🐝 Ross Round Sections - Episode 8 - Harvesting, Packaging and Tasting Comb Honey

Right, final part of the Rossround series. I'm gonna show you just how easy it is to turn these frames into a fully packaged Rossround product. So when you buy your Rossrounds, they come with plastic clear sections like this, and if you are the best person in the world at doing Rossround sections, you can go for a double-sided clear one like that. If you're like me and you've got a good side and a bad side, then you can have one translucent cover and one clear cover. They clip together really nicely like that, very simple, and for the purposes of today's video, I'm definitely gonna use one translucent cover to hide the gnarly side, and one clear cover to show off the Ross Rounds to its best potential. But before we get into any of that, look at this. We need to get the Ross Round sections out of the Ross Round frames. And you might look at it at first and think, wow, this is going to be really, really difficult. It's actually quite tricky to get it out, but it's not at all. It is the simplest design in the world. It just clips together, and where you put those white plastic sections inside at the very beginning, the bees have used that to mold their wax around it, and it means that cutting them down and trimming them is very easy, not that messy. I'm not going to say it's perfectly clean. Got my wooden chopping board here today, and I'll have a mop up at the end, but you end up with a very presentable product. So as you can see here, these 2, these are my best 2 sides that I've got. And then on the other side, you can't see it because it's got the plastic on it, but it's nowhere near as good. So these are the 2 that I'm going to go for. But as you could see on these side here, they're probably indicative of what they're like over this side. So all you need to do is get a knife And just kind of like start levering that frame apart like this. If you can't see what I'm doing there, you're getting that knife in. You can do it with a hive tool, but I would just recommend a little knife and just start levering those frames apart like that. They come apart really, really easily. And once you get them apart, you can actually just start to do it with your hand. And because you've got those plastic inserts in there, trust me, it feels like properly dodgy when you're doing it. You're thinking, I'm gonna rip everything apart. And if you did this with a wooden section rack, you would rip it all apart. But you will see when I open this up just how well it kind of slides over those plastic grooves, and it means that you're not wrecking all of that hard work that the bees have put in. So I'm not doing that deliberately slowly for effect. So as you can see, that piece there, it just pops off, clips on, clips off, 2 individual pieces. And then what you get left with is this. How cool is that? Completely segregated Ross Round sections. And then all you need to do is peel off the back cover as well. I like to do it from underneath just to protect these faces, but what you can actually do is get in there at this point and put the plastic sections on top like that to give you some sort of protection. I'll show you it with a couple of translucent ones as well. They just pop on the top, so that gives me the ability now just to flip it all over and I'm protecting that comb, and then I can lift the top one off from underneath as well. Now it should just lift off, but it can get a little bit sticky, so just get your knife again and you just wanna lever in against some of these plastic white sections just to break the seal, and it should just lift off. Can be a little bit fiddly, this bit, but there you go, you can see it starting to lift now. There you go, as it comes, it will come really, really nicely like that. And there we go, it comes off. That's the best way that I've found to get them off, and it's pretty much foolproof in that you're not gonna actually break any of these wax seals. You often find you get like a dead bee or two that's kind of stuck in there, So, sorry about that, Mr. Beat. And then, it's really, really simple. All you're looking to do there is you just get your knife out and you just cut them off individually. So at that point, we've got 4 separate individual Ross Round sections. And then all you need to do is you just need to go around, trim the foundation off with your knife, and it's pretty much complete. Like, that is it. They're so simple. So at this point, I would take your cover back off, and you can get the covers a little bit mucky, so just be careful with those. Obviously, you can just go and clean them, but for this bit, I find it's better to have them off. And then all you're looking to do, put it on a flat surface, and you're just gonna go around and trim off all of that excess wax from around the edge. Comes off so, so easily. And then you wanna choose your very best side, choose the best side, and on the opposite side, put your translucent cover. So then the final piece of the jigsaw is you put on top the plastic cover, and we're complete. You can sell it like this. You will need a label to sell it, of course, but that is it. That is how you present the Ross Rounds. Quite a lot of plastic involved. That really is for me the only negative with this, because when you compare this to say like a wooden section rack, the wooden section rack doesn't use any plastic but is quite a lot harder to get it into a presentable fashion. Where I find the Ross rounds are very, very good at getting the bees to work all the way up to the edges in a good flow, but it does come with quite a lot of plastic in the presentation. So finally, you can buy the rolls of labels to go around it, and all you do is you put a label all the way around the edge here And then you end up with something that looks like this. Really is like one of the most presentable pieces of honey that you can get. Looks so much more presentable in my opinion than, say, a jar. And really easy to get like a nice looking label to go around the edge. But it's that bit there, the real open view of that honeycomb, that sells this product. You can sell it for a really good amount of money as well. Now I'm going to go inside this and I'm going to actually crack it open and just have a look and see what's inside the frames. I'm gonna have a taste of it as well. I am so, so excited by this. So in terms of actually getting it out and using it and eating it, what I tend to do is just take the top lid off like that and then just use a spoon. And you can just spoon it out and then all of the honey and all of the gunk will go into the bottom and it keeps it nice and neat. However, for YouTube, I think it's gonna look a little bit better if I take that bottom section off for the time being. And then what you can actually do is you can start to twist these bits of plastic And they do actually just come off. You can make a mess doing this, so try and do it over a sink maybe. So there you go, you can see that you can actually get those off with very minimal mess. Okay, little bit of mess. But the great thing about those is that they are completely reusable. Obviously, if you're using it for yourself, wouldn't wanna do it in terms of a recycling scheme, but if you're just doing honey for you, your friends, these bits of plastic here, you can use them time and time again. Just scrape the plastic off, you'll be good to go. And then that's what we're talking about there. Really, really beautiful honey. I'll cut inside it and show you how good it looks. Right, I've finally got that bottom bit off. It is so difficult getting that bottom bit off, and I wouldn't recommend doing it like this because look what will happen to your hands, completely covered in honey. So there is nothing better than just cutting into real nice Ross Round Section honey like this. I do love it, and when you open it up and you see kind of what you get underneath and in between those wax combs, It really is quite incredible. All of the bees' hard work, all they've been doing, they've been going out foraging that nectar, bringing it back. The young bees have been creating wax in order to store the honey in, and then the bees will come in, store the nectar, fan it down, and this is what the bees eat. You know, bees eat the honey, but it tastes so, so good. What I really, really love just looking inside here is the honeycomb structure and the way that it's kind of uneven and you get different colours and different shades and sometimes little bits of pollen in there. This is what makes the product so unique, is the different flavour profile that you'll get from each Ross round. But even kind of one side of the Ross round to the other side of the Ross round, you're gonna get different flavours because all of the nectar is different and nothing is mixed. I like to eat this. I'll cut it up, I'll have it with cheese, put it on a cheese board. You will really wow your guests with this. And in terms of sales, it sells so well. If you get this into kind of like a farm shop or a deli or something like that, And you chop that open or you start giving people tastes when you're doing the farmers market, this is the one that you want to give them in order to give that taste because the flavour profile is just so different, so pure, and as you can see, it looks fantastic. So there we go, we finished the Ross Round video. Final thing for me to do is have a taste of this honey. I can't wait. So you can swallow the wax if you want to swallow it. I always take it out. I just kind of suck the honey out of that honeycomb, but it is really, really amazing. What an incredible product. Thanks again to Thorn Beekeeping for providing all of the section racks here, the ancillary products, the packaging. Everything you see here was provided free of charge by Thorn Beekeeping for me to do these videos. I've had so much fun doing them. I love these products. I'm gonna buy them again. I hope you have fun with them too. If you have a go with them, stick it on my Facebook page, stick it in the comment, let me know how you get on.