Quote:
Originally Posted by Iowanian
Harvesting. I've posted a couple of times about that with pics. The time it takes I guess depends on how many hives you have, what equipment you have and how you're processing. Grove would have a different answer than I would, because from what I understand he takes full combs, crushes/smashes them and drains honey off into jars.
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I assume he means me.
I'll describe my process, but here's several videos, one of which is the harvesting process after I've taken a box from them.
https://www.icloud.com/sharedalbum/#B0U53qWtHWrV5T
He's correct, I take full boxes, because I don't run frames. There's a lot I don't do, but I don't begrudge anyone keeping bees however they want.
So for the Warré hive style that I run, you add a box to the BOTTOM of the stack in the spring, and you take a box off the TOP of the stack in the fall or whenever you decide to harvest. (Some guys harvest in mid summer or even spring.)
The theory is that in a natural cavity, the bees are observed to start at the top, and build comb downwards. This hive style mimics an "endless" tree cavity.
The downside is that you regularly get honeycomb that at one point contained brood. Every time a cell is used for rearing brood, the pupae leaves a papery husk when it hatches as an adult. Nobody likes the taste of husk, so having former brood comb holding honey is a negative for some people, and you certainly can't make cut comb out of it.
Another downside is that it takes a lot of bee energy (read: honey) to make wax, so forcing a colony to make their own honeycomb could be considered energy that is wasted instead of letting them not spend that energy (because you provide them with either already drawn comb or plastic comb)
The upside of this system is that I believe bees are made to make wax, and they're quite good at it. So letting them build their own comb in some ways lets them fully be themselves.
Another upside is that the comb gets renewed frequently. The queen is often laying in cells of freshly created comb, or just one year old. It's a known thing that toxins build up in the wax, and that wax which is re-used year after year contains more toxins than freshly built wax.
Another upside is that I don't generally do squat to my bees. The MO Conservation has guidelines as far as "every 10 days do X", and "every 30 days do Y", and for some folks that's part of the fun, but for me, NOT doing those things is definitely part of the fun.
I pay em a quick visit in the spring to add a box, and a quick visit in the Fall to take a box. The rest of the time I just enjoy em, look in the windows or sit and watch the entrance.
They work for me, so I get to treat em kindly...by leaving them alone. Other people get to treat theirs kindly....by treating them for pests or cutting out queen cells or whatever they want.
I don't use fume boards, but I've often used a thin box with a bee escape in it. This lets the bees which are in the honey box (that I'm about to take) make their way down to the rest of the bees, but doesn't let them come back up. A one way door so to speak.
So I leave this bee escape in-between the topmost box and the rest of the boxes for 24hours before I take the top box off.
If I don't use that method, I'll just take the top box off, put it on a solid surface (so no bees go out the bottom) and then place a bee escape on top. This escape uses some window screen rolled into a cone. The bees come out of the top of the honey box, crawl up the cone, then fly out and back to the hive.
There's a video of that at the same link.
Lots of ways to skin these cats, and I love it that so many of you are keeping or thinking about keeping bees.