Beekeeping Seminar - February 15, 2020

A hive, a backyard beehive, and then we're going to talk about extracting honey.

I'm Gary Brabant. I'm a beekeeper. I live in Felsmere. Everybody knows where Felsmere is.

Anybody who doesn't know where Felsmere is, we're trying to hide Felsmere.

We're trying to keep it away from people because it's a little treasure.

At least it's ours.

My wife Mary and together

we have about 25 beehives.

We extract and bottle our own honey and we do sell it.

We do sell it at the Felsmere feed store.

We also do bee removals and I think myself I'm probably one of the least expensive bee removal beekeepers in the area.

I say that because I not only don't charge you an awful lot or an arm and a leg like some people will.

I will not kill bees.

All bees are live removals.

I guarantee my work for 30 days and if the bees come back at any point,

call me.

I will go right back out and do the removal over or do what I have to do to to correct it.

Today we'll talk about the importance of beekeeping.

Over here we have a nice little chart

that has a great deal of information. So that you're familiar, there's only one queen per hive.

One, no more.

If there were a second one or more, the queens would fight until one of them was killed.

So there's only one and it'll always stay that way.

She's the primary

source for that hive to keep the hive healthy.

She's laying eggs anywhere from 1,000 to 1,500 eggs a day.

So she could and I've heard up to 2,000 but I'm not so sure it gets to be that much.

But she can lay 1,500 eggs a day and when she does it goes into the development stages.

It takes 21 days for a bee from the time the egg is laid till the time that bee hatches out of the

brood. 21 days and then that bee will live anywhere from 35 to 40 days and then die.

It flies its wings off. Basically it kills itself trying to provide for the hive.

So now in the wintertime up north, bees that go into winter don't generally leave the hive very often except maybe to do a cleansing flight and they'll live all the way through the winter into the spring because they're not out flying like its predecessors

from last summer.

So they're young, they work, they maintain the hive, clean things up, constantly doing something.

They all have a job.

They sleep very seldom and they work.

They have various jobs all the way up to guarding the hive, making sure that intruders don't come in.

Intruders being bees from another hive, wasps, you name it.

Anything that's not welcome to the hive is looked out after and they're clean freaks.

They love to clean. I can't really talk a whole lot louder but I'll try.

So you've got your queen right here in the middle.

She's the big one with the long

abdomen, I guess it is.

And then over here are your worker bees and there can be anywhere from on a hive like this, this size, 30-40,000 bees.

It's a lot of bees.

And then the drones.

The drone is this big one here and if you look at the picture you can see his eyes are much bigger than

the rest of them.

And the drone's purpose in life is it takes 18 days for a drone to hatch, I believe it's 18 days.

And when they hatch, the worker bees actually help them come out of the brood chamber to get out.

They help them escape.

They don't do a whole lot in the hive other than eat and walk around and get in the way of all the other bees.

So they're constantly eating, constantly getting in the way, but you only maybe have on a good size hive like this, you may only have maybe a hundred drones and not many more than that.

Their sole purpose in life is to breed with a new queen, a virgin queen.

A virgin queen is born in the hive.

After about a week, she goes on her maiden flight.

She goes up about 300 or 400 feet up in the air and there's a drone congregation area, a DCA, where all the drones will go up and fly

and they wait and they see her with those big eyes of theirs.

They see that queen coming and then

she will mate about 30 times.

After that, she'll go directly back to her hive and never leave that hive again unless they swarm.

We'll talk about swarms later.

But she'll stay in that hive and then she'll start about maybe five to seven days later, she'll start laying eggs and then

1,000, 1,500 eggs a day from that point on. The drone, as soon as they mate, they die.

That's it.

So they hatch out, they eat all the time, get in the way, fly up about 300 or 400 feet, mate and die.

That's a whole life of a drone.

So it's not a very exciting life, but that's the way bees are.

You can see why the abdomen on the queen bee is so long is when she's laying her eggs, you can see she has to stick that all the way down into that honeycomb.

So you have to be aware of that.

So she has to have a long abdomen in order to get to the bottom of that honeycomb.

She inspects every cell before she lays an egg.

And if it's not to her liking, she won't

lay an egg in it.

After a bee is hatched out, the first job that that worker bee has is to go back in and make its bed, clean up the hole that it came out of.

And that's it.

And if it's not to the queen's liking, once again, that bee will go right back in and clean it up a second time.

All right.

So we're going to talk about the importance of bees, what a beehive is, its components, protective clothing and equipment that you should have when you're going out messing with your bees.

Managing, I'm sorry, managed or domestic hives.

This would be considered a domestic hive.

The bees are not domesticated.

Don't get me wrong.

We have them in a controlled environment.

That's about all it is.

They're still bees and they'll still sting.

And I've been stung a million times and I'll tell you, it still hurts.

So don't think that you ever get used to getting stung.

You don't.

You don't look forward to it.

That's for darn sure.

We'll talk about a little bit, we'll touch on feral honeybee hives.

The feral hives, the ones you find around in trees.

How to establish your own hive and maintaining your own hive.

And then at the end, we'll talk about honey extractions.

We'll talk a little bit about that if you, if you get to the point to where you're going to want to extract honey on your, from your hives.

Importance of the bees.

Other than the three major types of European honeybees,

there are over 300 different pollinators in Florida.

And when I talk about pollinators, I'm not just talking about honeybees, wasps, flies, moths, butterflies, ants.

There's a lot of different creatures out there that are designated as pollinators.

So pollinating is critical for the, well, for the life of a plant in order for it to survive and produce

the fruit that it does, it does bear.

But the biggest thing of concern is that 80% of our food, what we eat, all relates to pollination.

So it's not just the honeybee, but it's important that we don't just inadvertently kill a bunch of pollinators for some off-the-wall reason.

Without pollinators, like I say, we would lose about 80% of our food.

We would, we would, bees go away, soon after we'll be going away.

Or pollinators go away soon after we'll be going away.

Beehive. The definition of a beehive is a structure in which bees are kept, typically in the form of a dome or a box. In this case, a box.

The Langstroth hive, which is what you see here, is probably the most common.

And then there's another one called the top bar, which is long.

it has the same type of frames inside of it and you can adjust it by putting in separators,

you can adjust it from 10 frames out to as many as 30, 40 frames depending on the length of the hive itself.

So, and those are probably the more common ones that you'll find with the backyard beekeeper and that's what we are, we're backyard beekeepers, hobby beekeepers.

We're not in a commercial sense.

Commercial beekeepers, a whole different world.

They send truckloads of bees to various places, groves, almond groves out in California from

Florida, apple groves or apple orchards up in Pennsylvania and Vermont, blueberries up

in Maine, strawberries in Florida.

We just, those commercial guys send out tons and tons

of bees, hundreds and hundreds of hives and they get paid for it for pollination because without the pollination the product would either not produce or produce poorly.

So, they bring in the bees to increase their crop.

The hive itself, what it consists of and you

can see it here, there's a bottom board, that's this bottom section here.

Then the hive body which is this white section here and you'll see everything is a different color.

Why you ask? Well, there's no reason.

It's the only kind of paint I could get at Home Depot that was kicked back and Home Depot said, we can't sell it so give it to you for five bucks a gallon.

So, that's what we painted it with.

And then when we get tired we mix up the colors and we end up with something like this.

But anyways, there's no rhyme or reason for the coloring.

It's just the color we happen to have available at the time.

We have an entrance reducer.

At the front you see that piece of wood.

It's got maybe a three inch hole in it.

I can rotate that and there's about a three quarter inch hole on the other side of it.

So, depending on the hive itself, if it's a weak hive, I would put it on the smaller

opening. A strong hive, I would have it on the larger opening.

That way the bees can come and go and not have any restrictions.

The inside of the hive, we have frames.

is a frame and there's ten frames in here in each one of these boxes.

To look at this, it looks a little nasty but it's got, that's drawn out honeycomb.

When you start out with the frame, it's just like this.

It's just pretty much clean.

When the bees start working

it, they start pulling out the wax.

They put wax in and they build up honeycomb.

This has been taking a beating.

It's been in the truck for a couple of days.

But you can pass it around and look at it if you'd like.

But that's the honeycomb that it pulls out.

And in time,

they'll get to a certain point.

They'll either start, the queen will either start laying eggs in it and they'll start developing brood.

Or if it's on the outside of the box, they'll start filling it up with pollen or honey or nectar.

It'll be nectar until it's full and

then they dry it out and it becomes honey. Inside, under the lid, we have an inner cover.

So you have an inner cover where it keeps the air flow circulating around inside so

you don't block it off. Then you have your top cover. It's called a telescoping cover.

And it also provides for air flow. The air gets up underneath it and gets into the hive.

Some of the concerns with, well, backtrack a little bit.

Some of the product that we

get other than honey is when we extract our honey from the frames, we have wax left over.

It's called cappings or whatever you want to call it.

You save those.

Save them, you melt them down and you can produce your own beeswax.

If anybody would like to see what beeswax looks like.

Yeah, it looks like a piece of cheese.

Don't bite into it.

So basically that's the construction of a hive.

So you've got your deep, the deep body is where the

brood and the queen will really concentrate her efforts to increase the population of

the hive.

And the top one, this is a medium.

We call it a medium super.

This is where the bulk of your honey is going to be made.

And you want to leave what you can for pollen

and honey down in the bottom box because the bees do eat that.

So you don't want to take all of their food away from them.

You want to leave them with something.

So you leave them with a healthy supply of food down here and you take what they made for you up here.

Take this and avoid anything in the bottom box if you can.

Okay, protective gear.

When you start working with bees, you want to have gloves.

Get some good gloves that will protect

your hand and a bee suit.

This one here is a mesh suit.

It's three layers thick and the bees cannot sting through it.

So I have a cotton one at home that actually is too warm to wear around here.

But the thing is, it's one single layer of cotton and when you're out working bees and you're sweating up a storm, the cotton sticks to you, bees go right through it.

Just nail you.

So you have your gloves.

Make sure you have proper footwear.

Tennis shoes.

No open-toed anything because if there's a piece of exposed flesh, it's

going to be exposed only for a second because you're going to be covering it up with your hands and everything else.

You're nailing them.

But you have a smoker.

A smoker is only

used to calm the bees down, hopefully.

When you open your hive up, before you open it up, you want to introduce some smoke to the entrance.

That drives the bees in.

Then when you lift up the top, you want to smoke a little bit, put the cover back down, let them settle for a few seconds, and then you can go back and take the top off and go in and work with your hive.

You want to work your hive at least every other week.

You don't have to go into it every day, but you want to go into it frequently so that you know the health of the hive.

You could be looking for parasites.

Three of the most common problems

we have around here are varroa mite, the wax moth, and the small hive beetle.

You want

to look for those and make sure that you don't have an overpopulation of any of those.

are small hive beetle lava, and this is lava of the wax moth. These are not from one hive.

These are from a number of hives.

If anybody cares to see those.

Then you want to have hive tools, tools to work with.

You'll have a brush and a hive tool itself.

The hive tool,

what it does is it helps you separate your frames when you start.

You have a little J hook here.

You can lift it up, pull out your frames, take a look at them, or you can use

your tool to move your frames around as you need to.

There's a scraper on here so you

can scrape off any wax buildup. There's a lot you can do with just this one tool alone.

You have a hive tool. Your brush, like I said, and that's to brush bees out of your way.

Gently brush them.

You don't want to be doing that.

You want to gently move them along so that they don't get hurt.

You don't kill them.

Because they're important to you, you need to keep them in good health.

Those are your tools.

Managed or domestic hives.

Like I had

said earlier, this is a domestic hive, managed hive. It's maintained by the backyard beekeeper.

That would be you folks if you're interested.

Which, by the way, how many of you are interested in having backyard bees? Some people I know are interested, but I don't know how many

To get started you need to do an awful lot of reading and familiarization.

YouTube, Pinterest is another source, and local bee clubs are very helpful in getting you started.

Mary and I are members of the Treasure Coast Beekeepers Association and we have a

a program that we have apiaries, oh I'm sorry, a apiary, and tomorrow they're actually having a

class on checking for varroa mites and hive beetles.

So they'll be in the apiary tomorrow and that's out on, what is it, the extension down in Fort Pierce off of Pico's in Fort Pierce.

You know where the old Highline Stadium or Highline building was in Fort Pierce? It's Pico's road is directly across from that and it goes west.

But they're going to be out there working the apiary

tomorrow. They go out there and we have our meeting next Wednesday at the club at the same place.

We meet out there once a month and it's this month the topic I believe is going to be

treatment for varroa and a couple of other topics. I can't recall right offhand what they are.

Fortunately I'm not giving the lecture.

Once a month you can go to the apiary, pardon,

it's in Fort Pierce off Pico's road at the Ag extension out there.

So anyways the

purpose for the maintaining a hive, backyard hive, is honey production for yourself, your friends, your neighbors, your father-in-law who's allergic to bees, and anybody else you can think of that might be interested in sharing your 60 pounds of honey.

The other things,

the wax.

You can use the wax for candles, lip balm, or whatever other thing you might consider wax for,

waxing the bottom of your skis or whatever. But there's always good some good use there.

And the fact that having the bees your garden will be pollinated.

So you shouldn't have any problem with a pollination and your flowers should, flowers and plants and mangoes and you name it should do really well.

The three common types of domestic honeybee.

We already talked about the Italian honeybee, very docile.

There's a Russian honeybee.

They're a little

darker in color and they're not too awful bad with the attitude. They've got a pretty decent attitude.

And the other one is, I want to say this, Carniolan.

It's, either way it's another pretty decent

breed of European honeybee. And around here you've got generally a pretty good mix of all.

A lot of the major beekeepers in the area raise Italian honeybees.

But still like I say when the queens do their maiden flight, you don't know what they're going to breed with.

So you're going to probably end up with a mix.

Right now a lot of the bees in order to, beekeepers in order to maintain the Italian strain, is they're doing artificial insemination.

They're breeding the queens artificially.

So and I have a friend of mine out in Felsmere who's doing that and I haven't seen him do it yet.

I've been into his little lab.

Mary and I went out there a few months ago and went into his lab.

But I'd actually like to see how he does it because it would have to be a very interesting process.

The African honeybee, also a fantastic honey producer, is very aggressive.

So you can't even legally have an Africanized hive in the state of Florida.

And Texas it's gotten so bad that that's pretty much all they have in the southern part of the state.

And Arizona as well.

You just,

after a while they'd take over.

A normal European honeybee hive will probably

naturally swarm once a year.

We'll talk about swarms in a minute.

But an Africanized hive can swarm up to as many as five times in a year.

So you can imagine how fast that those Africanized bees are going to take over at some point.

Fortunately in Florida they, well Africanized bees don't tolerate the cold very well.

Where the European honeybees do exceptionally well.

You can have them up in Canada and Alaska and whatever.

But the Africanized strain doesn't do very well in the cold.

So fortunately they're still going to be European honeybees as we go further north.

Unless they learn to become very resilient and be able to fight off the cold.

Feral honeybees, feral bees is basically what you have when you have like a knot hole in an oak tree and you've got bees living in it.

Or if you look up into the tree and you see an external hive up there hanging in the tree.

And those are feral hives.

You also find feral hives up in people's soffits in their homes, in the walls of their homes.

We had a gentleman up in Palm Bay last year.

Right as you walk into his entranceway to his house, on the other side of the plaster or the drywall, was a very large hive.

And they were coming in from outside, coming between the pad

and the wood that they had there. They were climbing up and they're working their way in.

And there were thousands of bees.

We had to do that removal.

We had to cut the wall out inside the house in order to get to the bees.

Or we had to take soffits out off the sides of the house

and remove the bees.

Even go up into the attic and push them out.

We push them out with smoke or with a chemical.

It's called BB gun.

It doesn't hurt the bees, but they don't like it.

So we spray that and they leave.

They come out of the hive.

Then we can vacuum them up and get rid of them.

But one of the keys to prevent you from having to have bees removed from your house is to walk around, take a look, and find any opening that's bigger than a three-eighths of an inch

and close it. Close it off completely. Because if you can close it off, they're not going to get in.

You shouldn't have a problem with it.

And that's the problem we find with soffits.

There's a little bit of room between the soffit and the fascia.

They're going in.

And they'll get in there and they will establish before you know it.

How to establish your own hive.

Busy Bee has quite an assortment of equipment that you can buy here.

Pretty much anything you need to get started as a beekeeper, they have it.

And I'm a very big proponent of keeping things local.

If you know a local resource for buying equipment, ideally that's what you want to do.

And Busy Bee has

I've talked with Danny.

He's the one of the managers here.

And he asked what we need to in order to provide to the customer.

And this basically is the layout here.

So you've got a complete hive box assembly.

You've got extra frames if you need them.

A feeder to feed the bees.

And this is a queen excluder.

A queen bee cannot get through that mesh.

Worker bees can.

The queen can't.

So to ensure that the queen doesn't go from the brood box down here up to the super,

to make sure that she doesn't come up here and then decide to start laying eggs up here,

you put this queen excluder between it. She can't come up. The other bees will come up.

They'll fill this with honey.

And there you go.

You've got all your honey product up here

and all your new eggs down below.

So that's the ideal way to do it.

And then you can go ahead and start making, getting your honey, making candles, doing all the nice things that you like to do.

When you get your box set up and ready to go, then you want to buy some bees.

Well, you can buy them or you can trap them, capture your own.

We'll talk about that in a minute.

But you can buy packages of bees, three to five pounds.

And a box like just this one here,

just the white box, easily put a three pound package of bees in there.

And get them started.

Put your entrance reducer down to the smallest hole.

And at that point,

giving it time, they'll start building.

And then next thing you know, you'll have this full of bees.

Then you put on your next super.

So basically you're looking at this with a cover on it.

Fills up.

Another box on top of that for the honey.

And if the population gets so big, you can actually put another one of these on top of it and then put the super, the honey super, on top of that.

And that'll keep them from swarming.

Feral hives, if you wanna try capturing your own hives, your own bees, you can put a box like this out,

all put together, but you wanna put a bait into it.

And I have this stuff, it's called Swarm Commander.

So if bees are out swarming, before they actually swarm,

you wanna take your Swarm Commander,

take one of your frames out, a little bit of spray of that on there, put it back in, and it's gonna draw the bees.

Probably gotta draw some bees now that I've done that.

But it'll draw the bees in.

The scent, I don't know if you can smell it or not, but it smells like lemongrass oil, doesn't it?

That's the biggest part of it.

Lemongrass oil is one of the better attractants for the bees.

So you can set this up and then set it where you want it, where you're gonna have your hive.

Don't set it someplace and then after the bees move in, relocate it because the bees are only gonna go right back to where the box was originally.

They won't stay with this box unless it stays

where you put it.

And they also have other hives, or what they call swarm traps, but what they are, it's a nucleus.

It's probably the size of the smaller box right here.

It's half the size of a regular hive

and it has five frames in it instead of 10.

And the nucleus is a great hive trap.

It's a great source for recovering bees.

When you do establish a hive in your yard, you wanna try to put it in an area where it's gonna get plenty of sunshine.

So in here, probably not so good because of all the shade.

I think I would probably put it more over towards those branches where the deadfall is,

but I would put it in an area that's gonna have plenty of sun.

So you know that they're gonna be able to at least have the heat during the winter. And they're a unique creature.

They can air condition their hive or they can heat it up.

They air condition by flapping their wings and just getting the air moving.

And they also can generate heat by flapping their wings.

So when it gets cold, they generate the heat and they keep the hive at about a 95 degree temperature,

even in the summer.

So 95 degrees year round.

Maintaining your hive, I already told you that they lay 1000 to 1500 eggs a day. That's an awful lot of eggs.

And we also talked about once it's established itself and it's grown to a certain point, you wanna put another box on top of this.

And if you decide that you wanna really be big into beekeeping and you wanna split your hive, then when this gets full, that would be the ideal time to do your split. That would be the time to take as many of the young bees out of here.

I say young bees.

You take as many bees as you'd like out of there, put it into a new box and reestablish a new box.

And the way you do that is the bees that are on here, you just go to your, you can imagine this being full of bees just all over.

Go to your new hive and just shake them into the new hive.

And then, or you could take that frame and just move it into the new hive.

But you gotta remember you've got honey stores that are in there. You've got baby eggs, baby bee eggs in there.

There's a lot of different things.

So you can do it however you want to.

And if you by chance move the existing queen from this hive into the new one by accident,

as long as there's brood, new brood in this box, they will create a new queen.

Or you can buy one.

You can buy a new queen.

It takes 17 days for the queen to hatch.

Once they, and then another week before she does her maiden flight, and then another week

before she starts laying eggs.

So you're looking at a month before you start having a viable queen in this box. You can go out and buy a queen tomorrow and she'll start laying that night.

So your choice.

Existing queen will keep them here if she's in here.

And you put the new queen in the new box so that they'll have a queen. And they, you put her in a cage,

in a little queen cage.

See, she found me.

I can tell you that in a second here.

This is a queen cage.

And when we put, you put the queen in here

and you close this all up.

After you get her in there, you close that all up.

Take this cap, this pink cap off.

And there's candy in there.

Actually, it's marshmallow.

And the bees on the outside will eat this candy and the queen will eat the candy coming this way. And they will eventually release her.

And it's taken three or four days.

She now is in the hive.

They've accepted her.

And she goes about her job producing more bees.

But this is a queen clip.

When we do our removals and we see the existing queen.

Now you gotta imagine 30, 40,000 bees on a wall in front of you.

And we have to find that one queen.

When we find her, we capture her in this.

She can't escape because these holes are the same size as that queen excluder.

And then we take this and basically our bee removal's about over with because all the bees are now gonna come to her.

And they're gonna go into this box, ideally.

So it works out, it works out good for us.

Which we have a removal to do tomorrow.

I mentioned earlier to do hive inspections periodically.

What you're looking for is parasite problems, wax moths.

If you see wax moths in there, you need to start treating them for wax moths.

The hive beetle, there's traps that you can put in there.

It's called, well, one of them is called a

beetle barn or beetle buster.

Beetle barn, it's a square piece of plastic with little holes in it on the side.

And they go in and they can't come out.

It's like a roach motel.

But use that.

And there's another one that fits across the top of the frames and you put mineral oil in it and they climb down in it, they hit the mineral oil, they can't get out, they can't figure out a way out of it.

Another way we do is we take the non-scented Swiffer.

Swiffer pads, and we cut those in half and lay them across the back and the beetles get into it.

The little hooks on their feet get caught up in the Swiffer pad and they can't get out, so they die.

Bees don't have that little hook, so the bees don't get into it so much.

And I'm sorry, you had a question and I, all right, there's, to buy queen bees, there's a number of places you can go. You can go on the internet.

One place up in Georgia, Chatsworth, Georgia, there's a guy up there called Dave.

His business is called Barnyard Bees.

He sells bees and queens individually.

There's a friend of mine out in Belsmere who sells queens and he's the one who's doing the artificial insemination. And he's getting bigger and bigger into queens.

Now I think he sends, how many did he say he mails out?

Hundreds a week, he's sending queens out constantly.

But his last name is Smith and it's called Charles,

Charles, he doesn't go by Chuck or Charlie.

It's Charles Smith and he's in Belsmere.

And I think you could actually find him on the web.

But I just call him, it's easier.

Nearly 40% of our bee population,

we have nearly a 40% decline in our bee population.

I'm sorry.

And that was last winter alone.

So those numbers are unsustainable.

We start keep losing bees as fast as we are, it's gonna become a problem.

Because food prices are gonna rise.

Due to the fact that pollination is going to be costly, so if the farmer's got to pay for pollination, you're going to pay for it in the long run. So just keep that in mind.

If you see bees, just don't go out inadvertently and kill them.

If you see a wild hive somewhere and it's a concern and you want to have it removed, by all means, get a hold of a beekeeper.

There's a lot of them that will come right out and do the work.

Some of them, like myself, we charge for.

There's a lot of work.

To start one hive, the average cost is about $500 each hive.

That's from everything, the equipment to buying the bees.

And then every additional hive after that averages about $300.

So you've got quite an investment in there.

That's why a lot of the beekeepers who do bee removals charge for their services.

And there's no guarantees that once we get those bees back to our property that they're going to be happy in this box.

They may just stay there for a few days and the queen says, I don't like the accommodation.

Maybe there's a tee under the mattress or something that's keeping me awake at night.

But if they don't want to be there, they're going to go.

They're going to pack up and leave.

The way you can tell is when you go back into your hive and you don't see any resources inside that honeycomb, all the pollen and all the nectar is gone and the bees are gone, you know that they've absconded.

They've taken everything and left.

Generally, when they do leave like that, they run out on you without paying their rent.

So I turn them into a credit bureau right away.

Because I don't want them back.

I'll take them back if they decide to come back.

All right.

Questions please hold off because we're going to talk a little bit about honey extracting now.

When you do your honey extracting, you've got various tools.

So imagine loaded with honey, capped.

You need an uncapping knife.

You have a bin underneath you.

You scrape all the capping off.

Once you've done that, the capping that doesn't come off with a knife, you take this little fork and you rake it. Now all the honey that's being exposed is going to start running down into this container.

Don't discard any of that.

Do the same thing on the other side.

Then you put this frame into an extractor.

It's a centrifugal extractor.

You can make one or you can buy one.

Or you can go about it the old-fashioned way and just take a spatula or whatever and just scrape all the honey off back into that bucket.

And then you've got to go through the separate the honey from the wax process.

So when you do that, you have two little screens.

This one here takes the bulk of everything out.

This takes the smaller stuff out of the honey.

And the honey just goes right through it and it fills up the bucket.

You get this filled up, you've got 62 pounds of honey.

So basically, that's the honey extracting.

Time to fill up your bottles to give to your neighbors.

You have a honey gate on the front of your bucket.

Close this down while you're extracting the honey.

Open it up to fill up your jars, your bottles, whatever.

And now you have raw, unadulterated, pure honey straight from the bees.

That pretty much is extracting honey.

It's tedious, a lot of work.

We have an electric.

We used to have a hand crank extractor that did three frames.

Now we have an electric one that does it.

It makes quite a bit of difference because it's about $600.

And that's the basic model.

You can go up to thousands, depending on when you go commercial.

But if you're a backyard beekeeper and you're doing it just for you, your own satisfaction, then by all means, you can just go ahead and do the extracting yourself and keep it cheap.

You know what Pinterest is?

You can actually...

It's a do-it-yourself...

It's a page.

It gives you instructions and all the measurements and everything you need.

But it's a do-it-yourself honey extractor, and your source of power is a hand drill, a cordless drill.

It's a five-gallon bucket, and I think there's three buckets involved.

Yeah, there's three buckets involved.

You drill holes in the bottom of this one.

It's pretty well laid out.

I looked at it, and I said, wow, this is really neat.

This is really neat.

I think that's how I would do it.

Because you want to get as much of the honey as you possibly can.

Yeah, that's, I think, how I would go about doing it.

I've got probably 12, 14 inches between my hives.

Yeah.

Bees have this amazing global positioning system built into their DNA.

They get up in the morning.

They go to the entrance, flap their wings a little bit, look and see where the sun is, and then they can go fly up to a three-mile radius and come right back within three feet of that hive.

They can go out, go that way, and then go that way, and then go over here, and then when it's time to go home, they'll come right back within three feet of that hive to find their hive.

The bees that try to intrude into another hive are called robber bees.

They're freeloaders.

They're looking for a free source of nectar.

They figure, hey, there's a beehive.

There's honey inside there.

I'm going to go get some.

Well, he'll try to go in.

She'll try to go in.

They're all girls.

She'll try to go in, and the guard bee will, in turn, attack her because she doesn't have the particular hive pheromone.

They know that she doesn't belong there.

Each hive has its own little hive pheromone.

When you move a beehive, you have to, in order for the bees to know to reorientate, you have to move it more than three miles from its existing place. Say I took a beehive from here, and I was going to put it somewhere else, that distance has to be greater

than three miles.

Then, when the bees do come out of that hive, everything is going to be totally different to them.

They're not going to recognize anything.

They'll have to do an orientation flight on their box, on their hive.

They'll fly around their hive.

They'll take a look at the sun.

They'll figure everything out.

Eventually, their GPS will program for this box, and you can just let them go.

They do an orientation flight, become familiar with where their location is, and then they go about doing their business.

Then, if you bring your bees back home later on, back to where you were, same process.

When they get back here, the distance is greater than three miles.

They'll do an orientation flight.

They'll go ahead and do their thing, and they'll figure out exactly where their home is.

Virgin queen.

Why a virgin queen?

Queens do get old.

All right?

I just told you that bees will probably live about 35, 40 days before they fly their wings off and die.

A queen, she'll probably lay eggs for two or three years.

The same queen, but eventually, she gets old.

She gets weak, and the hive picks up on that.

They realize that, hey, two weeks ago, we were getting 1,500 eggs a day.

Now, we're down to 800.

My queen is obviously not doing so well, so she'll lay another egg, and they'll develop that egg into a new queen.

Usually they do about six or seven queen cells at a time.

Of those six or seven queen cells, they'll develop them, and when they're getting ready to hatch, they'll dispatch that queen.

They will ball her up and kill her, the old queen.

The new queen hatches out, and say three or four of those new queens hatch out.

Then it's a battle to see who's the best.

They'll fight and kill each other, and then the one survivor will go to the other queen cells that are in the development stages, and she'll chew through those and kill the baby before she even hatches out. You could, but that's an awful lot of my time

spent watching for queens.

That's a job for Charles.

That's what Charles does.

That's right.

So, and now you've got your new queen.

And she does her maiden flight.

She goes up and breeds.

Comes back.

Starts laying eggs.

And she's good for a couple of years.

For your first extraction.

Probably a year.

About a year.

You can extract up to twice a year, I would think.

You have the spring nectar flow, which we're in right now.

And then the Brazilian pepper nectar flow.

Which ends about the end of November.

And maybe early December.

So you can extract maybe twice a year.

But I try to keep as much honey on my hives during the winter.

Because that's when there's less, it's called a dearth.

That's when there's no pollen and no nectar available.

And they need something to eat.

And instead of me having to make up a syrup to feed them, they have their own resources in the hive.

The question was, if you buy an established hive, will you still have to wait a year before you actually end up with the honey production?

It's probably very well into honey production as it is.

So you shouldn't have to wait that long.

You should have that year wait.