Pest and Disease Management
• This is the third part of a crash course, covering pests, parasites, diseases, and varroa management.
• The section will be covered in five or six videos.
• The focus of today's video is honeybee pests and parasites.
• Wax moths are a significant problem for honeybees that burrow through and destroy combs.
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.
Raising your own queens in beekeeping allows for selection of the best queens and spreading of genetics throughout the colony
- It is cost-effective and produces better results than buying commercially.
- A fire frame nuke box is all that is needed to raise fine quality queens.
- It is important to pull frames with larvae and nurse bees to ensure successful queen rearing.
- An excluder can be used to prevent the queen from being pulled with the frame.