Oh wow it’s amazing my grandfather and grandmother on my dads side kept bees and I loved to watch them granny never wore any protective clothes and never got stung she was the bee whisperer lol
brings back childhood memories of my dads bee keeping, I spent many hours hand cranking the extractor in a shed with the woodstove going full blast in August so the honey would floe fast. Your decapping tool is looked slow, I seem to remember the hot knife we used being much faster and was it longer I would decap a full size frame in 3 about seconds in one pass, maybe it was the woodstove heat? ..
I bet that did get the honey to flow faster. Lol. I have a hot knife as well and use both. If the wax is capped below the sides of the frame rails the hot knife doesn’t get down inside to uncap as easily. Both work well and do the job. I bet you got a workout between cranking the extractor and the wood stove. Lol. Some good memories no doubt. Thank you for watching and sharing your memory. Blessings.
Natures bounty :) Just need to be able to harvest it - and like most things, good things take time!! How many hives do you have? Any thoughts about the "flow hive" as I notice you only use traditional hives. Cheers ears.
You got that right!!! We are around 50 colonies. I plan to shoot for 100 next year and continue to grow our numbers. I hadn’t done much the last few years because of work and other things. Time to hit this a little harder now. I’ve seen information on the flow hives but I don’t think they would do well in cold areas. I also enjoy handling the bees and doing the proper checks. I’m sure flow hives are helpful to some select people but not something I’d want. Fresh honey from the hive is a taste of heaven. We love it. Thanks for watching and have a blessed week. We appreciate your comments.
@@OutdoorsandCountryLiving WHOA! 50 Colonies..Goodness me! And aiming to raise it too 100. Impressive. I think you're hitting it hard already at 50! :) Ah I see you are of a similar mind - flow hives not so great for colder climes. And they are pricey compared to traditional setups so not worth the risk. "Fresh honey from the hive is a taste of heaven. We love it. Thanks for watching and have a blessed week. We appreciate your comments" Me too - natures goodness in a jar, or bucket! Great for medicinal uses as well. Have a blessed week too :) For each day we get is such. Grateful for all that I have.
Awesome video, Tom! I do have some questions. It was my understanding that honey should be harvested in the spring, as the bees will feed off of it in the winter. And so if you take too much, the bees will starve. Am I wrong? How do you determine how much Fall honey is safe to take without endangering your bees? 2. You said, "the bees will repair the honeycomb." So, within each frame, are those plastic, man-made h0oneycombs? Or did the bees make them entirely from scratch? 3. How do you tell which honeycombs contain honey, and not larvae? 4. Finally, can you please post links to your honey extractor and hot planar? I'd like to learn more about it. 5. Finally, what pollinating plants are best to feed the bees, and how many per hive do you recommend? Thanks again for this educational video! This is something I want to learn more about.
Hey! You can extract the previous years honey in the spring of there is any left but I leave it to make splits or to extract in August. The bees gather nectar to make the honey and the process takes time. Normally there is not cured honey in early spring. The bees will not cap the honey until it’s around 18% moisture content or less. The wax on the frames is all drawn out by the bees. When you look at some of the frames I pull you will see some dark/brown areas and that’s entry a queen had laid eggs previously but in a honey super they backfill those cells with honey. I should have pulled a frame of brood (eggs/larva) and shown in the video but wasn’t thinking about it. I always leave more honey than I think they will need. I also normally try to only extract frames that are capped off because those are the ones that have the proper moisture %. I normally try to leave 2 deep boxes and often a medium or two of honey depending on the colony size. Bees will fly to find nectar and they say up yo a couple miles. I don’t worry so much about how many colonies per acre where we are because they have a lot of wooded areas they can go to trees, clover and wild flowers. We have probably 60 fruit trees, blackberries and several gardens and the honeybees love it. We were just talking the other day about how much better the gardens have been with the bees closer to them to pollinate. It’s truly amazing. The extractor is a Maxant brand and the honey uncapper I got from Mann Lake. I also have a hot knife but I like this one better. I also normally save some comb honey each year for us because I love to chew it and the wax. I’m spoiled. 😃 Let me know if you have any other questions. Thanks for watching and for the questions. Blessings and stay well!
Here is the link to Mann Lake. www.mannlakeltd.com/beekeeping/extraction-bottling/honey-extraction/uncapping-plane/ Here is the link to the extractor : www.maxantindustries.com/extractors.html As far as the best plants…. It depends on what you want your honey to be influenced by. We love the taste of ours because of the fruit trees, berries and wild flowers/trees. Some sunflowers are really good for bees as well as clover, black locust trees, plum trees and sourwood trees. The bees are pretty smart to they will figure it out. 😀
@@OutdoorsandCountryLiving Thanks again for the reply! The improvement to your garden is well-noted. That was an idea I want to do on my property, for my garden, and you've confirmed that idea. Thank you also for the insight on collecting in the Fall VS Spring. I will study this further. I, too, like chewing on the honeycomb. We're both spoiled. And afterwards you can make candles from the wax!
@@OutdoorsandCountryLiving Thanks for the links! Will bookmark them. Also thanks for the list of plants to research. Only one I knew of was star thistle, but will investigate these plants as well!
