Tonight I tried the kit for the bee venom extraction. I tried to take pictures but it is really hard with lots of flying bees and not being able to take my gloves off to work the touch screen on my phone! The glass sheets were cleaned and disinfected prior to use using the C11food grade steriliser that I use for the kitchen surfaces when cleaning them down for honey harvesting.
I decided to run the green poly hive as this was a fairly aggressive hive, the red poly, as this was huge and the blue wood hive as this was from fairly aggressive swarm. I thought this would make the best trial for the first run and they were all next to each other. The set up was really simple as I had already prepared the stands and explored the equipment.
The drive box connects to the battery pack and turns on at the back. There are 2 terminals on the back that feed out tot he frames. You are supposed to be able to connect 5 frames in series to each of the terminals so I connected up one frame to one and the other two up to the other terminal.
First up was the green poly. This was connected to the single terminal.
Then the other two were strung in series.
Fully suited in a bee suit as I have heard that this makes the bees properly angry, I turned it on… NOTHING HAPPENED!!! The settings on the control box are either Auto or Manual, but this is just the timer. So Auto has a 30 minutes run and then shuts down while manual just keeps going till you turn it off.
I was expecting an explosion of bees from the hives but nothing happened. After about 5 minutes of ignoring the plates I got bored and started dropping a few bees down onto the plates but nothing really happened. after about 10 minutes the red hive began to see interest int he plates.
Similarly the blue hive was very slow to start. The bee were more interested in attacking me. Not the most aggressive I have seen but not the friendliest either, so I left them to it and went and said hello to the sheep in the field.
The green hive had shown no interest at all in the pates.
After about 20 mins there was a flury of activity and the plates were getting a good seeing to!
Green hive still showed no interest. even when swapping the frames over to put a buzzing one in front the green hive showed no interest.
In the end I got bored and came in Stacking the frames back into their clean box and carrying the kit back home.
The glass sheets were surprisingly easy to remove and scrape off. The residue once dried was a fine white powder, which I then weighed and placed into the jar provided by with the bee venom kit.
Red hive gave 0.042 g.
Blue hive gave 0.027 g.
Totalling 0.069 g as I got nothing from the green hive.
Post extraction the bees calmed right down very quickly. I had 2 dead wees which was a bit of a shame but I will monitor the hive’s. All in it was an interesting experience, though the frames were never really covered in bees like in the pictures from the equipment suppliers.
Fascinated to see what happens if I remove the front entrances before setting off the extractors. This should encourage the bees out and onto the frames. Also want to try doing a morning harvest when the bees are active rather than an evening when they were all going to bed.