NEW BEEKEEPING PHOTO

HONEYCOMB shop front. Very nice design.

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MahakoBees.com - a beautiful beeswax vase





MahakoBees.com - A honeycomb vase





MahakoBees - A honeycomb vase

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MahakoBees.com - A honeycomb vase, made by bees! “Libertiny made a vase-shaped hive that the bees then colonized, building a hexagon comb around it. The wax sheets used to make the hive were embossed with a honeycomb pattern to help the bees on their way. Libertiny calls the process slow prototyping - it took 40,000 bees a week to make the vase. Since the bees get aggressive when they are interrupted, Libertiny had to guess when it was time to remove the vase.”

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NEW RAW HONEY glass honey bear teddy jars. BOY and GIRL honey jars. Beautiful glass #honey bear 250gram jars we found and are trialling - cost is $3 each (jar only). What do you think? Kids should love these no? What are your thoughts? Is $3 too much? Would you pay this much to put a smile on your child’s face? We did, and it was worth every penny!

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ONE MORE GLASS HONEY JAR prototype. Let us know what you think. Thank you

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MahakoBees - all about the superfood raw honey
Bee Labor or Industrial Product?
A great infographic showing How to Distinguish Natural Honey

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Beekeeper GLOVES REVIEW - Beekeeping 101 Bee equipment

http://www.mahakobees.com - NEW VIDEO.Beekeeper GLOVES REVIEW - Beekeeping 101 Bee equipment

Beekeeping supplies offer many options for hand protection against bee stings. Leather beekeepers gloves are one of the most popular, but often bee keepers choose to use rubber gloves, work gloves, or work leather gloves. These don't offer a new beekeeper enough protection whilst they build up confidence looking after their beehives and bee colonies. Beekeeping supply stores usually have two or three options. We look at these in the video but also look at some other, much cheaper options that many use. We prefer to handle our bees without beekeeping gloves all together, but there are times that you simply need to put them on for protection. If the weather is unfavorable, or the bees are agitated in the beehive for other reasons, you are best advised to put the gloves to be on the safe side. Sadly, when wearing leather beekeeping gloves, the beekeeper immediately looses much of their finger control and many more bees usually die during the apiary visit and bee hive inspections, especially if you are inspecting and manipulating all the frames. All the bee keeper can do, is take extra care to minimize the unnecessary bee deaths.

Bee gloves vary in price greatly. The quality goats leather or softened cow hide beekeeping gloves, with long ventilated sleeves and an elastic band will cost about $25 dollars or more. The cheapest option in a proper beekeeping glove would be around the $15 dollar range, which uses synthetics. And then you have the other styles of gloves, such as worker gloves, gardening gloves, dish washing gloves, or just very simple food preparation rubber gloves that can and do provide limited protection, which can be as cheap as a dollar or two. These provide only minimal protection, but they at least keep your hands clean from honey, beeswax and propolis. Bees will usually sting right through these.

So, in closing, we recommend all new beekeepers to purchase the full sleeve length beekeepers gloves, and in our view, the best gloves are leather, ventilated, and softened. The extra $10 dollars is well worth the investment. The gloves will protect your hands against bee stings almost 100%, and they will last many years to come. 

Enjoy your beekeeping.
MahakoBees

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Beekeeping - how to SAVE your wired frames

HOW TO Save your wired frames. http://www.mahakobees.com/blog. 

All beekeepers know, that building and maintaining your beekeeping equipment such as the beehives, frames, beeswax foundations, queen excluders and all the bee related tools of the beekeeping trade is time consuming and costly. Here is a quick tip on how you, as a new beekeeper, can save yourself many hours of your time by saving the frames before each peak honey flow season.



It is recommended, that as part of your beekeeping frame rotation schedule, to have all your old drawn beeswax honey comb foundations extracted and removed at least once every 1 to 2 years. This reduces the potential for spreading diseases within your apiary and keeps the wax nice and clean for each new beekeeping season. You can melt the beeswax comb, process it, render it, purify it, and reuse it for new foundation sheets, or to make candles, creams or other cosmetic products. We show you this process in a small home based backyard beekeepers way in this series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfE6cWwwWKog1Mx0wdsnkPbeIDvo-qPng.

So nothing goes to waste. The Honey Bees simply need to draw the new honey comb on top of the new beeswax foundation sheets, and use it either as honey stores or as the new brood frames in your lower hive boxes.



So, what are we suggesting? Simple. Firstly, watch our earlier video series on how to build a solid timber honey frame: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRWxK2zc4qQ. Once you have a solid full depth honey frame assembled, add foundation and put the frame into rotation in your hives. A year later, once you extract the honey and the beeswax inside the honey frames becomes darker, use a sharp knife to cut along the inner edge of the timber frame, and then carefully cut the wax along the wires. Remove the strips of beeswax and melt. The beekeeping frame should now be relatively clean of all beeswax. Then, use a heat gun or a blow torch to melt the remaining wax, and to kill any remaining parasites, wax moth eggs, and to coat the frames with the beeswax for protection. (See this video on HOW TO clean frames and kill wax moth eggs using a heat gun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwRAW7_xLw0). 



This will save you lots of time and effort by reducing the time spent on rewiring your frames and you get some wax for new foundation sheets as well. Not to mention, it will go a long way in saving you money by reducing requirements for treating diseases and controlling unwelcome parasites in your bee colonies in the apiary. So all in all, a worthwhile investment we think. 



We invite you to share this video, click the thumbs up and to SUBSCRIBE if you enjoy our content. It goes a long way in helping our pollinators in crises as we continue to combat the phenomenon of bee colony disorder where our bees simply disappear in massive quantities. Thank you for visiting. MahakoBees.

CONCERNED about bee hive colony - mites or ashes? Beekeeping experts?

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NEW VIDEO - ever seen this in your beehive? On your brood frames? On your bee larvae? 

What do you think it is? We are perplexed somewhat, as these black spots are distributed throughout the frame on all larvae, but the pollen cells are clean. The consistency and distribution of the black smears or spots is very even, that we think it is not bee smoker and ashes related. In which case, what is this? Can anyone help? 

We have researched the issue and cannot find anything conclusive. Please take a look at the video and let us know in the comments section or via email if you have experience with this, seen it in the past or perhaps are aware of the issue and perhaps how to treat this.

The beehive that this frame was extracted from was perfectly OK. The video is taken 1 day from its extraction from the hive, so you can see ants crawling around, but they would not be the cause of these black markings. Could it bee fungus? Hopefully nothing more serious like AFB or EFB, even though these symptoms are not indicative of those. No other similar symptoms exist in the beehive itself and the queen is laying fine. The colony is very strong, possibly too strong and is getting ready to swarm as we approach spring and warmer temperatures. If there is a treatment we should investigate, please let us know.

We appreciate all beekeepers opinions, feedback and advice. Especially from the experienced and expert beekeepers. Your time and input is much appreciated. Hopefully its something minor.

MahakoBees


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Music composed, performed and provided by Groovey - Adam Kubát a Pavel Křivák. You can visit their website on: http://www.groovey.cz/. Also, a big thank you goes to Kevin McLeod for providing his royalty free music "Skye Cuillin". We appreciate your kind contribution - (incompetech.com).

dark SPOTS in your honey frame? Honey harvest extraction - beekeeping 101

DARK SPOTS in your beeswax honey frame? Backyard beekeeper 101. 

http://www.mahakobees.com/blog. The dark spots can be many things, but more often than not, it will be pollen. It is often difficult to see as the bees cap the honey with a white beeswax capping. But if you shine light through the honey frame, you will see the spots. They are perfectly normal and are very good for you. In fact, they are very good for you in many ways. Unless you are allergic to honey and pollen, you should try and eat RAW honey in your diet as it helps prevent and in many cases cure hay fever by introducing your local flora into your body, therefore reducing hay fever symptoms when local trees and plants flower. 



It is not advisable to give children under two years of age raw honey or pollen. Seek medical advise prior, and seek medical help immediately should your child consume raw honey and show adverse reaction to it. 



To learn more, we encourage you to take a look at our range of earlier videos and specifically a short closeup of the honey bee queen eggs and larvae (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-2E76XaDYk), or alternatively our playlist of CLOSEUPS which has many related and interesting videos (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfE6cWwwWKoiXEp4xSACAmvTHSrweW0nU)



BUT, if the art of beekeeping interests you, the best place is to visit our http://www.mahakobees.com/blog website for many instructional and HOWTO videos.



We invite you to subscribe, like, and share our content.

Have a relaxing day

MahakoBees



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You can visit their website on: http://www.groovey.cz/.

What? A mid WINTER SPLIT? - Backyard Beekeeping

What? A mid WINTER SPLIT? - #Backyard #Beekeeping

Mid WINTER SPLIT required to prevent swarming. See all the drones at entrance? http://www.mahakobees.com/blog. At a glance we could see hyperactivity at one of the hive entrances. It is middle of winter in Australia, but the bees don't mind. There is still plenty of flowering trees and plants around, and the temperatures range from 5C (41F) at night to 26C (79F) in the day. In the sun, it can easily get to 35C (97F), so the honey bees are very active. Yes, the queen slows her laying, yes the drones are mostly evicted (see our DRONE EVICTION video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWSBfbAixo0&list=TLv0QzyBZoGSnAy635ZPGocQaJdtWePfqP), and there is no #honey flow, but none the less, if the hive is doing well, they can swarm and we certainly need to add honey supers at least once. In fact, several hives have 4 full honey supers on top of a single brood box with a queen excluder. 



Clearly, this is not your typical winter activity for most beekeepers around the world, and we are very lucky to be located here in Australia, because we rarely worry about preparing bees for overwintering, we never need to feed our bees any sugar water or pollen patties, and as you can see, we can even encounter the odd swarming situation and need to split the hive or manage the colony to prevent it.



In this short clip, we ended up removing plenty of the drone comb and splitting the hive into a small nuc. A video on how that went mid winter and how the new hive progressed with making a #queen and establishing themselves as a strong hive will be released soon. It's on the cutting table now. So we invite you to subscribe and click the thumbs to show support. We release new videos weekly so join us if you like bees, are a beekeeping enthusiast, or just like to learn what all the buzz is about.



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