Learn all about harvesting honey from your beehive!
Shop the tools: [ Ссылка ]
Captions:
Before you harvest honey for the first time, keep in mind some beekeepers chose to do so in the fall, while some wait until spring. By waiting until spring, you leave your bees with full honey stores, giving them the best chance of survival through winter by way of maximum food supply.
Check with local beekeepers if you are unsure of how much honey to leave your bees for winter. You will want to be cautious with how much you harvest. Since a colony's sole purpose is to create enough food stores for their health and success through winter and into spring, it is always better to leave more than to take too much and put the colony at risk
We recommend leaving all the honey on most first year hives so that it can become established and have the best chance of survival through the coldest months.
When harvesting honey, accept that it will be messy! Doing it in a garage or place away from nosy, foraging bees will make your life easier, just be sure it's a space that can be easily cleaned up later with a hose.
Regardless of how you plan to gather honey, tools you will want for taking boxes or bars and cutting the comb are: your hive tool, a good knife, and possibly your smoker and brush. A swarm bag can be helpful too. If you are harvesting multiple boxes, it's nice to have a pace to set one and cover it so that bees attracted to the free food can't land and gather on the box or bars you just cleaned out.
Bee escape boards are a great way to clear bees out of surplus honey boxes on both Langstroth and Warre hives. Put escape boards directly below the boxes of honey you would like to harvest with the yellow "bee maze" facing down. Leave them on for a couple days when the outside temperature is dropping into the 50s or below for the most success. Now when you go to remove the box of honey, most bees will be out of the box. Note: if there is ANY brood in the honey box, the bees will NOT leave the box and you should not harvest it.
Foundationless hives can be harvested two ways: by cutting off, then crushing and straining the comb, or by making cut comb honey.
A bucket strainer is an easy way to let gravity and heat do the work. By cutting combs into the top bucket, then crushing it up and letting it drain through to the bottom, the effort for the 'keeper is minimal. Do this on a nice, hot day for quick results. You will want to crush and stir the comb in the bucket a few times to get all of the honey possible. What remains in the top bucket is mostly wax that can then be rendered.
Cut comb honey is highly sought after and hard to find. Not only is it beautiful, but it's delicious and utilizes the whole comb, as the bees intended. A simple, handled comb cutter is all that's needed.
A crusher strainer is a heavy tool that crushes combs and leaves the wax behind. It can be simply hosed off after use and dried in the sun.
Music: "Tribal" by Wiki Chaves ([ Ссылка ])
