I am going to give a bee venom harvesting a go. I am always on the look out for ideas and products that can help me to get more out of the efforts that need to go into keep my bees happy and healthy. This has been a long time coming but finally I have bitten the bullet and got a kit to try it out.

Theory is pretty straight forwards. Set up the kit outside the hive and leave it on for 15 mins then off for 15 mins and harvest from the glass sheet. Will give it a go and see were I get to. It will be interesting to see how aggressive they get and if this has a calming effect or the reverse over time. Green poly are my most aggressive hive and a huge colony so will be a good place to start as a trial.

Key to the success of this project is the selling of the bee venom so please Contact me if you are interested in buying some bee venom.

First up is the venom extractor. After doing lots of research online I though this one was the best and at the best price point. I got a 3 frame set-up. I needed some way of rigging this to the hives so I built some little frame supports.

Frame Supports

I am going to need some way of supporting the frame on the front of the beehives. Trouble is that the hives are not all the same in height or in design. I have a mix of poly hives and wooden as well as some on scales and others not. The plan is to be able to clamp a small platform onto the front of the hive stand so that I can adjust the height according to where the bee hive is and which sort I am trying to harvest from.

So I started with some old 4×2 and cut it down into 2×2 and 2×1 strips. This gives me a nice rectangular support lengths to give me a solid base for the venom extraction frames. This can then be attached to the top of the flag pole and the flag pole clamped to the hive stand. The frames are supposed to be 180 mm x 270 mm but we will see when they are delivered next week. Either way these should suffice to give me the flexible support that I need for the venom extraction process and easily switch between the different hives. It doesn’t take long so small variations in height can be chocked up with wood if needed. These are not permanent additions to the hive, thought they probably will stay up at the apiary all the time.

The plan is to return the glass slides to home and to dry them out in the dark. I have a multipurpose scraper to remove the powder from the glass surface.

Tip: Bee venom is really quite dangerous in it’s concentrated form so take great care with the powders. This is especially dangerous to pets and non beekeepers who don’t have much natural immunity to stings.

A milligram digital scale is needed to measure the quantity that is produced. Each slide should given me < 0.25 g so need a lot of slides to make this worth-while. A 0.001 resolution on the scales is therefore important. Was simple enough to get of Amazon. This one came with a calibration weight and a weighing bin.

I have bought 2 ml glass bottles. I bought the dark glass ones as bee venom is light sensitive and should not be exposed to direct sunlight.

I plan to sell vials with 100 mg of material as my standard unit.