Traditional German skep video series

Most of us aren't going to agree with all of these practices but this series is quite interesting. Bee huts in the regular apiary and the orchards where they take the bees! I always pictured skeps as being small but these look like they're about the size of a Langstroth deep. 8 videos in the playlist.

It wasn't until I watched this series that I found out it is a myth that the keepers killed the colonies when they harvested honey.

Some might have killed the queen but even in the 1500s some beekeepers were doing some interesting manipulations and harvesting honey without kill the queen.

I finally finished watching the whole series and they DID kill some bees to get the honey. They did try to save the queen and mostly killed the bees in the brood comb with sulpher. That was a bit of a shock and even my husband who wasn't really paying attention said "OMG, what are they doing killing bees?" The other surprising thing was feeding sugar syrup and a little sugar candy when they moved them to heath fields.

On the plus side was the use of bee huts, traditional skeps made from straw and covered in manure, and the various yields.

The yields were:
Comb honey (from the heath which doesn't flow readily so is good for that purpose)
Pressed honey
Wax
Pollination
More bees to sell as packages.

Other nice tidbits included showing how they swapped positions of a weak and strong hive so that the bees from the strong colony would return to the weak one to help support it and increase their numbers.

The craziest thing was they had a guy watching the hives during swarm season and when a hive started to swarm he would place a big panty hose like thing over the entrance to capture the swarm and then they would re-hive them or sell them as packages!

Impossible to gauge the value of anything due to being listed as marks.