COULD THIS BE THE BEST BEE HIVE EVER?!?

oh look how exciting this is we're out at the bee yard here on the daddy curbs farm and in the back of my little blue farm truck are two horizontal hives my task today is to get them out of the truck alone cuz I'm by myself and get them into the bee or find a place for them so we can figure out how to start transitioning from the horizontal I mean vertical length drives to the horizontal hives I wasn't so bad how you like my tie-dye shirt Luke made it I want to show you some of the features of these horizontal hives before we get them out there I'm just a little bit winded first of all notice my very simple handle that's for me to grab when I want to open the hive like just a little hook and then on this side a chain to help keep it open I screw here down to here at just the right length to make it just a little past 90 degrees so it'll stay open inside the hive I put aluminum window cloth or window screen over the vents there's three three-quarter inch vents on both ends of the lid and that goes over the top of this that's that's for like an attic space above this inner cover or these inner cover boards two of the inner cover boards also have a vent and those will just be spaced out like they are evenly to provide for some ventilation up into this area and the air can be drawn out through those vents up here inside here it's just a regular long hive I have a a divider board to go between the hive space and the dead space let's walk around the hive here my hinge we have the hive entrances there's three entrances two of them will be blocked one will be used maybe at some point multiples will be open but initially it'll just be one and then we have the long piano hinge or the long hinge here that long hinge is really good because we can put a bunch of short screws in this is only 3/4 inch material so these are 3/4 inch screws and then on the bottom I used one and one quarter inch screws just to be a little more secure going into that bottom the bottom board there so we have a 3/4 inch lip on the 1/2 inch board overall I feel like the hives turned out well they look nice they seem like they're gonna be functional but of course I haven't used them yet so I don't know for sure but I do like how they turned out as far as just a functional box for me the beekeeper will see how well the bees like them dr. Leo uses these you saw a video of mine where we were sitting and chatting about beekeeping I first met dr. Leo on the Doug and Stacey off-grid with Doug and Stacey Channel saw him doing long hives or horizontal hives on Doug and Stacey's little homestead and I was very intrigued so when I got to meet them and see those boxes in person when I went to the home studying life conference it was just something went off in my mind and said that's what I should be doing so we're gonna give it a shot I had a friend build these two boxes for me I put the chains in hinges and paint and all that on but the boxes were built by a friend so let's get him into the apiary over time I developed little holes in my my screen hood here and the double electrical tape one piece on the outside one in the inside to me seemed like a good idea it's not working they're falling off I discovered that I had holes in the hood when I had some bees in my hood and I didn't recognize from where they were coming we're gonna put one up here on this mat I gotta get the weeds off of it but that's where one is going for sure I'd like to put one over here in place of this hive but we'll have to see about transitioning that hive I wasn't so bad bees didn't come out at all we got this one area cleaned up so now we're gonna go get one hive and bring it in right here man won't that be so exciting when the entire bee yard is full of these boxes instead of these I think it'll look better it'll be easier to know who to manage and how to manage them no more heavy lifting I think what I'm gonna do is I'm going to go ahead and get this box moved I'm going to get a hive box a horizontal hive put right there in that spot transition all of the frames from that hive into the horizontal and that way the bees are already used to flying right in that same spot and then I'll get that nuke the small nuke that's over here into this box that the camera is sitting on the one I just put in place with this now close I'll get these boxes stacked up over here somehow and then I'll get that box I'll get that box in place move these here get that over here on the mat and then get the frames put in up top let's see what they look like down inside their top box looks pretty empty I expected that notice I have two different size boxes here this is a full deep and this is the deeper medium the larger medium so I'm gonna be combining both of these into the horizontal hive this hive still looks pretty good lots of bees in there they don't have a lot to do right now because there's no pollen or nectar anywhere but they're hanging out with the boxes moved over here I can get all of this out of the way and get that hive box pulled back and get those transitioned into there now a lot of beekeepers agree that if you move a hive within just a couple feet the bees will be a little disoriented but they'll find it no problems the only difference between this new hive and the old one as far as position goes is it's going to be a little higher maybe a little to the left or right but I think they're going to find that just fine we're gonna position the hive on this end to this end this is my divider board I'm gonna start positioning those frames out of the old box into here I'm gonna pay attention to where the brood is and try to put get it on this end as much as possible and then let the rest of it stack to the left I'm looking to see if I see any eggs and I don't so I'm going to slide this to this left end closest to the camera here same thing here it looks like this is mostly empty with a little bit of nectar not much because eventually I would like to replace all of my frames to not have foundation at all but that's probably a couple years of process before I can completely transition to that you turn the cam around and show you what I'm doing as I'm pulling them out of the hive I am taking a look just to see what they have on them as far as resources and then just placing them right here in the hive in the long height of the horizontal box each time I'm keeping an eye out for that Queen just to make sure you know if I see her of course I want to be more careful I always want to be careful but just keep an eye on the Queen up there if she is sighted or not we have some pollen and some honey in this one these bees right now are extremely docile which is very nice for me I don't think I found any brood yet now I gotta get stuff moved down so far everything has just been resources I did get stuff moved down this way so I have more room this date frame that I just put in has a lot of honey on one side and is mostly empty on the other I'm gonna save it for this end and I'll probably end up staggering the shorter frames between the taller frames so they will actually build out the bees will actually build a portion of comb on the bottom to fill in that space that one has a lot of honey on it and this one has this one has a lot of honey and actually has a lot of uncapped honey we are getting into some brood nest here there's not a lot of brood but this is I can see some larvae down in there I haven't seen our Queen lady yet and here's here's a lot more brood if you can see that but that's a lot of capped brood right there so our brood nest is going to be down here on the right side as I stand behind the box here's an example of how the bees take a short frame and turn it into a tall frame if they have the room so a lot of honey and a little bit of brood on the other side mostly honey and here's an empty deep so I'm going to slide all these back here and put this one between here and here all right in the new horizontal hive here we have our brood nest on this end we have a lot of resources here in the middle and on the end as they become more productive through this next honey flow which is going to be a month or so away they'll start building in filling that in and then I can move this down the backerboard divider board and move it down and insert more frames and I'll start putting my inner cover boards back on this is the entrance I want open and I want to close those too so I'm going to put a piece of cloth in both of those that's one horizontal hive in place it looks like I do need to level it up some but I'll come back out with a level and some shims to put under the feet but for now it's in there the hive is transitioned we'll come back and check on that probably tomorrow let's go ahead and take a peek in this little box that's newt box that's not bad there's a fair number of bees in there I'm going to go ahead and get those in that other box so now in the daddy curves B yard we have 1 2 horizontal hives and a total of 4 more of the vertical lengths trough hives the goal is to get eventually 6 horizontal hives and be done with the vertical hives all together I left the boxes stacked in front of that horizontal hive because there were still bees on it and I was giving them a way to crawl in I'll come out tomorrow and move that I'm really excited about the possibility of my bee yard looking a lot more clean and orderly when I just have a bunch of these boxes like this sitting here I think it's gonna look nicer than a bunch of these boxes all stacked up plus I won't have as many boxes wouldn't wear the stuff that you use for your hives stacked up around the house on the front porch and back porch I can clean that up possibly sell that equipment they don't be transitioned to horizontal hives completely making this whole operation way more fun at least that's the goal you guys know that here on the daddy curbs farm I believe that everyone has a story and every story counts I want to give a great big shout-out to dr. Leo for being a natural beekeeper that's willing to share his story to help other beekeepers also shoutout to Doug and Stacey their off-grid homestead is amazing and it was really nice visiting them and seeing this type of hive with dr. Leo on-site in person thank you so much everyone for sharing your story and being a part of my story through this video I'll talk to you soon

Channel: Daddykirbs Farm - A Homesteading Story

Views: 264,916

Rating: 4.7882557 out of 5

Keywords: Blake, Kirby, beekeeping, beekeeper, bees, beehives, bee hive, horizontal hive, Dr. Leo, long langstroth, long hive, long horizontal hive, langstroth hives, daddykirbs farm, daddy kirbs, daddy kirby, daddykirbs beekeeping, daddy kirby bees, No More Stacking HIVE BOXES, No More Stacking, Transitioning to HORIZONTAL HIVE, BEST BEE HIVE

Id: l2h_9zoKmXU

Length: 21min 26sec (1286 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 08 2019