Laurence Edwards wraps up his beekeeping series with lessons from a late-season honey draw-down. The key mistake: waiting for full racks instead of harvesting frames as soon as they're capped, since bees can quickly consume the honey again. He demonstrates the simple harvest method and discusses requeening and relocating the apiary with minimal colony disturbance.
Right, I said I wouldn't do it. I know it's 8 PM again, and this colony here is an absolute monster. It is on 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 boxesâ 3 National Deeps, 3 National Shallowsâ and every single box that's in there is full. I mean, not a single cell in any of the frames. But this video is not about big stacks of honey, it is about Ross Rounds. And the last part of this video, we'd gone backwards If you remember, we had filled those frames completely, all the way up to the edge, and I missed my opportunity to harvest it. So it was a bit of a reset. We'd gone backwards, they'd eaten all the honey, and I said later on in the year I'll come back and hopefully we won't have to do anything else and the bees will just fill up all of those cells again with honey. I'm back here today to find out, but what I'm gonna do is that even if I can't find one that's suitably capped over, I'm just gonna take the very best one. I'm gonna take it home, I'm gonna get it packaged, and I'm gonna show you what the end product looks like. But I'm kicking myself a little bit, and I guess my feedback for you on the Ross Rounds and the wooden section racks is that you only really get one good stab at it. And if the bees completely draw it out, fill it with honey, and cap it, just take it straight away, even if you need to take individual frames or individual sections. Don't wait for the whole box to be perfectly complete before taking it, because it's very, very quick for them to go backwards. I didn't think it was that quick. But this year has really thrown me a bit of a curveball, and I've gone backwards very, very quickly on these Ross rounds and also on my section racks. However, we're in a pretty good place. We can finish the series, both the wooden section racks and the Ross rounds. Got some in here that are very nearly capped. I'll flash up some of the old images and pretend that I did really well and that I didn't mess it up and the bees didn't eat it all, but in reality they did, and we're kind of sitting at around 80% capped at the moment. Let's get out a couple of the frames and see how well the bees have capped them over. So this is what the frames are looking like now. They're kind of okay. They could be a lot better, but you know, they could be worse as well. I'll take that. They're predominantly capped. They're definitely full. They're definitely ripe in terms of taking that honey away. And what I'm going to do with these 2 is I'm going to take them away, take them home, show you how to do that harvest, and then I'll package them up and get them ready for sale. So as I said, it's very, very late at night and I've got a real big grumpy colony Plenty of bees here. You've got to excuse them for it. They are getting requeened at the end of the year, but we're moving away from this apiary, so I don't want to do anything at the moment. I don't want to disgruntle the bees or take their queens away. Need to get the honey harvest off first, and it's very, very isolated here, and the bees have done very, very well. So in terms of harvest, I would say the same with the Ross Rounds as I would with the wooden sections. Harvest a frame as soon as it's ready. This frame here, it is ready to go, but what you can't do is just leave a big gap in the middle of that Ross Round section rack. So if you have an extra frame, you can buy the frames on their own for about ÂŁ4 or ÂŁ5, and what I would say is as the frames are ready, just take it out and replace it with a new one and just keep on doing that all the way throughout the season. Don't wait until you're going to get that perfectly all capped, all of the frames in the whole rack. 'Cause you rarely get it that perfect. All I would do though, all I'm gonna do is you're just gonna shake it, shake those bees off, and there we go. It's as simple as that. I've got a frame that I can now take home and harvest. Harvesting these couldn't be easier. Preparing them for sale, absolute doddle. That's gonna be the final episode in this series, so make sure you hit that subscribe button.
