Euthanizing of a dangerous hive.

as I start this video I'm standing in my bee yard the hives down the row this hive no longer has bees in it as you'll see in this video I had to take a step to euthanize this hive I wanted to create this video to give a journey of decision making process about what to do with the nasty hive there's a nasty hive and then there's a dangerous hive I did an evaluation of this hive by doing an inspection my intent was to reclaim this hive by wreak weaning it I set up a plan to go through the hive and find the Queen dispatched the Queen and in beekeeping the Queen decides the aggressiveness of the colony and the offspring and if you replace the queen with a gentle queen in time the entire colony will transform into a work of a hive just like the rest of them down the row here what ended up happening was I was successful in my operation to find the Queen and dispatcher but along the way I evaluated the threat of this hive and the risk of keeping it functional and decided to take action to euthanize the hive if you're not familiar with that term dispatch the hive kill the hive removed the colony and I ended up having to take action to kill all the bees in this hive I've never done that before it's the first time in my 10 plus years of keeping bees and I don't see videos on the internet of having the face set decision make this decision and execute it that's what this video is about I'm first going to show you how aggressive the bees were on the day that I went in to do the inspection to find the Queen and then I'm going to show you how I actually went through the process of dispatching this hive yesterday now this is the first time in the spring of 2020 that I could stand in my yard without a bee suit and not get sung so as much as I hate to say the pain of killing this colony its mission accomplished it was even complicated trying to work on the other hives because kept getting stung so watch this video with the intent to learn that was the purpose of it is to show you the evaluation process and then I made the decision based on risk which I'll talk about and then I'll show you how this bee suit which is gloves underneath it this is actually worse than the I don't understand what's going on here but I'm gonna take that hive apart find the Queen or Queens replace Taccone is just simply unacceptable smells like a banana factory in here when they sing behind scent and that's all I smell and you can see on the glove they're just out of control so what I'm gonna do is shut the video down take a break and walk away and see if I can calm them down although quite frankly I think this is what I'm good I've been out here in regular jeans and every time I walk out they had cost me today I'm gonna take care of them I had a hive two years ago that was similar to this but not this bad this is the worst of any hive I've ever seen it's unbelievable so I'm gonna bring you along for the ride I'm gonna record the entire thing now when I do my intervention today I have other stuff that I want to do I'm gonna put a brew binder scale swap the pigs out although quite frankly I think given what I'm seeing I might literally just go for the Queen today be done with it and skip everything else I had planned because this is just borderline ridiculous okay get to work that's what I'm gonna do [Music] let me talk a little bit about what this hive with the background is on this hive this is an overwintered hive whose two hives combined the bad news is I took a split from this and that box over there has the other half when I took a split I put this box in the middle the second deep and I put nothing but foundation in it there's also a coin excluder on there I'm hoping that I've made my job easier because there's a lot of bees in this hive by putting the Queen excluder there I think I could strain the Queen to one of the deeps I'm gonna find out because on May 16th I made that change and it's a 27th now so when I go in and look at those hives for those colonies in those high bodies I should be able to determine which one has brood and if it has brood there's a queen in there one of the things I know about this hive is it's springtime it's possible that it has multiple Queens I'm gonna take nothing by chance so what I'm gonna do is take the boxes off and look through every single frame to find the Queen I don't believe she's marked in this one and I'm gonna look for other Virgin Queens running around in there do I think I'm gonna find one probably not but I'm gonna noting the chance because when I reclaim this hive I don't want them to kill my new queen one of the things you see set up over there is flat panels coroplast I'm gonna take the - honey box off the top and I'm gonna put them on the coroplast and then I'm gonna put a screen cover over them to close them off so the bees can't fly I'm gonna take the top deep box off I'm gonna put it on that stack and then I'm going to cover it with screen then the only box that I'm gonna have to deal with a flyyy bees is the bottom box and I'm hoping that the queen is in there and I'm gonna go in and do the deed earlier I had these gloves and I came out here and got stung through them and I'm really happy with the fact that I've multi gloved but not being stung so what I have to remember here is I'm not being stung as bad as this is as many stings these gloves are taking I could be calm take a deep breath and focus on the job at hand and that's what I'm gonna do so I let the smoker although it don't matter with these guys and I'm gonna perform the operation that I just did I'm not gonna talk any further I'm gonna get to work [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] oh that one got through [Music] [Music] have you [Music] there's no fees in the box here on me [Music] [Music] okay what I see is that there's no brood in that bottom box you know what [Music] I'm gonna have to go change it so I'm gonna shut the video off here [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] okay look mission accomplished I think I'm gonna just button this I've up and walk away I still don't know whether I'll euthanize it or not but I know I got the Queen that's the key thing the funny thing is over there the box of honey I put robber guard on it and I'm gonna try and take it might as well get something for my stings today I'm gonna button everything up put it in the car and leave and my suspicion is the next X number of times I come out here so I replace the Queen and all these bees are replaced but needless to say working the bees the spring has been awful because of this this is just absurd it's never really this bad but gotten this close a couple times so I'm glad today finally came to watch so I wanted to show standing here in a t-shirt and no protection amongst the flying bees that I'm not in jeopardy this is typical these bees are gentle they're docile and they're not going to come after me unless I try to invade their hive now if I'm gonna go in this hive I'm gonna use a smoker and it's always responsible to wear a veil but in the case of the other bees you saw that I can't even be in the yard when they're on top of me but here this is fairly normal so I wanted to show before I talk to you about why I do what I'm gonna do I want you to see what normal looks like you're not in jeopardy with bees this morning I'm gonna do something that is unusual for me as a beekeeper first time in ten years I am going to euthanize the one hive that I have as you'll see in this video I have some bees that appear to have some really super aggressive genes in them may be Africanized can't tell that but the problem lies with making that decision do you kill the hive do Yury Queen the hive and reset it in my case I've made the decision to euthanize the hive which is going to kill all the bees specifically because of how aggressive they are this is the first time I could stand here in Ebisu with the veil off in the yard without being accosted and it's because I have the hive completely closed up I came in and did that last night one of the things that I know is I have neighbors who ride their horses in the field next door to me and I have little kids that play in the field up above and the measurement that I have is that the bees have been coming into the backyard which is good fifty hundred yards away and accosting us in the backyard as I speak so I didn't get them all shut up some of them are out there that's the first one that found me this morning though and it's going to be aggressive so I'm gonna cover up I've taken my fair share of stings to the spring and I don't care to have any more so as I was saying the bees have been knocking at the back window of the house they've been chasing the dog in the backyard it's just untenable and it's dangerous if my family tries to mow the grass the bees are gonna come get them so I'm gonna take this hive out I have another colony in reserve to put in this equipment and I absolutely hate detest making this decision but it's the right thing to do I've been in Africa I've worked aggressive hives before in the past mine others but nothing like this hive and it's got to go last night when I tried to close it up even when I had it closed up the foragers coming back were immediately on the defensive so what I'm going to do is pour soapy water into the hive I have five gallons of water prepared and a full bottle of dish washing detergent you have to buy the kind that has the degrease ingredients in it the best one to buy is dawn in this case I think I couldn't find dawn at the store so I got Palmolive or some other brand but Dawn dishwashing detergent has the best degrease it changes the exterior of the bee and that's the reason why it kills it what I'm going to do is I have a ladder I'm going to set it up and you'll see from the video that I have a screen enclosure and in the enclosure the bees can't come out but I could pour the liquid down through the hive you'll see how to do it so why am I making this video because I want to show I've not been able to find anything that shows how to euthanize a hive I've seen a lot of posts on bee source and other forums and as again I know that there's a lot of discussion about whether or not you could recover this hive I actually went in and found the Queen and killed the queen with the idea of redoing it but because the hive is so aggressive I'm gonna take it out I could take this hive somewhere remote and rhe Queen it it would take 45 days but the liability of this particular hive I'm just not gonna take the chance it's not worth it you'll see from the video in a few minutes how aggressive this hive is when I opened it up and had it isolated to a single box every single bee out of the box came up and covered me and I've been stung so many times this spring just doing inspections in the other hives I can't open another hive without the bees from this hive coming in accosting me and quite frankly I can't have this risk in my apiary so I'm gonna get to the task what I have here is I have two five-gallon pails they're both half-full so I didn't spill them I've already filled them with water and I'm gonna pour this in what I understand is you need about a cup for every gallon I do have bees accustomed me now when I do this I've sealed the hive off but not great I just taped off the front entrance with a guard I'm not sure if they can get out or not but I do know that there's bees out and about because they're the foragers that came back in the late evening so I'm gonna have to wear gloves and I guarantee by the time I get doing this they're gonna be all over the place I don't think they'll be as aggressive but I'm not gonna take my chances so all I'm gonna do is stir this a little bit so it's mixed in I don't want it to get really foamy and then I have a second container that I'm going to use the dip and selectively pour between the seams and that's how I'm going to perform the task one of the things I thought about doing is getting a squirt bottle and I might come do that later and spray any of the outside bees with soapy water to dispatch them to I think you could see what occurred man it just it breaks my heart to have to do this but I know thinking it through that this was the best but one of the questions I'm gonna get is what do you do with the hive now it's soapy water I'm gonna collect all the dead bees I'm gonna take them out and I'm gonna rinse all the frames down with water just spray them with a hose lightly until all the soap goes away and then I should be able to just put this high back at service with another colony yeah it's really sad to do this and there's a handful of bees around here you can see they're kind of buzzing I probably will come back with a spray bottle and get them and whatever is left and then I'll take it from here so I'm gonna open this entrance and see if they come out I have to assume that they're done which they are so the only thing that's here is whatever was around now I've seen other methods that talked about how to do this to a hive there's discussion about using dry ice don't know where you would get that in these days there's discussion about pouring rubbing alcohol in and when the rubbing alcohol evaporates it zaps a bees you think about doing mic checks what the rubbing alcohol does but I find this less caustic in that way I'm not poor in rubbing alcohol down through and again in these days you can't waste it there's so many different ways that people talk about what the more traditional way was to use a sulfur you light sulfur on fire in the gas basically what you want to do is create an environment that takes away the oxygen for the bees or it does something to impact them in this case I think common wisdom if you look on USDA where they talk about how to euthanize a hive and so on they recommend the soapy water method and as you can see it's quite effective so I know there's going to be people that disagree with me on this taking this action but trust me after watching that video and understanding the threat to the family and the neighbors in the neighborhood this this had to be done I would not feel comfortable taking this hive and putting it out somewhere in the middle of the field for the fact that anybody that comes upon this hive is going to be in serious trouble and I'm not willing to take that risk so this is how you do it now I have to clean this all up but the mission is accomplished I don't like it but I had to do it and now it's done you

Channel: nwnjba

Views: 2,359,943

Rating: 4.886425 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: O4ldpyIE5t4

Length: 35min 0sec (2100 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 10 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/servaliant0]

In no world did I think i'd spend the full 30+ minutes watching this video about bees but man that was an excellent watch. He is clear spoken, easy to listen to, and you can really tell he cares about his bees and his craft a great deal. Hopefully he doesn't ever have to kill a hive of his again.

[u/IrishinManhattan617]

TLDR: The queen bee in a hive moderates the aggressiveness of all the bees in a hive. In this video, a man shows you the difference between how bees act based on an "aggressive" queen bee (see video @ 3.00 to 20.00) and a "calm" queen bee (see video @ 20.00). The man tries to save an "aggressive" hive by killing the aggressive queen bee (@ 17.42) and replacing her with a "calm" queen bee with the hope the "calm" queen bee will change the behavior of the hive. During the operation he decides the "aggressive" hive can't be saved, and decides to kill all the bees (@25.00 to 32.00).

[u/BIGBUMPINFTW]

"I set up a plan to go through the hive and find the queen, dispatch the queen... and if you replace the queen with a gentle queen, in time the entire colony will transform into a workable hive."

He utters this in the first minute of the video. How can I not watch the whole thing now?

[u/terrask]

I used to visit the beehives in a park nearby. I could sit however close I wanted and just chill watching them being busy bees. It was very soothing.

This man, you can feel his pain.

[u/mangopearapples]

Interesting video but holy shit the sounds freak me out

[u/Zolroc]

His reasoning is solid, the difference between a normal hive and that angry one is astounding as well, but you know some small part of him was also just like “fuck these jerk bees”.

[u/esPhys]

Is it normal for bee keeping gear to be so ineffective? Before anyone mentions, obviously without it he would have been stung 1000x more than he was, but for one the suit is only a shirt, that seems isolated by an elastic waistband, and then he wears a bunch of pairs of pants, and the beekeeping glove sucks, and he needs to wear tons of shirts underneath the beekeeping suit. Seems like you'd just be better off wearing a 3mm wetsuit with just the bee suit mask/hood.

[u/shakezilla]

I felt really nervous when he started taking the different levels off the bees were swarming in front of his face. They sounded like little bullets hitting the camera.

[u/Paleoram]

Go to 20:00 to see what normal bees are like, it's amazing to see the difference.