For those who appreciate the healthiest alternative to refined sugar, honey is like fine wine. It comes in a wide variety of flavors influenced by the flowers that the bees get the nectar from.
I grew up keeping bees, and years ago got into doing what they call cut outs. A cut out is live bee removal and relocation, a very good idea if you have bees living in your house or as in this case under a shed floor.
We use a bee vac that my son and I built that allows us to regulate the amount of suction to capture the bees in vented buckets. We use rubberbands to hold the portions of the honeycomb containing baby bees (the brood) in frames that go in a regular bee box. Because of the weight of the honey and how fragile the comb is we cannot put it into frames. Once the bees build out new comb on frames reinforced with wire and wax foundation they are strong enough to hold honey.
Once the bees are contained and the brood and honey removed we take the bees to a suitable location and set them up in their new hive box.
When the brood is there the bees usually stay, but to make it even more likely we often put the queen in a cage in the hive. The worker bees feed and care for her, and after a few days we go back and release her.
The honeycomb goes into buckets and is later crushed to release the honey, and then drained with a large screen.
Some impurities are heavy and go to the bottom, and some like bits of sawdust or wax float to the top and are skimmed off. When harvesting honey from kept hives it stays clean, but cut outs are often in awkward locations making it impossible to prevent stuff getting in the honey. The honey is too good to waste, and once gravity has had time to act on it, the honey is clean and good to eat.
This may seem like a lot of work, but with raw honey costing 50 dollars a gallon, and the ability of a strong colony to make more for years, it is a win win deal for a beekeeper. We often get paid as well.
Here are some pictures from a job we did last night. There were two colonies successfully removed from under the floor of a shed.
First we cut a section of the floor, then lifted it onto the saw horses.
Then we worked on vacuuming bees and removing honeycomb.
Finally after a while we got to the brood in the center and put it into frames.
Then into the box.
Here is a look at a bucket of new comb full of honey.
This is one of many things we do as family. I thought others might find this interesting.
I grew up keeping bees, and years ago got into doing what they call cut outs. A cut out is live bee removal and relocation, a very good idea if you have bees living in your house or as in this case under a shed floor.
We use a bee vac that my son and I built that allows us to regulate the amount of suction to capture the bees in vented buckets. We use rubberbands to hold the portions of the honeycomb containing baby bees (the brood) in frames that go in a regular bee box. Because of the weight of the honey and how fragile the comb is we cannot put it into frames. Once the bees build out new comb on frames reinforced with wire and wax foundation they are strong enough to hold honey.
Once the bees are contained and the brood and honey removed we take the bees to a suitable location and set them up in their new hive box.
When the brood is there the bees usually stay, but to make it even more likely we often put the queen in a cage in the hive. The worker bees feed and care for her, and after a few days we go back and release her.
The honeycomb goes into buckets and is later crushed to release the honey, and then drained with a large screen.
Some impurities are heavy and go to the bottom, and some like bits of sawdust or wax float to the top and are skimmed off. When harvesting honey from kept hives it stays clean, but cut outs are often in awkward locations making it impossible to prevent stuff getting in the honey. The honey is too good to waste, and once gravity has had time to act on it, the honey is clean and good to eat.
This may seem like a lot of work, but with raw honey costing 50 dollars a gallon, and the ability of a strong colony to make more for years, it is a win win deal for a beekeeper. We often get paid as well.
Here are some pictures from a job we did last night. There were two colonies successfully removed from under the floor of a shed.
First we cut a section of the floor, then lifted it onto the saw horses.
Then we worked on vacuuming bees and removing honeycomb.
Finally after a while we got to the brood in the center and put it into frames.
Then into the box. Here is a look at a bucket of new comb full of honey.
This is one of many things we do as family. I thought others might find this interesting.
