Harvesting Honey - Harvesting Honey From a Beehive - Harvesting Honey From a Flow Hive

You know the best thing about harvesting pure honey is when you can drink the pure honey from the honey pot. I feel like we need the food. G'day and welcome back to the Weedy Garden again. This episode we're going to harvest a bit of honey. Welcome back to a beautiful morning here in the sunshine. Good morning bees. Time to harvest some delicious honey. It's good to have a little bit of water beside your bees so they can always have something to drink and bees can't swim. So it's nice to have a little bit of log or stone or something like that that they can stand on and then and walk around and drink from so they don't drown because if they sit up here and they slip off they're going to drown. So good idea to have a little platform. These flow hives come with a little ant trap which is a little system where you put oil in the bottom of it to stop the ants crawling up. It really works but you've got to also keep the long grass away. If they crawl up the grass they can come onto the hive via the grass to pull all the grass out and keep the weeds away from from your hive. So I'm just going to do some maintenance on the flow hive. It's got these little legs at the bottom that stops the ants from coming in. You can see these ants here. See the little ants there? There's ants all around here but they're not coming up here. They're quite clever. I'll show you what it is. You notice I don't have my bee suit on. It's because I'm not disturbing the bees and I'm just being really chilled. You know I've got no stress hormones in me or anything like that so there they can sense that I'm chilled. Just put a bit more oil in here. Okay so I just tighten that down so it covers up the oil and the ants they can't get in because they they can't get through that little moat. It's like a little moat around a castle. So I just do all four of those. Just clean the bottom of this out. Get all the dead ants and the gunk out and put some new oil in. I just squirt enough in so it just starts to overflow and to make it a lot easier to screw these off and on. I get my wire brush and I just give it a little scrape around the thread there because then that just takes any any dirt off. Makes it easy to screw up and down. All right so all of them have got oil now. Just put this last one on and we'll have a look at the hive beetle trap. Similar thing with the oil. So this is the hive beetle trap in here. It's again it's just a lot of oil and it looks really healthy actually. You can see a little bit of pollen here. A lot of dead hive beetles. So I'll take this over to the compost and clean it and put some fresh oil in. Let's chuck this in the compost. Yeah lovely. So nice and clean. Back in. I'm gonna put some oil. Ordinary vegetable oil. This is vegetable oil everybody. As long as the hive beetle can't swim in it. So just put a nice little big lot of oil in here. Gonna have to use the rest of what I've got you can see. See the hive beetle comes in here and the bees they knock it out and kick it out and blow it out and it'll fall down and the oil trap, they fall into the oil trap and they can't get out. So that's the end of them. So that's a really good way to do it. If you didn't have the oil trap then the bees would keep them out but they've got to work extra, extra, extra hard to keep all these hive beetles away. So this is a brilliant little setup and this is a little ventilation. You can put it on this way or that way depending on if it's hot or cold. If you want to, if you want to keep the warmth in you turn it that way so it blocks off the ventilation. Keeps them, keeps them warm but we want it open. Always have it open here in northern New South Wales because it's always pretty warm and then just close that off again. So that's ready to go. That's pretty much all the maintenance I do on that. So now we'll harvest some honey. So put on these little catches here. So yeah, show you how easy it is. I would never have got bees if it wasn't for the Flow Hive. You know, I've only had good experience from the Flow Hive. I've got my little cloth with me because I have that with me every time I work on this just to, just to clean everything up. Just keep it nice and clean. Okay, let me put this on. Then we need our little tool. We've got to open the top up here as well like that. Alright, so this is the back of the Flow Hive. You've got one, two, three, four, five, six frames and usually the bees, they'll start to make their honey from the inside out. So as these ones get filled, it gets filled. So the last ones that are filled are the ones on the outside. So if you look through the side here, you can see if I open this up, there you go. You can see all these are capped and it's as easy as pie. So the thing to understand is that the top frames here, they're made of plastic. It's high quality food grade plastic. But the bees, before they do anything with it, they coat the whole thing with their own beeswax. Okay, so the way the Flow Hive works is there's a bunch of cells like half hexagon shape and another row of ones that are half hexagon shape and they move up and down inside this slider. And when they come together, they make the cell, the honey cell. And when they join up, the bees, they go around and they kind of put their wax just around the edge here to level it, to seal it all in. Then they coat the whole thing with wax and then they start to fill it with nectar. And as that cell gets full of nectar, there's another bee that sits there and flaps her wings and they dehydrate the honey to a certain level. So then it's ready and it's turned from nectar into honey and then they cap it. And it's important to know that if you harvest the honey before the honey is capped, then you're harvesting honey that's still nectar. And what happens if you do that, you put it in the jar, smells nice, tastes nice and if you use it quickly, it's kind of okay. But if you leave it in the cupboard with the lid on, it could expand because it'll get fermented and it turns into like a mead honey. So it's a good idea to make sure that they're capped. So when I harvest, I always leave about a third to the bees. Although there's lots of flowers around here in the Weedy Garden at the moment and it's full summer, it's always a good idea to leave some honey for the bees because if we get thunderstorms and wet rain for weeks on end, like we did a few years ago, all the bees, they can't fly around in the rain. They get bombarded by water droplets so they stay inside the hive and start eating from their supplies. And if they run out of that and they still can't come out, then they'll start to perish. So it's always a good idea to leave some honey for them. But one of these little bees, they can fly up to six kilometres around this valley to find flowers and when they come back and they've found some flowers, they'll buzz their wings in a certain way so all the other bees understand what they're saying and they'll know exactly where that flower is even if it's four and a half kilometres away. But I think there's a lot of flowers in the Weedy Garden to keep them busy and it gives that diversity of the taste of the honey. I've got a lot of diverse flowers which gives them really nice diverse flavours so any jar of honey can taste different from the next. They all taste delicious. I'm going to take these two frames and I'm going to take these two frames and I'm going to leave these two in the middle for the bees. So let's start off with this one. So take the little cap off the top and we get a jar. Okay, so then we have this little thing here. It's a little, like a little funnel. So we just screw this little cap off here and we stick this in. It's got a little nozzle on the bottom here. It needs to go in the bottom. You can feel it go in and there we go. We've got a little tap on it. Just place our jar so the honey's going to run out. Watch this, the honey's going to run out soon. Then we get this little tool and then we set it down the bottom. There's two little compartments here. You can see the bottom and the top and it's got this little plastic divider. If you put in the bottom first, I'm not going to put it all the way through and try to turn because that means I'm opening all the frames at once. It's quite difficult. So what I'll do is I'll just start from the beginning and just slowly turn. You can hear it sort of click open. See that? And then just slowly put it in and turn a little bit at a time. And if you look on the other side here, you can see how it's opening and then we've got honey coming out. No bees were disturbed. If you look up here in the cells, the way they move apart, the bees barely know that you're even taking the honey. I'll just let that run into the jar. Yes, we'll see that honey coming in there. If you do this in the wintertime or when it's cooler, yeah, the honey comes out a lot slower. Okay, see sometimes there's a little bee that falls into the honey pot. So what I'll do is I'll put it up the front and now I'll lift the honey off her. You can see they're almost empty when they're almost not dripping anymore. So I'll close this one up here. You always got to just close this up first and let it drip out. But it's already been broken so they're still going to, the honey's just going to keep dripping out now. Even though we take this away, the honey's still going to drip down and stay in the bottom here. But the bees, they'll come and eat it and reuse it. So that's, they're very efficient in that way. They clean up after themselves and they clean up all this honey. The bees can have the rest. I always like to clean this up when I've finished harvesting. Let me close that down. Thank you bees. You know the best thing about harvesting honey? Cheers everybody. Just drinking the fresh honey from the honey pot. I'm like Winnie the Pooh. Well, hope you enjoyed this video. So that's it for this video. I'm not quite sure what the next video is going to be about but tune in anyway because the Weedy Garden video is always going to be different and exciting. Hope you enjoyed this one. Have a nice day and I'll catch you later. If you do like my content then please subscribe. It makes a big difference. Have a nice day and I'll catch you later.