Things are coming along for the bees, it is week 10 and things are getting better, but still it is going to be an uphill battle to prep them for winter. The small size of their hives has lead me to feed them with sugar syrup to produce more honey. This will be used as an energy source for the bees.
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Do you have these bee hives by your gardens?
Hope you are all okay after those storms moved through yesterday.
howdy, how much does it cost for an initial setup of the bee hive, i live in australia and looking to start, any info would be appreciated, cheers
JPthebeeman is a great bee/swarm catching youtube channel.
Nope – ain't going to do that bare handed. Nope, nope, nope. You are much more trusting than I am Sir! Regarding the bridging between frames – I was taught to keep the frames together. Not sure if that was just us having different teachers or what – but it made me wonder if that extra space is what is causing yours to bridge. Mine do not bridge. I just have all 10 frame butted up to each other and then spaced to the center of the hive body (so the extra space is on the outside, not between the frames).
Any idea why they love just one side of your frames? Colony size, light, heat, something? Mine don't do that. I have to say – you made me cringe when you set the hive body on its side. Didn't lose a lot of uncapped honey doing that?
Sorry for the long comment. I hope your family enjoyed the live show 😀
No beetles in sight. That's a good thing. Did I see some golden rod blooming behind you?
That is awesome Luke! My aunt gave us a bee box two years ago, but haven't gotten bees just yet…have to make sure my neighbors are okay with it!
I don't keep bees but I'm very interested and have been reading and watching all I can get my hands on.
Just curious, on that first hive, could it be that you put that second level on too soon? It looks like they have decided to build up instead of across the frames.
I'm enjoying all your videos, thanks for sharing.
Are you using Pierco Frames? Do you have problems with them compared to the wax frames?
Nice nice.
How do you find the queen? What do you look for? There are so many bees, isn't it impossible to find someone that looks differently?
Thanks for nice educational Video! Best greetings from Kiev, Ukraine! Good luck beekeeping! :)
How hard are bees cost wise to take care of.
i am only 11 and i am starting to have bees
can I make a few suggestions/share thoughts?
From what I can see (without the camera being closer to the frames) it looks like you have a lot of drone larvae cells there. Not good to have too many drones (males) when you don't have very much honey …and fall is already here…winter just around the corner. A drones main role is to eat a lot of honey & mate to a queen if they are lucky because very few get that opportunity/privilege…& then they die right after because their penis falls off. A queen will take the penis of each male she mates to (since it's barbed), & the penises will shrivel up & fall out of her body after she has collected their sperm. She ends up with a collection of all their penises at the end of her nuptial flight. yikes. They actually call it "sexual suicide." Beekeepers have a saying that goes: "It is better to have loved and died than never to have loved at all." (instead of "loved & lost" they changed it to "loved & died"). Well, that's the life of a male bee. They are high maintenance for the worker bees to care for. So, in the fall you will find tons of dead drone bodies on the floor right outside the hive because the girls (worker bees) kick them out to reserve food for themselves to sustain themselves over the long winter. Drones require a lot of resources & care, so they find it better for their survival to just kick ALL the drones out, or the majority of them, depending on how well their colony is doing. In fall I see tons of dead drones on the floor all around the hive (not worker bees, just the drones). Sometimes you see worker bees actually dragging the drones out of the hive (because they don't want to leave. Could you blame them?! yikes). They then starve & die.
I'd probably be tempted to combine those first two hives. They are pretty small & you live in an area that gets pretty cold so they need enough bees to keep each other warm. They probably don't have enough honey to sustain themselves over winter. And, they have quite a few drones. You can line the top of a super with newspaper to separate the top & put some frames in there over it with bees you are adding to the hive so that the native bees to that hive can become accustomed to the newcomers scent before they are all allowed to comingle. In about 2 days it might be safe to remove the newspaper & they'll get along. I only say that because your hives don't look very mature yet and it's already fall. If you don't, well then I hope they make it because this happened to me a few years back & they didn't survive the winter since the colony was too spindly.
Also, a bee brush helps a lot! A lot. Just swipe them a little with it so you can take better inspections of what's going on in your frames without all of them walking all around blocking your view (also keeps you from killing so many when stacking the supers back on when concluding inspections). I try hard not to kill the bees if I can, and a bee brush helps a little.
Get a queen excluder (but, I don't recommend the plastic ones). Put it on top of the deep body super. If you have 2 deeps then put it on top of your 2nd deep (although you probably don't have 2 deeps yet since those colonies look very immature still). But, eventually once you do have 2 deeps you can put it there. A good reason to have one is so that she stays in an area that you know where she will be at. It makes it much faster to find her. And, it's also useful so she can't be laying eggs at random all over the place (IF you plan on consuming that honey without eating any eggs/larvae, this ensures that your mediums or shallow supers are honey only, with no possibility of eggs/larvae on them). So, those are a few benefits to having a queen excluder.
Also, wondering if you have marked your queen? I'm pretty sure this year the fashionable color for queens to wear is green. It helps a lot to mark her as another way to locate her faster, and also so you know what year she is.
As for the wax that they are cross hatching from one frame to the next, just scrape off "ALL" of that wax every time you see it (so that they don't keep building on it) and make them start over, but this time they should likely fill in the wax straight rather than it extending from one frame to the next. Also, immediately scrape off any wax you see on top of the frames too…just any wax that isn't in the frame where it is supposed to be at because they shouldn't waste their time on it if you will just end up tearing it up when you remove the frames when you do your inspections.
Propolis is sticky and it's a brownish color. You will see it used for sealing the supers together so that when you open them you have to pry it very hard because that stuff is like glue! They like their hive to be airtight (it's also antibacterial). They also sometimes use it to attach the little frame handles together for some reason (that's annoying). What you pointed out there isn't propolis though. It's wax (see the round cells it has on it?) that has been dirtied from stepping over it a lot (if it wasn't being stepped on constantly it would be light golden like the other newly made wax).
Just a little personal tip of mine: if it gets real hot in the summer then put a little piece of screen on the slit opening to your inner cover & then put an empty shallow or medium super (w/out any frames) on top of that then put the telescoping cover over that (I'd do this so that they have an attic …because heat rises). I do this to make them more comfortable, otherwise you'll see them tiring out pretty fast & you'll see a whole bunch of them hanging out on the outside of their hive trying to cool off when they can be making the most of the season doing their tasks. Some people put a wet sheet over the hive to keep other bees from robbing, but I have done this idea to keep their hive cooler.
have you thought about using top bar hives? I just mention this because it's an even more "natural/organic" home for bees than a langstroth is because it's missing the center sheet board on the frame, which allows them to make the guide to build off of themselves. I use langstroth, but I didn't know much about the top bars at the time, so if I did know about them then I probably would have gotten top bar instead. It's also said to keep varroa levels low because the walls are slanted downward.
You can also use foundationless frames in your langstroth and that should make them pretty happy about that because they like to make their own size cells rather than going off of plastic that is already pre-sized for them. It just gives them more chance to do things their own way a little more. I let mine do that on most of their frames (I kept switching out the plastic ones one at a time). It's easiest to do this when using shallow frames because they fill it up from end to end with comb a lot faster & the weight keeps it from breaking off so easily when carrying it if the comb isn't attached on all ends to the frame securely yet. It's also the way to go if you prefer to have comb honey squares (if you eat honey).
I like shallow frames because they are easier for me to pick up the whole super.
Luke, I bought some "local" honey the other day and I'm unfamiliar with what exactly I was getting. It seems like it was mixed with wax, is this normal? I have bought honey comb before with wax and honey but this seemed like it was "blended" honey comb. I am still using it but I thought maybe you could fill me in on different types.
Thanks!
Hey great your bees are looking very happy. Man always wear gloves 😉 Just to be on the safe side. There was a moment there that the guard bees were deciding if they should have you for breakfast. But you handeled them very well. Thumbs up.
sorry to say you're doing everything wrong …the frames should be close to each other no space between them so they don't have to build these bridges between the frames .. these bees has to be fed .. you should take one super out and put all the drawn frames into one super and feed the bees to expand and store honey for the winter .. or like the other guy said pick the best queen from them and kill the other 2 queens and join the three hives into one strong hive …
They are cross hatching because your frames are not properly spaced, you have too much gap between frames
How are the bees doing?
I wish I would have been there to help you with some things for sure! Its also called cross combing between the frames and burr comb on the top.
The reason your bees are building cross comb is because you are not maintaining bee space between each frame. The frames must have their shoulders pressed firmly against each other and then center the frames within the box. This also helps prevent your bees building super wide frames, which are almost impossible to get out without damage. You were doing just fine without gloves. 🙂 Having an audience makes us nervous, so try and limit the times you have spectators, especially family. You're doing just fine as a beekeeper. Enjoy them.
without gloves, no thanks
Pretty good what not to do video. Hopefully you've learned from some mistakes like we all have had to. Always press the frames together tight then center them all in the box. Prevents all the cross combing. Because all 3 hives are so small adding a second box is a mistake. In this case it would be best to take any drawn out frames in the top box and put them in the bottom box. Then shake or brush all the bees out of the top box and into the bottom box and remove the top boxes. Giving bees to much room like these had is a recipe for disaster.
26:30 Poor bee was dying 🙁
Random question, what do they do with the dead bees? Do they move them out or.. eat them or something?
You can keep the bees from building between frames if you keep your frames pushed together and the space on each side. Check out the book ABC and XYZ of beekeeping by AI Root.
Ok. I’m sure this guy has learned a lot in 5 years but if you’re a new bee keeper this is NOT an educational video. This guy had no clue what he was doing during this video. Seriously read a book. Beekeeping for dummies is an amazing starter for new keepers.
Do you still keep bees
Do you use the bees on the indoor plants in the grow rooms?