Honey Payoff (bees paying their rent)
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- Опубликовано: 27 янв 2025
- First honey pulls of 2021. Indications so far are that the harvest will be good, but not great. The bees built a lot of new comb this year which saps resources. I'm amazed at how well they've performed.
Link to my Amazon Store, with products I recommend:
www.amazon.com/shop/duckriverhoney
Note: if you purchase from my Amazon store, a tiny amount of money will come out of Amazon's pocket and go into mine. The price to you is the same. They have deep pockets and I don't, so your support is appreciated.
Great to hear you say, "this box is heavy"! Love, "Honey bunker". And it make you laugh. I might suggest a fan to circulate the air. Given the space, not certain that would be a big deal. I seem to have better luck with escape boards when I provide empty supers below. Just copied Ian Steppler.
Thanks, I appreciate it.
The BIG HONEY BOX -> name for the container! 🙂
The Honey Box....like it. Thanks
😂 LOL !! “Bees paying their rent” good one!
Thanks! The bees get free housing, free healthcare, free meal ticket...and only have to pay rent once a year. A beekeepers job is to collect and not let the bees skip out on their part of the deal. :)
The "Honey desiccator, Super maintainer, Extractor Container". What did I win?
You won the longest honey house name contest! LOL
Your persistence and hard work is paying off. Congrats! Suggested names for the container - "Honey Hopper", "Honey Pod", "Honey Hutch"
Thanks Zelma! I always love to see your comments.
The honey container
Very cool , enjoy that honey 🍯
It’s good stuff so far, amazing to see the differences in color, thickness, stickiness, and taste among the different frames.
Congratulations! Love your videos.
I grew up in Florida. We called that weather "sun showers".
Thanks, very kind of you.
Nathan, do you wish you would have got a 40ft container or are you happy with 20? (I’m sure cost factored). Love the wagon. I need one of those. Was planning on getting a Kelly’s hive dolly with extended nose but looks like you do fine with a regular. Are you putting a board under supers to use that dolly?
Yes, get a 40. Wish I had. The cost is not nearly double, so the 40 is cheaper per sf. I use a migratory lid turned upside down under the stacks and move with a regular dolly, works great.
Thank you very much
👍
Great looking harvest!!
Thanks Randall, I may be more excited about the drawn comb just because of what it’ll let me do in years to come. I’ve been thinking about traveling around to some other beekeepers and interviewing them. I’d love to get down to see your operation sometime if we can work it out.
@@DuckRiverHoney having that combs makes a huge difference. Yes, i think we can work that out.
Looks like it going to be a good season. I thought I was the only one that needs a ladder to reach the top of the hives . Lol . Keep up the great work. Thanks
Thanks Kathy!
Did mine this weekend pulled 1 full super of each hive and left the partial. Then after spinning replaced the boxes so they could keep working. Managed to get 50lbs out. Very happy.
That is awesome!
“ The Bee Castle “ , if you have a couple hives close to this container, it would be a perfect place to learn how to graft a few queens and raise queens from your highest producing colony. Those colonies have great genetics to graft from .
Thanks! I grafted a bit last year to experiment. May get more into it next year, we’ll see if I need to or not.
Congratulations. Thank you sir for all your hard work 🙏 will be waiting on the processing video
I'd call it the Sugar Shack
Thanks Jason! Sugar Shack sounds like maple sugar...isn't that what they call the buildings where they boil the syrup? I think I remember it that way anyhow.
@@DuckRiverHoney You are 100% right on that 😃
The Honey Ship
Like it :)
I can't hardly wait to see how much ya get!
Thanks!
DR HONEY HOUSE , incorporates the river, is the shipping container near your house , where the electricity come from . ??
I put the container next to an old grain bin on the farm. There is electric service at the bin so I plugged into that.
I’ve been thinking about getting two 24 foot containers to set side by side and connect them together using bolts. I figure about $4000 compared to the price of building materials. Two containers should be more than enough room to manage my Apiaries. You definitely have the idea and a good start for being a beekeeper. I pulled 11.5 gallons off one colony and that colony has seven more frames of ten almost ready to pull . I’ve been beekeeping on and off since 1985 . I got back into it three years ago . Earlier this year I lost seven hives due to sac brood and European foulbrood. It started off bad yet allowed me to see first hand how good times and get bad and then back to good times . My plans is to expand up to 25 hives . That’s about all I want for now . Once I can move into a better job with more normal hours I plan on going into beekeeping full time.
Awesome! It’s always good to plan…I don’t know if I want to beekeep full time though. Long hours and lots of work. I love it, but it’s a tough way to make a living. I’m shooting more for hobby business or full time retired sort of job, in addition to a lot of fishing.
Name suggestion: “Sweet Steel”
LOL
I harvested honey for the first time this year and used Fisher's Bee-Quick and had similar results as you. Lots of bees left in the honey super and my hives are in direct sunlight. Because I had nothing to compare it to I thought maybe this is normal or maybe I should have used more. Ended up having to brush them off frame by frame before going into the honey house as I don't have a small leaf blower.
I really like the way Bee Quick smells. Honey Robber smells bad (my wife says it’s the worst thing she’s ever smelled) but it flat works. Bee Go is supposed to smell even worse.
Hallelujah!.
"The Honey Crate"
Thanks! Sea Crate, Honey Crate…
I am so happy for you, I've just started a RUclips channel on beekeeping 🐝😄 thought...why not😂
#all the way from South Africa 🇿🇦
That’s awesome, be interesting to see beekeeping there. Do you deal with overly aggressive hives? What about honey badgers?
@@DuckRiverHoney I just started a few months ago, I have 5 hives, 4 topbars and 1 langstrath hive. I plan on getting 40 hives buy the end of the year. I haven't had any problems with the bager yet, and I found that my topbar beehives are way less aggressive then the langstrath, only my langstrath hive is a bit aggressive
‘The sweat box’
A place where honey goes to sweat it out.
Hey have you done any research into moving hives small distances. Let’s say less then 6ft for me it’s 3ft. My girls are against a iron fence and in the cooler months are shaded so the girls have a early night every day. In full sun the hives are pumping. I want to flip the hive to face the other way and move it about 3ft. Can this be done .I’ve seen a bit on shoving brush against the hive to force them to reorientate.
You can do it, but expect drift if other hives are nearby. If the colony is strong it'll recover. If it's a weak nuc then you could weaken it further. You can also move a foot a day and not worry about it much.
@@DuckRiverHoney the one moving is a strong hive. It’s a double deep with about 5 solid frames of brood plenty of bee bread and stores above in the super.
@@DuckRiverHoney thanks for the advice mate. Much appreciated. I’ll
Let you know how I go.
Yep, cheers Wayne
Did you coat the inside the shipping container with spray foam insulation? If so how well is it to keeping the container cooler?
It’s doing much better than an uncoated one, but it could be twice as thick and would be much better. I used one Froth Pak 650 I believe it was.
Congratulations! Random question..What do you use for smoker fuel?
Pine needles. I take them up in the fall and store them in a trash can in the shed. I need to do a video on my smoker system. I’ve got a 20mm Ammo Can I store the smoker in that works well. Metal so no worries about starting fires, and airtight so it kills the fire and saves fuel.
@@DuckRiverHoney Pine needles work great. I tried switching to pine shavings (flake) and did not like it. Needles are cheaper and easy. I light mine by putting my propane torch on the side of the smoker while it gets cherry red and I am puffing. Greatest way I know (so far but still learning)
it's steel so I think it should be the "Honey Hangout"
Problem is nobody will hangout with me in there, it’s hot and sticky and work is required!
I’d like to pour this honey robber all over my bee suit! My bees are crazy aggressive this time of year! Smoke barely works! argh!🐝
That would be a great experiment, please film it!!!! FYI when I pulled into the driveway after pulling honey my wife was downwind of me. She made me go straight to the shower. Honey Robber is NOT good for your love life.
Good job man I know the feeling
Thanks! Where are you from?
@@DuckRiverHoney from Montreal Quebec running about 115 colonies right now
That’s awesome, lots of Canadian beekeepers.
Which part of the country are you from? Sweet white clover is still going strong here in SW Iowa. 16% has been the moisture content on most my pulls this year.
Middle Tennessee. The only sweet clover we have anywhere around is an acre and a half I planted last fall. As it's a true biennial, most of it won't bloom till next year, though I do have a few that bloomed this year. I've got a couple acres of buckwheat that'll be blooming within a couple weeks, but those flows don't amount to much except hopefully keep hives from losing weight. Plus we're into small hive beetle season, and nearing peak Varroa season, so it's a good time to pull honey, shrink hives, and get treatments done. I may put supers back on in September and try to catch some fall honey.
@@DuckRiverHoney sounds like you have a great plan!👍 I definitely under estimated the amount of honey I was thinking I was gonna get.🍯🍯🍯🍯🍯🍯🍯🍯🍯
That’s a good problem to have! Seems like it was a good year across most of the country. Hope we don’t have oversupply pressure on prices.
@@DuckRiverHoney I've been asking for $1 an once. Can't afford to let it go for less.
I think you have not enough bees for all that many frames boxes
Hives got shrunk during the honey pull. Less space to guard for the bees.
Great informational videos. I’m really interested in triple mediums for brood. I’m going to try an experiment in the Spring with triple mediums and under super the whole hive. Do you know if anyone does it like this?
All mediums makes a ton of sense for a lot of reasons. I've never heard of anyone undersupering the hive....you'd end up with a lot of pollen and brood comb further up the hive, and you may have trouble getting the bees to draw foundation put underneath the brood. Their natural tendency is to move up. Normal undersupering puts the empty comb or foundation above the brood but below the honey, and lots of testimonials say that they work it quicker because of the gap that is created.
@@DuckRiverHoney thx for the insight… keep up the good work
Congratulations on your harvest! If I can ask what did it cost to get your shipping container and put it in place? Also I know you are using medium supers for brood boxes but what do you think of single brood chamber management?
General inflation plus a storage container shortage had the prices way up. I paid $3200 delivered. Single brood boxes are very efficient for commercial beekeepers because you force the queen to lay side to side instead of having an egg shaped brood pattern that spans multiple boxes. In a commercial setting they will pull off honey and then feed the bees if there is a dearth. This system is efficient because it maximizes returns per dollar of woodenware investment. In my hobby beekeeping system I'm not so worried about return per dollar of woodenware...I want my bees to keep themselves through the dearth without me worrying about them. That's why most of my hives are triple mediums - they have plenty of resources in a hive that size to make it through the year.
@@DuckRiverHoney Well you probably came out ahead on the price. Lumber prices are high right now and if you wanted a concrete floor that would have been costly as well. I'm thinking about the single brood method because of what I have been reading about bees being better able to overwinter with a smaller area for the cluster and stores. Thanks for the reply and thanks for the helpful videos. I'm looking forward to your extraction video.
The container made sense to me. It’s mobile so I can move it if needed, plus it functions as a good drying room. Construction prices are crazy right now!
I had no sound on the last few minutes of the video.
Sorry about that, the sound is there, I bet the issue is on your end.
My sound lasted the entire video. You can replay it and fast-forward to the part you missed. Maybe it will work next time.
@@BeeGeeTheImp thanks.
I’m having the same issue as well with the sound.
Duck River Man Cave
Funny!