BUSY! BUSY! Wax dipping some new lids & building boxes

hi I'm Cayman Reynolds and today let's show you what we've been up to the last several days and that is building equipment wax dipping building equipment making thousands and thousands of cats so we're gonna show you a little bit of it we'll be showing you more in future videos however before we get started I wanted to say that we have some really cool products that we have I've never seen before and I don't really know a lot about that we're trying a couple of new things this year one because I love tinkering around with bee stuff but I think it might be helpful information for those of you who are wanting to do things differently than what we do which is definitely a good idea sometimes for sure also by the way we're doing a live chat tomorrow night at 7 p.m. that's Saturday today's Friday so be there or be like this board and be squared because we use a square and that's really important if your equipments not squared it's not gonna sit down the way it's supposed to so let's show you a little bit of what we're doing we got some lids cooking in here this is one that's been pulled out for probably about 25 minutes or so and it doesn't look all that crazy now but that wax just soaks right up into here for those of you who don't know what we're doing wax a dipping is basically just you know heating up hot paraffin and microcrystalline wax and then cooking your equipment in it and what that does is when the wood reaches high temperatures and there's a lot of different methods out there some people are pushing the 300 area I do it more around 250 and you can dip them for hours you can dip them for 50 minutes um there's there's really no one way to do this isn't that the way life is especially beekeeping so we dip these for 15 minutes 250 degrees probably was closer to 20 and I'm pretty excited about these lids so this is just a nice piece of plywood tops I'm gonna give you the measurements really quick so we have 16 and 3/8 so that's what these two top pieces would be as well and then we have 20 and 1/8 so there's that and that is your lid right there now we also have on the bottom these rims which many commercial beekeepers are using I really like the idea because it's going to help accommodate our patties and a few other things we'll be sharing with you how well those work for us this year but I'm pretty optimistic that I'm going to love them but the other it says basically all there is to it and those are 1/2 inch if I didn't already say rims just oh the whole length around that just sits right on to the lid and you can use all kinds of things like foam is that Ian uses or we call it reflects reflectix down here or double bubble and then there's also other little thin things that you can put in between there to kind of help seal around that if you feel that's necessary so that's and it's a really basic lid right there and with the wax dipping and everything I'm looking around $4 somewhere maybe even a little bit under probably around $4 her lid not bad now if you don't have access to a wax dipping system that's alright you can still paint them but the reason the wax dipping works so well is because you have just almost an infinite amount of places that moisture can seep into wood and when it does that it causes it to swell and then when it swells it leaves you even a bigger gap for the next time it rains or whatever is going to bring moisture into your box whatever you're making you've got to steal it off good and I talked about this a lot but it doesn't matter if you're using the most rock resistant wood or if you're using something really cheap you can use something that's really cheap and if it's still really really well it's gonna last a long time so definitely take the extra time with that for whatever you're using and seal it up great so let's show you what we're dipping over here and then we'll take you over and show you kind of what we've been cutting up about a hundred eyelids going got cinderblock on top of here you have to watch it I'm sure the safety police will be out in droves again today every time I do a video on how to with a saw or something all of a sudden I have about 20 mothers [Applause] all right and my mom's not even that bad so mom if you're watching this you're awesome greatest mom I really appreciate and love you and everything else essential safe good letter alright so you see all the foam up here and a lot of this is just air that's being pushed out of the wood now moisture and air is coming out and this is really important that heat is causing all that to go out and it creates a vacuum where the wax can go back in you see all those debris up here and this is just sawdust and all kinds of different things that have fallen into our wax dipping tank it won't hurt it a bit but you can see how it's foaming over here and eventually that's all gonna work its way let's let's get under here you can just kind of watch as it's bubbling up and it's really nice to have things as sampled a lot of people ask me this well why don't you do a unassembled so you can fit more in one the more equipment you have in here the more foaming that you're going to get and also if you assemble it afterwards then you have to worry about all the new breaks that you made it that's here you know run screws through it or staples every time you put that in that's another place that a drop of moisture to get down into so it's really about just creating the perfect seal or as close as possible every single gap is still correct themself this is pretty warm so we're going to set that down it's nice to have a bucket of water back here definitely make sure your tank don't over now this tank I just turned it back on so it's not at full temperature right now that's why I was able to handle that lid so long definitely want to have an apron on or something like that that's very helpful too all right yeah this is just soaking right on and you can see it bubbling right there next to these screws and just soaking right in there sealing around those screws you see a couple staples that we put in here I'm going to do a test here before too long because some folks say that you can't use glue and glue the lids down with this stuff I say this heat compromises that I'm not a hundred percent sure that's the case so I'm gonna be trying to do some tests and see if that actually is the case and I'll be doing a video on that specifically sometime here in the near future so let me pull this one out so how's room to expand I just soaked an eye on that beautifully yeah you get close up on that wall if you want we'll go over and look at the equipment these are a nice pair of gloves too they're nice and thick you definitely want gloves that aren't going to be really tight on your hands because it'll be very difficult to get off but it's very cheap to do once you actually get the set up the wax itself isn't that bad but the problem is is getting the tank which you can sometimes get them some Amish or Mennonite fellows to make for you at a more reasonable price or if you have those skills or a buddy in the family you can get them to do it they're really not that complicated of a tank but then the initial investment into the bees with your beeswax back into the wax because you have to fill the tank up and yet keep it filled so I think we purchased six hundred or so pounds and I want to say that forty percent of what we purchased went just a fill to paint up somewhere around there pretty close and so in that initial investment it's pretty a lot to swallow but if you can get a group of beekeepers or a bee club together or if you have some welding skills that works out pretty well I'll try to leave a link below in the comments I'm in it at the top and you can see where I purchased this wax from I'm really thinking that quality wax let me show you real quick so this right here is a chunk of the micro crystalline it's I don't know if you can see it really well with the camera but it's more of a sticky film than a hard wax like a block of beeswax and this is the paraffin right here and it's much more smooth it's easier to break it and wants to chip more and the reason you want to have both of these is for the fact that on the atomic level this will not hear a single chain and so that is doesn't bond into your void near as much and that's why you use both of them you could use paraffin it's gonna want to leach out of your boxes more to where the micro crystalline is really interlinked really well so using the 50-50 of both of these products so I use 50% of this 50% of my click crystalline and that works very well you only use the paraffin it's not gonna one stay in your box is good and using this nice wax it really creates once it dries and you can pulls down it is a hard layer you can kind of pill it up a tiny bit with your fingernail but not much most of it's in the wood it's not really gummy feeling or anything like that it's really nice to see some of the older of methods that I've seen at least a box clean really gummy there's really not much coming up like that at all and what's on the outside really isn't helping you just need once soaked into the wood so it's a it's really nice it's really high-quality stuff all right now over here you know we're in the process of doing a lot of different things but we have about the equivalent of 300 mating nooks cut up and we'll be doing more videos on this Dustin's still hasn't got all of his work done so we're gonna have to get the whip out and you know get him in the shape he's twice my size so hopefully he'll behave anyway so we've this is a long board we've got a bunch of scrap but not scrap wood just a bunch of what we've had stacked up for a long time and some of us a little faded but still in really good condition and we have the joints here that we've made with a dado blade and we've cut out the sides so we can take the end boards and just push them right up against it just like our boxes and the frame rests are up here and once we get it all completed we'll show you we're going to be making some grooves in the center for the mating nooks it's gonna be really neat and the cool thing about watching our videos is the fact that you don't have to spend anything to watch them and then you get to see all the mistakes that we made so you don't have to make them yourselves that's the cool thing about YouTube and we'll be honest if it works out really well for us will be of course going like this and like yeah yeah it wasn't that a great idea or if not Laura will probably be making some comments about the boneheaded ideas so anyways we're fixing to wax dip the nucleus colony over here doing stick it in there got you alright I was already gonna have it in there but I forgot here's that five frame nuke that I showed you all how to make and they're really easy willing to wax dip in that and we're going to be using this in the videos this year we have some five plate new boxes that we've made so we're gonna try to keep some colonies and some really cool equipment I've got something really neat stuff I can't wait to show you guys so stay around for that watch out for the live chat tomorrow at 7 p.m. be there or be square and bring your questions I'll try to get to as many of them as I can and I'm going to try to eat plenty of honey before the video so I have a lot of energy because it sounds like there's a lot of questions can be on there so thanks everyone for watching our videos its Springs almost here I mean the bees are already flying and getting the maple trees so fresh Tennesseans we better get busy so that's what we're going to do thanks for watching our videos

Channel: Kamon Reynolds - Tennessee's Bees

Views: 40,271

Keywords: beekeeping, beekeeper, honeybees, bees, Kamon Reynolds, honey, How to install a package of bees, How to install a nuc, package vs nuc challenge, how to make honey, beehive, provap 110, Tennessee beekeeping, Tennessee beekeepers, Package of bees, swarming, swarm, swarm control, queen cell, queen cup, swarmtrap, swarm trapping, how to make a swarm trap, swarm trap, bee cast, wax dipping bee boxes, hot wax dipping bee boxes, wax dipping bee boxes for sale, wax dipping

Id: W6PbaookJXQ

Length: 12min 38sec (758 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 31 2020