Big PROBLEM in the HORIZONTAL HIVE! Was THRIVING now DYING

all right let's just get right into it welcome back to the homestead this is actually the rest of the day after you guys watched the hose video we moved right into this video so you guys can see we're working hard for you guys so we can keep you up to breath on what's going on around this homestead okay because now we have a major problem with the bees all right the other day i was working on this patio if you guys saw that video real quick i wasn't trying to show you guys how to build a patio you always want to make sure your patio is slightly slanted away from the building so the water drains off of it i didn't get into all that stuff but while i was making the video i mentioned that you want to make sure you have a fresh air intake into your root cellar and a way to get the spent air out and i thought that was a really important point hence the video title okay so i'm working on this patio here uh trying to get this ready for the learning center and i was uh having to bring in some dirt on the corner over there so the rock wouldn't fall out and i keep a big pile of dirt out in the woods there okay which is also where we keep a couple of our beehives now in the process of going back and forth to get the dirt i try to keep an eye on the beehives and i was looking over at the horizontal hive and i noticed there was almost no activity at the horizontal hive which is totally strange this time of year and especially with this heat at a minimum i should see some bearding where they're hanging out in front of the beehive and trying to you know keep cool and all that kind of business and there was like nothing going on so i was like oh no so i came and dumped the dirt off and i jumped into my suit because i didn't know what to expect i got my hat on and my helmet and my stuff and my little equipment and i went over there and i checked out the beehive and what i found was not good okay so i came back i called dr leo and we talked about it for a little bit and he said yeah i'm gonna come right up basically dropped what he was doing and wanted to come up so we could get into this beehive see what happened and then we could explain it to you guys a lot of y'all are new beekeepers out there and you know it's not rainbows and unicorns you know sometimes you guys are going to run into jam ups and we're just trying to show you these jam ups and then show you how to work through them so you can be a better beekeeper a better homesteader you know just a better person all around so dr leo is getting ready to come on right now and we're gonna go over here to the woods and see what's going on i got some deer laying down here through the night i can tell yeah it's awesome all right so now we're out here in the woods this is our horizontal hive and this is our friend dr leo in case you're new to our channel of dr leona dr leo and i have produced a lot of bee videos to help you guys out on your journey that have well over a million views on them now so we really appreciate you guys tuning in to check out these videos and uh you won't say anything real quick yes hello again and there i think it's a very important video today because instead of the happy end there of pulling in hundreds of pounds of honey from the hives we have something that's less expected but it's a very important lesson in natural beekeeping and in life in general yeah um i'm dr leo i am a natural beekeeper in the ozarks of southern missouri and i have a website horizontal hive.com with free plans for building your horizontal hives and free advice on getting started keeping bees with a smile yeah it's great resource so make sure you guys check that out i'll leave a link down below plus it just flashed right across the screen here so we're gonna open this thing up and just see what we see all right well some six weeks ago when we visited this hive together it was bustling with activity and lots of these and we were very much looking forward to the bountiful honey crop but i can tell by the smell of it that their honey is not what we're going to discover now oh you can deserve an order i'm bad with smells so you can you smell a difference or something yeah it's kind of a fermented smell of because the honey's so hot no it's because there are the creatures that are now consuming your honey here fermented right and it has this smell oh there it is yeah i can actually smell it now there you go all right wow okay the hive is empty so we cannot even say that the bees died because what most probably happen as they absconded yeah once the nest started to be overrun with their wax moths and this is what we have now we have our small hive beetles and wax moth and these are scavengers that are after whatever is left off of the colony when the bees are gone so how do you think it might have happened that's the puzzling part to me i mean the hive was totally strong i know we moved the entrance over because they were looking really strong and i kept an eye on them they looked really good and within like just a few days this is where we're at now all right let's go through it and then maybe we'll have some our uh cues as to what have happened so wax moths and small high bills um here is a way to tell these there are two craters the little larva that have pointed ends like this this is the small hive beetle a pastor native to africa and they lay eggs are in the cells that have some protein in it that means pollen or brood or cocoons and when these tiny larva hatch they start devouring everything and destroying the calm the other one that we see here is wax moth and the wax moths these green cocoons yeah these are the small butterflies the moss they infiltrate the five and there they lay eggs and when the lays uh the eggs hatch the larvae start crawling around and they spin this kind of our cocoons they're destroying the comp too they feed on bee bread on honey on bee brood on cocoons all the cones are destroying the hive and then they prepared and produce a new generation of wax moth and the cycle repeats itself until there is nothing left so we have the double whammy of beekeeping yeah you know actually i lose more bees to small hive beetles than to varomites that's for sure but as long as the colony is very strong they can defend themselves they would be cleaning it all out right and staying clean so what happens there here is that for some reason the colony could no longer defend themselves from the past and my guess is that because they were so strong and we were shot on equipment and we were not able to take several splits of them they became overpopulated and their congestion is one of the triggers of swarming and if they swarmed and you didn't see the swarm coming out what happens on that very day is half of the worker bees leave and the proportion of bees to the area of the honeycomb that they need to guard and protect suddenly drops by 50 percent and the sudden drop in the workforce allows these pests to run around and deposit many eggs and the bees cannot keep up anymore with the cleanup and defending the calm which means that you know one of the keys of preventing this from happening is to have the colonies at the peak of their strength but preventing them from naturally swarming um because otherwise you won't have enough bees to take care of this very larger household all right now uh all of that is not wasted because this is beeswax that you can melt and make candles and beauty products from right it may not look clean right right now but it's very easy to purify you cut it out you put it in a cheesecloth make a bundle and put it in boiling water all of the impurities will be left inside inside the bag and the melted beeswax will come out of the bag and when it cools down it will solidify like a big thicker pancake on top of the bucket with the boiling water right and there another comment i have is that i remember just why we were not able to expand this nest or more in the springtime or in the summer this was because these are frames were cross comb meaning that the wax comps were built connecting several frames together like you can see on this one right and they're um this was full of honey and we didn't want to rip it apart uh because then kanye would start running and they're smothering many bees so we decided to wait until the harvest time to address this cross-coming issue and they're moving forward we really will want to prevent this cross coming cross coming is natural of course but uh it makes hive management much more complicated and we cannot do the things we would want to do to the colony to give them more space so uh i remember you had some of these frames that had we moved a couple of them in there yeah so i wanted to give you some tips on preventing this cross calming in the future so if you want to give bees the freedom of building their own wax which is great then do not use what they sell in the kermers or by the name of foundationless frames foundation is the sheets of wax that you put in frames like that some of the frames are sold like that and they're called foundationless so that the bees can build their own calm that's all right but you need to give them a very good guide to get them started on the straight line and unfortunately this triangular shape that they put there on these top bars is not sufficient to provide guidance of where the center of the com is just the protrusion of it is are not tall enough to get these started in the straight line it will work on many of the frames but on some others they will start connecting combs together right so if you ever want to let the bees build their own calm you either need to give them a strip of foundation on that means the piece of wax imprinted with the beginnings of the cell like this just give them a strip and they will start drawing it down or use a frame that instead of this triangular shape that doesn't reliably work has a t shape like this yeah you could see that's deeper there yeah it's much deeper and then it's really abrupt so when they start hanging in bunches drawing new fresh calm they do it from the lowest point and this provides a much more secure guide to get them started building in the straight line down right you know in other words about foundation i see that you've used the plastic foundation this is something i avoid for several reasons uh one bees need to have the freedom of making holes in the foundation under the conf of ventilation and for traffic so even if they have a thick frame like that if they have to put a hole here for ventilating or for excess from one b way between the frames to the other during the winter they will make pop holes all over of course that's not something they're able to do with the plastic foundation this is of course convenient for you as a beekeeper right order and have the frames that arrive with this already pre-installed right but uh i don't use plastic foundation just because it doesn't give the bees the freedom of arranging their master as they the way they need it and if you guys are new um the reason why we had those is because we went from the vertical hives to the horizontal hives and this actual design of the horizontal hive that you can get for free on his website is able to accept those frames so it was good because i was able to reuse the equipment and now we have the other boxes takes a little bit different frame so that's why we had those frames i was new to beekeeping and that's what they sold remember we told the guys that your mentor teaches you things and then you learn those things and then you have to kind of keep digging so you can learn more and then change some things because that mentor taught me to use those plastic frames but that's really not the best way to do natural beekeeping yeah correct doc but unfortunately foundation that they sell today in america right can be even even worse even worse than using plastic because it's contaminated with a lot of pesticides actually i brought you something to read if you have a moment like you know some people read horror stories i brought you one of these horror stories i don't need to read you know stephen king at night because for me this is the horror stories it's called the uh pollution of wax and the beehives in north america with agrochemicals right and that's produced by the leading universities with all the analysis etc but you read into this article and all of a sudden there are pages and pages of tables listing all the chemicals they find in beeswax right these wax is like a sponge it takes in whatever the bees bring into the hive from the surrounding fields and not only that amazingly the most prevalent chemicals found in these beeswax and american beehives is not the ones that the bees bring from the fields surrounding the hives but the chemicals that most bee keepers put in their beehives trying to control wax moths and their bromides and small habils and whatnot especially the varroa mites so what's the alternative well foundation does help offer many advantages you'll have straight calm uh the cells will be uniform uh i always make sure that i have a few frames in my beehives or that are foundationless meaning the bees build their own calm right and there the reason for that is you can tell on this one the fray and the cells are so much bigger than the cells imprinted on the foundation yes the bigger cells is where they rear drones the male bees and beekeepers traditionally have been are hating drones because these do not collect honey they only go and change queens from other hives and these as you can tell by these brown cells the brown is the color of the cocoons that were left behind it means that here a lot of drones were reared at the expense of consuming honey in this conduct another frame of mostly drawn brood another frame of drone brood and in nature about 17 percent of all calm that the bees build is drawn calm which is great for them because they need it for procreation right but not so good for honey production because the drones consume honey to fuel their mating flights but they do not contribute there directly to honey product right so for this reason beekeepers are using uh frames with their foundation and printed with smaller cells to produce small beads but almost all foundation in america is are polluted with pesticides for example the famous bee breeder in europe fert the author of raising honeybee queens is saying that if you raise drone bees or in a conventional foundation frames the uh semen of these drones will not be viable anymore because they're being raised in a highly polluted environment makes total sense like humans and yeah just look at this picture uh at these tables like pages oh many of the front and back yeah front and back list of agrochemicals that you find in almost all beeswax are produced in america wow so my solution was to use my own beeswax that i harvest in the wilderness and they're melting it and making foundation but it is very slow and tedious process and you need the special mill right to imprint this hexagonal person on the list of wax so it's not really practical to do it for most beekeepers unless you have a very large operation and a large amount of wax and by the way i wanted to show you the contrast this is the beeswax that i get from my bees by melting the comb that they don't need anymore and this is the commercial foundation that you buy through bee supplies right do you notice the difference yeah yeah then smell this yeah smell this not as good but yeah well i can smell it for you yeah this smells like very um the smell of hive bees beeswax this one this is very aromatic and this smells almost of nothing well the reason for this contrast is that most of the foundation produced in america is made not from the brood calm like that it's made from cappings what they remove from the cells when they extract honey and this is virgin white wax like that the problem with that is that when the bees build their own honeycomb they don't just use wax they mix it with propolis this is this brown stuff here yeah that's like the sticky glue and not only it makes the wax stronger it also gives it strong virus and bacteria killing properties so the generations of bees raised in the cells stay healthier because they're surrounded by all of this propolis right so when you give bizarre commercial foundation not only it's the wax that has no poly a propolis on it but also it's contaminated with all of these agrochemicals so searching for a solution i uh tried foundation from all over the world and the best one i found that's the closest to what i produce myself and my fury comes from the mountains of spain and this is what i use spanish beekeepers in the mountains are uh keep these away from agricultural fields it's wilderness beekeeping just as i do it in the ozarks so they produce foundation using the whole of the calm like it should be it has this wonderful sweet smell uh it has almost no traces of pesticide and like it's impossible to find foundations with syrup because where on planet earth and all of these chemicals circulate in the atmosphere but compared to the conventional load of pesticides this is something i'm comfortable using uh in my beehive now do they send an analysis on with it or do they if you ask them they can give you something yeah they can if you compare yeah unfortunately the analysis is very uh expensive and every batch will have a slightly different analysis but this compared with that is really night and day and there's some you have on your website yeah i use it myself in my beehives and also it's available on horizontal hive.com in the size that specifically fits the horizontal high frames of the european lanes format which would be like this right which is like the new style that we have in the hive we're going to take you guys over to in a second so now that we're at this point of our um discovery what's next so uh if you have a hive where that's that's that but this hive is not really dead we don't see a single dead bee right that means that they just laughed and uh i think that what probably happened first they were swarming right they swarm left and the remaining portion of the hive left behind was not strong enough and they started being overrun by wax moth and small high bills and which point they swarmed out too it's called absconding right so they're somewhere in the environment i wish you had one of your swamp traps installed i could have caught them huh yeah you might have caught their own swarm this way but they're so one thing about the bees is they have this internal clock and they know that they're running out of time so they were trying to battle with the bugs and they couldn't win so they have to leave now because time is of the essence if they don't get into a new home start to develop comb and brood and get ready for winter they're not even going to make it through the winter no so and for them you know having a lot of possessions is a burden yeah isn't it like that for us [Laughter] it's like having all of this property it requires upkeep and maintenance and u-hauls and everything yeah absolutely so what to do with this is or inspect every calm right and if it is not severely damaged like this one that's not too bad you can salvage it if you were to leave it at room temperature like that the destruction will continue sure there are small eggs that we may not see now so even if you shake out all of the larvae they may still be some left behind and as they hatch they will continue destroying the car spinning uh the cocoons and like until nothing else left right so if you want to save this you need to freeze it for 48 hours right uh freezing uh kills the small high bills and wax moth in all stages adults larva and eggs right and just then put that in some sealed container and keep it until you can use it again in your beehive uh because this will make an excellent ready-made comp for storing honey during the following year right so we'll just go through that and they're calling whatever calm is malformed or just their damage too much for example i want to try to salvage this because it already has a lot of these cocoons and damage to it and there it's not a complete calm anyway so to do this just salvage the wax wax is a wonderful product you can use for making candles and beauty products and again it's very easy to render it into the purified wax yeah we'll walk you guys through that whole system after he gets out of here i'll go getting into getting into this uh stuff separating it and then maybe i'll show you guys how that all works so now we're going to walk over check out the other hive you want to do that while we're yes absolutely you have more to do here or we're not pretty much fun yeah i just wanted to show you that you take a knife if you have plastic foundation that has um wax built in it you just scrape it off with a teaspoon right but they're with their these wax you just take a knife and you cut it off the wires that's one thing that happens when they get in there is they make it all smushy like that yeah so take this and put it in a bucket with the liner of cheesecloth or old t-shirt with no printing then put it in bundle and in boiling water and what will come to the surface after everything cools will be this nice pure uh yellow beeswax and all the bugs and larvae and everything will just die in there and so you'll be all set so and one thing uh we were talking about too that we might want to mention to you guys is you don't want to just let this thing fester right here okay because these pie beetles and these moths they're laying eggs and their their job is survival so they want to drop back onto the ground so they can get this life process going all over again so all you're going to do is if you let all this get onto the ground as you're going to contaminate the whole area that your beehive is especially with the small hive bills because the small hive beetles are they complete their life cycle in the ground right the wax moths these are butterflies that lay eggs and have this big fat worms uh for larva they can complete their life cycle inside the box but but this small hive beetle that's exactly why we had to replace that wire and we did not and we did not okay and the small factor this is live tv folks they need to go into the ground and to pay there so if you let these are uh smaller larva go to the ground here they will just produce another generation of small hive beetles right so don't leave it behind put in the bargain if you have chickens give it to your chickens if you are rendering wax it will take care of the problem but dog is totally right just don't let it sit here for weeks or breathing tests all right so we're gonna pick that lid up that just busted off of here and then we're gonna go check out this other uh beehive now this is the hive that we split off of the other hive so these are the wild bees that we actually caught in a swarm box that are local native black bees and so we're grateful for that we were able to continue that bloodline and then the other two hive um that we have maybe we'll get to them today maybe we won't those are the transported bees that i had brought in and you know before i learned about natural beekeeping and stuff so so see even though doug lost one hive he still has three hives after starting the season with two right so that's the importance of breeding your own stock because you will have mortality right some of them will die during the winter and again you know it's part of natural beekeeping because the natural colonies living in b tree in the woods they die too yeah to the same past nobody gets out alive but if you keep multiplying them faster than they swarm out the parish your empire will keep increasing in size that's right and i was mentioning earlier as well we had a lot of problems with the black ants i lifted this lid off and inside the black ants were real heavy they had eggs going on so i got them out of here scurried them out and then i put some de around the bottom and that keeps them from climbing up the legs and getting back in here i guess we're going to see what we got huh yeah you know for me opening a lance horizontal hive is always like a feeling of coming home because it is just the most pleasurable form of a horizontal hive to work with see we open it and we're not seeing any bees right now what kind of moth is that there uh it's a regular kind of moth but see this may be wax moth but the thing is that any beehive you will see will have wax moth and small hive beetles and baromites in there right so all of them are in there waiting for the hive to become weak so they can multiply right so see we open the hive and you can put the palms of your hands on the top bars and they will feel slightly warmer in the spot where they're rearing brew here on these frames like this one is cooler and this one is this is a very warm too and there uh these lands european style frame doesn't have gaps between them the american frame and the other hive required additional cover boards because there is this crack between the top bars so here we are not disturbing any bees just by opening the hive the spacing is different too the old books on horizontal hive beekeeping will tell you that the ideal spacing for the horizontal hive layout is one and a half uh spacing between the ribs of the combs the american is one and three-eighths of an inch so one-eighth of an inch less this is another reason why in frames like that the bees are encouraged to do cross-calming right they just don't get enough room that they need okay so let's crack it open and take a peek inside so we transferred this sky from the langstroth which is the american vertical hive standard to the legends they produced a new queen here are the small high bills please meet them their names are paul ringo john and george you can see how the bees are changing them yeah you see the bee just jumped right on it so uh if you have a chance just you can smash one or two with your hive tool just for for the pleasure of it i actually have a special until that i carry in my toolbox it's called the beetle smasher yeah i got it one of the beekeeping conferences and i really like it it even has this shape if the beetle hides here in the corner you can still reach them like that sometimes you have to go anyway so wow this color looks very nice with all this capped honey and the brood underneath is the ideal arrangement for upcoming winter and there some people write to me saying i open the hive and i see that there is brood and honey on the same frame am i doing something wrong they're doing everything right exactly that's how they do it in nature the whole point of having this multi-story high was to separate broods from honey right but it creates all kinds of problems for hands-on because here when i have honey and brood on the same frame i know that the bees have the resources right there on this frame to feed themselves and to provide for their young when you separate brood from honey it's more convenient for managing a hive but then you need to be always watching to make sure that they have enough resources left after you pull honey beautiful this is a heavy frame and this is the pattern of our brood and egg laying by the queen that made me fall in love with this particular style of horizontal hive called the legends hive because the bees now have the ability on the frame like that to produce brood in a completely circular pattern the american frame that's just nine inches deep is not deep enough for them to do it in a sphere or in a round pattern and the closer it is to a sphere the easiest for them to ventilate and protect and there to heat too is that on both sides yep yeah cool another big benefit of having a frame that's only 12 inches wide as opposed to the conventional american frame that's 17 and a half inches wide is that there is much less space on each side of the brood cluster again aiding the base and warming it and protecting it and having this snug environment that they would have in the betraying the woods yeah that fits really tight it is a lot different than the other either horizontal hive with the other frames and the vertical hives this is very very tight fitting okay and we don't need to go over all of the frames but i wanted to show you the frame that was the length straw frame the previous sir video so what we did we had that the langstroth frame that we cut short and we screwed it into the lens i have to have it transferred into this new format and you can tell that the bees have completely recovered from this surgery and they are um rearing brood on this frame too will they connect those two frames and fill in this here yeah eventually they will if you give them enough time but this is a frame that's completely simulated there is capped brood there are larva in there there is capped honey and the next frame had their the frame filled in by the bees all the way to the bottom so the upper portion of this frame is what we gave them when we cut the length straw frame and embedded it here and this is their new construction and they did make it in two planes but they didn't connect it to the next frame so it's all good and eventually when you spin this frame for honey in the falling gear you'll be able to cut off this lower tongue beautiful i like what i see and again even though you lost you lost the mother colony the this genetics perpetrates itself on this new hive and the life goes on so you think we'll need uh a couple more frames for them because it looks like they're at the end almost uh yeah i agree we can add there or one or two with the new colonies i try adding frames relatively slowly yeah so they don't have so much volume has happened in the other too much but they cannot then they cannot keep up with it okay i'll go get the frame just one or two or what uh yeah i would i would do one just one yeah or a couple let if you want to be sure you can check the foundation frames on this side too and see how far they progressed in uh building on these frames and if if there is not much progress then all you need is a couple of frames because there's nothing on there yeah so this frame is still just starting to be transformed they're starting to draw out the frame these cells like that drawing them out from the foundation the other one is pretty much constructed so yeah i would say i would add one more frame on that end there so they can then put the divider board and then pull the divider board back right all right let me go grab that frame right now and then we'll close it up very good there is one more trick here when you're sliding these frames back if you don't want to smash any bees you can give a puff of smoke and this causes them to go down so when you're sliding the top bars back together you are not crushing any bees and see this is the same genetics as in the previous hive that was really mean but they have even better home here than they had in the other height not only the shape of the frames is more natural but this one is insulated with natural wool inside which gives them so much protection they feel are very much at home in this box snug yeah okay well done that's it did you want to go out and check the two out in the field that's good all right we're gonna go check out two more hives so stay with us now don't go anywhere hit that subscribe button in case you haven't subscribed yet he'll be back up for some more visits and we have a big announcement at the end of this video that you're not gonna want to miss all right i like this little tool here now just a short walk from the forest are our other two beehives this is a horizontal hive that we started off with again we started with the vertical hives then we went to the horizontal hive and now we're comparing the horizontal hive with a length horizontal high lanes horizontal hive the one with shorter and deeper frames yes more natural yes so we're going to open these up now we're going to see what's going on with them and again if you want to build these yourself you're welcome to do it dr leo has the plans on his website totally free horizontal hive.com or if you're not a building kind of person dr leo builds them and ships them out right yeah we can ship it anywhere in 48 states or and that's a very good way of getting started there get this swamp trap go back to other videos by doug because the beekeeping naturally doesn't start with the box it starts with the bees so you need to obtain local bees but once you have the bees you can either build a five like that with very simple tools or purchase one from horizontal five dot com super easy i encourage you when you watch doug's videos to pay attention to how much before she has on his farm it's always heartwarming for me to come and to see this small piece of paradise that means the fields uh planted in monoculture crops not very healthy for us or for the bees but here i still see some white clover in bloom or all kinds of things coming up almost continuously from the spring until late fall yeah it's important to feed your pollinators so don't just think about your garden for yourself we have flowers all around this whole property for our pollinators oh my very good this this is one strong hive considering that it was just a split or an artificial swarm that we took off of this hive maybe six weeks ago or two months ago but they've expanded beautifully when you see bees like that hanging out in the empty portion of the hive where that's a very good sign that the bees are strong and healthy and one of the benefits of having this extra room here is instead of bearding out as they would do on normal hives or regular american hives they have this room basically to chill out within the hive so but if the frames were here would they still hide out in there they would still be able to because when you fill the hole high with frames you still leave a crack for the hot air to rise and be vented out of the vents on the roof so this horizontal hive roof has screened vents are that serve like attic vents to prevent overheating and there also of course the box is built from lumber that's twice as thick as what you find in conventional heights right also when you approach the hive you can tell man a lot by looking at the entrance if you see regular activity with foragers coming and going you many times can predict what you see inside a health and thriving colony and there it's good that we open it today because when the bees are busy like that on the very last frame and you see they're starting to draw out their wax on the frame it's time to be adding more frames otherwise they will continue building from the roof of the hive rather than from the frames that you give them and that's worse than cross combing and then you pull the lid off and everything busts open yeah yeah at least with cross combing you have a option to do it or not you know yeah so look at this beautiful propolis so they connect these sir top bars together and in warm weather this properly is like chewing gum and it will stick to your teeth too if you put some in your mouth now back in the day the pioneers that's a form of dental hygiene was to chew on the wax and the and the comb and it still is in many parts of the world yeah like right here wow look at this beautiful white comb that they're building yeah and it is all filled with their nectar and they're starting to cap it here in the corner yep and you guys will notice um maybe these are a lot more calm than the other hive they're a little more golden in color and they're a little more docile we had the bees were left over and we actually had lost the queen and we had a queen sent up from down south and so this queen is responsible for the temperament of this hive yeah but you can tell by the color of some bees that she made it with some local drones too see how some of the bees are much darker instead of being yellow oh yeah and they have black with almost no yellow striping yeah this is the color of the european dark bee the local beer of the north and they're the queen mates with multiple drones so some of them will have southern genetics like these workers with their yellow striping on the abdomen but on the same frame you have their sisters that are parented by the northern drone wow the european dark bee drone that will have a gray or almost no yellow striping at all just very dark color and this is the point even though you started with the queen that was brought here from mississippi uh with each generation that passes the new queens are being locally mated so the genetics of the bees becomes more and more adapted to the local conditions and the hardness of winter too so how does that happen does the bee does the drone make it in here or does she go out and come back she goes out of the hive to mate and they have special drone congregation areas which is a big mystery because the bees this year the drones and the queens they will go mating to special playgrounds where mating had happened in the previous years even though of course they were not alive in the previous year to know where exactly the spot is yeah but the spot pretty much stays stationary year in and year out and scientists have no idea to the present day just how they know where they're supposed to do for mating right and it's very important for them to be maintained in the wild uh in uh open flight because this prevents inbreeding right if the drones could copulate with the queen inside the hive there would be a lot of inbreeding rendering the hive potentially not viable and totally weak so they have this amazing mechanism of avoiding and breathing by going and making an open flight and again for the queen it is important to have multiple mates so that diversity of the workers is there in the hive right they will be children or daughters of different fathers and they will different traits you've seen some are yellow some are black some are better foragers some are better guard bees some are better ventilators so having all of this diversity of workforce is important for the health of the b column and now one thing i oh there's something going on with that it just ripped apart they had some cross comb going on at the bottom so they continued building this com that we gave them see how they already connected these parts right right that's what they were doing down there uh-huh and they attached this one slightly to the preceding frame yeah and one thing i'm noticing is there's no hive beetles running around uh i notice it too yeah okay doc if something like that happens if you see calm collapse don't just leave it there because they will be building around it making three-dimensional catacombs so you need to remove it from where it fell but i would not remove it from the hive right now because it has brood and it means you will waste the uh the brood that's there i would wait until it hatches and then i will remove this small piece from the hive altogether so what i will do now i will grab this piece that collapsed and i will carefully detach it from the rest of the comp first i will see whether i can even put it back into this frame where it belongs and i think i can do that i will just gently squeeze it in there and it will rest in place and they will patch it but normally when you cannot reattach it like i've done uh just remove it and put it in one corner of the hive come back in a week or two and once there is no brood on it you can remove it you could remove it straight away but then you've wasted all of the flowers that are in there no that was good it went right back in there yeah excellent so very good we see here is another healthy thriving colony and this one will actually produce you some honey uh harvesting now would be too premature because you see on the frames that are being filled with nectar the nectar is not capped yet right capping is the sign that the moisture content has been um brought down to where it will not ferment on you right and when it becomes real honey rather than nectar it's also important because bees don't just evaporate moisture from nectar they also add enzymes there and they convert some of the table sugars found in the nectar of the plants into the good sugars found in fruit fruit frozen glucose right so let them do their magic for another month or so and after that you'll have a few frames to pull from here there you go and right now the only thing we have to do with this hive is to give them one or two more frames right so they don't run out of room and don't don't start building from the roof of the heart right more huh yeah thank you more frames so when i enter the frame if you see some beads between the two frames uh in addition to giving it a path of smoke uh you can also wiggle the frame like that and any of the beads that may be in the way they will get out of the way so that the frames can be put together without crashing a d and there is on the side of the frames there's just a little bit of space between the frame and the wall that's how this is designed so they can go down the wall to other frames and they can also ventilate it properly yeah very good we're done with this one too all right here i'm going to show them that real quick see there's that little gap right there all right oh my i didn't know that was sitting there okay we have wire here instead of the road that's reassuring yeah and let me look at the entrance there this whole hive feels real real warm oh yeah very active so you have plenty of frames there just looking from here i say that they're not drawing foundation on these frames yet so they don't have to worry about them running out of room and let's take a peek at how they're progressing on these new frames that we added since last time and they're doing nice filling it with honey and building more calm they build more calm when they run out of room storing things so even though there may still be room on the preceding one frames they will start construction when they feel there is more nectar coming in that they have containers for storing you know this side is quite typical on plastic foundation yeah see that i've never really seen that on this ecological or pesticide free foundation from spain that i'm using but uh i've seen it over and over again that if you give these a choice between an empty frame where they build their own wax plastic foundation or natural beeswax foundation they will choose between their own wax or natural wax but with the plastic wax they will often times make irregular construction like what you see here yep there were even instances where frames like that were loaded in a swamp trap and when the swarm moved in instead of starting to build wax on these plastic frames they started building it from the bottom bar down completely ignoring this plastic foundation and that's not what you want no you know i want to specify here that it also depends on the climate in some climates like arizona it gets so unbearably hot in the summer that plastic foundation is many times the only practical way to go because the natural wax may overheat and melt and collapse especially if you use conventional beehives with bare little insulation in the walls yeah so insulation on your beehives isn't just for cold weather climates it's also good for if you're in the hot areas as well absolutely you know most of my horizontal hives that i ship out i either ship to new england or to texas yeah let's take one frame out but i can tell it just yeah just you can just hear it yeah it just sounds great yeah and you know even the smell of it you open the hive and there is a difference in the smell between a healthy colony and the one that's experiencing problems with some kind of infestation right yeah beautiful so give them another two three weeks and this will be completely capped and ready to be pulled for extraction if you ever have to pull a frame that has honey partially capped don't extract it all at once first spin it out gently without uncapping the sealed cells this will remove the nectar that is higher moisture content then drain it from the extractor and then do the uncapping and then you'll be able to separate nectar from the completely ripened honey right but the the best way to proceed here is just to wait until everything is capped right uh back home i do honey harvest as late as october even the first week in november i think we have done uh november or late october for sure yeah there you will see all the of these cells cupped and there will be less disturbance on the bees because many of the bees that i hear now won't be here anymore in two months time and there it will be better honey for you and less disturbance for the colony yeah so some beekeepers actually draw honey twice a year we've usually only drawn once and there have been years where we didn't draw any honey at all yeah and it's a very good practice to delay the harvest until late in the season let me explain why imagine you open this hive in early july and you see there are many frames that are packed with honey you go ahead and you remove all of these frames from the hive thinking that the bees will continue filling it with honey in july and august and september but why what if weather becomes unfavorable for foraging it becomes too hot or too dry or too rainy or too cold depending on where you live if they're prevented from foraging then all of a sudden you open the hive in september preparing it for the end of the season and you see they're really short on stores and you need to provide them something for winter survival and you've already extracted all the honey most beekeepers will give them sugar water for the winter so there you've compromised the integrity of their food supply by pulling honey too early and going into the part where they need it the most because it's getting cold and they're not as active so they're going to be sickly inside with the sugar water yeah so it's really good practice to always be leaving a stockpile of reserve honey in the hive and in the long hive like that because there is so much room for them to store honey uh as long as the hive continues to be strong you are not losing anything by delaying harvest by a couple of months you'll just be harvesting it at the time of the year when you can tell exactly how much you are leaving behind for the winter and this way you can avoid sugar feeding completely now there if if the hive is this long so to say this this laying uh horizontal hive is there a certain amount that you suggest in leaving how many frames or do you just kind of see how big the hive is how big it will really depend on the strength of the colony but there's a rule of thumb a really strong colony wintering on laying straws frames you'll probably need between 12 and 14 frames some of them on the ends will be fully filled with honey they won't touch it during the winter but this is their spring reserve right but an average colony we can overwinter on 10 frames wow and many beekeepers will think oh it's not much because we overwinter our colonies in double deep chambers that means 20 frames but in the old days langstroth himself he designed the hive to be hosting a colony that will be overwintering on 10 frames on the understanding that the smaller colony is actually healthier and more sustainable than the really big ones right the reason why we still have lizards but we don't have dinosaurs yeah i just see wonderful frames are being filled with honey and lots of properties too so let's open it on this end we don't really have to but to check the brood chamber and make sure that there is brood there's almost certainly brood because otherwise you wouldn't have such a strong population of the bees but uh even lands the author of keeping these and horizontal hives was saying that during your first few years of beekeeping it's actually permissible to be opening and inspecting the hives more often because you are gaining experience getting used to working with them i was when i first started beekeeping i was heavy into kind of getting in there every couple weeks or once a month and as i've gotten better at beekeeping more confident i backed off of getting in there so so here is a frame with brood we don't need to find the queen the presence of healthy brew tells you that the queen is there and the strength of the hive is another indicator of the quality of your queen compare the pattern of brood though here compared to the lane's hive see how she had to spread the lane instead of the circle it's like that and we know just from geometry that there a sphere is a perfect shape for limiting the loss of heat from the surface of it so the closer it is to the circle the better it is for the bees in terms of temperature regulations insulation and protection nice all right we just came out of the bee yard and right when we were done i caught one right in the eye so if you guys don't uh see me in a video for the next little bit might take care of those little puffs i got underneath my eye too [Laughter] but boy that was a good one now if you guys ever get stung just real quick you don't squeeze it and pinch it to pull it out you want to scrape it you can use your fingernail you can use your hive tool you can use a credit card you just want to scrape it off because at the end of that stinger is a pus sack and in there is all the venom and if you go to squeeze it out and pull it out you're going to push all that venom right through that stinger and right into your skin so once you get the stinger out pour a little apple cider vinegar right where the sting happened and it'll take away the pain and it works really good so there's your little uh on the way out nugget for the steam uh we'll see how this one uh i can feel it but we'll see how this one puffs up on us so yeah a cube of ice also goes a long way that would just feel good today period it's like 100 degrees out here i really appreciate you coming up check out his eyes yeah yeah you got some books i see yeah i do you know things that we were doing today they're really explained in great detail in the several books that i published and translated from french and from russian the number one is skipping bees with the smile the 2020 edition it's been a big seller for five or six years already but this new edition published early in 2020 really has much more additional information on successful natural beekeeping either in horizontal hives or in vertical hives too because many of the principles stay the same this is the one that we were using when we were increasing the number of ducks colonies earlier this year so instead of two colonies we had four now we have three but with still 50 increase and raising honeybee queens walks you step by step with lots of full color pictures as to how to become your own bee breeder so you never have to buy bees again and we could have had seven eight nine ten hives i just didn't have any space to put them and we were like right there queen cells everywhere and he was actually at our conference he speaks every year at our home studying live conference and he was explaining to y'all how you can actually make really good money with your natural bees on your property selling queens and nukes you guys can do this package them together what is a package of be yourself or a local car it can be anywhere from 200 to 500 dollars depending on your marketing yeah you see what i mean but the local queens are you know there is a waiting list with people who produce local queens yeah and they may sell one queen for a thousand bucks i mean see so there's lots of different ways that you guys can break free from that nine to five and live this homesteading life that you guys are watching because you know you want it and we keep showing you guys how you can do it and not only just the queens but then you have the honey and just all the things that come with it do you think these are horizontal hives there is the book written by legends these european style frames that we now have in two of the hives were invented and tested by lance and friends so this is where the name of the hive is coming from so he describes his 20 years of beekeeping experience with horizontal highs with this book so even if you just contemplate having b's on horizontal five this is a book to have because it is managed differently from the vertical stand yes and finally you know a lot of inspiration i draw from this book honey from the earth that takes you around the world without you leaving your armchair to 23 countries showing you how bees are kept today everywhere from africa and jungles in asia and australia and us and china and some people still keep bees in lock hives like this others like in russia they still go into trees and there are hollowed their out highs right inside the tree that you climb up to collect honey from so for me keeping this is not just about the livelihood right or honey or wax or any anything other that's useful for us right it's really the experience of witnessing this amazing life form and feeling more alive myself right from immersing myself in our nature and interacting with this amazing insect society yeah when you guys are passionate about that everything else will fall into place but this is an easy kind of a thing that you can get into just as a hobby a lot of people after our last video were curious they were just going to put out a box they didn't really want to do the beekeeping but you had mentioned that you could just put a box out just to provide them a safe place to live and it's beneficial for everyone and there was a lot of people that were going to do that as well so very encouraging and i'm glad to see that we can harvest a lot of that comb and then still use it on the homestead so that's important to um to know it's not just like you don't have to just destroy all the equipment or anything i do have some repairs on that one to make now yeah yeah and do remember to put a wire instead of the string on there that was a hand-me-down beehive so and nobody would believe us that it was not set up by you and me no i mean we were just we used to see his face you saw it bloop all right as always thanks for coming by the homestead if you guys have any questions make sure you leave them down below we try to get to your questions and answer them and one question i can remember off the top of my head is um in the last video you would mentioned about uh the plywood that you used was organic or chemical free no no it was formaldehyde formaldehyde free so how do you get that you just ask for it at the big box store yeah you can but actually they don't know you need to go and look at your local suppliers of plywood and go to their website and read what's called the sds safety better shade for each plywood and you will find a few that will have no formaldehyde in it but these manufacturers when they sell through the big box stores they don't really advertise that it's formaldehyde free right because then people will start asking store managers questions about the other kinds of drivers what about this one this one oh it has steel from aldehyde in it no thank you right so but yeah you can find it here and there even the largest manufacturers just check them out there and you will see that they have some of the brands and grades of plywood that are now formaldehyde-free you just need to dig into that and they're find it in their sds datasheet yeah see we read the questions and we answer them now for the big announcement it is now you won't believe it but uh one month from now october 3rd and 4th i have the two-day natural beekeeping class at my april and doug is going to be a guest yes uh you can imagine how difficult to take doug away from his homestead with his lovely wife and all the animals and bees and other things that anchor you to your place and you don't even feel like leaving and going on a tropical vacation because it's so peaceful and beautiful but i've been trying to talk doug into coming to my two-day b class for years now and he finally agreed so he will be there october 3rd and 4th 2020 and you can register at horizontal hive.com and attend this class and meet doc too at the same time and thanks for watching his channel and there uh if you want to make it to this class we are offering you 50 off your registration fee just make sure when you register on horizontal hive.com that you use the coupon code off grid in one word okay make sure when you go to horizontalhive.com and you register for that class that you put in there off grid in the coupon code so you can save some money and so you're coming to the class where i'll be and he'll be and we'll all be if you miss it you'll probably be at the wrong class and then you'll still get the great dr leo but no doug so make sure you guys uh check out the website horizontal hive dot com check out the books hopefully we'll see you guys it's limited seating so hopefully we'll see you guys at the app area at his place and maybe we'll do this again next year in case you miss it this year we'll have some hope out for you so maybe you can catch us there next year yeah and if you are watching it now when this video just came out please don't delay because the september workshop is already completely full it's all down so we still have seats laughter as of this filming at the october third and fourth 2020 class but if you want to be there it's going to sell out so uh look forward to seeing you there that's the buzz so thanks for stopping by the homestead and we'll see you guys on the next video see ya how's it look no no it's not bad if you didn't tell them you had it nobody would know

Channel: OFF GRID with DOUG & STACY

Views: 238,197

Keywords: Off Grid with Doug and Stacy, Doug and Stacy, Doug, Stacy, Off Grid, off the grid, off the grid living, off the grid homes, off grid living, off grid cabin, off grid with Doug and Stacy, off grid solar power system, off grid house, off grid homestead, off grid solar, homestead, homesteading, homesteading for beginners, homesteading off the grid, natural food recipes, holistic health, holistic living

Id: InuQfm5n3co

Length: 67min 26sec (4046 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 27 2020