Double Deep Mega Honeybee Hive Progress

[Music] so [Music] [Music] hey there it's james with carp spees and i've been wanting to do this for some time uh if you remember quite a while ago several months we set up an experimental hive we call it the mega hive and the reason is it's basically um two deep boxes on top of each other but there's a unified deep frame that runs through both of those so what we did is we set up the hive with these custom frames i call mega frames they're super deeps i'll show you a picture of those in a second and then we seated the hive with some brood frames regular old deep frames from a few of my other hives just to get the thing going so i haven't had a chance to get into that hive to do kind of a detailed inspection and see what kind of progress the bees are actually making in there here we are in early to mid september and one of the the big tests for this hive is will they survive winter so i figured it'd be a good time to get into that hive do a detailed inspection get some video of it and show you the results of that so far and then we'll see what happens after winter if they make it through or not so just an idea that i had a while ago i wanted to do something creative i wanted to build something i think the bees would like you know kind of mimicking what i've seen that they do out in nature and based on some research and books and stuff i've been reading so it'll be interesting to see what happens so come with me on this journey and uh we'll see how the mega hive is doing so i built a bunch of these double deep frames and you know i did some research online and i guess there used to be something called a jumbo frame and it wasn't quite this big but it was you know deeper than your standard um you know deep frame today so but all this is is basically two deep frames with the top bar the bottom one and the bottom bar of the top one cut away and then two foundations inserted in here so this is what i put into the mega hive and then um as i mentioned we seeded the mega high with some regular d frames in the middle of the brood box to see how the bees would react if they would actually build out these frames create really deep comb or like this what would they do with those frames that were you know didn't have the bottoms on and extend it to the bottom of the hive so we'll get in there today and we'll see what they're doing with it all all right so this is uh this is mega hive and uh we'll open it up i'll just leave the camera there and get the top box as an inner feeder this is the honey super in case they want to produce honey and then the bottom two boxes the two deeps are actually connected together and that's what has these mega frames that i you know custom built here so uh we'll see how they're doing on these mega frames uh what's happening on the lanny board we call this hive but uh the queen's name is medusa so we put a little symbol on the front just to represent medusa but you see right now there's some fighting going on in this hive so i'm not sure what's happening right now i'm gonna be curious to get in here and see what's going on so let's check it out i'm gonna try to do this without smoke i haven't been using a lot of smoke lately i'll see how that goes i've been keeping the bees out of this top one [Music] they are feeding not much speed left oh wow so good signs on the inner cover lots of bees here and um it is queen excluded so i don't expect to see a queen up here we are about noon right now so most of the foragers are out and about so far they're not attacking me they haven't been painted in the head yet but i'm sure that's soon to come so we'll set this down here and then i'm just going to take a peek inside and see what's happening with the supers i literally just put this on last time i did a quick inspection so i don't expect anything in here so i'm just going to pick one at random [Music] yeah so nothing's going on in here which is uh to be expected so we'll just pull this whole topic on again lots of good activity down here on the excluder make sure you can see this so the bees are going to get angry this is where they'll do it usually when you go ahead and pull the excluder off so i just put it on and there's let's see these are being pretty calm make sure no cleans on the bottom here so far so good now one of the limitations of the mega hive is your inability to uh you know manipulate these two boxes you have to treat everything as a whole and since these frames are so deep um you know that can make it a little tricky but for my purposes my thinking is is that we'll create a really strong two deep um high core high brood hive and the bees can really work this won't mess with it too much we'll just do regular inspections we're not pulling honey or anything out but if they can build a really good solid hive down here then that provides an exceptional foundation to be able to do you know to fill up honey supers and things like that and just you know good survival rate for the bees so that's the thinking anyway don't know what will happen in theory here so what we're going to do is we'll start with some taking taking a peek at some outside frames let me show you one thing real quick so as we get in here look at this you'll notice i do have a nine frame setup and there are dividers in here there's a divider on each side to keep the spacing nice and even i felt that that was really important because if this are extra deep you don't need them building comb across frames and things like that so just wanted to note that okay so here we go let's take a look at what we got going here so i'm just doing a visual inspection i see that the outer two frames here don't look like they have anything on them so i'm gonna look at the second one in and just take a peek and see if that is true and it looks to be true and a quick look at the one on the wall same story so we're gonna let those be and we'll start with the third frame in and see how that's doing again so far bees are being pretty friendly okay a little bit of weight not much but here we can see so we do have you can see we have some comb being built so they're working on the third frame from the wall nothing on the inside edge go ahead and put this back in and we finally got the attention of a guard bee they're starting to buzz so now let's look at the fourth frame and so far i've been able to pull these out pretty easily with my hand without a tool this definitely has a lot of weight well i guess it was a little more weight okay so now we can really see what the bees are doing here so they have built comb all the way down the frame this is uh looks like it's mostly brewed here don't see our queen on here anywhere i'm looking for some eggs in there it actually looks like there are some eggs there's a tiny little bit of honey at the top and then here's what they doing on the other side not much yet and then just a tiny little bit of damage as i pulled up the frame because they're building away from the the foundation you can see that this is a little flexible so they do that i don't know if that's all these are just mine but mine do that across the entire ap area i don't know if that's a what the deal is there seems to be on 10 frame and 9 frame configuration but it can cause a little issue when you pull frames out so let's put this one back in or actually just to give us some extra space i'm just going to set this down here okay so now we're getting to the middle so we're now fifth frame in so this is the center here we go see what's happening here so i think i reset this frame last time i moved one of the ones oh this is interesting i thought i saw a bee with a little k-wing on it maybe it was just cooling though i don't see it again k wings when one of its top wings sticks out to the side that's actually a virus so you want to watch out for that let's see it again that's why you inspect so they're doing a little bit of comb here not much let's see what's on the other side not much i don't see the queen on here and now i'm just a little extra sensitive to be looking for that k wing i don't see any more of it it was probably just a bead so the next frame here was one that we used to seed the hive with so that's where the initial brood came from so this one's actually got some propolis they're sealing this one up pretty good so i'm just gonna break that loose get the rest of these while we're here oh i didn't remember what i did yeah i moved some of these uh regular d frames to the one couple uh spaces to the outside to try to get them to start building in the middle more that's why that last frame was a little empty but let's see what this looks like this is an actual d frame doesn't have the bottom part it's not a mega frame let's see how the bees responded to this configuration and i can just tell you right now this is very heavy so they must have wow must have honey on this [Laughter] let's see what's going on oh wow okay taking a quick peek for the queen she's out here see if you can see her see her she's right there next to the honey in that group little white dot my terrible marking job that's medusa but look what they've done they've actually built comb below this frame so they're they're mirroring the mega hive setup so we can watch medusa do her work looking around great looking queen terrible marking job by the beekeeper but what a what a good looking queen and then you can see on this side again really nice lots of honey in there brood all over the place really neat to see them build the frame down looks looks kind of like a natural kind of hive setup and there's a medusa up there doing her thing you follow her around a little bit all right so that's great so that's a really good sign we will carefully get medusa back into her home and that might be why the bees are getting just a little more agitated they're not too bad again i'm not smoking or anything here so pretty good so let's see this frame is a normal frame so knowing that medusa is over there looks like we have the bees blinking up there knowing that medusa is over there this is a frame let me check the other side oh wow so it looks like a lot of larvae in here some honey broods emerging not too bad not a great brood pattern but you know hey they're making good progress but since i know um our queen is over on the other frame and i want to start getting them to build these deeper mega frames i'm going to take this and put this in the queen excluded box and we'll let these bees do their their business but uh yeah so we'll we'll replace one of these blank frames we'll do that right now okay and uh since we have this one we've pulled out we're mixing these up just a little bit too much here but i'm gonna go ahead and put this one back in here and let them go back to town on that and let's see what's happening this with this other the last of the regular d frames that we know the queen's not on and on so heavy okay so they are putting nectar in here wow okay so this is definitely a food frame on this side i don't see any brood in here at all it's all nectar it's starting to get that look where they're they're about ready to cap it check the other side oh same thing make sure there's no brood no it doesn't look like there's any brood on this side so this is another great frame to switch to the upper box so we're gonna do that just double checking that medusa wasn't super fast and ran over to this it doesn't look like messing with the bees food they get a little more ornery okay and i can just see from visual expression uh inspection looking in that there's not much happening on this one but they have started so a little red and we don't want that all right so i'll let you look nothing on the outside but they have started building a little comb so i'm going to move slide this one in and so my goal has been to slowly work those regular frames out so we were able to take two out we're leaving one in because they've built a lot of comb underneath it and that's just fine and now we will go ahead and put these new ones in here as replacement and i'm just gonna call this a success uh the only thing i'm gonna check i'll check the video and i wanna look a little more closely at um the wings of some of those bees i did notice one that looked kind of like haywing that's a virus i'll have to research how to treat that i think it comes from varroa um the other thing i'm gonna do is we're about ready to start treating forever so um it's probably time to think about doing a sugar shake the other thing is i'll take some stills from the video and i'll run that through that b scanning app and see if there's anything obvious that pops out um but just a note i wouldn't totally rely on that you still need to probably do your regular sugar shakes or if you use you know alcohol to do your test whatever process you go through so but overall visual inspection wise this hive is looking really really good considering it was absolutely tiny to start with it was a walk away split and they've just really come around um they look like they're doing something fun here in terms of building their selves a home nice core of home in the middle slowly building out we'll let them continue to do that they're running out of time because we are getting towards mid-september here um but who knows sometimes in kansas we don't get uh the really really cold weather till you know january february um you know there's been a few years we haven't even gotten any snow until the new year so uh it seems like global warming is actually affecting kansas weather a little bit but they'll need to be ready when it does get cold in january february because we get some pretty brutal cold cold stuff so anyway so far so good i'm really happy with where things look today so we're gonna put the uh the excluder back on put the super on put the inner cover on we'll reset our feed i have some new inner feeders we're going to use and then we'll cover it all up there and i think we'll call it good for the day here so pretty excited things are looking great thanks for looking at this with me hope this inspires you to try something new anyway so and i'll just leave the video going here and watch as we finish up [Laughter] oh and by the way if you know you have any comments or feedback on what i'm doing by all means be glad to hear it i'm always looking for feedback even if it's super critical all right we got our queen excluded super on well that's good now we'll just do our cover and i'm leaving the entrance hole in the front at that position for a while all right so let's uh let's actually show you what we're doing with the uh beater on top this is new this could be a debacle actually so uh first time i'm using these two gallon square feeders from i think they're from little giant so so this is what we got we got a two gallon bucket it's got a lid with holes in it it's supposed to seal what i noticed about these little giant buckets is there's no like rubber seal in the lid and uh i did test them with water to see if they leaked and they didn't but i just had this fear that these leak all into the hive you know that would be a bad thing so i'm just going to step aside here and tip it over to let anything drain out for a second make sure it doesn't pop off and then we'll cover this up for the bees all right so i'm just again i'm checking the seals here well the last thing we would need is for this to just ooze out into the hive so um because we're in late september we're moving from a one to one sugar to water ratio to a two to one sugar to water ratio this is kind of somewhere in between um the next batch will definitely be two to one and uh this will last a while so this saves you a lot of time in terms of having to do this which is why i'm switching notice the messiness of this this actually had um some corn syrup mixed in it that's why it has this color to it um and i'm moving away from that that's a i think that's a bad idea but you can see these just get really messy you got to fill them all the time it's a lot of work so i think this will save some effort again if it doesn't leak so and because you're putting it inside a deep box covered the chance of fermentation goes down a bit it'll still ferment if you leave it too long but it helps all right looks like they're good it's not leaking still some fighting going on [Music] in honor of our pet pig mabel he surprisingly doesn't like i don't know what they're training for all right and uh we're in kansas yeah today is a extraordinarily calm day but uh wind can come up at any time so we do use these straps for most of the hives looks like i got a twist in here so just to make sure that we don't get a big gust and end up with a bunch of bees on the ground that would be bad pick some of these up at harbor freight bernard wherever they work great looks good all right we'll just put the uh also we'll do the uh the feeder at the entrance here we'll keep we just keep doing mason jars on that that's a lot easier since they're on the outside um but boy they'll be super well fed so these bees um should be fine uh you know one concern with using that much feed is just that um you want to look to make sure that the queen has space delay and if you notice from the observation there was a lot of open honeycomb where medusa could go in and lay eggs so if you were seeing all that filled every inch of it with nectar then uh then you would want to ease off the sugar syrup because then she'll have no space to lay and that's that's bad news so uh and right now we're in kind of our last hurrah for pollen with the sunflowers blooming here in kansas but in a couple weeks that'll be over and they won't be able to get any more power and pounds kind of a key ingredient for bees to be able to build comb so pretty critical there so anyway again last thing to do here is just replace the feeder on me or fill the feeder on the outside uh so we're good so thanks again for watching this video hope you enjoyed it again looking for any feedback at all i know there's a lot of beekeepers out there and i'd be glad to get your advice i'm new to this so thanks a bunch thanks again [Music] hey on behalf of myself and the bees here we just want to say thanks for watching our videos if you have a chance please click subscribe also if you have any ideas for future videos you'd like to see go ahead and put in the comments section thanks again [Music] you

Channel: Make It Happen Greenhouse and Carp's Bees

Views: 2,742

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Id: GL19JHPyUA0

Length: 29min 28sec (1768 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 18 2021