Monthly Archives: March 2014

Dear viewers,

Thank you for visiting. We did a little honey production/extraction experiment in this video and wanted to share it with you. It is suitable mostly for new hobby farm or city backyard beekeepers, but it may also be useful to the experienced and well seasoned beekeeping networks. 

Its all about yield when dealing with honey production, and selecting the most suitable frames and hive setup is very important. Many factors need to be considered: Your hive yard apiary location, your type of bees, your health and ability to carry the heavy honey supers, your capacity to extract and process large or small quantities of fresh honey and residual wax cappings, your extraction equipment, what product you are aiming to produce, and the list goes on. So, there is no “right” or “wrong” way do be a beekeeper and everyone has different views, needs and experience. The best you can hope for, is to implement the most optimal setup and environment for your circumstance and hope that remains constant for you as long as possible. But even then things will ultimately change as time goes by, as your hive numbers fluctuate, weather patterns change, and your circumstances change as a whole. So please, take all of our videos with a grain of salt, as nothing is set in stone. If you see a better way or have experience with similar situations, we encourage you to drop us a line in the comments below and share with the beekeeping community at large. This is fantastic hobby, and the bees need our assistance more than ever, so let’s aim to get as many people involved as possible and assist them along the way. 

So, back to the video:

We took two raw honey frame types, 

1) the “ideal” which is a two thirds in size when compared to a full deep honey frames, and

2) the full deep frames of raw honey that most professional and or commercial beekeepers use. 

We had one extracted and not extracted of each, and weighed them on our very accurate postage digital scales. Interesting outcomes. Plenty to discuss and debate in the comments below, so we invite anyone to add their experience, feedback or elaborate on this topic. It would be interesting to see what other beekeepers think and what their experience is with both frame styles and their honey harvests from each. 

If you are enjoying our beekeeping videos, we invite you to support us by subscribing and sharing with others. It helps us greatly to grow this channel.

Have a fantastic day

Mahakobees

http://www.mahakobees.com

Hi,
This is a very nice cloud based beehive tracking system. We have been using the free version for a while, and would recommend it to anyone. It is fantastic. Easy, fast, convenient, and constantly evolving.
See if you like it, and also take a look at our channel MahakoBees. We have lots of videos for you.

https://www.youtube.com/user/mahakobees

http://www.mahakobees.com

Have a great day
MahakoBees

This video describes and shows one of the many ways you can light a bee smoker quickly and easily in only minutes, that will smolder for hours. Describes full instructions, items needed, and the step by step guide to a successfully smoldering bee smoker.

MahakoBees

Decapping fresh honey frame wax cappings with hot knife closeup

This is a short clip of a fresh honey bee full timber frame being decapped with an electric hot knife. Rather a slow process, especially where the wax and comb have not been built up by the honey bees over and above the timber top and bottom bars. Those areas we decap with a decapping fork. We find the electric hot knife sufficient, but perhaps a steam hot knife would be better. Also a larger version would be nice. This one is cooled too quickly and does not reheat fast enough, so its slow and your hands get rather sore after a while. Before running the hot knife just under the wax cappings, we use a blunt knife to clean the frames and have them ready for use in the hives. This frame is a very light coloured but absolutely delicious tasting raw honey. 

I may do a video later showing the entire process and the setup we have. Beekeeping is a great hobby, and we are only just learning so any feedback or suggestions are very welcome.

Have a buzzing day

MahakoBees

Dear viewers,

This short video explains the use of a simple thing – just a SCREW to be exact – which literally will revolutionize the way you remove bees wax cappings from your honey frames. This is not my original idea, but I cannot recall where I have seen it in the past. Check out the video to see what I mean. Absolute MUST for small home hobby beekeeper.


A little more detail:

1)
we recommend you use a stainless steel screw as you are dealing with a consumable food, and it is raw, unprocessed honey, so stainless steel is a must in our mind.


2)
use a screw that is at least 5 cm in length (2 inches), depending on your thickness of the timber cross bar, and the type of frames you are using. You can’t go wrong by testing. Simply place the frame onto the screw, and rotate it in its fully vertical position. If it does not catch on the wooden cross bar, you got it just right. You may need to adjust by trial and error.


3)
We find this method is fantastic, simple, and saves you lots of back and wrist pains. You do not have to carry or continually counter weight the full capped honey frame, which can sometimes way up to 4 kilograms. However, having said that, it is still a relatively slow part of the honey extraction process and not suitable for any larger quantities of honey frames. If you have only a few hives, this is fine in a small hobbyist style homesteading environment, but the commercial decappers are far superior. Cost is probably the limiting factor, then space, and honey supply/demand that makes the commercial justification a little difficult to satisfy.

Please leave your comments below, we would love to hear from you, ask questions, and share your thoughts. We would love to hear from you.

We invite you to share our videos if you find them useful and quietly hope you can also click the subscribe and like buttons to help us grow this channel. Thank you in advance.

Enjoy your day or evening
MahakoBees


Music composed, performed and provided by Groovey – Adam Kubát a Pavel Křivák
You can visit their website on: http://www.groovey.cz/

Also, a big thank you goes to Kevin McLeod for providing his royalty free music Ïnner Light”. We appreciate your kind contribution.

INCREDIBLE feeding frenzy! Parrots as pollinators “swarming”?

Hello everyone. We captured this short video clip of a large flock of native Australian parrots a little while ago and you may find it interesting. Especially in light of the short article below. Birds are better pollinators than insects. Interesting. Native Australian parrots

would definitely be one of them, and in this clip you can see how noisy they can be when in a feeding frenzy. Aren’t they beautiful though, and not the least bit concerned about me video recording them. Enjoy, share, comment, or subscribe if you wish to see more great videos in the future.

MahakoBees

Interesting article:

Birds are better pollinators than insects

“Bees don’t see red very well at all,” Adrian told Australian Geographic. “By mapping the history of the flower evolution, it was possible to show that red flowers pollinated by birds actually evolved from flowering plants that used to be insect-pollinated.”

A possible advantage of attracting birds, is that some insects can be inefficient pollinators. The change in colouring, Adrian says, “enables plants with red flowers to get efficient delivery of pollen to enable sexual reproduction, and avoid having nectar stolen by insects.”

Professor Marie Herberstein, an ecologist at Macquarie University in Sydney, says the discovery about the interaction between plants and their pollinators is very interesting.

Marie says that while it has been known for some time that insects are attracted to blue, this is the most complete study showing that bird pollinators are attracted to red.

“This is particularly significant in Australia as we have more bird pollinators than any other continent,” Marie says.

From: http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/news/2013/03/red-flowers-the-trick-to-attracting-birds/

Dear viewers,

This was not planned, but during a quick visit to the hives, I noticed something strange yet wonderful. Can you spot the SNEAKY INTRUDER flying in and out of the beehive? Right past the guard bees? Its tiny, harmless and a very close relative to the honey bee. Leave your comments below. For those not searching, this is a clip showing honey bees up close at the beehive entrance fanning eagerly to cool and ventilate the beehive. You can also see some guard bees, and clearly not doing their job right, unless this is a unique relationship?

Thank you for visiting and watching. Please share this video and subscribe if you are enjoying our content.

Have a fantastic day

MahakoBees

Music composed, performed and provided by Groovey – Adam Kubát a Pavel Křivák

You can visit their website on: http://www.groovey.cz/

Dear viewers,

I could not help myself and had to upload this one! COOL little BOY helping build our timber honey frames. Very cute, very excited, and great skill with the eyelets and all the tools to be honest. We believe in getting kids involved in beekeeping young and in all the activities associated with it. Bee it hive inspections, building brood boxes, painting and cleaning honey supers, extracting honey, bottling, and off course cooking with RAW honey and in the end, enjoying the fruits of our labor. Get them away from the TV and computer games and get them out there, into the back yard, into nature and into the fields, learning real life skills. This video is a little example of such an activity. Great little beekeeper in the making. Take a look and share the video. We trust you will enjoy this short clip and it may put a smile on your face.

Enjoy and have a fabulous day.

MahakoBees

Music composed, performed and provided by Groovey – Adam Kubát a Pavel Křivák

You can visit their website on: http://www.groovey.cz/

Also, a big thank you goes to Kevin McLeod for providing his royalty free music “Up on a Housetop”. We appreciate your kind contribution.

CLOSEUPS of Honey Bees – Beekeeping (playlist)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pU85oNHkSdA&list=PLfE6cWwwWKoiXEp4xSACAmvTHSrweW0nU

This is a new beekeeping playlist we have created which consists of all sorts of videos of our bees. This includes our Honey Been as well as our Australian native Stingless bees. Most videos are closeups or slow motion to give you an opportunity to really see the been in detail. So please, click though to flick through the videos, like them, and we invite you to subscribe for many more intriguing beekeeping additions in the future.

Thank you for visiting
MahakoBees

CLOSEUPS of Honey Bees – Beekeeping (playlist)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pU85oNHkSdA&list=PLfE6cWwwWKoiXEp4xSACAmvTHSrweW0nU

This is a new beekeeping playlist we have created which consists of all sorts of videos of our bees. This includes our Honey Been as well as our Australian native Stingless bees. Most videos are closeups or slow motion to give you an opportunity to really see the been in detail. So please, click though to flick through the videos, like them, and we invite you to subscribe for many more intriguing beekeeping additions in the future.

Thank you for visiting

MahakoBees