Beekeeping | Painting Old Hive Boxes With Bees Inside

boy that box is dirty it needs painted well it doesn't take long for those hives to look kind of bad i mean they start getting a little dirty a little muddy and wear and tear the hives start looking bad after a few years and you're wondering how to go about making them look nice again maybe you're the kind of beekeeper that likes to keep your hives looking nice well today i'm going to show you a couple of ways that you can paint your boxes one of them is by removing it taking it back to the shop and painting it another example i'm going to show you how to paint a live hive out in the field all this and more is starting right now we have different opinions so back here but they can present a story that's the bee that enjoys earl grey this is a bee from the uk no doubt what's up i'm david burns and today i want to get into some hives paint some boxes with you after a while the beehive kind of looks trashy it kind of looks dirty and so how do you wash them how do you clean them how do you paint them we're going to do all of that today even scrape some propolis out clean up those boxes and whether you have a lot of hives or just one or two sometimes you just want them to look good so we're going to do that i'm going to show you two examples today of how you can paint the boxes one example is out in the field with bees in it and the other example is by swapping them out taking them back to the shop and painting them before we get started let me tell you i'm going to be at the eastern aquacultural society of north america down in shepherdsville kentucky and this is going to be an exciting three-day conference some of you live in the area or you enjoy going to b conferences this one is one of the first b conferences where people are gathering together and listening to speakers and i hope you can be there i want to meet you there i want you to drop by and say hey david burns i know you and we can talk maybe we'll go out for supper or something but i'll leave a link below where you can sign up and register for this awesome event you know i am certified as a master beekeeper through the eastern agricultural society of north america so that organization means a tremendous amount to me and how they continue to promote beekeeping i'm not getting paid to say this but i just really like uh the the eas so check my link out below and if you want to register for that let me know in a comment below that you registered and maybe we can find each other and do a little chatting at the conference on a free day or something so now let's roll up our sleeves and get to work well another way that we can paint hives in the bee yard is to go out to them in this kind of a scenario where they're covered in cicadas and dirt try to knock off most of the dirt with your gloves or something like that try to get off there's more cicadas you guys having problems with cicadas like i am too like they're everywhere i don't really have them making a lot of noise yet but oh my gosh they're when i wake up in the morning they're all over my hives they're all over my porch they're just there's either live cicadas sitting there or there's the skeletons hanging out wow all right so when we paint it like this we're not going to remove the top cover we can paint right up to the top cover or if you want to you can take the top cover off and flip it over and that way you can paint all the way up to the top of the hive i don't really want to take this top off and do that because i'm going to release a lot of bees so i'm just going to show you for demonstration purposes how you can paint a hive in the bee yard well obviously when i start painting a hive i'm going to start at the at the back of the hive where i don't have as as many bees and then i'll work my way around the front of front of the hive where i'm going to paint my the front of the hive the last so back here i'm just going to get a good coat of paint on there the problem with painting uh with a bee suit on is it's hard to see the good thing of painting with a bee suit on is if the bees should get kind of riled up you're you're protected now the other thing about painting a hive outdoors a live hive with bees in it the other thing to consider is um is it bad for the bees is it gonna be uh too many fumes well again i'm using latex which is a pretty innocent uh paint not gonna affect the bees at all the other thing to consider is once you paint the outside like this of a live hive i suggest that you go back within a couple of hours and sort of separate the two boxes you know paint can act like glue and if you paint the two boxes together all the way around on all four corners it might be hard to open it up again the paint is kind of sealing it off this is actually quite fun i do enjoy this like i said in case you're just joining me you can take this top off and you can actually flip it upside down and when you do that you can paint all the way up all of the top box because we're we have a telescoping top cover which means it's hanging over the top of the box a couple of inches roughly and that's going to prevent us from getting a coat of paint up on that very top part of the box so you can decide how important that is for you years ago my wife sherry and her mother went out to about 50 colonies that i had here at the bee yard and they started early in the morning like this and they painted all my hives for me very nice of them to do that they didn't get stung they just they just did what i'm doing now they just went hive to hive and gave it a fresh coat of paint amazing in it now again i'm using latex and it goes on so nicely and you know you're not really painting um you know a masterpiece painting or anything you can just swap it on there you just want to get a coat of paint on there so i've already done two sides that quickly and i'm gonna finish this side over here and then i'm going to drop around to the front now the front is a little more questionable as to how how you're going to paint the front so let me get this side over here and then i'll show you but i think painting the front of a hive the trick if you're going to do it live with bees in it is to do what i'm doing this morning i'm really coming out here i started uh setting up my camera it's about 6 30 and uh took me about a half hour to get everything set up but now it's seven o'clock in the morning and so we're about an hour a little over an hour from sunrise but this is on the south side of all my buildings so there's not a lot of sun hitting the hives so the bees aren't really flying that much enabling me to come out here and paint these boxes without a lot of b traffic if that makes sense okay so now we're ready for the front now in this case what i don't want to do is be so sloppy that i drip paint down onto the bottom board because if i drip paint down onto the bottom board it means that bees are going to track it inside it's not going to be the end of the world i am dripping okay so you have to you have to be a little more skilled painter than i am obviously i need to run a little less paint on my brush it kind of got pushed back so good example of how you don't want to just slot paint everywhere i didn't really get that anything on the bottom board to speak of so keep loading your paintbrush very lightly like a little bit at a time so you don't have a lot of paint slopping around yep see how i'm just kind of getting all the excess paint off the edges of the paintbrush i'm sure that some of your are just awesome painters and you do it for a living and i'm doing everything wrong and you're just cringing about how how bad of a painter i am and if i had a different brush and if i had a different stroke method i get it but remember when you're a beekeeper you have to kind of do what you have to do right you just can't always be professional at everything again some of you are wondering about the color uh what color can i paint my hive it really doesn't matter the bc ultraviolet so they're not always going to see the color of their hives in the same color that you see it so think about that also if you live in the deep south or a very hot country where the temperature is just scorching all the time don't paint them black because you're going to attract a lot of sunlight or heat from the sun and that's going to be rough on them look at that i'm down to the last one inch i got a little spot over here that's like an indentation like a piece of damaged wood maybe it got hit by something either in production or out here if i don't go all the way down it's not a big deal right i don't have to go all the way down what i don't want to do is actually paint to be so i'm going to keep it a little bit from going all the way down i'm not going to paint that bottom board i'm good with that wow that really looks nice i love that that really is an easy way to clean up a hive out in the bee yard without moving the frames out the bees are going to stay out of that paint and i don't hardly smell anything at all latex is just pretty uh benign in fumes and odors like that they are they're looking at it because they're used to a different shade or different color that was a little bit of green on it and now it's not so it is something they're probably going to look at and reorientate you know make sure is this the same hive i left i remember it being green but obviously they're going to figure that out real quick but there may be a little confusion for a little bit but you can see how that can really shape up some of your hives out in the bee yard and i think this is going to encourage some of you that have been not wanting to fool around with taking all the frames out and taking a box back to a shop to paint it you can just do it out in the field but remember let's break that two deep boxes separate them in about an hour a little bit before they have a time to really lock in with the paint well before we move to the next section of painting boxes i want to encourage you to give me a thumbs up that really means a lot to me and you know what i do appreciate it many of you i feel that we're friends we talk back and forth through comments here on youtube so uh give me a thumbs up it does a lot to help me out on youtube plus it helps me understand the kind of content that you enjoy for me to make for you to be a better beekeeper also if you're brand new to my channel and you're not a subscriber please subscribe we're working toward a goal of a hundred thousand subscribers by the end of this year and we're gonna have to roll up our sleeves and get to work and encourage people like yourself first time viewers to get on there and subscribe click on the bell so you'll be notified each time i make a new video i appreciate it so much now let's go back to work so now we can take take this deep off that's dirty and it needs cleaned up and painted and we'll just set it off to the side and we'll put our nice deep on here ready to put this deep back on here let's make sure the beads are off of the lip around the edges so we'll smoke the bees so that we don't kill any when we put this deep back on that looks pretty clean move out of the way bees all right looks good all right we'll center the box up like this very good well there you go we replaced the dirty deep shell box with a clean one and now we're going to take the dirty one back to the shop now let's take it back to the picnic table we'll talk a little bit while we paint it well i do want to wash this off because a lot of this is just dirt so we're gonna have to wash that off and dry it before we paint it but this propolis at the top we really do need to knock this off not only are we gonna paint this box but we're also gonna do it during coffee time thanks to a subscriber though he encouraged me to have tea time to have a cup of tea in the uk something this practice where he lives so i thought in honor of his suggestion we would have coffee time but it would be cup of tea time so cup of tea time look at this open up some tea i don't smell anything because it's in its own little container look at that it's earl grey tea earl grey is one of my favorite teas um i love the smell of that bergamot oh that bergamot oil wow if you've never had earl grey gotta consider it i when i open this up i just hold my nose in there i mean i can wear this bag on my nose i love that smell of bergamot so much i think bergamot is more like an orange sort of but it has such a unique smell to it it looks like an orange or shaped like an orange uh something like that all right cup of tea time great suggestion appreciate that so much good to have some earl grey with you while we talk about why haters hate why do haters hate big big subject today seems like there's a lot of hate and so i thought while i'm painting this box i can talk about why haters hate now i did record myself painting this box yesterday we took it off the hive as you saw and we brought it in in order to paint it but what happened was i had my camera settings incorrectly and because of that it wasn't good footage it was kind of weird and i'm just getting used to having to set my own settings on the camera i want to do that because i can get better images for you guys but at the same time i'm used to just slapping a cell phone on a tripod or something and it does all the work for me bear with me while i get used to how to run a camera the old-fashioned way again it's not because i have to it's because i want to to get better images anyway i i painted this yesterday and as you can see the footage was uh the settings were off and it really looked bad it was jerky and then when i was in the edit room looking at it i was like no i don't want to have to do all of that over again so here i am doing all of that over again but i chose to do the same box because why not give it a second coat sometimes in life when you make a mistake you just got to give it a second coat all right there's a lot of application there i'm quite the philosopher but i want to talk about why haters hate as i have my call as i have my cup of tea here and i paint this box so why do haters hate that's a good question i know that you have experience being hated um something happened something was going on in your life you were in a organization you were in a workplace you were in a family environment something happened and somebody got mad at you they didn't like what you did or they didn't like what you said and they started hating on you and when you look back on it you're like i have no idea what i ever did to deserve being hated by this individual you know what did i do and sometimes you can even ask people like oh i know you're upset with me i'd like to apologize what did i do they kind of won't talk to you they'll like they hate you so much that they're not even gonna give you a chance to try to make things up try to try to apologize or you know try to be okay with it um a lot of times uh people hate because they're jealous i know that sounds weird but it's true if you begin to do something that other people want to do if you begin to achieve something that other people are trying to achieve oh my gosh some people take offense of that also if you're enjoying doing it and you're a very happy person and they're not so happy like they they're just a negative nilly a debbie downer oh my gosh if you're happy about stuff they don't like you they don't like you being happy it offends them that you're having a good time in life and that you're happy and so they hate you so i think it's important that we understand why do people hate why do haters hate um they're jealous is is can be one of the reasons and i'm not just talking about other people i may be talking about me i may be talking about you sometimes we're jealous aren't we and we kind of start hating the fact that somebody else achieved something got something and we didn't and you may say well i don't hate but you know kind of inside of you you may have this attitude of hatred um other times i think people hate because they have a low self-esteem they they don't think very highly of themselves they're battling some issues with with themselves and again something about you has kind of offended them um it's a little bit different than being jealous because some some haters might say you know they're not jealous and i don't think all haters are jealous some haters are angry and they get angry at you because of something you said did or a position that you hold and we've seen that a lot during the pandemic how there's been a a divide in people and how they feel toward other people based on political opinions based on a lot of things about life you know we hear examples of people getting into fights over somebody not wearing a mask wearing a mask uh there seems you know there's a level of hatred that's sometimes based on opinion like if somebody doesn't hold my exact opinions i hate them and a lot of times we don't even know the person we're only looking at their opinion and we're deciding whether we like them or not simply based on on a difference of opinion and i really don't think that's fair at all because we need to be able to separate a person from their to their views or their opinions just because we have different opinions doesn't mean that we're a horrible person oh you might be wondering why i'm not using a roller it would be faster there's a little some cracks and some deep little notches in here from a hive tool or a hammer guided or something and i thought if i used a brush i could actually get into some of those grooves more and fill in some of those deeper spots a roller won't do that and that roller won't get into these handles like this either and while we're talking about let me jump off of being why people hate just real quick the reason you don't paint the inside of a deep pipe body like this is because the bees like to propolize the wood the rough spots on the wood and if we paint the inside it seems like the beads just want to get rid of the paint sometimes we feel that you know the paint needs to only protect the outside where the weather hits the box and we don't want paint associated with being inside the hive it just kind of makes sense now this is latex paint i strongly recommend that you only use latex and that you don't use oil when i was a young beekeeper a long time ago we used oil-based paint on our boxes thinking that we could really protect them and we kind of found out that it sealed off the box too good oil-based paint does that and it kind of caused the boxes to rot from the inside moisture out and latex was a great invention because latex allows the box to breathe it allows the wood to breathe and so we really like that part of it so back to hate why do people hate now people hate because they're jealous some people hate because they have a low self-esteem and other people hate um just because they have a very angry side to them some people are just angry uh i can get that way when i get hungry what do they call it uh hung angry what is that word that they use hangry i think it's hangry you're hungry and you get angry uh if i get really hungry i get mean i i don't really but i kind of do feel like uh my focus is off if i'm hungry um so somebody told me that they can only take their medicine on an empty stomach and i was like i can never take that medicine i never i'm never on empty stomach [Laughter] i enjoy eating um but i think some people do hate because they're angry they're mad and they're mad they have a disposition in life of being angry at everything even things that they really can't do anything about they're angry about it they're mad um and i've said before that we have to be careful how much of the news that we listen to all day long because sometimes the news of course media depending on what media you listen to but they can present a story of course the narrative is what that particular news wants you to believe right and so they can really if you and you start following the news that is uh according to your philosophy and your opinions and when you hear them give a news broadcast about a subject or person who it can make you angry gonna get there again being angry over something in the news can make you angry the rest of the day wow we painted we gave that whole box a second coat so you can be a person that hates because some something else or somebody else has excited your um your hatred it's it's made you kind of become a hatred because of something that you heard and you can hate now is all hate wrong is it bad to hate everything some people might be thinking it's not bad to hate a murderer you know you can hate somebody for taking the life of another person there are bad things that we should hate when they're wrong we should hate when they're bad i'm not going to get into that because i understand what that means by all means i i get it i've hated stuff before don't get me wrong but i think i'd like not to hate anything i really do i think if i can get rid of all hatred and it doesn't touch my ego i can live a much more content and happier life i think sometimes being in a in a daily rage of hatred it's just going to raise your blood pressure it's going to set you up for all kind of personal relationship issues it's going to set you up for poor health er it just you know in today's workforce in the day's workplace you can't be a hater and show a spirit of anger where you work if you get mad at work and have a fit of rage because you're angry and you're hating on something you might have to take an anger management course you know we have laws in effect that won't let people be angry at the workplace in sports activities if you start showing hatred and anger it's poor sportsmanship it's poor work relationships and you could lose your position there you could lose your job over being a hater and an angry person you know i all wars start with somebody that hated something all bad events started by somebody having a spirit of hatred about them something in them that hates and that it gets blown out of proportion people can't keep control of their hatred once it becomes very very ingrained in their thoughts so let's move away from you know what causes it why it exists and then let's move toward what can we do about it now we're talking about why people hate and sometimes we can remove ourselves from that equation and say yeah why do people hate me but are you a hater am i hater are there times that we don't even realize i really don't think haters that hate realize that they hate and that they're haters although everybody else knows it right i don't think they always see themselves that way they think they're righteous they think they're standing up for the good for the just and that by hating things they're going to change things through this attitude of hatred and that um that's not the right approach that i personally would take i don't want to be that person i don't want to live my life hating everything and other all the other people let's face it when i was younger i had a an attitude of anger and i had to learn as i got older to control my anger and i don't want to go back there i don't want to go back to be an angry person that hates things i'd rather be a kind person that can help other people now we're all interconnected through some strange way depending on your philosophy or your religion we are all connected we really are we're connected to one source whether you say that source is god or you say that source is the universe there's a level of consciousness that bro brings us all tied in together to one another the plant life the the animal kingdom and so forth is you know i don't understand it but i see more and more evidence of it and so if we're all connected wouldn't it be cool if we could all help each other out more and instead of hating we can learn to be kind and appreciate each other i think that's awesome i i think it's just a good attitude there's a honeybee checking out my new paint job and that's my paintbrush and that's my cup of tea and their land they landed on that to be landed on my cup of tea and it must be like a european bee because it likes a cup of tea more than a cup of coffee so it's just sitting there and it's now drinking from the tea bag obviously that's the bee that enjoys earl grey this is a bee from the uk no doubt okay so now we know that honeybees love earl grey tea have i just discovered mic control b is drinking earl grey don't have mites you know that's how some of these things get started in it we started thinking about all these um home brew remedies to control different kinds of pests and diseases oh that's just cool to have a bee join me during cup of tea is just a lot of fun and it's gone well now i gotta hurry up and finish this video before that scout bee goes back and says there's a cup of tea of earl grey at the picnic table follow me and does a waggle dance so it is tough we are going to be hated it happens and it's really bad when you're hated for no good reason but look i don't hate you i like you i i think you're pretty cool for watching my video and all you're all right okay well very good we completed the uh cup of tea time we got to watch we were joined by a european bee from the uk apparently to enjoy a cup of earl grey with us while we painted this box a second coat covered up my air and now we're moving on again thanks for watching my videos i really appreciate it so much that that we can spend time together and do click on the subscribe button and click on the bell so you'll be notified each time i make a new video because i don't want you to miss a single one i'm here to help you keep healthier bees and avoid horrible mistakes i'll see you next time a little different coffee time this time it's actually going to be tea time and i forgot my tea be right back all right got the t i'm gonna put it in the t take two yeah this is killing me to get this scene i can't do it now i'm out of water wow three two one before i move on to the next section let's see how does it go

Channel: David Burns

Views: 18,699

Rating: 4.9365077 out of 5

Keywords: Beekeeping, honey bees, beekeepers, how to keep bees, why keep bees, painting bee hives, what color to paint a hive, hive color, why haters hate, david burns, david burns beekeeper

Id: G8qxfag4gMA

Length: 34min 31sec (2071 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 06 2021