Epic Failures in Beekeeping

so earlier this morning I was finishing up my top of the pasture chores and I noticed something very interesting so yes I have a swarm of bees that have left their hive and are looking for a new home you see this year on our farm we have actually three active beehives going we have two over there and then we have this flow Hive over here and when I say flow Hive I mean this Hive it's a specially designed beehive that actually lets you open up the back and rather than completely disturb the bees you can actually get honey right out of this back side here even though it doesn't look full enough to pull honey out yet but actually based on the B activity I'm seeing here today versus what I was seeing over the last couple of days I would say that half of this Hive has left and is now the group of bees that are over on that fence post over there and so in today's video what I'm gonna need to do is catch all of these bees and establish a new Hive and hopefully not Macaulay Culkin myself in the process his face hurts and where is his glasses again see we without his glasses what do you think Toby dog I was just going through my collection of beekeeping supplies to see what I need to do this operation and even though I have a fresh Hive box I have my specials B sauce for capturing bees I'm realizing that I don't have enough frames inside this box to catch all the bees so before I can even start this Mission I gotta go to the store and by the way for those of you guys seeing my little bottle of bee sauce and wondering what it is it's basically sugar water mixed with bee pollen as well as a few herbs it attracts bees so like I spray some right here let's watch what happens all right so while you guys are watching that experiment I gotta go run to the store real quick and get some bee supplies oh so the only store that sells bee supplies is this farm store in Montpelier so I have to leave the farm and it's about a 50 minute drive to get to Montpelier Montpelier as you guys might have known from the recent headlines was absolutely underwater only a couple of weeks ago and so it's still very much in the midst of recovery process and this is honestly the first time I've left the farm to come to Montpelier you know when I was on the farm and I was still working a day job prior to the pandemic I was going to Montpelier every single day so the drive from the farm to Montpelier is very familiar it used to be my daily commute yet driving it now feels foreign and kind of weird number one what's so weird is all the flood damage and just experiencing what recovery looks like and seeing all the activity of the cruise and everybody really working really really hard to try to make things better I can't even imagine what the roads that I'm driving on now looked like back during the flood of course the downside to all of this is it's taking me way longer than than I would have hoped to get here like I said typically it only takes about 50 minutes to go from the farm to downtown Montpelier but as I just got into downtown Montpelier now it took me almost an hour and a half to make the drive and what I discovered when I got to downtown Montpelier was absolutely heartbreaking foreign [Music] [Music] although it's the smallest state capital in the United States Montpelier is our Capital City usually it's thriving and vibrant and filled with lots of little independent shops and stores and walking through those downtown streets I could hardly recognize the area I was walking through virtually every store downtown was shut down the sidewalks were just lined with piles and piles of rubble and things that have been pulled out of buildings that were either soaked and saturated and had to be removed or destroyed dump trucks and excavators were everywhere Road repairs were happening store improvements were happening and I gotta say my heart really does go out to those store Keepers because one of the things that's very unique about Vermont as a whole in Montpelier specifically is there really isn't a whole heck of a lot of big box retail here these are not large corporations these are people who own a store or a restaurant and operate it themselves or amongst their family and friends quite literally the textbook of independent small business is what you see at play when you walk around downtown Montpelier and to see people's livelihoods and Life Works destroyed and decimated like this and potentially on the brink my heart just really goes out for them you know lots of attention gets paid to places when they're in the midst of Crisis but I often find that the weeks and months after those times are the most significant and important and sometimes those are the most difficult weeks you know once you get through the big catastrophe how do you rebuild how do you find their strength to rebuild I don't think I have an answer to that one my plan had been to just drive to the farm store pick up what I needed and drive back immediately but when I saw all the devastation I felt like I had to stop and just take it in I know some folks in the comments might call that gawking but I don't know it was it was not quite that it was something a little bit more surreal and a little bit more filled with emotion and while I feel drawn to downtown Montpelier I also can't forget that I came here with a mission I have some to catch so I quickly went around the farm store looking for exactly what I needed and eventually I found it it was a hive box along with a bottom and a top this would be what I needed to get things started and going it would at least cover me for the next couple of weeks for what I needed to do with this Hive I really wish I kept hives on hand and when I think about my shortcomings as a beekeeper that's one of the mistakes I made if you're keeping bees it's always really important too be prepared yeah if you click off this video immediately after that I don't blame you so I grabbed the hive boxes paid for them quickly got him into my truck decided that the way that I went to get to the farm took way too long so I took a different route going through 302 and Berry the entire downtown of berry was a detour as well and I got rerouted all over the place going up hills downhills around and although the way it took me to get there was about an hour and a half it still took me about an hour and 15 minutes to get back much longer than I would have expected all in all the trip to Montpelier ended up taking me about four hours which sounds like a lot of time particularly when you're in to be emergency but I wasn't too terribly worried about it you see I've faced this situation before last summer I came out to do my morning chores and I made a pretty incredible Discovery I had another one of my fence posts that was entirely coated in bees I mean it was a ridiculous amount of beef the entire fence post was covered and painted in bees my guess is that there was probably about 50 or 60 000 bees on a single fence post I quickly checked my hives to see if they were my bees and it turned out that they weren't they were a swarm of bees from another part of the area and they just decided to land on my farm because they liked my farm you know just a side note our farm has so much good opportunity for pollinators part of why I leave certain parts of the pasture so long is it lets some of these weeds grow those weeds have flowers those flowers are sources of pollen for the bees and so tall weeds means happy bees and it means our farm is a nice happy bee habitat in the summer months as well as in the spring months since I had never actually captured a swarm before myself I had asked for help and my neighbor Laurie came to rescue she had a hive ready to go and she taught me how to catch the bees it really was an incredible experience [Music] okay they're looking for the queen [Music] foreign [Music] thank you they link legs and you can actually see bees that are stretching across like like no no because the guy over here won't let go of his milk over there in that patch there here which is tough because if we brush it she might fall to the other side of the fence and actually getting to that side of the fence is hard because you have to go all the way back down if you want I could try to go around and brush from that side and then you try to catch from this side yeah we can do that and you can take a cup and a brush yeah and hand over the phone yep [Music] you okay oh the risks of beekeeping like I said Morgan fun it's a lot of fun it is fun I gotta admit I really appreciate you coming down there to do this this is a lot of fun [Music] oh maybe she's in here there's some tall grass here [Music] thank you [Music] oh really [Music] um it thanks to Lori's teaching I really feel like I'm ready to tackle the bee challenge that I'm facing here and I feel pretty confident about being able to catch these bees I have my hive box now I just need to put on my beekeeper costume and get into it and I'm pretty certain that that swarm of bees will be mine seriously at this point I'm just like daring you to click off the video because if you don't want more bee puns you are in the wrong place as the truck pulled up to the farm I jumped out immediately and ran to go check on the swarm of bees oh no this is not a good sign they're gone every single one of them is gone this entire post was covered in bees and now there is not a single one and as I'm looking around here trying to find a way where I can see them or anything I don't see them around with the bees missing I immediately set out to search where oh where could they be it looked high I looked low I checked all of the nearby trees because that's typically where they would swarm to no luck I rode my bike for about an hour and a half all around the farm looking everywhere I possibly could looking for any sort of sign of those bees but they're gone you see what's typically happening when a beehive is swarming like that is it's basically a colony spinning off and so there's a second Queen now and she's taking a group of bees from that original Hive that she came from and they're leaving their original Hive they're going to a temporary spot and that fence post that I originally found them at this morning was that temporary spot and then from there they're sending all the little drone Scout bees all over the area and they're having them look for a suitable location to go build a new Hive and set up that new high in my experience that process can take I don't know 18 hours or so like you usually have like a full day to do it and maybe those bees showed up last night but I genuinely don't think I noticed them when I was doing my evening chores around eight o'clock last night and so I just assumed that they jumped out somewhere in the morning and when I came back down the hill from doing my cattle chores that was the obvious time to discover them which is exactly what I thought happened but regardless of it all they were not here on the farm you know our farm is about 160 acres and so there's a lot of places that they could have gone but I looked at a lot of different spots that were the obvious spots for them to go and I had no luck so I just assume that they're gone so I genuinely feel like losing out on that beehive is all my fault as far as tragedies go it's not the worst thing in the world that could happen so I'm not freaking out about it but I definitely have the distinct impression like I screwed up now that I have that beehive I will be ready in the future in case that happens with one of my other hives and by the way the new Toby dog book is available for pre-order right now if you want to check it out it would mean the world to me I will leave links for it you can just click on it and get either the print version the Kindle version or the audible audiobook version the print and Kindle versions have these beautiful illustrations and the audible audio version is like this full production where I narrate and I got some really talented actors to do the voices it's gonna be a lot of fun perfect thing for a family on a road trip to listen to

Channel: Gold Shaw Farm

Views: 74,581

Keywords: gold shaw farm, duck farm, goose farm, vermont farm, honey bees, honey bee asmr, honey bee farming, honey bees making honey, catching a swarm, honey bee swarm, honey bee swarm flying, honey bee swarm capture, honeybee swarm trap, farm vlog, honey bees mating

Id: hweWX24fZ24

Length: 13min 26sec (806 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 31 2023