25 Mar

Beekeeping is a fun hobby. You get to learn about the bees, food cycle, Pollen, Honey, beeswax and all things related to beekeeping industry such as the different beehives, beekeepers tools and different methods for keeping bees, maintaining bees and managing various parasites and bee related illnesses. If you are successful though, you get to share in the spoils of the honey bee.  Once the beehive and the bee colony living within it grows to strong and healthy size, they will start to to produce more honey than they can consume. In late spring to early autumn usually. At these times, you get to harvest a few frames per hive and extract the liquid gold that has been gathered by the bees and capped over with a thin layer of perfectly white beeswax capping.

Once you rob a beehive of its fresh honey frames full of raw honeycomb, you need to extract the honey. There are many tools and methods you can choose to achieve this. If you are only a small backyard beekeeper, you will most likely not have at your disposal a honey extractor or a spinner, and nor would you need one either. You can use a simple crush and strain method which is simple to do and very cheap to make the equipment for. Although this is a more labor intensive method, and will also completely destroy the honeycomb foundation, you can easily extract 20-50 honey frames in this fashion and also recover enough beeswax a few raw beeswax candles as well. In our video, we give you a few tips on how to extract honey using the crush and strain method. We also take a close up look at the fresh raw honey we extracted and reveal some of the health benefits of honey, propolis, and beeswax. Enjoy the video, thumbs up and share. To support our channel, we invite you to subscribe. Every vote counts, and we would be happy to have you along for our beekeeping journey.
Thank you for visiting our beekeeping YouTube channel
MahakoBees

•eSTORE:                 http://www.mahakobees.com/store.html
•Website:                  http://www.mahakobees.com
•Blog:                        http://mahakobees.com/blog
•Blog kids:                 http://beekeepingwithkids.blogspot.com.au/
•Youtube:                  https://www.youtube.com/user/mahakobees
•Google+:                 https://plus.google.com/+MahakoBees
•Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/mahakobees.mahakobees
•Pinterest:                http://www.pinterest.com/mahakobees/
•Twitter:                    https://twitter.com/mahakobees
•Flickr:                     https://www.flickr.com/photos/125372235@N04/
•Stumbleupon:          http://www.pinterest.com/mahakobees/
•Reddit:                    http://www.reddit.com/user/MahakoBees/
•Tumblr site:             http://mahakobees.tumblr.com/
•Tumblr blog:            https://www.tumblr.com/blog/mahakobees

08 Jan

Our new raw comb honey is all about that liquid gold, served in its most natural form. RAW COMB HONEY. It is untouched by human hands, unprocessed, unheated, unfiltered, without chemicals, sugar water additives or preservatives. Simply the healthiest natural raw food available for those interest in a healthy diet, all thanks to the hard work of Honey bees and the beekeeper taking care of his beehives and bee colonies. As colony disorder continues to cause much concern for beekeepers worldwide, few now dare to cut away the precious golden nectar with all that beeswax. It takes up to twenty kilos of honey to produce one kilo of beeswax. Keep that in mind when you purchase a true beeswax candle and appreciate all that hard work the bees put into it. Enjoy the smell, the beautiful honey aroma, and the long lasting burn.

Also, take the opportunity next time you visit your local fresh food market, and grab a sample pack of that beautifully fresh raw comb honey. You won’t regret it!

Hope you like our videos, and if you do, we invite you to subscribe to our MahakoBees or if you feel we deserve it, click the LIKE button below. We appreciate all comments and feedback so don’t be shy and let’s dive deep into the topic of bees, honey, beeswax and beekeeping as a hobby or in deed as a large and extremely important agricultural industry.
We appreciate all your support
MahakoBees

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

You can read more about what Raw Comb Honey is below. Information is from Wikipedia:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comb_honey

Comb honey is honey, intended for consumption, which still contains pieces of the hexagonal-shaped beeswax cells of the honeycomb.

Before the invention of the honey extractor almost all honey produced was in the form of comb honey.[citation needed] Today, most honey is produced for extraction but comb honey remains popular among consumers both for eating ‘as is’ and for combining with extracted honey to make Chunk Honey. Hobbyists and sideliners can best develop their beekeeping skills by producing comb honey, which they can easily sell for several times its value as extracted honey. Comb honey production is more suitable for areas with a prolonged honeyflow from dutch clover, alsike, and yellow clover. Wooded areas are not very suitable for comb honey production, as bees tend to collect much propolis, which makes the harvesting of comb honey much more difficult. This problem has been largely circumvented with the adoption of specialized frames which prevent accumulation of propolis on saleable units.

Hive management[edit]

Beehive with Ross Round style comb honey super and frames exposed

Populous honey bee colonies are usually reduced to single hive bodies at the beginning of the honeyflow when one or more comb honey supers are added. Comb honey can either be produced in wooden sections, shallow frames, or Ross Rounds. The successful production of comb honey requires that the hive remain somewhat crowded without overcrowding, which leads to swarming. Young prolific queens help rapid colony population expansion with less likelihood of swarming. Caucasian Apis mellifera bees are often preferred for their tendency to keep a constricted brood nest and for their production of white wax cappings, making more attractive honey combs.