What is Capped Honey
Capped honey is the stuff that bees make on top of the brood frames, in the supers.
When you put a super on a hive, the bees will start to store honey in it, and once it’s full they’ll cap it.
Capped honey is the stuff that the bees are 100% finished with. It’s the stuff they’ve decided to store, so that they have it for winter.
The bees cap honey with wax to seal it so that it doesn’t go bad, and they go around the hive and cap honey in just about every cell of the honeycomb.
A full super of capped honey weighs about 50 lbs, and is worth around $300.
You can take the capped honey supers off your hives and clear them of bees using a bee escape, so that you can harvest the honey without capturing too many bees at the same time.
You then spin the honey out of the frames of honeycomb using a honey extractor. The honeycomb is returned to the bees, who will clean it up and reuse it.
That’s the process of how beekeepers harvest honey, and it’s the process that allows honey to be harvested ethically.
If the honey was taken from the bees without returning the honeycomb, then the bees would have to make the honeycomb all over again from scratch. Honeycomb takes a lot of effort to make because it’s made from wax, which bees have to make from their own bodies.
Capped honey has a moisture content of around 18%, which is low enough to make it so that it will never go bad. Honey doesn’t go off, ever. You could eat honey that was thousands of years old, and it would be just as good as the day it was made.
If you want to be able to tell if honey is real honey, then just see if it solidifies in the fridge. Honey never solidifies when it’s fake.
What is Capped Brood
Capped brood is the stuff that bees make on the frames of their brood chambers. The brood chambers are the boxes below the supers.
The queen lays an egg in each cell of the brood frames, and then the worker bees feed the grubs that hatch from the eggs a special kind of food called “royal jelly” until they’re big enough to be sealed in their cells.
Once a cell is capped over, the bee inside spins a cocoon and begins to transform from a grub into an adult bee using the food that it’s stored in its body.
Bees go through four stages of development before they’re fully grown.
- The egg stage
- The larval stage
- The pupal stage
- The adult stage
When a bee has reached the pupal stage, it’s sealed up inside its cell, and is what’s known as “capped brood.”
Bees eat their way out of their cells when they’re ready to join the rest of the bees in the hive. They chew through the wax cappings, and then push their way out. It takes about a week from the time a bee is capped until the time it chews its way out.
The reason why a beekeeper might want to remove a frame of capped brood is so that they can use it to start a new hive. It’s a form of “splitting a hive,” and it’s a good way to keep your beekeeping sustainable.
If you have enough capped brood, then you can start a whole new hive by transferring the brood, along with a frame of honey and a frame of pollen, into a new brood box. You’ll also need to transfer some bees to the new hive along with the brood, so that they can take care of the brood.
If you don’t transfer some bees, then the brood will die. Brood needs to be kept at 93 degrees Fahrenheit, and bees are the only ones who can do that. Bees keep the brood warm by shuffling around in a carpet of bees, which is known as “bearding.”
If you want to, you can cage the queen from the original hive, and put her in the new hive along with the brood. If the bees in the original hive are queenless, then the bees in the new hive will probably accept her, and you’ll have a new hive that you can use later on.
If the bees in the original hive aren’t queenless, then they’ll kill the queen that you put in the new hive to replace the old one. In that case, you’ll have to buy a queen separately, and introduce her to the new hive using a queen introduction cage. It’s the safest way to avoid the new bees in the new hive killing the new queen, which can happen.
Sometimes, you’ll get a new queen that’s “fertile” rather than “virgin.” A fertile queen will start laying eggs immediately, and a virgin queen will have to go on a mating flight first.
If you’ve split a hive successfully, then the bees in the new hive will start building up the hive in the same way as the bees in the original hive. They’ll build out the comb, and start storing honey for themselves. A new hive will start off with some brood, so they’ll be able to care of themselves and build up the hive.
Over time, the bees in the new hive will replace the queen that you put in. They’ll do this by raising a new queen from one of the eggs that the original queen laid. When the new queen is born, she’ll kill the old queen, and that’s that. The hive is now independent of the original hive.
If you don’t have enough capped brood to start a new hive, then it’s best to leave it alone. Capped brood is a sign of a healthy hive. The more capped brood you have, the stronger your hive is. If you’re low on capped brood, then you’re low on bees, and you’ll need to let your hive build up the number of bees it has before you can start a new hive.