A North Wales beekeeper inspects a hive with Ross Round honey sections that are densely capped and ready to harvest, holding over 100 lb of honey by early June. The sections outperform traditional wooden frames and are easier to handle. The next steps are using a clearer board, then harvesting and packaging the premium-grade rounds.
Right, it's time to get inside the colony and see if the Ross Round sections have worked. We've cramped that colony down, they started drawing it out, we even saw a little bit of capping last time. Let's get in there and see if the bees have done the business and finished work on the Ross Rounds. So I think it's safe to say that the Ross Round sections have been an overwhelming success. I knew it was going to be easier to do the Ross Round sections than the wooden sections. In this video, I'm going to show you just how well the bees have done turning those Ross Round sections into beautiful sections of honey. So you might be thinking, hmm, what is going on over there? I'm going to cover that in a separate video because half of the battle with Ross Round sections is choosing the right colony of bees. Needs to be your best, strongest, most prolific colony, and then you genuinely stand half a chance of getting the Ross Round section rack sorted like this one is here. This colony is on a 14 by 12 brood box. It's got one Ross Round section rack, it's got 2 National Deeps, 2 National Shallows, and everything is Full, absolutely full. We're well over 100 pounds of honey and we're not even into June yet. That is magnificent. That is really, really good for North Wales. I'm going to cover that on a separate video, show you some of the honey, show you just how big and strong the bees are. But the purpose of this video here, we're going to take a look at the Ross Rounds and show you just how well the bees have drawn them out. So as soon as I opened up this colony here, I knew the Ross Round sections were going to be absolutely stuffed full of honey. You can see it if you look down between the cracks here. I'll pull out a couple of frames though, and I'll show you just how well the bees have sorted them out. So I think we can agree that has been an overwhelming success. Not only have the bees drawn them out, not only have the bees stored all the honey in them, they're capping them over really nicely as well. Not perfectly capped over, but definitely acceptable for sale. Only a few cells that have been missed there. I'm so happy with these Ross Rounds. And you can use them again and again and again. The presentation factor really is good, means that you can sell them for a premium. There really is nothing better than perfectly round Ross Round sections. So there we go, a little close-up for the camera. I am absolutely over the moon in how well these have come out. I can take them home now, get them ready for harvest, get them into their containers, and sell them straight away. I'm so pleased with how the Ross Round sections worked out. They're so much further ahead than the wooden sections, and the The experience that I've had with wooden sections in the past is that they can be a little bit more temperamental on them, and the bees don't like working them if they've got anything else that they can work, be it an empty box or some random space or even a super in there. Ross Rounds, however, the bees seem to work them really well, and they take to them kind of almost as well as a frame just with some foundation in it. In a separate video, I'll talk about harvesting. Obviously, we need to get all of the bees off these. We'll do that using a clearer board, but I want to wait until all of the other section racks are sorted in this apiary because at moment, the flow looks good, and there's no risk of the bees kind of going into this and taking that hard work away from me. So we'll put this colony back together again. In the next episode, we'll talk about harvesting, packaging, but if you want to catch up to get to this point, check out this playlist here which talks about everything to do with Ross Round sections.
