Beekeeping Tips and Techniques

Honey Extraction and Processing

In this video, the speaker is excited to harvest honey from his beehives. He checks each box to see if they are ready for extraction and finds that some have a lot of nectar but not enough capped honey to extract. He explains that the bees are backfilling the brood nest with nectar, which is okay because they still have other boxes to raise brood in. He also mentions that the bees can become irritable when the weather changes, especially when it's going to rain. He eventually finds a few boxes that are ready for extraction and takes them to give the bees more space to put more honey.

- It is the first honey harvest of the year.

- The top box is not ready to extract, but there is nectar in the cells.

- Weather changes make bees finicky, especially when it's going to…

The video shows a beekeeper checking on a hog half comb box, which is a type of comb honey production. The beekeeper gives the bees some smoke and removes the box to harvest the honey. The hog half comb box is a plastic cassette with a wax-coated foundation, which the bees build up from. The beekeeper shows off the different levels of comb completion, with some not fully filled out and others looking perfect.

The honey in the uncapped cells is still sellable and looks neat. The beekeeper got the hog half comb kit from Betterbee for around $110, which came with the wooden super and refill kits. The beekeeper thinks it was worth the investment and will be able to sell the comb honey for a profit. The process was simple and the beekeeper only had to put the box on the hive and let the bees do their…

Harvesting Honney

• The setup for extracting the honey involves a honey bucket with a honey gate, a clean lid with a center cut out, a food-grade bucket with holes drilled in the bottom, and a five-gallon paint strainer.

• The paint strainer is used to filter out any impurities from the honey.

• The two hives are opened, and two and a half frames are removed for extraction.

• The extracted honey amounts to nearly a gallon.