What Every Beekeeper Needs To Know In August

Here's all the questions you should be asking yourself as a beekeeper in August. So question number 1, is my honey ready to harvest? This is the point that we've been building to all the way throughout the season, and I see a lot of people getting it wrong when it comes to honey harvest, when it's ready, and how far you should push it towards the back end of the season. So in the simplest terms, your frames of honey are ready to extract when the moisture content is correct, when the bees have taken the nectar, placed it into the comb, fanned it down, got the moisture content correct, and then they've capped it over. The capping over the top is your signal that the frame is ready at that point. Doesn't mean that the frame is always ready because they could cap it over and then it can crystallize underneath like oilseed rape. So some honeys you do need a slightly different extraction and harvesting process, but generally the cappings over the top of the frame will give you the indication that you need. The rule that I use is that if the frame is 80% capped, all of the honey within it is going to be acceptable. So anywhere from 80% up to 100% is good to go. You can take all of those frames. Every frame that falls under that, say you've got a frame that's 50% or 60% capped, I'd pull that out and I'd say, well, it's not really conforming to the rule. It's not up to 80%, so it's not quite ready yet. Let's put it back and get the bees to work on it some more. Now, in an ideal world, we would do that. We'd go and inspect every single frame and we'd get them out and take them out at the correct optimum level. But But that is not really how beekeeping works on any scale, definitely not on a commercial scale, but not even on a backyard scale as well. So the system that I've kind of developed in the process of developing is if it's 100% capped, it's good. If it's 80% capped, it's good. But then the ones that are lower than that, the ones that are 20, 30, 40% capped, as long as you're balancing them off against frames that are 100% capped. And what I mean there is that if you take your 100% capped frame and then you add in a 30% capped frame. They almost cancel each other out in terms of moisture content. The high moisture content of the frames with a lower capping, like a 20% capped frame, is going to drag down— or drag up, I should say— it's just going to increase the moisture content of the overall batch of honey by a tiny amount. So you can chuck a few of those in. You can also chuck in a few frames— say you've got a few frames where it's not capped at all and you're shaking it out like that, nothing's coming out, it's it's definitely not nectar, it's definitely honey, it's definitely been reduced down to an acceptable moisture content for the bees so it doesn't shake out. You can probably even chuck in a couple of them if you've got a big batch. Say you've got 30 frames that are 100% capped and then you've got like 2 or 3 frames that are not nectar, it's not shaking out, but they're not capped at all and you're thinking, well, what do I do with them? You chuck them in. It really isn't too much of a big deal. And I found over the Over the course of years of doing this, you can get away with putting more and more into that mix. What you want to do is you want to get all of your honey out at a low moisture content. So when you put it in buckets and it's stored properly, it's not going to ferment. The best case is taking out all 100% capped frames, testing it with a refractometer, ensuring that it's at the correct moisture content between maybe 16 to 18%, depending on the honey, sealing it in nice clean buckets, and then storing it for however long you want to store it before getting it out into the jars. There is leeway in that process. So here's some of the things that you shouldn't be harvesting, some of the frames that you shouldn't be harvesting. If you're pulling out any frame like that and it's not capped over and you're doing the shake test, which is simply just shake the bees off and then give it one, one sharp shake of the frame, if anything comes out, then those frames are no good for extraction at all. You can't even blend them in. There's such high moisture content frames that they are going to ferment at some point throughout the harvesting process. You definitely do not want them. Likewise, any frames that have been tainted with any sort of chemical treatment. So if you've treated with Apivar or you're taking honey out of the brood box, the wax is tainted with Amitraz. The wax is tainted with a chemical, which means it's not fit for human consumption. So definitely don't take out any honey that's not fit for human consumption. Make sure you follow all of the rules and the advice and the guidance on the back of the label. So once you're happy that the boxes that you're going to take off are ready for harvest, you've gone in, you've checked them, you've identified where the cappings are, Maybe move them around a little bit. Sometimes you can move some of the less capped frames into the middle and then give the bees another week and they'll come and finish them off. So you can do this little bit of a rejig. You get your boxes on, you put your clearer boards on if you're using clearer boards. My recommendation for clearer boards is either a multipurpose crown board with a rhombus board attached. You can actually cut the 2 rhombus boards on either end, a video that I will be doing later on in 2026. Or you use a Canadian cone escape board, also very, very good. And if you're going down the route of using boards, you need to make sure that you add in additional— additional space for the bees as well. Good example here, say you've got a single brood box and 4 supers of honey. You can't just say, right, I'm going to extract the top 2 supers and I'm just going to put a clearing board in the middle. Come back the next day and you say, why is there still loads of bees up in the top 2 boxes? When you're using these boards, you need to create additional space. This is why the transition to double brood is very nice at this time of the year. So here's a different, a different way of doing it. You've got single brood, 4 supers on top like that. Let's say we're going to harvest all the 4 supers now. So we put the clearer board in between the brood box and the 4 supers. If I did that, I'd come back the next day and there would just be 4 supers full of bees still. But if I add an additional empty brood box, a brood box just with frames of foundation or drawn comb, but nothing, no stores, no brood, nothing like that. So I've got brood box, brood box, then the clearing board with the queen excluder in the middle, and then the 4 supers above. You've given the bees all of this dead space downstairs in the brood nest, in the most active part of the hive. And what will happen is the bees will go out from the top box, from the super, go out, they'll forage, they'll do whatever they need to do, they'll come back in, and then they can't get back up to the supers and they'll be blocked in that new lower brood box. So think about that when you come to do your honey harvest. You need, you need to create that space there. Without creating the space, the boards don't work. I found through, again, years of experience that even, even the best managed colonies, when you do that process correctly, you still end up with a few bees in the boxes. Sometimes you get away and there's no bees in there, but a lot of the time there's a few bees that are in there. So you either need to go through with a brush, brush the bees off, really annoying, or you get out your blower and you just blow the bees off, which I find is much more humane. Means you don't have to touch the bees, means you don't damage them. You just blow them, they fly off, come straight back to the hive completely undamaged. So when you're going through that process, I end up doing 2 things. I end up doing 2 processes at once, and I find it really inefficient, which is I'll go there, I'll get my clearer board, I'll put my clearer board in, I'll create the space. I come back the next It's worked 95% kind of effective, and then I still got to blow the bees out. So I don't actually do that though. So what I do is I just blow the bees out straight away. I just take the boxes off, configure the hive as I want, blow all of the bees out, put them in the back of the truck in a nice clean kind of ratcheted up super box. I just put like an upturned roof in, stack the supers up, another one on top, strap it all together. Nice clean way to transport honey and go and take that off. It's a much, much easier way of doing things. I appreciate though it's not for everyone. So once you've got your honey off the hive, you'll be thinking, well, I probably need to extract it. And here's where a lot of people make this mistake. They will say, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to harvest my honey on the Saturday. So I'll harvest the honey on a Saturday, and then on the Sunday I'm going to go back around, I'm going to feed the bees, and I'm going to put the varroa strips in, and I'm going to do all of that work on the Sunday. And then on the Monday I'll I'll do my honey extraction. Monday, Tuesday, I'll do the honey extraction. It's a nice plan if I was a beginner beekeeper, which I was many moons ago, and I think I had the exact same plan, which was to do it like that. And what beginner beekeepers don't understand is that in order to make your life easier in the honey extraction room, the planning comes much, much earlier than that. So one good example of that is uncapping frames. You need to make sure they're correctly spaced. Once you know that and you manage your bees for that each year, you fix that problem and honey extraction becomes like quite a nice process to go through. It's quite a therapeutic process, removing all of those cappings. But the other really important bit of advice that people don't often get is it is so, so much easier to extract your honey when it's warm. And you don't want to have to go through the process of the honey cooling down and then it falling to you, the beginner beekeeper, to warm it back up again in Probably an expensive piece of machinery that you're not entirely sure how to operate. You might as well just take it at the exact correct temperature from when the bees were keeping it warm on the beehive. And if you've watched any of my videos this year, if you've watched any of the shorts, that is exactly what has happened this year. I went and took 3 supers off a beehive, drove it straight to the honey extraction room, uncapped it, extracted it, got it into the jars, and job was good. It was a really, really nice clean job. But the extraction The balancing of the extractor, the actual efficiency of the extractor, the harvesting, the ability to not smush and crush all of your frames, all of that is made so much easier by going out and harvesting the honey in the morning. Get up nice and early and go and do it, and then just extracting that honey later on in the afternoon. Split your day like that and do like a Saturday like that and then a Sunday like that. So Saturday you're going to go out and get 10 supers or 20 supers or whatever it is. Bring them back, you're back by midday, and then from midday through to like 6 o'clock, you do all your honey extraction. You seal the room up at that point. So it's, you know, it's not clean, you've not cleaned it up yet, but it's fully sealed. And then you can go back out on Sunday morning, you can get more honey supers and bring them back in and continue the process like that. And the whole time the honey's just kept at the complete optimum temperature. When you don't follow that advice and you rock up on Monday morning to extract it and it's had 2 cold nights in your shed or wherever you've kept it, like we've got like a honey extraction, sealed off honey extraction room is just like a big log cabin, but it gets very cold in there overnight. So when you go to uncap it, it's like, oh, it's really thick and sticky and viscous. It makes the knife so sticky. So you're constantly cleaning the knife. When you put it in the extractor, it doesn't just flow straight out, so it doesn't balance as well. So the extractor's banging around and you have to hold the extractor down. And all of these things are made so, so much easier by asking yourself the question, like, when is the best time to harvest my honey and when is the best time to extract that honey? The two go hand in hand. Commercial operations can't do that. Commercial operations just get too big to do that, but you can do it if you've got up to like 50 or 100 beehives and you plan it like that. It's very efficient, it's very easy, it turns them into much more manageable, digestible tasks that aren't quite as onerous. So a little bit of planning goes a long way when it comes to August honey extraction and honey harvesting. I love this next question. It's the question that I got wrong for so many years, and it's the question that I never really asked myself, which was, has the flow finished? Because what most beekeepers do is they say, well, there's bees in the brood box, the queen excluder's there, I put the super on, why are the bees not filling it with honey? That's the question that they ask. They say, why are the bees not doing what I expect the bees to do, which is produce honey? We get tons of questions like that. They'll say, I bought a queen off you, I introduced it into a colony, she's laid like a little bit of eggs and she's expanded it out nicely. The brood box is now full, so I put the queen I put the super on, the bees are not doing anything. Now, if someone messaged me that in April, I'd say, well, that's kind of how it works. You put the super on way in advance of the bees needing it, and then they build up into it. Give it 2 or 3 weeks, it'll probably be full. They come back after 2 or 3 weeks and they say, yeah, it's full. They're up in a 3rd super or something ridiculous like that now. However, do that same advice in August, and my response is completely different, which is they're not going to fill that super. It's like the flow is finished, the season is has ended. And the season this year ended really, really early. But I do, I look back to some of the poor decisions that I've made previously with my beekeeping and some of the chasing honey at the back end of the year and chasing splits and saying, well, I'm going to do this now to try and get more honey and I'm going to focus on varroa treatments later, or I'm going to do more splits now and split things up because the bees are looking good, but I'm not going to feed them because I don't want to waste money feeding the bees. There should be a natural flow around. The bees will get everything they need from the And now I know that you can't do that with beekeeping. You need to keep that buffer there. The bees need to have access to protein. They need to have access to carbohydrates. They need to be kept healthy by giving them the mite treatments at the right time. They need to be kept queen right if they're going off and superseding or swarming. They need management from the beekeeper. But if the flow is not there, if you're trying to create something that doesn't exist, then you need your fallback option. And your fallback option should be, okay, we're not getting any honey this year. The honey is not going to happen. So let me focus on getting my bees through winter. In the best possible way. Let me get my bees up to a nice healthy state so next year I can produce a decent honey crop that time. And that question kind of falls back to, has the honey flow finished? Because people make the mistake of chasing something that is not there. They see the bees, they see the queen excluded, they put the super on, they expect that it's going to be filled, but they don't look around to see the drought. They don't look around to see that there's been no rain at all, that the flowers dying, the brambles at the end, the Himalayan balsam is not yielding in the same way that it was. And I'm paraphrasing now, of course, the Himalayan balsam is just coming into yield, but it's looking up and seeing what's actually going on as opposed to just expecting the bees to produce something out of thin air. Now, I know that 2026 has been a very, very strange season and it's been a compressed season, but generally the advice that I give to people and the advice that we build now into 14 Day Beekeeper is to say that come the middle of August, In the UK, there's still going to be a little bit of a flow, probably still going to have a flow there, but that flow is of much more use to the bees than it is to you. You might get an incremental increase in the amount of honey that's in the super, but at the same time, you're just accelerating the viral load that is on the colony. That means that they can potentially dwindle and fail over winter. No one tells beekeepers that. No one says, well, You might get a little bit more honey now, but you might lose your colony over winter because you're not treating them in time and it might really impact them next year and mean that you're not going to get as much honey next year. And I think saying that to the majority of beekeepers, they say, oh, okay, well, no, I'm not too fussed about getting the honey this year. Let's revert to the winter configuration and then let's get the bees set up for winter. I'm not too fussed about it this year. And that is the advice that I would give you. Look around. The flow has finished. If you're watching this in 2026, it's going to be probably Middle of August before this video goes out, but the flow is done. You might be getting a tiny bit of Himalayan balsam, you might be getting a little bit of heather depending on the area that you're in. But I challenge you to ask yourself this question: is an extra super or an extra half super worth of that honey worth the risk on the colony? My view is clear. I don't think it is. I think everyone, barring people chasing like an exclusive ling heather crop, should cut their season around the middle of August. This year it was early August. Take the honey off, put the varroa strips in, put the feed in, feed them 1:1, give them enough space, and leave any remaining flow for the bees. This configuration for winter is very, very nice. It's a good configuration for advanced beekeepers because it reduces your reliance on winter feeding. It means that much less can go wrong in the winter as well. It eliminates or highly reduces the chances of late season swarming if you double brood like that. Treating early though is the big one. You're getting ahead of tackling the viral load, bringing the viral load down. You're bringing the number of varroa mites down prior to the creation of winter bees. If you create the winter bees under a high viral load environment, they don't live as long. It's as simple as that. It sounds like really complex scientific evidence, but it is as simple as that, which is the healthier you are as a bee, the longer you're going to live. And that's the aim of the game for winter bees. You want them to live for as long as you possibly can because that's what means that the colony can accelerate out of spring. If all of those bees die and dwindle off, you go into winter with a big strong colony and then you open it up in February and it's just down to like 2 frames and then you can't get the rapid acceleration. You need 10 frames of bees in the spring for the queen to say, right, the days are warmer, the days are longer, the flow is here, I'm going to go and lay everything up. And in 3 weeks' time you're up on 2 or 3 supers. You do that with a colony that's dwindled down to 2 or 3 frames of bees, they can't get anywhere near the level of a big strong colony that's come through winter healthy. And it's the connection of those 2 bits there. The question is, has the flow finished? Should I continue chasing the flow? But then look at those 2 examples there. One is no, you shouldn't chase the flow. Take your honey off, put your treatments in, get them fed, build them up, double brood, get them through winter really, really nice and healthy. And in April 2027, you're probably going to open them up and they're on like 8 to 10 frames with brood already created. Or you chase the flow, you don't do the treatment, you give it another 4 to 6 weeks saying, come on, please fill up that super. You fill up the super, you take it off and you're happy with it. And you do a treatment kind of like mid to back end of September. Then when you open up your colony in spring, you could be one of those people where it collapsed from 10 frames down to 2. And then you've sacrificed all of next year's harvest, pretty much all of next year's harvest, especially the spring crop. for one super of honey, which in my mind is a really poor trade. So it's just thinking a little bit wider than like that one single question, that one single season, and working out how to best prepare yourself in a sustainable way to continually deliver the best for the bees. It's not even about getting the most honey there, it's just to have reliable, healthy stock that you can, you can work with, you can do stuff with, you can get honey from, you can get queens from, you can make splits from. Or you'd even just leave them under your stewardship at the back of your garden, but you understand what is going on. You understand the cycle that the bees are in and how best to manage them. So before you go and start to harvest all your honey and start to go through that extraction process, definitely worth doing a little bit of a checklist. Have you got everything that you need? Have you got clearer boards? Have you got a blower? Have you got a bee brush? Have you got buckets? Have you got all of the utensils that you need For honey extraction. We're talking honey extractors, the uncapping tray, different types of sieves, different types of buckets, but then even the little ancillary items like the little honey scraper. Abelo do this brilliant honey scraper, it's about £4, cheapest thing they do. And I would say it is the most crucial part of my process because it means you can get all of the honey out of the buckets really, really quick. So there's loads of different bits like that, loads of little things that you need. I have done a PDF, I'll stick it at the bottom of this video, which is like how to harvest honey, everything you need, talks about all of this and summarises it and puts it into a nice PDF. So if you're interested in that, I'll stick it at the bottom of the video in the description and as a pinned comment as well. But it does make a difference having a little bit of a plan. As a seasoned beekeeper with a honey extraction room, you kind of get in the process. You know where the things are, you know what you need, you know you've got all of the main bits, so you're kind of ticking them off as you go along. It's the ancillary items that you get stuck on. So buckets. Have you counted the number of buckets that you've got? Everyone does this. They'll be like, I've not counted them. You start doing it, you start extracting it, and then you realise that you have just completely run out of buckets. And it's really frustrating because no one sells food-grade buckets anywhere close to you at that point, so it becomes a real nightmare. A few things that I don't use when it comes to extracting honey though. I don't fret over using a refractometer on frames or batches or anything like that. I decant all of my honey into a single tank, it gets a good stir, and then I use refractometer readings on the end, and I put that on the bucket as it's decanted out. Always well within the parameters that they need to be, way below any point of fermentation. But you realize, kind of having gone through the process of of doing little mini batches and testing them, and then it just always being okay. Some of that work is not needed, so I don't get caught out on the unnecessary bits. I do like the absolute minimum to maintain the highest quality though. So I probably jumped ahead a little bit when it came to honey extraction, because when you're doing your honey extraction, the first thing that you're going to need is a suitable place to go and do it. Now we've got a dedicated honey extraction log cabin. It's got 5-star hygiene rating, and it's just for that. It's exclusively used for that. It's used for like a week of the year. It's complete Waste of a waste of space in the garden, but it serves it serves its purpose. Now I know a lot of people that don't use a dedicated space like that; they'll go and do it in their kitchen, and people worry and say, "Well, is that is that hygienic? Is that okay to sell?" And it all comes down to your processes. So regardless of whether you're extracting in a purpose-built honey extraction shed or you're doing it in your kitchen, you should be able to document to the nth degree how you are ensuring that no contamination is getting into your honey. And all of these things are included in our HACCP, which is our Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point plan. Basically a big document, a big plan that says, this is how I ensure that the honey that I'm giving you in this jar is just honey. There's nothing else added in. There's no contaminants, there's no grit, there's no chemicals from any of the processes that we use. And as I said, this is what you present to your local food hygiene office, and this is what they use to assess you and give you your rating, hopefully a nice 5-star hygiene rating. When we had ours assessed, so we had ours done in 2019 I think it was, and then they came back and did the audit in 2024, and the lady was really nice and she said, can we, can we take some of your documents and forms and just kind of keep them? And I said, you can, there's no problem, you can do that. Just out of interest, why? She said, we want to hold them on the file because they are exemplar. And it made my day because I was like, yes, I know what exemplar means. And also I'm really chuffed that you think they're exemplar. So I said, we can do, we can do some more stuff around that because we went to town on our HACCP. But it goes into detail like this, which is what's the risk of contamination for the honey? Really easy risk of contamination for the honey is you take your super off like that and you think, oh, where do I put it? Right, just put it on the floor, pick it back up off the floor after 2 seconds, and then take it into the honey extraction room. And you've just introduced like bits of twig, bits of mud, bits of leaf, bits of pebble. Like, you need to get all of those things out. And the HACCP and like the philosophy behind a lot of the food hygiene is saying, well, no, you don't need to get that stuff out. You need to eliminate the chance of that ever getting in. Show me how you're going to do that. So everything's worked back to that point. So when you see my honey extraction process and honey harvesting process, I always start with an upturned roof, like a big metal solid upturned roof, and I put that on the floor. And then I'll go and get my bees and I'll blow all the bees out of it. So I've got a box of honey that's just got honey frames in, no bees, and I put that on the upturned floor and then I put a roof on top of it. And then I go and do the other super. I take the roof off, put the other one on, put the roof back on. Once I build up a stack of like 2 or 3 depending on how heavy they are, generally can get away with 3, sometimes 4 if there's 2 of you lifting. I'll ratchet strap that up like super, super tight and we lift it up into the back of the truck, put it in the truck, close the door. It sits in there completely sealed. So other ways of doing it are putting kind of like membrane on the back of your car. That could be a suitable way of reducing contamination coming in as well. But when I spoke to the food hygiene people, I said, well, do I need to do both here? Do I need to like clean the back of my truck and then like sweep it all out, sterilize it, and then put the supers in like this? And she said, no, you don't need to do that because once you've sealed it all up and you've got a nice big clean sealed container, then putting that in the back of the truck is fine. And then the really good point that she made then was, well, how do you know that it's not going to open up in the back of the truck. And I said, well, I don't think it will open up in the back of the truck, but to make it bombproof, what I could do is I could just ratchet the ratcheting up hive to the back of the truck and like hold it in like that. And she said, perfect, do that, put it in the process. So I put it in the process and gone through, and it's like that all the way through, all the way until the very end. Like, it's a little bit OTT, but it's a good process. But then thinking about that on your scale, you can do exactly the same. It doesn't need to be a purpose-built honey room because a lot of the contamination gets in before you even get there. It's about being smart. It's about thinking about that contamination from the very beginning, ensuring that it doesn't get in. Upturned roofs and strapping things down helps you get that into the honey extraction room. But then your process around where you should extract it really does come down to how much time you're willing to put into those processes and how closely you're willing to follow them. So the process could be something like this, which is, so my kitchen is where I produce all of my food, and then today I'm going to turn it into a honey extraction room. So here's my plan. I'm going to go through, I'm going to remove all of these food types. I'm going to go through, I'm going to sweep, I'm going to clean. This is the cleaner that I'm going to use. This is the dilution rate. This is the contact time. Your food hygiene office will help you with stuff like that. But what that means is that if you document all of these processes and you follow them rigorously, and you present them to the food hygiene office and say, this is what I'm doing, the likelihood is they will say, yeah, that's absolutely fine, not got a problem with that. When they have a problem is when they'll find people who are just extracting in their kitchen and the dog's next door and someone's eating their peanut butter on toast in the, in the other room. There's so many contaminants there. There's so many potential allergies within the kitchen as well. So you do need to be very, very careful. And it does require a little bit of planning. So if you've got bees and you're thinking, I need to— I'm going to extract my honey, I'm going to do it in the kitchen, you need a little bit of time on that. You need to think, okay, how am I going to get the honey into the kitchen? How am I going to make sure that the kitchen is a hygienic environment? How am I going to store the honey long term to make sure that no contaminants get in? My advice to you is do it all in one hit. Get it all nice and clean. Take it from the, from the beehive, take the frames into the honey extraction room in your kitchen. Uncap it, spin it, extract it, settle it, and then jar it and then store it in the jar. That's the that's the neatest, cleanest way and reduces the contamination just through the elimination of double handling. But that's a nice process to follow, and don't let me put you off it. It's not that difficult. It just requires a little bit of common sense. It requires you to think: I need some gloves. I need a hairnet. I need an apron. I need to make sure that the surfaces are clean. I need to make sure that I've got the right cleaner for the surfaces. It's making me think that there's probably probably an online. Course in there somewhere, isn't there, that I should be doing to show you what is on my processes and documentation? But that is definitely for another season, I would say. But that should give you a good start of getting the honey from the beehives into the jar. Honey extraction and honey harvesting is a very big module, and it's something that we cover in great detail in 14-Day Beekeeper. There's like 27 or 28 videos on honey talking about all of the things I've spoken about there. So if you want to level up your beekeeping and get ahead of the curve for next season, 14-Day Beekeeper will turn you from a beginner to an expert in literally 14 So this is why in 14 Day Beekeeper I took the time to do many, many videos when it comes to honey extraction. Talk about how to use an extractor, how to balance an extractor, how to filter, how to strain, how to make sure that your honey is perfect just as the bees have produced it. There are over 300 videos now in 14 Day Beekeeper, and it also comes with a free year's membership of HiveQ that's worth £108. There's PDF cheat sheets, there's exclusive podcasts, there is a thriving community of beekeepers who are all helping each other get the best out of their bees. It is without doubt my favorite place to be within Hive Q, just watching people help themselves get the best out of their bees. There is nothing better. If you're interested, the link is in the description, or you can check it out more at 14daybeekeeper.com. Once you've taken your honey off, a lot of people think that's it, we're done for the season. But no, there is a 30-video module all about post-harvest, all about the things that you should be doing between taking off your honey and getting your bees ready for winter. And that period there is about an 8 to 10 week period. It's quite a significant period of the season. So I won't go into all of the detail that's covered within our online course, but I'll give you the gist of it. When you take the honey off, you shouldn't be just going and taking the honey off and going straight into the extracting room. You should be going there with a plan. You should be going to take the honey off and put your feeders on. We put polyashworth feeders on because it's a great feeder for winter configuration. You should also be going there and feeding them as well, or at least setting them up for feed. You've just taken away all of the honey from the colony. So we like to go back in and we'll feed 1:1 sugar syrup. A lot of the textbooks get this wrong. A lot of people get this wrong at this time of the year, which is they think you have to feed heavy syrup for winter. And you do. You do have to feed heavy syrup for winter. It is the middle of August. It is not winter yet. And at the moment, all we're doing is preparing the bees for winter. We're preparing them to produce the winter bees. So all we're really doing is sustaining them. We're saying, go out, get what you need, get the pollen, get the nectar. But if you need a top-up, I'm going to give you a top-up here. I know what you're going to do with it. You're going to consume it and you're going to turn it into brood. So there's no point giving you 2 to 1 because I don't want you backfilling the brood nest. That's actually against what I'm trying to do at the moment. What I want you to do is take the food down, consume it, have enough to live, produce lots of nice winter bees, take the varroa treatment at the same time, which is a really nice combination of 2 important activities at this time of the year. And then once all of that brood has been created, you've got like 8 to 10 frames of winter brood that's there. As that starts to emerge, we can transfer and switch to 2:1. The bees will store it, it will build up the weight for winter, doesn't clog the brood nest. The winter bees are nice and healthy because we treated them early for varroa. That is my next point, I'm getting on to it. And then your bees are all set for winter. The timing of that in terms of when to do this and when to do that, the concentration of syrup, when's good to feed 2:1, when's bad to feed 2:1, it can become overwhelming really fast and it can become quite complicated. For the beekeeper and confusing, they think I just don't know what to do. 14-day beekeeper does solve that and does fix that. So if you're feeling confused, that's the last advert for this video. I promise. 14-day beekeeper dot com. But the final thing that you should be doing at this time of the year, in addition to taking the honey off and in addition to setting the bees up for winter with feeding and giving them a one-to-one feed, you have to put your varroa strips in. I found it's very simple to do that all at once. Go in, take your honey off, put the feeder on, give them one-to-one sugar syrup, give them their varroa strips. And leave them to it. You're coming back every week, you might top them up with a litre or 2 of 1:1, and that's all I'd recommend giving them the first time round as well. Don't give them 10 litres, it's way, way too much and it does more damage than good. It will block the brood nest, it will congest the bees down, and it will mean that those winter bees cannot be produced, which is exactly what you want to do. You want as many winter bees to be produced as possible, and that's what you should be thinking about in August. Don't be thinking the honey is off, it's now winter. There is a big 3-month period that all of the textbooks miss, and it's probably the most important time of the year for the bees. It's the most important time of the year for you as a beekeeper because your management is going to dictate how well that colony comes through the winter. Don't be one of these people who in January, February, or March opens up their colonies and they're dead, and you look inside the hive and it's a bit old and it's a bit manky and it's moist and there's mould, and you say, The damp and the cold killed my bees. Because I hate to break it to those people, it's not the damp and the cold that's killed your bees. It's poor management practice during that post-harvest from August through to September, October. It's the choice of feed, it's the choice of concentration of feed, it's the choice of winter setup, it's the choice of varroa treatment, it's the timing of that varroa treatment. It's all of these variables all condensed down into one simple metric, which is, did your bees survive the winter? And a lot of beekeepers feel too ashamed to say, my bees didn't survive the winter because I didn't manage them properly. I'm responsible for their death. And I'd say 99% of the time that is what is happening. Whereas I'm very much one for tackling things proactively and taking responsibility for my own actions. I'd much prefer to go in, take the honey off and say, right, bees, I'm focusing on you. And it's now my responsibility to give you everything you need to get you through until the next stage of the season or the next year. Now I know it's a little bit hard-hitting and it's a little bit pointing the finger at other beekeepers, but I see it all the time. It's a big mistake that beekeepers make at this time of the year, and I feel they're focusing on the wrong thing. The reason that I take my honey off at this time of the year, the reason that I take it off earlier than a lot of other beekeepers, and the reason that people are starting to trend, I would say, towards taking it off a little bit earlier, isn't because they think they're going to get more honey. Probably going to get a little bit less honey in the first season. It's because people are realizing that we are responsible for the health of the bees. They're not just a vehicle to produce as much honey as possible and we don't care about them. We need to foster a very sustainable relationship, and when you understand the bees properly, it's quite easy to do that, to keep the beekeeper happy, to keep nice, calm, healthy bees, and to produce a sustainable bumper honey crop each year, a decent honey crop. The beekeeper and the bees can work in harmony there, but you do need to get ahead of yourself. You need to question what you're doing on a month-by-month basis, week-by-week basis, even down to like a day-by-day basis. Question yourself, is the thing that I'm doing now good for the bees, or is it good for the beekeeper? And I think as long as you're answering that 9 times out of 10, that is good for the bees, then the beekeeper doesn't need to do too much work because the bees will take care of the beekeeper. So there we go. Turned into a very long video, that one, but August is a very busy month in beekeeping. I'll finish this series. September is up next, but I'll go all the way through so you've got a video for every single month of the year, making sure you know exactly the questions you should be asking yourself as a beekeeper.