Laurence Edwards checks his wooden section racks at River Apiary and finds capped honey. He explains why bees resist drawing comb in wooden sections, how restricting space early in the season forces them to work on the racks, and shows the finished product he plans to sell.
Right, it's time to get inside the wooden section rack and see if the bees have actually started to work on those sections. I found the wooden sections a lot more difficult than the Ross rounds to get the bees in there to work, and I'm always juggling trying to not give them too much space in order to get them to start working that section rack, but also not to trigger swarming. I think if I'm going to do this one again next year, I'm going to do it slightly differently, and I'm going to really restrict the bees onto a very small brood box quite early on and make them work that early on, because what I found is that as soon as As soon as they start working in that foundation in the section rack, that's it, the job's done, and they will continue to draw it out. But if you give them too much space, then they just don't start working it, and they will use any excuse not to go up there. So I'm learning all the time. I'm going to tweak things next year and make that a little bit easier on myself, and I'm going to try and restrict them much earlier on to get them working in that section rack. And then once they've started working on it, then I can start adding space and be a little bit more safe in terms of swarm congestion. Let's get my bee suit on though. Let's go and see, have the bees Sorted out the wooden section racks.
Right, it is 100% kicking off down at the River Apiary today. Loads of colonies swarming. Really good fun being down here though. This is the colony here where I put the wooden section racks. Hopefully the bees have not swarmed. Hopefully they started drawing out the comb. Maybe we're going to have a real treat when we look inside this hive. And there you go. This took a little while to get them working it, but now we have sections that are completely full And completely capped. I am so, so excited about this. This is literally one of the best things that you can get out of a beehive. Completely natural, just wood and wax. Add the bees and they turn it into beautiful wooden section honey like this. So it's not 100% perfect. I'm happy with this though. I think you could sell that. It's very, very difficult to get them to do the squares perfectly. Compared to the Ross rounds, wooden sections are difficult. I'm happy with this one though. Some of them look better than this, but I just want to leave the bees with them on just to finish them all off. I'm going to take this one home though, get it prepped, get it ready, and I'm going to give it to a friend. So there we go, my wooden section videos are complete. I've got my wooden sections, I'm going to take them home, I'm going to package this one up. Some of the rest in there aren't 100% yet, so I'm just going to leave them on the bees, give them enough time to finish everything, but we can continue the video with this section rack here because that is absolutely perfect. If you want to see some of the setup of the wooden racks and how we set the colonies up, check out this playlist here that shows you all of the setup to get us to this point.
