some videos to show all aspects of beekeeping in my little operation in my region of the country. I always tell people, I am not doing 'How To' videos, only 'How I Do' videos. It's simply a VLOG to show some of the different tasks associated with beekeeping. From the fun stuff, like splitting hives, doing hive inspections, and harvesting honey, to the tedious stuff, like painting and building boxes and scraping frames. This channel was initially set up to share videos with family and friends out of state, so there are a few old videos that I've kept on just because. I hope you enjoy the channel.
It’s a very floral honey. I have some folks that love it. It tastes fine to me but it’s not my favorite. But I’ve never understood why some say it isn’t good honey unless it’s a regional deal. Could be other varieties of privet give a different taste or different soil type cause the plant to yield different tasting nectar made up of different concentrations of the sugars. I don’t know. They are a wild ligustrum, so there could be many varieties. I will blend most of it with summer honey as it goes in the bottler and it blends into a great honey. Thanks for watching!!
I think it is simply due to how bad the mating percentages are this late down here. You can get plenty of cells to take late, but getting them mated is an issue the later we get.
I have never tried it. But I don’t really want to put the grease in the hives at this temp down here. It’s so hot in the hives right now, the bees cool the nest, but the kids and bottoms stay very very hot. I think Greg’s temps in the summer with cooler evenings are a better environment for the murder sauce. We stay at 80 to 85 all night long and then only get hotter as the sun comes up during the summer. But I do want to eventually experiment with it in a couple hives.
I wish I could use something like that but not on this terrain. It's way too rocky and uneven.. l use a lot of jester nucks when I'm alone and not much honey .. or a friend comes and we use a "hive stretcher". It's like for humans but it has a square hole in it with a strong net made from straps.. for moving hives on ruff terrain. You can adjust how deep will the hive drop down in the net to be sure you won't drop everything if you make a wrong step. I'm pretty happy with it if I can say it myself because I invented it for moving hives in impossible places here on the islands. It works great for moving only supers of honey. That's when you bring a couple of strong friends and you feed them good 😂. Have a good one my friend and stay away from the heat if you can
Only 94 and 50% .. here is 150 and humidity is 90% in the minus.. under 0. If l only knew how much is 94 degrees. I have 35-40c and no humidity at all. The honey is always dry here
Something like that would sure come in handy for me with all the surgeries I have had on my back but my Bee yards are not level enough so I will just keep doing it old school an slow . It is good that you can work it into your operation when needed . Thanks for the demonstration because there are a lot of Bee keepers that can use it . Thanks
What do you use on your fume board? I made one for this years harvest, have never used one. Just wondering what works best to get the bees out of the supers.
I have been using Honey-B-Gone the last couple years and it's just OK. If the fume boards are in good sun and get really hot it works really well. But if there is any shade or it's not hot, it's just ok. Personally, I am going to go back to Honey Bandit. Not Honey Robber. Honey Robber is the really awful smelling stuff. But Honey Bandit worked better in my opinion than the Honey-B-Gone. Fishers Bee Quick is also a good one. I went to Honey-b-Gone because of the available size and sprayer. But I will go back to Honey Bandit next season. Just works better to me.
About to move to using fume boards next season, how many supers will a fume board clear at a time? Can it do 3 to 4 or just one at a time, thanks Mr.Mike!
In very good sun and heat where the board get good and hot, it will clear two to three, especially the Honey Bandit brand. I was doing three at a time today in the heat.
Now that i've gotten over 40 hives now , i'm thinking about getting a hive lifter also, think it could help out my back big time. Thanks for sharing mike.
I love my hive lifter from Boris. I harvest 8000 to 10,000 lbs of honey each season and ALL of it gets lifted with my hive lifter. I usually lift two deeps at a time but sometimes three. The lifter can lift four deeps of honey but that's a lot to handle for me so I stay with two or three. I call my hive lifter my Backsaver 6100!
almost all the oaks we have here up in New England are hard woods. The soft wood stuff are the poplars. They grow fast, fall often and make a big mess.
Thanks for showing the hive lifter. I make all my boxes from logs I harvest on my place so I don't know if it would be for my operation. It really does the job and saves your back.
I starting pulling my hamstring this year when moving heavy things, so I ordered the hive lifter for that (in addition to saving my back). It's been great. It sure helps a lot. I did just lift a box inside to move it a couple feet and.........pulled my hamstring again. The hive lifter is a great tool. I did get the B3 Model. It's been a pretty bad year for honey though, in my area, so a lot of what I've been doing is pulling a few frames here and there, aside from a couple colonies that had full boxes. For those the hive lifter was great to lift off the box and blow out the bees. Sure have been enjoying your "How to" videos. =)
Great video Mike! it's good to hear the heat and flow comments and how to navigate through those times. Saving the back is always a good thing as we get older, mine is just about shot now days. When you're young you think you'll always be strong, then as you age you learn the truth of the matter. You give such good explanations for why you are doing what you're doing, I can't say that enough, I'm just right on keel with what you are describing so that I can understand better!
It's the Ryobi 18V Cordless Compact Workshop Blower. I actually inherited mine. The link is about a page long, so just search for Ryobi 18V Cordless Compact Workshop Blower and it should come up for you.
Good video Mike. It’s so much easier and cooler to do a little at a time. You’re not getting as hot and it’s easier to stay hydrated to work a few at the time. Hopefully you break your previous record.
We got it on Amazon. It was recommended to me by a viewer actually. It’s a really good ‘attention getter’ and we’ve had people riding by that saw it and stopped.
Mike you know why it's easy to cut your cappings . Because most of your honey frames are soft yellow wax mediums. If you spent hours cutting dark cappings from old brood frames then I bet it gets harder and harder.... l like How You Do that part of honey extraction.
I'm at 50min and the frames are still rotating. What's your plan to turn wax into honey.. it won't work 😂. Those guys make some silent extractors. You could forget it's spinning and let it work all night
@@Red_Scarf_Apiary normally about 10 minutes for late spring honey. It goes longer most times because I’m usually still uncapping and organizing during the run, but 10 minutes is good enough to get all the honey out.
@@MikeBarryBees Mike l have a story for you.. when I was still a young boy 10-15 years. There's an island here called Sušac ..which funny enough means dry island in ruff translation. It's far away.. with hives in the boat it's a 10h travel time. On it is only the light house keeper and his sheeps and it's full with rosemary. The island is used for lobster fishing by my people.. us too. But there's never time to get out off the boat when you fishing. Very rare to steal a couple of hours... and you're tiered... So we took 20 hives in two travel times. And some supers. Then we discovered a problem. Every time I went to see the hives everything was full with nectar and bees think about swarming. We ended up with keeping 4 deeps on every hive for supers and two times a week extracted all the nectar to bring home to other bees to give them to process. We tried just switching boxes but it was difficult to carry and it made the same problem with the hives back home. My father even had to ask a friend to use his bees too. After it was over and we sold the honey from "20 hives" there was enough money to buy a new truck with cash, from the factory and to start a new addition on the building my grandpa had for vine and distillery. We even bought a new distillation unit for lavender and rosemary oil. Good old days. I wish we had a scale back then. I bet there were days with 20 -30 pounds or more. We never did it again because back then there was enough honey on easier places. Now I'm thinking about doing it again this last years every time I'm there to sleep with my boat .. spend a night behind it in calmer weather. But it would be a big job impossible to do without the lighthouse keeper and his tractor. I had to write you this one. I never since then seen a stronger flow.. not even in a Balkan black locust forest where we used 6 frames per box.
