➡ The CanadianPrepper shares his experience of beekeeping and honey extraction. He explains how a hive of his bees swarmed, or left their original hive, possibly due to overcrowding. With the help of experts, he managed to relocate the swarm and even found they had produced a large amount of honey. He emphasizes the importance of careful handling, especially when trying to locate the queen bee, and the process of extracting honey from the hives.
➡ The text describes the process of extracting honey from beehives. The honeycombs are carefully scratched and placed in an extractor, which spins to release the honey. The honey’s color varies based on the flowers the bees feed on. The extracted honey is then strained to remove wax and other particles. The process yields a large amount of honey, which is appreciated for its natural origin and the hard work of the bees.

CanadianPrepper here. Today on the channel, I’m going to show you how I took one beehive and I converted it into all of this delicious, beautiful, liquid gold, Mad Max currency baby, honey. This stuff is going to be worth a lot in the apocalypse. And guys, if I can get up off my own knees, look at this. It’s getting really close to midnight, so we got to start stocking up and learning the skills. Because we must run the old ways of the old country. Soon, before the apocalypse, before Vladimir Putin, drop a nuclear weapon on my face.

Alright guys, so about a month ago, one of our hives swarmed. If you don’t know what swarming is, that’s okay. I didn’t either. I heard the term before. But this is what happened. So we suddenly found one of our hives hanging out in a tree about a hundred feet from the original hive. I had to call in my expert friends over at Strew and Apiaries to help me wrangle them back before they took off for good. I had to admit, I was very worried because we just invested in these bees and they were already departing. Apparently there’s a few reasons why a hive will swarm, so we can’t be sure exactly why they decided to leave.

But it may have been something to do with the fact that the hive was getting too big. Fortunately for us, they decided to camp out on a short evergreen tree that was within arm’s reach. They’re very calm. It’s actually just the way they are. They’re very young bees, so they’re not aggressive to start with. Before they leave the hive, they gorge on hunting and that makes them even more docile. The most important thing is to get the queen. Without the queen, it’s just a bunch of bees. So these ones that are flying around are scout bees.

So they’re actually going out and trying to find a good place for the hive to live in a suitable location. Right there, guys. And then they come back and they kind of have a boat. It’s very democratic. And whoever wins, that’s where they’ll go. The bees were quite calm, so we were able to scoop them up handful by handful, but that was proving to be quite time consuming and they weren’t all staying in the box. So we decided just to shake them out of the tree instead. So they won’t make another queen. They can’t make another queen because they don’t have any eggs.

She’s got to be in there. The chances of spotting her, though, are not terrific. If she is in there, these guys may migrate down into there. So we’re thinking we should let these guys settle a bit and we should go take a look at the other hives and see if we can figure out what went on. Whatever you guys think. Yeah. I can’t. This one is really empty. That’s not very heavy. Could this be the one where the hive split? It’s possible. We should maybe pull this top box on and take a look at it.

We look okay. They’re not progressing quite as much. What is that? Oh, it’s a queen cell. There’s a queen cell. We probably don’t want to get rid of them because if this is the one that swarmed, they need to continue on. So there’s no eggs or a young breed. If this is the one that swarmed, we’ll look at the other one, too. If this is the one that swarmed, the queen stops laying so that she can lighten down so that she can fly good. So that’s a possibility for sure. That seems super light. So this is basically full.

This one’s good? Yeah. That’s what we’re aiming for. This hive still has lots of bees in it. Yeah. So I’m assuming that it was actually this one that swarmed. I think so. And no fault of anybody’s because we had lots of room. They were just set up for it. It’s partly genetic. It’s partly environmental. There’s lots of reasons why they swarmed. So yeah, this one’s doing good. This one, unfortunately, is going to be a little behind. That’s all right. Now we had to be extremely careful because somewhere in this swarm of bees was the queen.

So the goal was to find the queen, get her into the box so that the rest of the swarm would follow. We had to be very careful taking handfuls of bees and trying to spot the queen in the process. We never did end up finding the queen. But after a while, Robert felt reasonably confident that she was in there. So we closed it up and moved it back to its permanent home. And let me tell you, that was a relief. Now we couldn’t move them back to the colony that we took them from. We had to start a whole new hive.

So now we have three hives. The original hive that these ones abandoned will make a new queen. Here we are. The day has finally come. We have the stroom family with us, and we are going to start hopefully extracting some honey. Let’s see what we get. It’s been an interesting year, to say the least. So we’ll just pop this lid, see what these guys are up to. So this is the swarm that escaped, and then we trapped it. They basically filled that box with honey. Okay, wow. Nice. This is all new wax. In fact, this whole box is full of all new wax.

And then if you look down here, you can see the honey. And this is copped. So there you go. That’s all honey. So the first thing we’re going to do is shake it. And that gets most of the bees off, not all. And then we want to top it. But we want to top it right in the corners here. If we top it here or here, you’re going to break the frame. Mostly because of the weight. So it’s quite easy. You just give it a little top, a couple of tops. Bees are used to holding on this direction.

So if we top on this direction, they usually just fall off. And there’s only one left for a demo. All right, so here we started cracking open our hives, checking on the state of the colonies, and looking for the frames that were ready to be extracted. Some of those frames were full of honey, but were not capped by the bees yet, so we left those to extract later. Capping is a process in which the bees put a layer of wax over top of the honeycomb in order to prevent the buildup of moisture and preserve it.

There were other frames that while they had plenty of capped honey cells, the bees actually started using it as brood. So we left those ones alone to encourage the hive to expand for next season. So we just pulled this frame out. We won’t extract this frame because it’s got a lot of brood on it. You could extract it if you wanted to, but we’re not desperate for honey, so there’s no real need to do it. They usually put honey on the outside edges, right? Right, and brood in the middle. And brood in the middle? Honey is actually a really good insulator, so it keeps them warm.

Honey, if it’s got too much moisture in it, will spoil. So you want to make sure that your honey is half to three quarters capped. They cap it when the moisture content is proper. If it’s too little capped, it could have too much moisture and it’ll spoil. Looks like they’re all coming out of the bottom now. Oh yeah, they’re getting agitated a bit. Okay, they’ve clued in that we’re stealing their stuff. That’s a beauty. I’m not sure about this one. We can check it out. This is the hive that I think split, and I’m not sure what’s going on in here.

Yeah, so because they swarmed, they’re not as strong, but they do have… Do you have a little bit going on here? Yep, there’s some in there. So there’s honey in there, but it’s not capped in it, so I think for now that’s going to be it for this one. Okay. This is all propolis. Propolis, what’s that? Propolis, it’s what they use to block up little drafts in their hives or to encase, like if a mouse got in there, they would actually encase it with propolis. And it’s like antibacterial, and you want to save that because you can make sabs and stuff out of it.

It’s very healing. We wound up pulling 16 fully loaded frames of honey, which was about half of what was ready to harvest. We replaced the full frames we pulled with empty frames so the bees could continue to work while we stole all their honey. Okay, this is hopefully the mother lode, hey? All right. Oh, yeah, that one’s heavy. Oh, look at that. Oh, it’s dripping, wow. Yeah, that’s a good one. Oh, that looks good. Smokes. All right, bros. Sorry to eat this to you, but it’s time to pay your rent. Once we had all our frames loaded up, we put the hives back together so the bees could calm down and then we headed inside to start extracting honey.

Let’s let them try to process the trauma here. So you only got stung once? I got stung once, but it was my own fault because I didn’t look where I was putting my hands. Before we load the frames into the extractor, we have to scratch the frames with a special scratching tool. We’ll need to do this every frame before it goes in the extractor. So the bees cap everything to keep the moisture level proper. Yes. It’s very thin. You can see it’s very thin wax that they put on there. So it won’t come out from spinning like they do a really good job.

So you’re kind of just breaking them open. So if you do it too much, like some people do it really far down and then the bees have to spend all that energy building the comb back up to look like this. I would definitely recommend securing an extractor like this one to the floor. When the weight of the frames in the extractor was uneven, this thing started having convulsions and seizures and started dancing all over the room. We ended up needing to have a couple people hold it down as we were spinning the honey out.

Finally, after spinning both sides of our first four frames, we had enough honey in there to drain the tank. And I got to say, it was pretty awesome to see the fruits of the bees’ labor that we just stole come out of the spout. It really did seem like we were mining liquid gold. So is the color different sometimes, or is it… Yeah, it’s different depending on the flower that they’re feeding on. Yeah, so this is like a canola. That’s probably mostly canola. And that clover. And sweet clover. They’re both very light. Still just pouring out of there, holy cow.

It’s crazy. I don’t want to fill it up too high, but damn, it’s never going to stop. We had it pouring into a kind of jerry-rigged system with two strainers. First a one with wider holes, then a finer mesh to filter out all the excess bits of wax and propolis. We ended up having to scoop the wax out with a ladle between each round to allow the honey to flow through quicker. In hindsight, we probably should have prepared for this a little bit better. But surprisingly, most systems that you would buy online replicate this very method.

But honey is, what is it, anti-microbial? Yeah. So it inhibits any sort of pathogen. Right. Yeah. So there shouldn’t be any bacteria in there or anything. Just knowing, you know, that we made it makes it that much better, you know? Actually, the bees made it. The bees made it, but they’re working for us, right? From just 16 frames, we had filled a 5-gallon pail and still had some left over. Nature really does provide. If you’re willing to steal from bees, that is. Incredible. I just ate the work of thousands of bees who spent their entire life slaving over that.

So I could do that. Thanks bees. Appreciate it. I’ll try to keep you alive over winter so you can do it all again next year. Okay, guys. If you live in and around the Saskatoon region and you want to get into beekeeping, you need to contact the strewn apiary. They’re going to hook you up. They’re going to get you the bees. They’re going to get you the boxes, and you can come back and reference these videos. And hopefully, we can show you what to do. So we got roughly 11, maybe 12 gallons of honey in this whole endeavor.

And I asked Chat GPT, and they said, that’s roughly 130 to 140,000 calories, all right? That’s a lot of calories, and we’re only halfway done. Make sure you watch the first video where we give you a tutorial on how to set up a hive from start to finish. Thanks for watching. Don’t forget to like, comment, subscribe. Canadian Prepper out. The best way to support this channel is to support yourself by gearing up at CanadianPreparedness.com, where you’ll find high-quality survival gear at the best prices, no junk, and no gimmicks. Use discount code preppinggear for 10% off.

Don’t forget the strong survive, but the prepared thrive. Stay safe. [tr:trw].

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