Basic Beekeeping 101 - Short Review

beekeeping let's see for my brother joe i put together a bunch of pictures now i just wanted to show you uh these are some some beehives right here and these bottom ones right here these are these are hive bodies what happens is there's a little entrance down here at the bottom and the bees come in through the bottom and then they they make they make more bees right here and they keep their honey up here and it's kind of mixed together but there's ways that you can separate it and you can make money both off getting the bees and getting the honey and these are very heavy and so that's why these ones are a little bit smaller because they're easier to lift and that's a that's a high of top so a hive basically consists of a bottom which you can't cannot see right here and then a bunch of uh hive bodies and the ones where you collect honey are called supers they're pretty much the same thing it's just what you call them high bodies where the bees like to reproduce and the super is where you like to to collect the honey and uh so oops that didn't work out very well but here's a here's a picture so how much does it cost per hive so uh each box so i i think starting with four boxes is good you can get two big ones and and two uh a medium sized one so these are so called full size i think or large these are called medium they pretty much cost about the same thing but um anyways about fifty five dollars per box this for say you're gonna set up one hive it's about 55 dollars per box and you're gonna get four of them for one hive one two three four uh one two three four i'm sorry i was pressing on it in the screen but i wasn't using the mouse um and so that's about a little over two hundred dollars for one hive you're gonna start with just oops you start with just what the bees in the very bottom one and then you're gonna add more as they grow um and then 125 dollars per package or per nuke and that's how you're going to get the bees you're either going to get them in a package or you're going to get them in a nuke and i'll explain to you what those are so what's the payout so after you spent 350 per hive that's about what i did i got two hives and all the stuff and everything and it cost me about seven hundred dollars so the payout is after the first year because you have to wait a year for them to grow then they'll make about 200 to 300 per year that's estimating why because they're going to keep on growing and you get to cut these you get to when they keep on growing and they get too big for their house you got to hurry up and and sell some of them um otherwise they'll leave they'll what you call swarm and so you don't want them to leave so what you do is you split you take some of them out and you can sell them and so you for each split you can do at least one per year you get 125 bucks and then if you sell the honey and you get between 60 and 100 pounds of honey for each hive um then you can make you know two dollars for each one you know you can make you can make 200 to 300 per year for each one of your hives so you know you're gonna you're gonna pay for that and then the first year you're gonna have to wait and the second year it's gonna pay for itself but after that if you've got your hives you know these things the wood will last for a long time um you know if you paint them and everything so they can last 20 or 30 years and if you keep your bees going they last a long time and so if you have 10 hives that's 3 000 a year oops two to three thousand dollars a year if you have a hundred hives that can be up to a hundred thousand dollars so you make a lot of money so here's the bee the the bee wax and what the bees do is they they make this stuff on frames and i'll show you the frames and they go inside and they fill it full of honey right there um so you're you're going to get your bees and different types of things this is a package right here and they send this through the the the mail like the postal service like you know like like the us postal service the person that drives around the little jeep they can deliver these um and they weigh them by pounds or either two pounds or three pounds and that's how they they measure how much is in them um and you can order these and they have they have a little queen inside and she's in her little cage and stuff and you can order that or you can get a nuke and this is a nuke and it's they're already they're already it's like almost like a a bunch of bees in there and they've already there's another nuke i got a nuke but my nuke was made out of like um cardboard and so i just took the new cat uh so what what is you have a bunch of frames inside you can take the frames out and put them in your hive so there's some equipment maybe we'll return to that so here's a picture and this is the hive body the bottom and someone has a bunch of frames right here so what you do is is when you get your package is you either dump them in here you literally dump them and they don't bite you nothing happens they don't sting you you literally dump it and you you put a lid on and then you put some like straw in front of it because you want them to get used to it and you that's if you get a package and they stay there and they don't move and then after a couple days would come then you take the grass away and they'll stay in the hive but you see these frames right here these i'll show you a picture of the frames uh here's some frames right here and uh if you get a nuke which is one of these or one of these then you've already got frames in it you just pull the frames out and you stick them in and that's a little bit better because they will um if you get them in a nuke then they they've already it's called drawn out their comb this is the comb down here and they've already made the wax right here and you can put the bees in it so so once you get your bees inside so you're gonna you're gonna order your bees and they're either gonna come in a nuke or they're gonna come in a package that's a package right there and then what you're going to do is you're going to dump them in your hive right here and you're going to close up your hive and then you're going to stick a bunch of sugar water uh you can do 50 sugar 50 water and you're going to stick it on top so you look and then you put little holes in the lid and the bees come up and they grab it so that's one way i put mine in a butt in one of these right here and then i hung it as if it was a frame so here's here's a look at a bee hive and this is your bee hive right here and then you have your supers up here that's where you collect the honey and the bees will start in the middle in the in the very center they'll make all the bees they'll make all the bees and then they put the honey on the outside but they keep on growing out and some people will put excluders they're like little things because the because you have the queen honeybee that she's in here and the queen honeybee will go around and she will lay eggs but you don't want those eggs to get in your to get in your honey so what you do is in between these boxes you put an excluder right here and that prevents the queen from coming up and so she can't lay any eggs up here so everything that you take off the top because there's a queen excluded that prevents the queen from coming up everything will be just pure honey so here's another picture of these frames right here a box with the frames and you can get different types of frame this looks like it's a plastic frame you know it's wood on the outside but it's plastic um right here and so they made they actually printed this out of plastic and then they kind of covered with a little bit of wax though where the honey's the bees go mmm they get close to it and want it but um this is nice because they're really strong so last year after year and it's already printed in the shape of the honeycomb you know it's already got that little thing and they'll go and they'll they'll make their their uh things this one um this is one that they kind of let the bees do it completely here's the frame and the bees kind of just built on it themselves and you see all the bees in here now when the bees come in and they start building on the frame remember all these frames are sitting inside the hive they're sitting inside your hive right there um but when they start building on it towards the center they like to make their new bees right here so they laid eggs and then on the outside they lay their honey so you can see that by the color if you look right here it's kind of a golden color versus the outside is kind of a whitish color and the whitish color is honey and inside are our bees uh their their their eggs so here's another picture you can see these are eggs these are a little larvae in here little worm type things and they're they're eggs that grew and they're gonna turn into honeybees and these bees will go and they'll take care of it and they'll cap it off and then when you actually look at your bees you actually see some of them crawling out and this is your honey right here once it's been capped off once the honey has been capped off and it's good to go it's good to eat um but anyways so here's here's your different type of workers in in the in the beehive you have the queen bee you only have one and she's the most important one and you have workers and drones and the queen bee is easy to recognize because you got all these guys going around they all look exactly the same and this one looks a little bit different and sometimes they'll put a like a little a little mark on it that way they know which one is the queen bee so here is here's a bunch of larva and here's a bunch of little eggs they got planted right there and they'll grow up into bbs and then you can see the the kind of the life cycle and so here we have right here we have all the bees and we have all the uh the capped so these are new bees being created and and you can get like hundreds of bees you know every day so once you've set up your hive and you let it sit so say you know you get a new hive a new package of bees and you put it in the hive and you wait after four to eight weeks you know then you're gonna add more and more and if you look over here you know they they put they just they just had one box and the bees come in through here they just had one box and then after uh a year they or no not a year after less time like i've got two boxes now one of my hives once it fills up you know they filled seven out of ten frames and that's the magic number they use because if there's ten frames in here if they filled up seven out of the ten frames then you add another box and then they start adding honey and stuff and you can put a queen excluder that way you just get honey on the top and that's it but then you know say like a year has been gone by and you can do this once a year or more depending on how your bees are doing you don't want them to get too crowded if they get too crowded then they'll leave and you don't want that to happen or at least half of them will leave and they'll leave half but you don't want that to happen because you because you know if you did it yourself if you took out a lot of them yourself you could make money off that it's like 125 dollars just like you know leaving goodbye so you don't want to do that so what you do is you can take out some frames you make sure they don't have the queen on them because you want to leave the queen inside your hive and you put them in a new hive and they they will make their own queen and they'll make their own hive and then you can you can sell that so here's your honey this is all capped honey right here and there's a hot knife and the hot knife just shaves off the top and then the honey just kind of falls out so anyways i hope you enjoyed this i am going to send you some links to some really cool places you can go to learn more about it but there's lots of youtube videos and we'll see if we can get you some bees if uh if that's what you want to do so anyways

Channel: John Heathcote

Views: 380,167

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Id: DAMaSwH-9NE

Length: 10min 37sec (637 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 25 2015