How to become a Beekeeper! | Beginner Beekeeper Episode 1

welcome to rascal apiary and today we're going to discuss how to become a beekeeper and what we're going to use as one of our tools to guide you through the process of becoming a beekeeper is the North Carolina master beekeeper program certified beekeeper practical examination a link will be provided in the description to the North Carolina State Beekeepers Association and you should go there print it off follow along with us let's get started [Music] okay now that you've downloaded the paper printed it out and you're gonna follow along with us let's go to section 1 section 1 is the applicant properly dressed to manipulate a hive of bees let's get dressed all right we have Mike all dressed up ready to get into a hive as you'll see he has his jacket with included veil his bright orange gloves to protect his hands he has his hive tool also very important he has long pants so bees aren't gonna sting him on his leg and if he picks up his foot you can see he's got closed toed shoes also very important you don't want to get into a hive wearing sandals so question 2 in Section 1 was the applicant able to light a smoker for the entirety of the inspection so smoker you're gonna have to take one of these guys and light it and keep it lit let me tell you hufflepuff never meant so much to making it through the entire examination so let me show you how to light it and let's go okay today we're going to demonstrate how to start your smoker up and keep it going for your inspection now the first thing that you're going to need something to make a flame you could use this we have this as well matches or however you want to make fire you're gonna need a smoker and then in our bucket here we have kindling and that's just something small that burns pretty easy and then we'll also add like a piece of pine or some other bark or wood to keep the flame going and smoke going typically we'll use pine like pine needles in our smoker that gets it started real fast it's easy to light those with anything and then we'll put wood shavings or something on top of that to create the smoke and untreated wood the other tip is don't wear your plastic gloves while you're doing it occasionally I do it's okay just don't burn yourself because then you have plastic stuck to you and they'll take it off because you don't want to burn a hole in the front of your veil as you're doing this smoker if you bought a new one brand new pop it open take out the disk that's in there and the disk will have these legs however the legs sometimes are pushed in so it's a nice flat round disk you want the legs to be out like this so it has something to rest on okay and then of course legs down make sure it's in there that way and it is and what we're gonna do is put some kindling in there so we just reached in the middle of a bucket here and we'll fill fill a little bit in there and then I'm just gonna grab a small chunk of wood put it in there I'm gonna light my my torch the clicker sometimes doesn't work that's why I was saying him may be embarrassing if I click it and it doesn't start a flame so boom there we go so then I'm just gonna stick it right in there and get that smoke going a little bit you can put it on the ground and do it it's a little bit better because then the ashes don't come out at you but you got to keep your lighter lit boom that way your hands out of the way you're getting it nice and hot what you want to see is a flame once the flames start coming out give it little puffs you'll start seeing more flames good sign which you want is high flames coming out of there and then then you would smother it with your kindling to make the smoke so I'm gonna keep adding some more kindling a little bit at a time get the flames going typically you want to sit your body to the wind so that your smokes not hitting you in the face but for this video the shot in the background was cool enough I'm gonna sit here and let it hit me in the face every now and then so just keep pumping it if you have to light your smoker again or your lighter again - to create more fire if it burns out you can do that but typically I just pump it wait for some flames and embers to come out make it through some Hickory in there a little bit more wood and as you're going just pump a little faster and faster until you start getting a flame and then just smother it and you'll get a lot so you want to just keep pumping get those flames nice and high hopefully you can capture that on the camera nice and high once you have that going go ahead and take your your kindling and put out your fire there you go I was missing the flame a little bit and take that out stuff like this that comes off your table saw when you're cutting real small pieces just crunch it up put it in the top and what you want to do is start puffing again on this thing in the the smoke might go away for a little bit but as you puff it'll start flames will start coming out again and that's what you want the more you pump the more you're feeding that heat at the bottom some oxygen and the more smoke you're gonna get if you're doing this practical you want to be almost obnoxious with it okay try and make sure you prove the point that yes I can create smoke as we're doing here it's burning my eyes a little bit once you start burning your eyes a little bit go ahead take it close this thing up now on the practical you can read if you have to restart it a second time that's okay but a third time is a no-go so now that it's closed I give it a couple pumps short pumps and then longer pumps so the short pumps are because they're still kindling in there and you'll see it try and come out because the air that you're pushing in if you do the short pumps it comes up but not out the hole it drops back in into a spot that's out of the way of the air and then you can do big pumps and you're good to go make sure your cap is sealed properly you might have some kindling on the outside because I just drop it all over and then this will last you the entire inspection the only thing that you have to do once you get to this point if you're using smoke or not for your practical is walk over and give it just a couple pumps you don't even have to pointed out nothing but just to keep that that heat and oxygen flowing through your smoker all it's doing is slowly burning kindling in there and it'll stay lit now if you go 5 10 minutes and you don't pump this it's gonna burn out I mean it just cools down and way too quick just do one or two frames and then just come over and give it a little pump one or two frames come over give a little pump if you're using it then you're good another tip is if you're pumping it you should be able to put your hand over it and get get a feel for the heat that's coming out it should be cool you're not trying to blast your bees with hot air okay you're just trying to get cool air plus smoking your hands if you are not wearing gloves and you're trying to be brave and show that you can just use bare hands which I give a thumbs up to that I do it on occasion depending on time of year but smoking your hands will keep them from stinging you it's not a hundred percent it's kind of like anything else in the world it's just a technique that you can use to try and prevent being stung also if you have been stung just once and you want to continue go ahead and give your smoker a couple pumps with your hand or whatever the part is like if it's a leg smoke that it masks the banana smell which is the alarm pheromone that the bees put off whenever they sting you can mask it it's not going to prevent it completely but it gives you an opportunity to continue your inspection that's it and the final question in section one is can you open a hive box let's show you how to do that take off your weight throw it on ground gently then if your hive top doesn't come off easily it is because propolis in the inner cover have now connected it what you're going to do is take your hive tool and you're going to put it in between the box and the the top and then what you're going to do is use it as leverage and just pull until you hear that propolis crack once it cracks then this will come off easily and you can tell ours has been proposed because you can see the propolis all around the sides this you can clean off however propolis has medicinal qualities so we keep it now I'm gonna put the the top cover behind the hive in a manner so that when I take the boxes off I can lay them perpendicular on the top so that we're not crushing bees inner cover you will put your hive tool in the cracks on the corners lift move on to the next corner lift and then on mine if I get the back too then I know I can lift and get the top off not a ton of bees so moving on to section two what we're gonna do is point out each of the hive components basically everything that makes a hive box now we at rascally Perry recommend do this entire section before getting into a hive you don't want to be in a hive with your bees out you trying to do an inspection and do this practical at the same time with a certified beekeeper and it'd take more than 20 minutes for you to get through all the questions as you're inspecting just go through the things that you can go through that don't involve your bees prior to actually doing the inspection that way you can get in there you can focus on them and your priorities not as much as practical as it is taking care of your bees and that's the responsible thing to do let's get on to identifying hive components all right we're at the hive you'll notice I'm not wearing protective gear like Mike that's because I'm not going to be doing an inspection I'm not going to open the bees at all and I'm not in front of the hive in the bees flight path I'm also not wearing any perfume or heavily scented shampoo so we shouldn't have any problems and if we do we just calmly walk away let's get to it oh you'll see our smoker still going all right we'll start at the top we have a cinder block on top that's just to help weigh it down a little bit in case anybody comes in gives a little nudge we have a telescoping outer cover and that's covered with metal and it comes down and hugs the box on the sides just underneath that is our inner cover and it has a hole on top for internal feeding we also have a hog 1/2 comb which is a type of super we have a queen excluder you can see sticking out just here that just keeps the butt of the Queen and the bottom brood chambers we have a shallow brood chamber and we also have a deep frame brood chamber underneath that we have the bottom board you'll see extends all the way out here with a nice landing board and the entrance reducer and you'll see the bees going in and out of that and underneath that this lovely heavy-duty hive stands so in Section three you're gonna see us actually open up a hive box and we have one that meets most of the requirements of this section if all of them what we'll do is we'll get in there we'll find every piece will point it out to you we'll take pictures so you can see close-ups and then if there's something that we can't cover because not all hives are equal we will find something that will cover that specific bullet point so you know what it is and you know how how to identify it let's get to it our super we look in from the top but we're not expecting to see much like you should see honey if you're getting to the point where it's capped honey take a look see if it's worth harvesting if that's what you feel like doing but we're not looking for a queen in here all you should find our adults worker bees and drones if they can get past your queen excluder if you so choose to have one okay the super you don't have to place on the the top cover you can just place this on an edge off to the side okay you're gonna do the same thing to get your excluder off just put your hive tool in there run along the edge I'll free it up and then you can take it off I put it on top of the the super most of the time but in this case I'm just gonna put it on the inner cover on the front I have the Queen sitting on top she's not moving actually a little worried about her now cuz why is she sitting on the top frame here so I'm gonna pick her up and the way you do that make sure your gloves on nice and tight okay you want to pick her up where your fingers former you okay and you want her head to be going into the web of your fingers so right right like this so I'm gonna pick her up so her butt is the red part of the hive tool move the other bees slightly and she is dead but this is how you would pick her up just like that try not to squeeze so I'm going to set it to the side see if we can figure out what happened these are shallow frames you can tell because the palm of your hands can basically go from the top to the bottom even a child's hand could pretty much do this there the pros are they're lighter so that if you have back problems they're easier to lift once they're full of honey however they're the same length as your deeps so they will fit in a extractor easily how to re Queen your hive well this is one way we're gonna have the bees do it and I'm going to ensure that they have eggs and larvae and if they have an abundance of it I'm gonna let them do their thing and make some super seizure cells and then I will I will decide if I'm going to split this into a bunch of little nooks or if I'm gonna sell Queens or what I want to do okay so my wife just pointed out adult worker bee and a drone now adult worker bees have many different jobs throughout their lifetime that is covered in a different video that we did I believe a slow-mo Monday so if you'd like to take a real relaxing trip and watch some bees put them on the screen you can listen to them my son makes some music for it and I put informational notes facts on bees so that you can watch and still learn something it looks like even though this was a a brood chamber that's what we had decided as beekeepers that they were gonna have to brood chambers they had decided to treat it as a honey super which kind of makes sense because this is a ten frame hive and in this area because we talked to local beekeepers they run one ten frame box with supers on top because there's enough frames for the Queen to do her thing and make make a brood chamber so that being said all of these frames appear to be honey honey and nectar no pollen at all and all you want to do is as you're being a beginner you're gonna make mistakes like killing your queen on accident which we can't prove that I did that she might have just had a heart attack when she saw me but at the same time it's it's good to stay nice and slow even pace but not so slow you're in the hive for over 20 minutes we'll try and keep this part of the video less than 10 we just want to get in see what we can see if we see what we like then we get out if we see what we don't like like a dead Queen then we got to kind of investigate more but the key is not to get too frustrated with yourself or the others around you that are trying to help you because everything is fixable you just got to step back and think about it we watch the video the other day of a guy who tried a new technique on all of his hives and he ended up killing them in two weeks that's gonna happen my advice is don't don't don't do something new to all your hives that's why you have to do something new to one and then recover here we're gonna have a adult bees these are girls and then we'll have drones walking around right here this is a drone so a drone does not have a stinger and all he does is reproduce typically he doesn't even feed himself he will go through the the hive and beg the girls to feed them and then they'll feed them let's see this is why I like the j-hook because this hive in particular not all hives do this and not all hives are the same this one specifically proper Eliza's everything that it possibly can all the time it makes my life a little rough because I try and move nice and smooth and the propolis sometimes wants to hold on for dear life so what I do here is I put my back to the Sun and I look at my frame of mainly all male bees something that you should look for is the size of the cell if you look at these size they're bigger than looking over here at this size that's a little smaller the other thing you're looking for is remember when I said put the frame up a little higher and scan the bottom we have a queen Cup here and here the reason that they're still cups are because they're not capped over and there's nothing well I got a check but Oh in here I have bee bread that is a nectar and pollen mixture that the bees do now you can hear that they're getting louder that is because they're all drones and when drones start moving around and buzzing around they get real loud they also like to crawl all over your hands and everything else they're kind of funny little guys but I'm gonna continue to look for eggs I put my back to the Sun and I look down into each of the the cells and that has nothing but a bunch of drones and a couple workers okay now that I got one frame out of the way I put it on my frame rest it's easier to maneuver in the hive I do my search pattern for my bees I find more Cup I do a book method to flip the frame over I'll do it again so the camera can see finish my pattern but this is all it is hold it like this flip like that boom that way your wax doesn't fall out of your frame because this is a foundationless frame so I'm doing I'm doing an extra careful job looking for any eggs because the Queen's sitting right there motionless and typically at this point I would have seen the Queen alive walking around and I would have just gone ahead and closed it back up there's no reason to go through the bottom box if you already found your queen however I need to find some eggs oh there's larvae in this one and lots of it make sure there's not a second Queen walking around in here you look larvae as well and these are the small ones that you would graph so grafting is a little bit more advanced for a beginner beekeeper but what you're looking for there is not exist not a larvae but an egg that's starting to curl into a c that's the best way I can describe it for you without showing a picture but if you do know somebody that is currently grafting and you say hey my hives having troubles can you come and graph some Queens for me if they're good friends they'll do it for free so here we're showing you a queen cup and remember Queen cup is when it is not filled or capped there's absolutely nothing in that one so it's just on standby it's it's on standby for when the Queen decides hey I'm getting old and the workers start pestering her saying hey you're old and everybody kind of agrees like hey lay in this cell and you'll be on your way so if that's death or swarming there's what it is haven't found a second Queen or any sort of what is going on there no any sort of indications that there would be I see a ton of drones which are male bees and in that case it could be an indication of swarming however since I have the Queen sitting right there she's not swarming anytime soon and all the Queen cups are not filled so you can go ahead and say that that's less likely but we are in luck because I just reek wean or I just pulled a queen from a different hive and I might just combine this one with that little nuke or combine the nuke with this hive because there's plenty of bees we'll just try and get them to like the new Queen by using that newspaper method and we'll talk about that coming up next basically gone through every frame because the last one is actually completely empty so I'll finish this one and then we'll close it up and Lisa and I will go take a break and discuss what we want to do because we're a team and that that's empty okay so we got we got a bunch of bees and they now have no Queen but we did have a couple frames with lots of larvae on it I just use my hive tool to get that that frame moving cuz sometimes a propolis very very tough to move all your frames over a little bit more plus side they give me a guide because where I see it stacked up is where the frame was we'll see if we can stick this one in yeah so okay then you got your last frame in right but you're not done because you need to then push it up against the rest of the frames and then you also need to go to the other side and make sure both sides are evenly spaced so when you look at the hive you go space on the outside space on the outside done then I just pick up the next one next box stick it on here whoops get out of there try and be friendly to the bees as much as possible well I'm gonna put the Queen excluder no I won't you're right so so because no Queen that kind of tells us they have nothing but bees now they just have to focus on making a queen and then they'll they'll have this kind of downtime where all they really all they're really going to do is bring NexStar into the hive so I want to make sure they have some room to build wax and I want to make sure that as they build wax they don't instantly fill it with nectar and then when the new queen comes she has no place to lay so she'll go on a mating flight come back and if she still has no place to lay we're in trouble I give them a little bit of extra space and then the next time I come in we'll take a look and see how they're doing and hopefully we'll we'll have some signs of Queen cells and then maybe I'll make some more Ives remember to put your inner cover back on and then before I put my top on I take a look around because we have some other things that we put in the hives sometimes that get left out beetle blaster is one of them brood minder sometimes depending on the hive so I just look for things that are lying around like Queen excluder I wouldn't want to put the whole thing together without putting one in now Queen excluders our subject for discussion discuss with me in the comments I know that not everybody uses them I only use them until they start making the super the super and then I take it out so they can fill the whole thing but that's one person's plan you don't have to follow it put that on put our weight back on prove that our smoker still going it's going pretty good so we're done let's move on to the next section miscellaneous questions section four now your high box should be sealed up at this point if you're still in there and the Proctor is trying to ask you questions that you know to be in this section miscellaneous questions just ask them to pause and seal up your hive go somewhere where it's nice and cool because here in North Carolina it can be hot and what you may want to consider is maybe some switch 'el or some honey pecan apple cake you can find those recipes on apiary eats that's shameless plug so now that you're out these questions how do you answer them we're gonna go step by step and give you a reasonable answer to pass this test question one is what kind of slope should the hive have and it's talking about the bottom board and why should it be sloped this way now when you set up a hive common practice is you put some sticks or some sort of shim behind the back of your bottom board that way it lifts up the back of the bottom board a little bit and it gives you about Reed agrees lift three to five and that is so if there's condensation and a hive it drips down and runs out the front now if you have a screen bottom board does that make sense not really because it's gonna go through the screen and then it goes into the ground but if you have a solid bottom board which is what we run at rascally Perry it's gonna hit the bottom board and then you don't want it just sitting there because then it'll rot out you would you want it to slope forward and run out of the hive typically if you do have condensation in your hive it's kind of a sign that something could be wrong but that's something that you and your area will have to look at and figure it out really here I know that if there's condensation in there it's because the bees have found another entrance so the wood has warped a little bit and rains getting in and then it needs to drain out the front and then I just go put blue painters tape over that hole and then let the beasts prop lies it and we're good problem solved the next question is which way should your hide be facing and why so south south east is what we do here however the textbook answer is south-facing slope and protected from prevailing winds now that's coming from the beekeepers bible reliable source it's a book it's not Wikipedia but we do southeast facing because the way that the winds blow here predominantly are from the northwest so if we're facing southeast we're protected that make sense okay so the next question is number three is this high prepared for overwintering now I can't give you the answer to that because I'm not standing at the hive that you're inspecting or did inspect however what you're looking for for an overwintering hive is an abundance of brood and an abundance of honey because what you want is that Queen should be laying you know winter bees which predominantly live longer than summer bees or spring these and you want them to be able to eat something over winter because they don't come out of the hive and get nectar at least in North Carolina they do a little bit during the winter but as you get further north they're just not they're gonna cluster and stay in that hive as long as possible eating their stores and protecting their brood so what what you're looking for is brood and honey now if your brood is split up in the hive and your honey is still on top but your brood is not condensed to the middle of the hive then you could have a issue as well and you could run into a problem with your Proctor asking you that question so make sure that those frames that are on the outside that have brood are swapped out with resource frames that were in the middle because what the bees are doing is they start out with brood in the middle and then they expand right well when those the brood in the middle merge then they start filling it with resources all you got to do is pick them up and swap them to the outside now don't do this if it's spring well don't do it if it's summer just tell your Proctor no they're not ready but this is an explanation on how they would be ready and what I would do if necessary so that answers that question for does this hive have an adequate food storage for this time of year and what you're looking for as a beekeeper is brood and resource frames so when you're looking at your bird frame don't count the resources on that frame just go this is a brood frame it has eggs larvae and capped brood now what you want is another frame that has resources and in that that frame would be be bred nectar and honey pollen is your other resource as well be breads really is what's feeding your bird so you want a one-to-one ratio there where you have you know one bird frame and one resource frame so it the way that we look at our boxes is we have a brood box as we're inspecting it if we go okay the center three or four frames are all brood and then the outside frames or resources and then we have a super on top and there's also honey in there we're happy because that means an average of one to one is happening if we get more resources than brood we're looking good and we're happy with that so that should be your answer if it's not a one to one the answer is no and be honest it's okay as long as you understand what's going on so question five the lights have a later question four does it have enough food storage storage yes but is the hive preparing to swarm is the second part of but so what are the indicators just looking at food storage because that's kind of what the question is asking now if you start to see your brood dwindle and honey storage increase so let's say you have a super on there that thing's full and then you go into your brood box and you notice that last time you had two frames of resources or four frames of resources but now you have five or six frames of resources and only a couple frames of brood that's gonna be a giant indicator that they are back filling everything and they're going to swarm soon now you start taking out those frames and looking at them you're looking for swarm cells which are at the bottom of your frame if you look at the last video that we posted or two videos ago we talked about tips for beginner beekeepers and one of the things was lifting your hive looking around and then lifting a little bit higher and scanning the bottom for swarm cells now if you have those cells in there in the middle of the frame that's a different story but swarm cells on the bottom kind of along the sides a little bit those are swarm cells they're getting ready to swarm it's something you should look for don't freak out about it you can make many many hives off of swarm cells so if you're only expecting two hives this year and now you have swarm cells Congrats you can have four or five or you can sell those cells to a beekeeper that needs a queen and at some point we'll put out a video on how to do that number six is if this hive were short on food what would you do to correct the situation and there's a lot of resources out there that tell you you must do this or definitely don't do this we're gonna give you the advice of a beginner beekeeper that only has two hives and it's your responsibility to keep them alive and it's my responsibility to let you know how so that there's no emotional event that happens later with tears lots of Tears and you seeing your bees starve it is really cute looking at their bee butts sticking out of the cell but then you realize it's kind of your fault that they died so the answer one to one sugar water during the spring in summer that's what you're gonna feed them you just mix one part water or one part sugar mix it together and then feed your bees the next thing that you could do if you have let's say you know a hive that's doing really really well and one that's not doing well at all if you still can maintain your one-to-one brood stores ratio and still take some out of your good hive take some of the the resource frames out of there maybe one or two knock off the bees put it in the the hive that's not doing that well and give them a chance you know anything's better than nothing when it comes to intervening to try and help your bees other things that you could do is put a Paul and Patty on don't put the whole patty they sell it individually impacts but really in North Carolina here chop it up into little pieces poke you know one sliver in let them eat it check back in a little bit put another sliver in I would give them you know four days in between maybe a week in some cases to eat that sliver of pollen patty if you put the whole patty in because you're like I'm not gonna be here for two weeks then the hive beetles will start eating and procreating in there and then now you not only have a weak hive but now you have a hive beetle infestation and that is just decimating to a hive that's weak um and that answers that question if you have any comments about what you should do please set us up in the comments there's a lot of different techniques out there but this is what we recommend to people with two hives that want to survive seven is how would you combine this colony of bees with another colony of bees so that we have to understand the situation if you are combining colonies that means something has gone wrong in one of them we're not talking about disease or pests we're talking about you've lost a queen you found laying workers in there which is another loss for a queen there's a lot of different weirdnesses that can happen with bees between inspections and you show up and you're like what is happening sometimes you have to kill a queen because it is just creating the most defensive bees and you don't want to have to deal with that so what you're gonna do is you're gonna pop off the top of your hive that's healthy and that you want to have these other bees join take the top off take the inner cover off lay a newspaper down now this newspaper you get its store you can get from your neighbor that still gets the newspaper delivered borrow it ask and lay one sheet on top and then what you need to do is mix some sugar syrup so that's one part sugar one part water mix it together put it in a mason jar that has a lid that you can see holes in call the feeder feeder lid or spray bottle that's a common thing go down to the dollar store or whatever the cheap store is near you and pick up a spray bottle fill that with sugar water you're gonna spray this newspaper not soak it but just get it wet and spray it get it wet now it's wet with sugar water okay and then you're going to take the hive of bees that are not doing so well and you're gonna put it on top of that newspaper so now you have the bottom box or boxes is a healthy hive good to go with the Queen then you have a layer newspaper that's wet with sugar water and then you're gonna have your box that's not so so healthy or with a queen on top of that and what's gonna happen is they're actually gonna chew and eat at that newspaper as they get the like taking the sugar and the water during that time they are going to be smelling the other hive and we're talking about the top box they're gonna be smelling the other hive and getting used to the smell of that Queen and becoming familiar that way if you put that box on with no newspaper they just go down and hunt the Queen the bottom box will then defend the Queen you have World War B in there and it's bad news it's bad news for everybody so your kids coming around the hive or you're coming around the hive they will be angry so put the newspaper if you are really concerned because they're big eaters put two sheets douse the the newspaper with water put your other hive on they'll eat through it it gives them a day or two they put these little holes in it and they'll start sticking their head through and then eventually they'll make it through now if you wait a week or two you'll be able to do an inspection take the newspaper out they should be good they they won't have decimated your your good hive in there and then we'll have mixed well and then what you want to do is make sure you then sort the boxes so that you have brood on the bottom resources on the top and sometimes that means moving around frames but for the most part the bees will figure that out for you by the time you get to that inspection question eight is describe how you would wreak weaned the colony you just inspected and a lot of techniques out there I'm talking a lot of techniques for reclaiming but what are we trying to do you got to understand that you have to get rid of the Queen that's already in there if she hasn't already bit the dust some other way so that might mean pinching and placing under a flower and having a little burial ceremony that's that's one option and then the bees within probably an hour or two will know hey we don't have a queen anymore let's start making a new one and all they're gonna do is pick a couple of eggs that are good to go they're going to start feeding it differently than they with royal jelly and an abundance of nutrition and that's gonna pull out your little peanut shape supersede your cell sometimes they'll they'll be on the bottom like swarm cells as well but this is because you have forced them now to make a new queen that's how you that's one way to replace it a new queen will emerge they'll fight on the inside maybe some swarming probably not that's one option beginner beekeeper second option would be to call the Queen and then go to a beekeeping buddy of yours or your association or store and buy a new queen and what you would do is kind of like how you did when you first got your swarm if you dumped your swarm into a box and then hung the Queen in her box inside there so that the entire colony could smell her and get used to her same sort of idea you're gonna put her in a little box hang her in the hive let the colony get used to her and then now you have a new queen a couple days later three you'll have to come and let her out if she hasn't shoot her way out but that's for a different video this is just how you wreak ween so that that's two steps right there both answers are acceptable so good luck question 9 is if your hive was being robbed how would you stop the robbing and straight answer you have a robbing screen install the robbing screen done that should give you a pass on this another way if you're a beginner beekeeper you're like what's a robbing screen just get a bedsheet or some sort of sheet that's bigger that can cover the whole hive and just drape it across the front now your bees will find a way into the hive the other bees you'll see just hit the front and they'll just crawl around the front of that neck curtain or blanket or whatever it is that you put there that's another technique that you can use there's a lot out there so a simple google search will give you all different kind of ideas DIY builds on robber screens what I would suggest is learn what a robber screen does understand the dynamic and what it's preventing and then build your own that's what we do here so you don't spend all your money your first year on all new equipment might look great but some of that stuff becomes very pricey as you start out with two hives and then next year you have four hives then you have eight hives and so on and so forth and you're sitting like I said 20 hives going okay now we have to put them off property and I'm not buying robbing screens for all of them question ten is what method would you use to harvest honey from this hive for extracting now this is the part that beginner beekeepers are like yeah this is the exciting part that 10% of beekeeping that's more fun than fun and that's extracting so depending on what kind of frames you have if you have lengths trough frames you can just have an extractor like you may or may not see behind me here can't see you okay so that you can't see but basically it's a barrel and you put your frames in it and you crank that thing and it will throw the honey out of the frame and most of the time keep your wax pretty intact so you can just stick them right back in the hive and those honeycomb look good that's one way another way is cut comb honey where you're taking your frame out and you say I don't have an extractor I'm gonna use a knife you cut that out boom stick it in a box or a jaw a box plastic box preferably and sell it that way and people just use a regular knife and put it on warm toast let it melt and eat the honey that way another way is chunk honey that's basically pouring honey into a jar and then you stick your cutout comb in there it's pretty cool looking those are just a couple of ways of extracting and you might be asking well how do I get the honey and a port into the jar what you're doing is you're cutting your your wax off of your frame and then you're gonna squeeze it and filter it so you can squeeze with your hand or whatever but it will then go into a strainer and then go into your your mason jar or honey jar and then you just cut out a little chunk of honey and you drop it in there it's fun people love it because kids are like honey wax the hive is inside my bottle it's awesome but there's a lot of different ways to extract if you have a or a or a top bar hive it's gonna be a little bit more difficult the extractor won't work for you which is the big barrel that you turn you're gonna have to do cuts and squeezes that's really the only way there's a lot of cutting with top bar and war a kind of hives so depending on what you're inspecting research get the answer that that you like but typically the satisfactory answer is I'm gonna stick my hive or my frames into an extractor and I'm going to spin it now that we've been through every step of this practical what happens next well in Section five your instructor will fill out their evaluation typically they say something nice about you and they say pass because that's what you want and that's what they want they want more beekeepers so they're going to give it to their instructional coordinator or educational coordinator depending on what the title is in your state and they will then pass it on to the state association who will then send you a certificate so that you can put it on your wall in the background or our two certificates saying that we are certified beekeepers and now you can call yourself a beekeeper so congrats leave his comment hey like subscribe hit notifications let us know if this helped you let us know if your state has some questions that were not covered here that you really need answered we will do our best to help you and maybe we'll make another video that's on like Georgia certified examination or EAS if you don't know what that is google it it's a cool little association not little it's big but it's traveling once so maybe it'll come close to your home and you can go meet some really important people in the beekeeping world so that's all I got for you have a great day

Channel: Rascal Apiary

Views: 14,818

Keywords: How to become a beekeeper, Beekeeping 101, Beekeeping, How to start beekeeping, How to become a certified beekeeper, How to take care of bees, How to pass a beekeeping practical exam, how to manage bees, Rascal Apiary, Beginner beekeeping, how to inspect a hive, beekeeping 2021, sustainable beekeeping, treatment free, flow hive, how to become a beekeeper

Id: cNMYFta7yqA

Length: 56min 8sec (3368 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 10 2020