Honey Harvesting Descriptive Transcript

Summary: Paul Kelly, research and apiary manager, shows how to harvest honey from a beehive.  

00:04 - 00:25
[The video opens with footage of Paul Kelly harvesting honey from an open hive. The text “Harvesting Honey” fades in. The video transitions to a montage of seven shots showcasing honey bees and different elements of the research centre, ending with footage of a bee taking off from a yellow flower as the logo for the Honey Bee Research Centre fades in.]

00:26 – 00:59
[Cut to medium shot of Paul in the apiary speaking beside a hive with an active bee smoker on top. Paul holds a long narrow brush.]

Paul Kelly: Hi everybody. We're here today to talk about harvesting honey. We've talked earlier in another video about how to super the hives. We're at the mid to end of July here now starting to think about harvesting our summer honey and in this area we harvest honey typically late July and then again in mid-September. So our goal is to have all these boxes [Paul refers to the hives stacked beside him.] full of honey by the end of July and then we'll super the colonies again after we harvest 
this honey. 

00:59 – 01:24
Paul: We're going to talk about three different methods of harvesting honey: one is using a bee brush, the other is using a bee escape, [Paul holds up a rectangular wooden board with a triangle on one side and a screened hole in the centre.] this is called a Quebec escape board, and the last one is using a leaf blower, which we've modified and shortened it up so that it can work as a bee blower. You'll see that in action in a moment.

01:24 - 02:00
Paul: So we are going to harvest the honey from this hive here, let's just see what's inside. Puff a bit of smoke at the entrance, set the lid down upside down a good step away and we'll peel back the inner cover. Lots of bees, not a lot of honey up in this box here. I'm looking down and I don't see cappings here, I just see open cells, so that one is not ready to harvest, so we are just going to cover it back up again and set it off on to the over turned lid.

02:01 - 03:03
Paul: Well, we'll look in here. Wow that looks fantastic. Lots of capped honey down in here. [Camera zooms in on frames in open hive.] It's capped right over to this outside frame here, so this one is ready to harvest. So the first method using a bee brush what we do is we loosen up a number of frames and then we can take those frames out [Paul removes one frame and shows it to the camera.] and it's quite easy to brush the bees off when the surface of the comb is capped, but we just it's kind of flicking motion like this. We flick off like that, we avoid long sweeps because you kind of role the bees and crush them. Periodically you need to run this brush under water to wash the honey off otherwise it gets quite hard. So there we've got one frame with all the bees removed. [Camera zooms out bringing Paul back in to view.] Of course we don't want to take the bees with us when we harvest the honey. We're then going to put it into a box that has no frames in it and cover that up immediately.

03:03 - 03:38
Paul: When we are harvesting honey one thing we have to be really conscience of is robbing. If we are exposing a lot of honey the smells are there and if the bees aren't getting much nectar they'll come and start robbing this honey, so we keep it covered up as much as possible to keep the bees from getting it back in there and once robbing gets started it's very difficult to stop it. [Paul removes another frame from the hive and brushes the bees off.] But you just go through frame at a time, brush the bees off, look at that beautiful capped honey there and then covering it up as we move along.

03:38 - 03:57
[Paul continues to remove and brush off frames.]

Paul: This takes a considerable period of time but if you are only dealing with a small number of colonies it's a perfectly adequate way to harvest honey. Just brushing the bees off like so. That's enough of that you get the idea there. What we are now going to do is talk about using a bee escape.

03:57 - 04:47
Paul: With a bee escape it's a two-step process. [Paul puffs smoke on the open hive with a bee smoker.] We have to take the honey supers off the hive, put the bee escape on, put the honey supers back on and then we come back in several days. The ideal time is about after two days. The cooler the evenings are, the better it works [Paul removes the honey supers from the hive and places them on the ground.] because the bees move down at night to keep the brood warm and the cooler it is the more of that action there is. So set all of those supers off, every one of them is full, pry it out of there. You can see how I am setting the supers on kind of a crisscross pattern here so there is very little contact and you are not squishing many bees.

04:47 - 05:32
Paul: Now what we are going to do is we are going to take a honey super that was extracted last year. [Paul places the super on top of the hive.] So it's empty, the cells have been extracted and that'll give them some space to work on, then we will put our bee escape in place. The screen side goes down and we have arrows here to indicate what's up just so that we can see once the supers are back on make sure we've put this on the right way. It only works that way around. Then we just set these supers back in place. [Time-lapse footage of Paul placing supers back on hive.]
Just brush a few bees off there. [Paul places the internal cover and lid on the hive.]

05:33 - 06:17
Paul: It's very important once you are using a bee escape that there are no holes where bees can get in. Once the bees move down through that and go through the bee escape they can't get back up so there is nobody home to protect this honey. [Cut to close-up of side of hive.] If there are holes here robber bees could get in and steal the honey and there's a lot of fighting and dead bees and so on so you don't want that to happen. So what we use is painters' tape to paint any cracks that there may be and we make sure [Return to medium shot of Paul beside the hive.] the inner cover is on good, there's no upper entrance at all and that will be fine. So we come back after two nights and then we can just lift the honey off the hive and take it into extracting there will be no bees present. So that's that method.

06:17 - 07:10
Paul: The last method I am going to show you is using a bee blower and what we do with that is take the honey off the hive. [Paul removes the lid and the first super and sets them to the side. He stands the second super on its side.] The top box wasn't very full so I'm not going to harvest that box. And then we get a leaf blower going and we blow in between the bottoms of the frames and we turn the frames like pages of a book so we can blast the bees out. Once that's done we just haul the honey away. So we'll get this blower going and show you how that works. [Paul puffs smoke on the super and open hive and uses the blower to blow air between each frame.]

07:42 - 08:43
[Footage cuts to him standing beside the bottom piece of the hive.]

Paul: So we've removed the honey from this hive and now we are ready to give it more space. This box here came off the hive and it was only about half full so we'll put that back on. And it's mid-July so there's still lots of honey going to be coming back in. So we'll give it an extra box on top of that and now that's supered ready to go for the late summer crop and we'll add probably another box there for the fall flow as well and just harvest all this honey in the mid-September. When we harvest honey in mid-September we use the same methods, a brush or a bee escape or a blower, but at that point we are not giving them supers to fill we're leaving them just with their brood chamber and then we carry on with the fall management then. Thanks for watching. Happy honey harvest.