Building a Beekeeping Business from 6 Hives

I'm gonna see how long it takes to take these six hives and make a living from them so I bought these six colonies and they were on that pallet and it was eleven hundred dollars and they are absolutely vicious I got one after me right now there's a couple ways you can make a living from bees and basically as either selling honey or selling bees and I want to go the selling bees route because there's a lot less um there's a lot less equipment you have to buy so first thing we're going to do is go make some Queens and start splitting bees start making more bees [Music] so this is what I'm doing to get calmer genetics into my bees this is a friend of mine's Hive that he wanted me to graft out of so I grabbed a bunch of Queens for me and a bunch from my friend this isn't the first time I'm grafting Queens I tried it last year a couple times or actually two years ago with not very good results so this year I'm doing a little different I'm using Bob Binny's method and I'm following it exactly as much as I can and so hopefully we'll have good results four days ago I came in and put an excluder between the two boxes because I'm still a beginner and it's almost impossible for me to find a queen when there's so many bees she is dang it there she is right there can you see her once I see the queen I'm always like how was I not able to find her before but all right so the next thing I did is I set these boxes off to the side because that was always my biggest problem trying to put a little bit of brood in with my grass and I'd always miss some eggs or some young larvae that they'd focus on those instead of focusing on the uh larvae that I gave them so this time I'm putting an empty box on the bottom and putting only food frames in there making sure there's not a bit of brood so now I need to find larva that's only a day old to grasp from a lot of the bees that are on open larvae are nurse bees and you want a lot of nurseries in there to make good Queens to feed your Queens I'm in my truck because it's a lot warmer in here it's kind of cold outside I don't want this war of it to get chilled it's got little babies hatching while I'm doing this there's one hatching right there while I'm grafting my last one tons of babies are getting born I went over and shook a whole bunch off before tell me why it's got a whole lot quicker now you know come and show uh is angled and I was trying to go for the first frame going in at the top messing up so many couldn't get it took me probably 30 minutes to do one frame now I'm down to like six minutes for the six or seven minutes for the last one and this one will be just as quick if not quicker so when I started on that other one I was going for the top down at with that angle and I just could not hardly get it now started going this way and slide it in I don't know how well you can see that it goes in there and it Scoops it up so going in with the angle that way it's been working great all right so I went ahead and set the grass in there is already bees hanging off of some of them I'm gonna go ahead and get them some feed one to one sugar syrup just to get them Juiced up as if Bob Benny calls it I did give this Hive a gallon of sugar syrup uh four days ago when I put the queen excellitter in as well now this is a double screen board it has two screens on it and opening going out the back foreign so that bottom one is queenless with absolutely no brood in it except for the queens that I grafted so now what I want to do is find um open brood with a bunch of the nurse bees on it and shake it down in front to really Overstock that bottom Colony with nurse bees with a double screen board it keeps the bees from touching each other through it and it does it makes the bottom Colony know that it's queenless if it's a single layer where they can touch each other they can get the Queen's pheromones back and forth and uh they'll they won't work those Queen cells like I want them to well this is the Moment of Truth I've only crafted twice before both times with not very good success but this time using the Bob Betty method hopefully um I did it right and I'll have good success but this is four days later Bob does this Step at three days but with work I wasn't able to get back here to it at three days but one day later should be this time well they've eaten a little bit of this pollen Patty in four days but not much I almost knocked that top bar out [Music] so I can see already but I'm having better luck than I've had before and those bees are hard to get off of there but it looks like I'm having some pretty dang good success here uh there's see how many empties there are one two three three empties I'm tickled I am so tickled all right well so far so good man I'm so tickled no idea so there's 15 30 40 . so there should be 42 I don't know if they'll all turn out to be good but uh there's 42 cells on that I'm very pleased it was a queenless cell starter the way I did it now I'm turning it into a queen right cell finisher so putting this Kleenex floater on so the queen can't come up and kill my cells and putting the cells up top here go ahead and give them one patty back all right so far so good I'll see you back here in several more days well I'm fixing to go split those mean old hives um I went and built these bottom Boards out of scrap from work they use a 3 8 rim and I'm making a double note box so I'll show you how that works [Music] so it's hard to see in this one but I cut these grooves I love how you can see it with the lighting but I cut these grooves in there then I got this quarter inch plywood slides in there and now I've got two separate hives and this one's entrances here and the other one's over there there's plenty of videos on double nuke boxes and I got these and this is scrap flooring from where I work as well so that goes on under the lid so that I can work on half of it and these Bays not go back and forth there was some bigger pieces of scrap that I was able to make a full-size lid so cheap I know so this is how Michael Palmer does his he just has four on each side but with only this quarter inch plywood fits five but somehow doing a double nuke box they grow faster than having a single nuke box or just having them in one big hive so that's what I'm going to be doing I'm going to be putting all the even though those Queens are super mean I'll be saving all the Queens so I've got six Queens down there and I'm gonna go and split all the coins into these three hives then when I've got those splits made I'll go in there and I'll just split the rest of the hives to pieces and we'll see I'm hoping to get four splits per Hive but we'll see we're still in the end of April and still forecasted to get some upper 30s temperatures in the next month I thought it can't make them too small but with this double nuke box they should be able to share some heat through that board I'm having to wear a full bee so for the first time I usually just wear the jacket I'm not the type that goes without any gear on like a you see a lot of people on YouTube a little brother won this had a raffle at a B club meeting he went with me too and uh I'm glad he did this is 11 days after I grafted them so these Queens should be hatching out tomorrow and the grass are looking pretty good I think it's 42 out of 45 made it and that's way more than I need but I'm giving some to my buddy so yesterday I went and made all my splits I split those six highs into 30. so now I've got 24 queenless splits and I didn't video it because I was short on time and those beads were absolutely eating me up so now here I'm going through my hives have been queenless for overnight this is the next middle the next day I'm going through and just dropping a queen cell into each one then I've got a cord of uh one to one sugar syrup that i'm dropping on top of each one Bob says that they accept Queens better if they've got feet on them foreign all right it's been uh 12 days since I introduced these cells so 11 days since these beef the Queens would have hatched and you know there's 24 colonies and it went through 22 of them at this point out of the 22 um three of them I could not find a Coin or eggs but that does not mean that uh there isn't the queen because I'm still a newbie and I just may not have seen the queen so I'll take you guys to this last one it's two colonies and the odds are we'll find the queen where the two queens these are still some mean bees I've you know they're still the same old bees until the new ones get laid and hatched they're crawling on me crawled up here that's why I put my belt on the outside I don't know if you can see that there's one crawled up in there and stung me on my stomach another one tried to sting me on my arm but thanks foreign [Music] splits and they're trying to Light Me Up foreign that one got me Good Golly I don't know it seems to go on camera I am getting beat up without them [Music] well I have not seen the coin I gotta be honest it's hard to look when they're eating me up good grief maybe it's because they are queenless [Music] smoke over smoking these beads is helping you guys ever had these this mean on an acre foil I'm just gonna put this hide back together put a rock on it check it later well I know I have at least 19 queens that I laid eyes on um the other five I'll check back in well I don't know I'll check back in four or five days and then maybe in a week and if there's no queens in a week I'll just uh combine them with the others so that's not as good as I was hoping for but I went and made a couple of insurance splits with some extra cells I had so I've got two more coins up at the house that I can put in here so that'll make at least 21 that I've got so here I'm less than a month into it I'm one from six to 27 for sure and maybe a few more so how many do you guys think I can get in a year so I think it was April 10th that I went and picked these up and how many splits do you think I can have ready to sell or have mated Queens in at least by April 10th of next year think I can have a hundred or fifty two hundred who knows um just if I do it right how many of you guys think I can get I'm gonna shoot for as many as I can and I don't even so it's embarrassing how many I want to get so I'm even gonna say how many I want to get just in case I don't reach it but but at this point I am sure this is what I want to do for a living it's a good thing bees are trespassers so it's not like if I want to do cattle I need way more acreage but these bees are something I can do on much smaller acreage just follow along on my beekeeping adventure and we'll see together how long it takes to go from six sides to making a living so thanks for watching and God bless

Channel: Jared Beekeeping

Views: 18,932

Keywords: Bob Binnie, Kamon Reynolds, Bee keeping, Honey bees

Id: bQZJQqjEkr4

Length: 15min 35sec (935 seconds)

Published: Wed May 24 2023