Monthly Archives: May 2014

CRUSH, STRAIN, TASTE honey extraction method by our young beekeepers

CRUSH, STRAIN, TASTE honey extraction method – a younger generation twist on the traditional crush and strain method. This video is rather emotional and will definitely bring a smile if not a tear into any beekeepers eye. In our view, almost every beekeeper is a very kind and considerate human being with a patient, family oriented, committed and loving soul. There is nothing better than engaging your children or grandchildren in the most rewarding activity known to man for centuries – beekeeping. And the fail proof way to get them started is to involve them in the simple honey extraction process itself. Yes, the good old crush and strain method. The little enthusiastic and motivated helpers in this video take it just that one step further though, which most seasoned beekeepers seldom do. They TASTE test the honey — frequently! They do this of their own accord, without any training, supervision, or enforced motivation. And they do this very often! Yes, honey must be good for you. The proof is in the pudding so to speak, or in this case, inside this honeycomb frame, and subsequently evidenced in this short video.

So, if you are ever presented with a chance to keep bees and would like to take up the challenge of becoming a beekeeper, even if it is a single small hive in suburbia or on a roof top in the middle of a busy CBD, we strongly recommend you do take up the challenge. Especially if you have little children or grandchildren you can share the beekeeping joys, pains and pleasures with. It will be the most rewarding hobby you will ever undertake, not only for yourself, but also for the younger generations. Sadly, not many young people consider beekeeping a hobby of choice and not many realise how important these social insects are to our way of live and our reliance on being at the top of the natural food chain. 

Once you expose yourself and your kids to the amazing social honey bee phenomenon, your life will begin to change for the better of its own accord. You will be amazed with how bees live, grow, reproduce, manage and coordinate their activities within the colony, and you will begin to draw parallels between our human social networks. Ultimately, you will unavoidably become far more in tune with nature and respect it. You will seek improvements in your interactions with nature, your way of life, and the impact you as an individual have. Whether you like it or not, you will become a better person inside and we strongly believe your children will benefit too. They will not only benefit from the beekeeping hobby and related activities itself, but it will also bring you as a family closer together, get them away from the hypnotic wavelengths of television and computer games, and as they grow and learn, they will gain understanding that the sterile approach to nature that our modern way of life brings may need to be adjusted and improvements implemented. Hopefully, our future on this planet Earth will be more harmonious as a result… one beekeeper at a time.

We invite you to SUBSCRIBE to our channel and help us spread the word by clicking the thumbs up and sharing. We hope to see you for our next instalment in a weeks’ time.

Take care

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 “Touching Moments Four – Melody”. We appreciate your kind contribution.

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BEEKEEPING 101 – Removing beeswax cappings using a HOT KNIFE before honey extraction. Nice closeup action. 

Beekeeping enthusiasts,

Our new video shows a closeup step by step instructional how to for young beekeepers where we show the beeswax uncapping process we follow to clean the frames, remove the cappings, and prepare the frame for extraction in a centrifugal frame extractor.

There are many ways beekeepers choose to remove the cappings from their honey frames. None of them can be considered the best or the ultimate, nor can any other methods be considered flawed. It is a very individual matter. Some hobby beekeepers use a hot know, some a steam knife, others use only the decapping fork or a simple kitchen serrated knife. And those beekeepers operating in larger beekeeping farms and apiaries with 20 or more hives tend to have automated machines that have spinning rotary blades or spikes that as the frames pass through, remove the top beeswax cappings. Some things to consider when starting out, is the volume of frames you are going to be processing. That will definitely have an impact on how you choose to remove the cappings. Other considerations may include your opinion and thoughts on say a hot gun may have on the quality of  honey you produce. Another consideration is what to do with the cappings? Do you want beeswax? The work it takes to clean it, melt it, filter it and process it? Many don’t want the hassle and opt to scratch the cappings or use the heat gun. 

As you get more familiar with your beehive and the honey frames you extract, you will find that the bees also produce varying shapes on the honey frame, and that too can be a problem and may alter your choice of beeswax decapping process you choose to try or adopt. In this video, we had a perfect frame, where the cappings were built outward by the bees and the cappings were ABOVE the actual timber frame. This makes it perfect for use of a hot knife, as the knife can be rested on the frames and simply slice off the wax cappings. Many frames however are not that way and the bees build them just below the full depth or height of the timber frames. In this scenario, a hot knife can do very little, and the only way to get the cappings off is to either scratch them or pull them off bit by bot using the decapping fork. This often leads to another debate we will cover in one of our future videos – should you use 10 frames or 9 frames in a full deep honey super? What are your thoughts? Leave us a comment below. Will the honey yield be higher or lower? Or the same? Will the hot knife cut through a much thicker overhang of honey comb? Will the running honey cool it too quickly slowing the whole process down? We are keen to hear your thoughts. 

So as you can see, you will need to equip yourself with tools and skills to use them to accommodate several scenarios, each requiring a different method. Each honey frame will be different and may require use of two to three different styles even within the single honey frame. 

We hope you enjoy our videos, and if you do, please click the SUBSCRIBE button. It helps us keep growing this channel and assist the much needed and very sparse new and young beekeepers. Hit the LIKE button and share.

We thank you for your support and hope you visit us again for our next video, where we will examine the use of a heat gun. Is this the method for you? Many say it is fantastically easy, fast and more efficient! We are keen to learn your thoughts on the matter after seeing our brief study.

Have an enjoyable day.

MahakoBees

http://www.mahakobees.com

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

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

Closeup look UNDER THE LID OF A BEEHIVE during a hive inspection – this is what you can expect

Hello dear visitors and subscribers,

This weeks short video shows a closeup look under the lid of a beehive during our autumn hive inspection. This is what you can expect to see inside a twelve month old beehive all going well. Nice and healthy beehive with a strong colony, plenty of honey stores and a strong laying queen. 

Any time we look into our hives, the first thing we get ready to catch a glimpse of is the number of hive beetles present as you lift the lid. This is critical to check. Any new or novice beekeepers out there, if you do not check in the first 3 seconds of lifting the hive top cover, you may not get a good understanding of the extent of the damage they are able to do. 

We have quite a substantial problem ourselves, but we keep on top of it, squash as many as we can, and most importantly, we keep our hive very strong so they can dedicate enough bees to keep the hive beetle at bay. We use all sorts of traps, which we will cover in detail throughout the next few months. Keep your eyes out for that series, as once you lose a beehive to the hive beetle or the wax moth, (or FBT etc for that matter), you will never look into your beehive the same way. This series will be very extensive as one of our current projects is to review the hive beetle problem and as many have done before us, attempt to find a solution to the problem. The industry so far, it seems to us, deals primarily with the SYMPTOMS of hive beetle, but we would like to tackle the problem from the other end – successful prevention. This involves understanding hive beetles anatomy, life cycle, strengths and weaknesses. Once those are well understood, one can attempt to deploy strategies that may exploit one or several or in deed all of these. We are strong believers of using as little chemicals as and where possible, especially pesticides, and believe that nature has way to deal with every problem naturally. It may be less cost effective yes, possibly difficult to implement, and yes, perhaps not even commercially viable, but we are not a commercial beekeeping operation, and we care about our bees and those around the world, so every helping hand may assist, and who knows, the saying “Seek and you shall find”may in the end win over.

We hope you enjoy our videos, and invite you yet again to SUBSCRIBE, thumbs up, and share. Any comments and your time in publishing them is also greatly appreciated. 

Have a fabulous day!

MahakoBees

DEAD honeybee closeup but THE LEG TWITCHES??? – beekeeping 101 tutorial. 

We wanted to show a closeup of bee anatomy and picked up a dead honey bee in the apiary to do so. The bee was dead for at least 30 minutes, perhaps more. As we recorded the video over a few takes, all of a sudden, the dead bees leg started twitching. Very awkward moment, and rather unexpected. We gather this is normal and it is just the nerves, but none the less, it can surprise even beekeepers. In any case, the bees are a beautiful creature, a social animal that goes through an amazing number of phases in its life, and its skills, tasks and roles constantly change, right up to the last moment of its passing away. Bees are certainly one of the most amazing insects on planet Earth, and we should all study and respect them for what they are and what they do. Yes, all creatures contribute in many mysterious ways, but the bees (and ants and termites for that matter) seem to have a power we don’t yet possess. They are a completely independent creature, yet completely dependent on the social network they live within. They know nothing, yet know it all. They seek only the best for their beehive and not even fear of dying stops them from striving to achieve the greater good of the many and the cost of itself.

Hope you enjoy this rather sad video, but death is part of life, and the bees live theirs to their maximum potential, and we should celebrate that. Have a honey toast or a spoon of honey in your tea, and ponder what tremendous amount of energy and commitment went into that single delicious sweet nectar. 

If you enjoy our content, we invite you to subscribe, click the thumbs up, and share the links. We also love to hear your comments, suggestions and feedback in general. 

Make the best of your day too.

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 to Kelvin McLeod for his kind contribution of royalty free tune – Touching Moments Four – Melody. We appreciate your work.

Is my QUEEN BEE ALIVE and laying? Brood frame closeup examination – beekeeping 101

We take a closeup view of a honeybee frame of brood removed during a beehive inspection from a beekeeper’s apiary. We briefly examine the difference between a drone and a worker bee, and talk about what went wrong when our queen escaped from the brood chamber into our honey supers. This is a continuation of a series of videos on this topic.

The video also shows in more detail the layout of queen eggs, larvae, pupae, both worker bee and drone cells, and how the bees design their layout on a typical brood frame. Honey stores, pollen stores and the brood itself. 

We encourage you to look at our earlier videos and specifically a short closeup of the honey bee queen eggs and larvae (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-2E76XaDYk), or alternatively our playlist of CLOSEUPS which has many related and interesting videos (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfE6cWwwWKoiXEp4xSACAmvTHSrweW0nU)

BUT, if the art of beekeeping interests you, the best place is to visit our http://www.mahakobees.com website for many instructional and HOWTO videos.

We invite you to subscribe, like, and share our content.

Have a relaxing day

MahakoBees

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