Beekeeping | Can This Tiny Tool Save Your Honey Bees??

now you're going to be shocked at what this little tool is but when I show you how to use it it's going to blow you away hey everybody David Burns good to be with you I'm inside a hive right now and it's good to be with you on this Sunday I'm going to show you something really important and we've heard a lot about this more recently now I want to let you know that a decade ago I was doing a lot of research a lot of reading and a lot of experimentation with propolis and the impact that it has on our hives we've had research done on the subject for decades and decades ago way back on the impact that propolis has on the hive the health of the hive if you're new to propolis it's something that bees gather from trees and plants and they bring it back to the hive and they actually use it we sometimes say they use it for gluing things together which they do they also coat the inside of their hives with it and it's antimicrobial antibacterial anti everything it's used as part of the bees immune system reduce the energy that the bees have to use to cut down on all the pathogens in the high so this is why I'm pumped and excited to tell you guys about this little tool it's cheap to buy and you can utilize it in a way to keep your bees much more healthier now let me tell you a few more things about propolis look at this I have some showand tell items today now here's a piece of wood that we took out of a tree and if you can see here all of this is propess that they've added I've kind of I scraped it down into a pile right here but this is really hard because it's cold right now but you can see all in here how much this is actually coated with the propolis even in a piece of Comb like this even in our own hives you can almost start to see if you hold it just right um little pieces of propis that are added to strengthen and maybe help sanitize these cells especially the brood area and of course this is where we find the uh most frustrating part of propolis is usually around the hive itself where we're lifting frames out on the edges of our frames in these areas here we can always find a lot of propolis but what has gained a lot of popularity just recently is the idea of the amount of propolis that bees add to their colony on the inside of a tree like this is called an a propolis envelope they surround all of the wood in here they coat it with a layer of their propolis now this is something that we've known for years is not something new it's something that has been discovered many many many decades ago and it has been written about uh way back so it's something that even I wrote an article in the American be Journal as you can see here about the importance of propolis in keeping a hive very healthy but this has recently gained traction the idea that if we can coat the inside of our hives with propolis or do something to encourage the bees to coat or put more propolis on the inside of their hives like this that it can keep the bees healthier so stay with me because I want to show you how you can use this little tool now obviously we can see how they put propolis uh here in the slot that holds the frames and you can even see how they put propolis in the crack between where the boards meet together uh inside the hi box now there's a blob here for who knows what but notice here where it is a little bit more rough you can see the bees have added some propolis more in the rough area now big chunks of propolis over here where they actually a frame was resting close to there they wanted to seal a a gap off and again we see it down in a crack now one thing I want to show you in particular that can explain what I'm telling you today is you can notice where bees add propolis let me flip the box over this way for you we'll keep looking at this now notice here on this side that there there's more propolis I don't know if the camera shows it but you can see where it's rougher they start to add more propolis even like right here if you can see where this knot is you can actually see they've added a lot of propolis right here around this knot so anywhere where it's more rough you will notice that they will add the propolis so right up along this area here so right along here you can see another spot where it's rough and notice they put the propolis right there again some frame material uh extra propolis here where a frame was close by now particularly along this area right here where it is more rough you can definitely see it's kind of a brownish almost a shiny appearance of the propolis all the way through here where the wood is actually a lot more rough that's what bees do they like to use their propolis to smooth out rough areas if you notice here it's it's smooth wood because now we use wood 3/4 inch Pine and so this wood is is very smooth on both sides and if a little bitty tiny drop of propolis right there some of it is on here but not very much so in other words even though your hive is probably made out of the same wood there's not a lot of propolis that's been added to the box after it's been in the hive for a while a little bit but if we are to rough it up much more will be added now there are companies that are starting to sell boxes that are roughed up on the inside this is something that we used to do all the way back uh about 10 years ago we were actually selling a hive called a David wishlist Hive we manufactured beekeeping equipment for a long time and those hives actually were scored on the inside after after I read a lot of studies that were being conducted that were showing there was a slight increase in the overall health of the bees especially that they didn't have to exhaust themselves on their use utilizing their own immune system because they could rely on some of the propolis on the wall of the high now some of the studies that were done by meeting scientists uh maybe back around 19 or 2014 2016 about all the way through 2021 maybe a lot of these scientists were doing experiments especially on this wall on the inside of a hive they were conducting these experiments PhD emology many of them to see what kind of effect it would have on the colony and they would also sometimes staple on a like a propolis material propolis trap they would cut it staple it on as well as I did back in those days too so I would staple a propolis trap on the walls of the hive and then the bees would add more propolis in that trap increasing the amount of propolis that is actually in the hive I know I'm saying propolis propolis I'm going to say it both ways because I started out saying it one way I can't really make the switch I do sometimes but um I found that it really didn't make an overall big difference but one of the things that I particularly did for a long time when I was studying the outcome was I would gather propolis and I would make a tinure out of it using some strong alcohol and let it start to dissolve and once it did I would score my boxes and especially the Deep hi boxes in the hive body and then I would actually dip my paintbrush into this dissolved propolis tinure and I would actually also score it but then I would paint my propolis in on these high bodies and I got to tell you I didn't really notice any particular strong difference it wasn't like oh my gosh all the hives that I did this to are outstanding and the ones that I didn't do them to they didn't do as well but I'll leave some links down in my um notes of the show here in the links below I'll leave some links to some of the recent studies that you can read that scientists have made conclusions of whether or not they do help or don't help to do this but I still am a firm believer and science does support it a little bit that it can help some in some areas now I've been telling you I'm going to show you what this tool is this is the tool that we use it is something I'm sorry I don't know the exact use for it but I believe that it is a wallpaper scoring device in other words if you want to get wallpaper off that's been on there a while you kind of just rub this on there and it roughs up and helps you remove the wallpaper sorry if I got that wrong but I I bought it back then and that I remember somebody telling me you need to buy a wallpaper remover and as you can see it's got these two little wheels in here and I picked it up on Amazon I don't know maybe $11 not much but this is what we use and here's a picture of one of our employees Zach a young man that he would actually do this a decade ago to our hives we had a special Hive called a David wishlist Hive it was more money to buy it because we had to pay Zach to sit here and score the inside of these hives and so we don't we just didn't have the market we felt we needed back then so we stopped selling it but I want to show you how to utilize this you take this as an effort to rough up this surface of your inside of your hives so that it forces the bees to put more propolis there and the propolis is what is going to be kind of part of their immune system to cut down on the pathogens now before I show you how to finally use this tool I want to encourage you guys to Please Subscribe bobblehead David is over here holding up the sign trying to get you guys to subscribe to my channel and we really do appreciate it so when you buy one of these um be careful wear your hearing protection this one's not very loud some of them have a real screeching uh noise to it and that's why the hearing proteor but this one is not loud at [Applause] all so what we're doing we're just rubbing it and these little teeth here are grinding into the wood and it's really rough and the bees will not like that and they will add propolis to smooth it out [Applause] you can see the amount of wood that is actually uh taking off with these little teeth also be aware that these aren't really durable and so we did break a lot of these but we were making a lot of hives too so just realize that if you have a lot of hives uh you might want to think of another way this is a quick way for a hobbyist to do it now I realize that this is available uh as uh product that's already done there's a company that I saw at the honeybee Expo that actually has already scored the inside of their hive boxes that they sell and so if you don't want to fool with it you can look up companies maybe on the internet that are doing that but this is just a video for do it yourself sometimes beekeepers want to do things on their own this is in case you have a hive or two a hobbyist and you just want to experiment and see if this can help your overall health of your hive as studies slightly indicate then you could probably purchase something like this like we used to do and actually score the inside of your hive and see if bees will add more propolis there and increase their propolis that's being used as part of their immune system to cut down on pathogens now there's no way I'm going to bank on this little tool and scratching the inside of my hive saving my hive I'm going to have to bank on skills that I've learned over the years and how to keep a hive alive keeping your might levels down keep keeping a strong Queen in there making sure the bees are well fed during the seasons that they need food those are the two most critical things that you need to be doing but there's other things like more propolis on the inside that gives us a tiny little bit of Edge and you know what anything can help right but when it comes right down to it how strong a colony is really boils down to you and your inspections I just made a brand new video for you guys showing you how to look at frames I showed you what to look for on these frames if you've missed that video this video right here will help you I'll see you over there

Channel: David Burns

Views: 19,506

Keywords: Beekeeping, beekeeping 101, Beekeeping tips, beekeeping training, honey bees, beekeeping classes, beekeeping basics, beekeeping for beginners, how to start beekeeping, david burns beekeeping, when to start beekeeping, packages of bees, queen bee, where to buy a queen bee, propolis in hives, scoring bee hives, adding propolis

Id: KSCDzUzqrok

Length: 13min 32sec (812 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 21 2024