- [Woman] Well, there you go.
There you go.
You got it.
- [Aaron] The purpose of smoking is for them to kind of go into more of a defensive action and protect the hive and get back in there.
They aren't going to get out as much to attack.
They're more about protecting what's in there at that point.
So think of it in the wild.
If there's a forest fire, they're gonna go and try to protect where they're at and not explore.
This is kind of mimicking that in a controlled setting.
For the top bar, we lay these bars across the top.
They're very loose.
What happens is then the honey bees create what's called propolis.
You can see a little bit of it here.
All of the cracks in here and create a solid structure underneath.
When we're coming into the hive we're looking at this to pop that propolis off so we can actually expose the the honeycomb and honey that the bees have created.
So this is what they're building their wax off of on the top.
You can see how it was dipped in wax and then from that they start to build their honeycomb down.
So you can see the honey coming off of there.
- [David] The bees actually have two stomachs.
They have their own digestive stomach but they also have a stomach where they take the nectar back and then they process it with inside their, their body and they put it in the wax and then it's a fair amount of water in it.
And eventually they have to take the water, they evaporate the water out.
When they get it to the consistency of honey, then they cap it, and that's for preservation and it keeps 'em over the winter time.
- [Aaron] So this is all, all of it's in the wax.
And then this up here is capped.
This is uncapped, so they'll cap the honey when it's the moisture is completely gone from it.
So these down here there's still a moisture content on it a little bit.
These are, that would be your solid honey that you would really try to process.
Typically, we would do it once a year, wanna make sure that they have enough to, to get themselves going.
We also don't want to take honey from the population that it's using to survive throughout the course of the, the spring summer time.
We'll make sure we leave plenty of honey in here to not set off an a an alarm within the hive that they need to collect more.
- [David] And that's about three pounds or so.
When you uncap it, it allows you to save the, the wax and, and you use a centrifuge.
Then you don't destroy the wax as much and the bees can fill it up the next time.
This would be the very first thing to do before we put it in the centrifuge.
And this centrifuge, will spin around and there'll be four frames in there.
The centrifugal force will spin the honey out.
We're gonna do half of one side.
Then we're gonna flip 'em around and do the whole other side and then do the remainder.
As a family physician, I used to recommend honey a lot to people, except for the first year life.
Bacteria cannot grow in honey.
So that's why it's, it's kind of sterile.
Honey is actually used for medicinal purposes.
They can use it for salves.
If there's an infection on your leg or, or skin you can cover it with, with honey.
You could have two hives and one hive could go two miles, one direction.
The other hive decides to go a mile the other direction to get honey.
And with their communication skills, those hives will continue to go exactly to those same places.
So you could have one type of honey from one hive, Right next to it, the other, the other hive has something totally different.