Don't Make These Simple Beekeeping Mistakes!

today i'm going to tell you my top 10 beekeeping mistakes to avoid hi i'm lauren setters from black mansion honey welcome to another episode of no nonsense beekeeping i have made pretty much every mistake in beekeeping i don't want you to make the same mistake so i'm doing this video i'm going to tell you about all my mistakes round it up to the closest top 10 give you the information so you don't make the mistakes yourself straight in then number one do not interfere with your bees too much and with all of these i am talking from personal experience i'm not saying oh yeah maybe you could make this mistake i'm telling you mistakes that i have made that have been either detrimental to my wallet to my bees or i've just been really ineffective number one do not interfere with your bees too much it took me a good few years to realize that the less i intervened with the bees the better they did the more honey they produced the more splits i made so do not interfere with your bees too much and we're going to talk about later on in this video what is too much we're going to talk about regular inspections but what i mean by too much is do not fret over your bees all you need to make sure with bees is that you're doing your varroa treatments at the right time of the year they've got enough food to get through the winter and they've got enough space if you do all of those things your bees should be fine and okay that's massively oversimplifying it but the biggest mistake and i've got this at number one for a reason is it's so easy to get carried away with interfering with your bees you might do a manipulation you might add a queen in there and you think okay it's supposed to be 48 hours before i check to see whether that queen's been accepted and you're just getting kind of nervous after 24 hours and i guarantee people will be sitting there watching this video and thinking yeah i did that 100 and it took me years to realize it's better not to do that and i do think the more colonies you get the easier it is to say okay well i'll just leave them for a little bit you've got one colony in your back garden that's your only hope and you want to nurse it you want to make sure it's okay and you think by going and checking up on them all you're doing by checking up on them is satisfying your own curiosity as to what's going on and if you're not an expert it's difficult to tell what's going on anyway every single time you open up that beehive you set them back if you can remember that then it's a really good mantra to work by right number two compatibility of beehives now i remember when someone said to me very very early on in beekeeping choose your format and stick to your format and i kind of thought the whole time definitely got this bit of advice nailed it i've chosen my format it's a national got that sorted and it's only when i kind of looked around the other day and i'm looking at it now it's behind the camera i'm kind of thinking i completely got that wrong like even someone telling me it and then me trying to actually live with that advice still got it wrong so what that means is that beehives come in loads of different sizes and shapes different formats different frames you've got your daydreams your commercials your langstroth your nationals and then within the national you've got national deeps 14 by 12 national shallows for beginners it is a minefield i do appreciate that and i know that from experience it's really really difficult the advice is though is choose a hive type and stick to it religiously stick to it and i just didn't do that and i really do regret that decision so i said right i'm going to go with the national hive type that's the hive type that i'm choosing so i bought loads of hives national deep hives with national shallows as the supers and already without kind of thinking too much i've introduced two different size frames into my beekeeping operation so i've got a national shallow and a national deep and okay it's fine to have two different frame sizes if you're not going to use them interchangeably but then i made the decision to move to 14 by 12. and i just thought right i'm going to go to 14 by 12. i won't go into the reasons why but i decided i'm going to move from a national deep to a national 14 by 12. so i've got 200 14 by 12 brood boxes so we're already within that national format i've got a 14 by 12 frame a national deep frame and a national shallow frame then we move on to mini mating nukes and i bought loads of mini mating nukes with mini plus size frames thinking well i don't want to waste a whole frame of bees mating some queen so i'm going to go for a smaller one so anyway i'm going off and talking way too much about this i've ended up with four different types of frame within a single format so my advice to you is stick religiously to your format do your research first and make sure that you're not even expanding that within the national format if you're going to go with 14 by 12 stick to 14 by 12. if you're going to go with national shallow supers as your supers stick to that religiously don't chop and change my advice is if you can manage to lift a heavy national deep box full of honey the best system in the uk is to use national deeps for everything for your supers and everything it makes the manipulations the easiest easiest things in the world if you're anywhere else in the world i would suggest going for one format of langstroth and just choosing a single size box and that will make your life so much easier right next one then and this is number three but this could equally be number one this is a big big one and everybody makes this mistake every single person who starts beekeeping makes this mistake and for some people it's maybe not a mistake it is a little bit subjective this one placement of hives just ever think about where you're going to keep your hives because i started out and i had four hives very similar to this in a garden that was about 10 meters by six metres and they started off in spring and i got the nukes and i put the nukes in had a swarm in there as well and i thought this is great this is fine no problem at all with them being in the garden and then they grew to about this tall and then they started swarming and i just thought oh my god what am i doing keeping four massive colonies of bees in a tiny little garden and you could see the neighbours looking out the window just like looking at you saying what are you doing you're ruining our nice small neighborhood with your aggressive swarmy bees so i would always suggest keep bees on somebody else's land speak to farmers speak to landowners there are loads of places to keep bees well out of the way of people out of the way horses public footpaths keep them out of your garden just ever think about it don't make the mistake of putting them somewhere that's really inconvenient to you your family your neighbours and then have to go through the process of moving them because moving a big aggressive hive that's in the back garden to somewhere else difficult and if you put them somewhere else to start off you never have to make that move number four is starting with one colony i have a lot of people ringing me up for advice about this because we sell the queens people are saying i've got a colony in my back garden it's two frames of bees we're in september there's no queen there's no brood there's nothing i want to buy a new queen to get it through the winter and i have to tell these people i just say you like you're wasting money on a new queen here adding a new queen to that size colony over winter it's just not worth it so i say to them you're best off just merging it if it's disease free with another one of your colonies or if you need to do test frames as well to check queenness in a state of a colony taking frames of eggs from another colony so my advice to everyone start with two colonies may seem expensive at the time but when you get to the point where you're potentially going to lose one and you can split the other one pays for itself within a single year right number five buying extraction equipment that is too small for your operation hands up i am guilty of it i bought a two-frame manual extractor i bought it new i bought it from china it's absolute rubbish but i kind of thought when i bought it you know what i'm not going to need to extract loads of different frames i'll do it with a little hand run jig like that this isn't going to become a business this isn't going to grow to 10 or 12 hives so i'm just going to cheap out and go for a 100 pound little manual two frame extractor it's the biggest force economy in the world if you're going to put your money anywhere put your money into second-hand extraction equipment holds its value really really well and if it turns out you're not going to use it you can just sell it on again for pretty much what you paid for it if you buy it too small you end up just chucking it away because no one's going to want to buy a secondhand two frame hand crank extractor and if they do you'll probably lose loads of money on it anyway so my advice is make sure that you're buying the correct size equipment always go that one step above and then if you can't afford that one step above buy it second hand make sure it works well and it will hold its value really well if you want me to tell you a specific size of extractor i would say go for a minimum 12 frame extractor electric if you can afford it and then the next step up from that is go for 20 frames you can get a 20 frame electric extractor in your budget second hand then that is what i would be going for even with say kind of four or five hives and you will end up with four or five hives after a couple of years beekeeping number six is the quality of the beekeeping equipment that you buy and this refers to extraction equipment and your beekeeping equipment as well and i'll say this about the majority of the big suppliers in the uk that they're all pretty good like there's no one that's really really bad who i'd say definitely don't buy it from them they're really really bad all of the wooden cedar components you can get in the uk are very very good however i would just do your research and this goes across all of it watch reviews on youtube go and have a look at them in person look at it in the shows see what people are saying or beekeeping forums and just make an informed decision over the equipment that you're going to go with comes back to compatibility as well if you choose a hive type that you can only add a super from that company then you're locked into that so if you buy 10 of them then you're locked into that style i really do like an option where it's fully compatible with a wooden national kit and for me personally if you're buying supers as well i'm going down the route now of just buying seconds cedar supers and then mix and matching that with polystyrene brood boxes and roofs number seven if anybody talks to you about doing a shook swarm every year because it's good for the bees or that you should put matchsticks on your hive to give your highest top ventilation then don't believe them because what they're saying is a load of rubbish but also you might want to kind of think about where they're getting their information from because in my mind doing a shook swarm out of nowhere is really really bad advice putting matchsticks under a crown board to give the colony ventilation really really bad advice and if they're giving you those two bits of bad advice you might want to challenge the other advice they're giving you as well number eight and this is going to be really really contentious so i apologize in advance if this doesn't apply to you make sure you treat your colonies for varroa i'm firmly in the camp that i believe you should treat your colony every year a minimum of once for varroa if you're in the uk obviously if you're somewhere that doesn't have varroa you are incredibly lucky but most of us have to deal with pests so obviously in the u.s you've got small hive beetle as well over here varroa is the one that causes the majority of the issues for us if you hear people saying they're treatment free i'm not saying that there's not people that are treatment free but you have to understand the journey that they may have been on and the sacrifices that they might have to make to get to the point where their bees are treatment free so if you've got one colony of bees and you've just spent a thousand pounds on extraction equipment and your bee suit and your beehive and you spent like three grand in total getting ready for bees and then someone's saying to you you need to not treat your bees because it's good for the whole community i would challenge that and say well i'll probably end up stopping beekeeping in a couple of years because that colony is going to die and it might not die but i would say it's highly highly unlikely to survive over the course of about three years unless you do your varroa treatments like i said get the comments on here because that is really contentious if you're a new beekeeper i would say get your varroa treatments on make sure your bees don't die due to varroa viruses right number nine and i said we talk a little bit about inspections not inspecting your bees at all or enough and i see so much of this which is people saying i want to get a beehive i want to buy a beehive i'm going to put it at the back of the garden i'm going to put it on some land and i'm just going to leave it alone not going to do anything i'm saving the bees my argument to that is you're definitely not saving the bees what you're doing is causing a real hazard and a nuisance to your neighbors and you're causing a real hazard and a nuisance to other local beekeepers because you're not being a responsible beekeeper by checking your colony for disease or regular intervals you might have thought with the best intentions i'm going to get a beehive i'm not going to do anything with it and i'm saving the bees and my argument like i said is you're doing the complete opposite of that you're causing a nuisance by doing that so the mistake that some people might make is they don't inspect their bees at all or enough and when we come to inspections what i say is you don't need to go and inspect your bees every other day you need to inspect your bees every single week once a week at the same time every week seven day intervals and you're checking them for disease and you're checking them for swarm control it's as simple as that seven day inspections and then the final one is is more of a mantra really and it's just a bit of a challenge out there to everyone always learn from your own experiences i post a lot on facebook and i post a lot on social media and i get people challenging me a lot of the time saying you shouldn't do that you've done that wrong and i love a challenge i love a discussion about beekeeping but what i say to them is have you tried this they generally don't come back with a comment and then my argument is well if you haven't tried it yourself how do you know because you're just going on what you maybe think or what somebody else has told you i'm going on my own experience and showing you my own experience so for example someone was challenging the other day that you shouldn't put a box of foundation underneath a brood box in spring in order for them to expand down and to draw out the combs underneath now i've tried that and i've done that a lot and i find that's a really good way for them to expand it's maybe not as quick as doing it above but if you've got fondant on your colonies you could do it underneath and they'll expand down fine there's no problem with it whatsoever i've learned that from my own experience so if someone challenges me i can say well i've done it and it works and there's no problems with it whatsoever so i think that's a valid technique please don't get into the mindset of hearing something from somebody else somebody in your beekeeping association is saying well i do this and then going and taking that piece of information and using it to challenge others because beekeeping there is so much bad information out there like it's just littered across forums across old books but mostly it's in people's minds and it people will say it with such force and authority that people think well that's definitely real another example i had the other day was how late can you add foundation into a hive and i was showing that it's possible to do it in october the video showed that i put a frame of foundation in fed them and four days later they drawn out the frame of foundation it didn't have any drone cells on it so there's a real benefit there now i was challenged on that to say it takes eight pounds of honey for the bees to draw out one pound of wax and i said well thanks very much for that statistic but have you ever weighed a frame of foundation or ever weighed a frame of drawn comb because i'd wager it's probably cost me about 6p in feed in order to get that drawn out but that was their challenge and the challenge also came back saying that you shouldn't put it in between the brood because you're going to split the brood but i've just showed them in the video that they drew the comb out and then i went back a week later and they'd filled it with eggs so i'm talking from my own experience but i'm being challenged by people who are just hypothesizing and like i said please don't let that put you off challenging me on things i'm not saying that i'm the authority but what i'm saying is this is how i do something here is an example of me doing it and i'm talking to you about my experiences i would recommend for everybody to try and do that yourselves put stuff into practice try things out some things will work some things won't work and talk with authority about the things that you've done that work versus the things that you haven't done that you don't know work so there we go 10 top mistakes that i hope you won't make and i can guarantee you will make some of those mistakes and i can guarantee i will make some of those mistakes again guaranteed because they're very very difficult ones to not make but even on some of those things there people have recommended that to me people have given me the advice and it wasn't me saying i don't trust your advice i think i know better i'm going to do it a different way like with the issue of compatibility of hive components i had it in my mind the whole time make your hives compatible only use one format and i just found myself in a bit of a mess and i'm thinking how have i done that so even with the best intentions you can get it wrong people will get it wrong but you just need to think carefully about what you're doing try and limit the mistakes that you make but most importantly learn from the mistakes that you make so i hope you enjoyed that video i hope you found it useful don't make the mistakes as always please hit the subscribe button please hit the bell so you're notified of every video and i'll see you next time

Channel: Black Mountain Honey

Views: 46,605

Keywords: beekeeping mistakes for beginners, beekeeping mistakes, beekeeping mistake, beekeeper mistakes, top 10 beekeeping mistakes, beekeeping mistakes to avoid, bee mistakes, beekeeping fails, beekeeping advice, top tips for beekeepers, beginner beekeeping, how to start beekeeping beginners, how to start beekeeping in your backyard, mistakes to avoid beekeeping, make beekeeping mistakes, beekeeping tips, beekeeping training, beekeeping for beginners, beekeeping basics

Id: iVY5TREMHTg

Length: 17min 44sec (1064 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 05 2021