Laurence Edwards of Black Mountain Honey shows how a Thornes propolis trap works: a 460 mm plastic mesh placed on top of frames collects pure propolis as bees fill it over a few weeks. Freeze it solid, crumble it, and you get clean propolis with minimal wax. The trap costs about £3.50 or you can make one from roll-stock mesh.
Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping and another episode of Bite-Sized Bees. So I just wanted to give you a really brief insight to a product that I used successfully last year. I didn't take a video of it though, but it was a great product, and that is a propolis trap. So when you're collecting propolis, you can go around on all your frames and scrape stuff off a really time-consuming process though in order to get that valuable propolis that you can use for tinctures and other things. This trap here makes that process so, so easy, and that's what I'm going to talk to you about in this video. So you can buy these from Thorns. I bought this from Thorns with my own money, only about £3.50 each, really cheap. There's effectively a plastic mesh, so you open it up like that, 460 by 460 millimeters, And all you do is on top of your brood box, so underneath your queen excluder, you want to get this nice and close to the brood box because that's where you get the most activity from the bees. You place this directly on top of all of your frames, and then what you want to do is you just place that directly down and sit it on top of the top frames. And the bees hate this, absolutely despise it, because they don't like the spacing and they don't like the holes. So then all they do is they just block them up with propolis And it takes a good few weeks for them to do it. They go out, they just go out into the wild, collect some propolis, bring it back, and they propolize that into place. So do it at a time where the bees hopefully aren't going to swarm. Do it early on in the season, maybe when you can get away with like leaving them for a couple of weeks without doing inspections. Come back and then you just take that off, put it into the freezer. You can fold it up if you want, stick it into the freezer like that, make sure it's completely frozen. You take it out, crumble it up, and all of that propolis comes out. And what you're getting is a perfectly pure propolis. You're not getting bits of wood, you're not getting bits of wax. You might get a little bit of wax, but nowhere near as much as if you're scraping frames. So that's all I wanted to show you in this video. If you're in the market for a propolis trap or some way of gathering propolis from your beehives, I can highly recommend these from Thorns. I paid for these myself. I've had a couple of these on the go last year, and I've just bought myself another 10 because I want to stick these on a few colonies this year, get myself a nice haul of propolis. So you could probably make this yourself as well. It's just like a plastic mesh. You could probably buy it by the roll really, really cheap, but Thorns do it. It's cut to the right size and it's got the right holes, and I know that's a really good product and it works really well. So thanks for watching. Please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.
