How to Keep Bees in 2021 | Beekeeping for Beginners | Beekeeping 101

hey i'm larissa from beekeeping made simple and in this video i'm going to talk about how you can get started becoming a beekeeper in 2021 so this video is for people that already know they want to be a beekeeper you know what it entails you know how much time and a general idea of the money you're going to have to spend on equipment and you just want to get started and get going and if you're not sure what beekeeping entails and how much money and all that stuff then check out the video in the show description down below which goes through those basics first okay so you want to become a beekeeper well first what you need is your equipment this is i'm going to show you how to keep bees using a langstroth style beehive and that's what this video is for now there are other beehive styles but i really strongly recommend as a beginner keeping it simple and using a langstroth style beehive that's because there's so much information about it if you're looking for a mentor if you're looking for a class if you're just looking to ask questions on forums and facebook groups and your bee association most people have a langstroth style hive and that's what they will be able to help you the most with other style beehives are fine but it's just a little bit harder to get started using another style hive so for langshore style hive you're going to need to buy some stuff a long show style hive is composed of boxes and they're three different height boxes but for the most part you just have to know about two the medium one isn't completely necessary to know about so the two size boxes you're going to have is a deep which is called the d and it's the taller box and you're gonna have a shallower box which people call the shallow or the honey super so you're gonna want two of each two deeps and two honey supers and these boxes you know just get stacked up on top of each other and these boxes you know they just get stacked up on top of each other there's nothing securing them together they're the bees will use propolis which is plants up super sticky to attach them together and plug up if there are any holes any gaps within the hive and you don't have to worry about attaching them whatsoever inside the boxes you have frames now you can put foundation in your frames if you like i don't i don't see a huge need for it but if you're buying a starter kit it might come with plastic foundation and so you might as well just pop them into your frames if you like now they're the standard size is a 10 frame box which means it fits 10 of these frames in there if you are concerned about not being able to lift your boxes because they can get pretty heavy uh shallow honey super can weigh upwards of 30 maybe even 40 pounds so if you want to ease up on the weight of your beehive then you can get an eight frame box which means if it's eight frames in here it's a little bit narrower you might want to get a third shallow honey super to make up for the lack of space of frames and your boxes will be lighter now um that's the beehive two honey supers and two deeps is what you're going to want to buy and then the beehive has a lid on it you'll see in the hives behind me they all have a metal lid on them we call this a telescoping outer cover and this telescoping outer cover has a fancy name because it's a cover that hangs over the top of the beehive there are other lid styles but i really recommend that with style because um if you deal with rain a lot of rain everyone you know probably has rain but if you deal with a lot of rain or cold winters snow um you're going to want that heavier duty outer cover warm weather places you can deal with the cheaper migratory cover which is pretty much just a board on top of the hype and then you're going to want a bottom and a bottom is pretty much just like a piece of wood that um has an edge on three sides but one which allows for the bees to come and go through that one open side making it an entrance there are a variety of different kinds of bottom boards that you can buy um but you know if you want to make it easy for yourself just go to a beekeeping supply site um day dance is one that we often use or better be uh is also another great beekeeping supply site and they have the starter kits which you can buy assembled or unassembled the unassembled ones are cheaper because it and it costs less to ship but you can buy the assembled ones if you don't have the time to put it together or the tools and it comes with the lid and the bottom board and the frames that fit the right size box if you want a diagram we have a checklist with a diagram of all these parts with pictures next to the parts so that you know what they look like and just go to beekeepingmadesimple.com freebook the link is down in the video description and you can download that free getting started guide with that checklist so you have your beehive the other thing you're going to want is a smoker this thing right here now you might not use a smoker a lot your bees might be very calm and it's not necessary to use a lot of smoke but it's always good to have a smoker especially your first year so that it it really can keep if the bees are upset you use smoke and it masks those alarm pheromones that might be released and when you mask an alarm pheromone that bee that's alarmed that's telling the other bees hey there's a problem in the hive let's go check it out those other bees can't pick up on that pheromone and so only one bee is alarmed as opposed to her getting other worker bees alarmed as well and this is not only good for you because you're not you know maybe getting stung by more bees or being bothered by them flying towards your face but it also helps keep the hive calm because if these are stopping what they're doing because they're alarmed by an intruder taking the roof off of their house and it takes a while for the hive to get back to what they were doing before you came around so the less you disturb the hive and bother the bees and alarm them the better these are also pretty cheap like 20 bucks if you are planning on having a lot of hives they have kinds that are extra tall and that fits more smoke or fuel so that you don't have to keep on feeding more fuel in but this size smoker is fine if you have two or three hives you're going to want a hive tool take my advice buy a couple of these these are about seven dollars there's a few different styles i like what they call the j-hook or hobby hive tool it has a hook on the end which is good for using some leverage if a frame is really stuck in there and you need to use a little bit extra force really buy a few of these and if you can spray paint it a bright color so if you drop it in the grass you can find it easily you are also going to want some safety gear stain resistant gloves are very handy highly recommend them even if you don't react too much to getting stung by bees your hands uh you know joints your face they swell up a lot more than other areas of the body i now don't often use gloves when beekeeping because i find it very clumsy and difficult to maneuver and do things with these heavy leather gloves on but when you're first getting started is really good to have and also sometimes your bees are just cranky if there's not a lot of flowers blooming or other bees are trying to steal honey from them which is what we call robbing they can be cranky for a little bit it's understandable bees are going to be perfectly happy year round no matter how calm they might be so a pair of gloves is always good to have now you might have a pair of heavy gardening gloves leather gloves that you want to use that's fine but keep in mind the beekeeping gloves come up to about your elbow which is nice and they have elastic around them to prevent bees from getting inside a lot of the gardening gloves you know end at the wrist and it's really easy for bees to crawl right up inside there and take my word for it they will so the beekeeping the gloves are way better and then of course you want protection from the bees getting to your face so you want a veil now it can be as simple as a veil that just covers your head and neck this one comes with a plastic helmet and is about thirty dollars and then you can wear whatever kind of clothing you want to feel comfortable around the bees and to protect yourself from getting stung it could be just wearing a long sleeve heavyweight shirt and long pants like i usually do but if you're a little nervous being around the bees or if you are in a state that has africanized bees and so you might have a hive that's a little bit more aggressive then you might want the jacket which is a veil built into a jacket or the full suit which is available into long sleeve shirt and long pants i'll be honest the suit is incredibly convenient it comes with those big hype tool pockets and it makes beekeeping easier if i don't um have bees at my property and i go to check them you can wear whatever you want to under the suit just wear the suit the suit gets dirty it gets sticky gets covered in propolis which um stains your clothes you cannot get it out so you don't have to worry about ruining your clothes and having to wash this sticky clothing that you have on that maybe you're getting getting into your car and getting honey everywhere else you just take that suit off when you're done roll it up into a ball and um wash it when you get a chance but for those of you that maybe are starting to see how much getting started beekeeping is adding up a veil and just wearing an old pair of baggy jeans and an old long sleeve heavyweight shirt that you have or find at the thrift store is just as good as wearing the full suit and will save you quite a bit of money and finally of course when you get into beekeeping you're aware of the fact that you're going to be getting some honey and honey harvesting is not something you might be doing your first year with your bees you might but you might not a good way to tell how much honey you need to leave your bees over winter if you do have a cold winter is to not harvest any honey from your bees to make sure you calculate how much honey is on the hive before you close it up for winter and see how much is left in the spring and that will tell you how much the bees used uh that year and it'll give you a good idea of how much you should leave them the next year but if you maybe want to harvest just a little bit or for the years after your first year when you want to do some serious harvesting you have a couple of options you can buy an extractor which is a big metal cylinder it uses centrifugal force spins the frames really fast and causes the honey to fling out of the cells of honeycomb without the honeycomb being destroyed you put that back in the high the bees can refill it instead of having to rebuild all of that honeycomb extractors can get pricey you can find pretty cheap ones for two or three hundred dollars but then they get more and more expensive depending on if you want one that's a hand crank versus an electric extractor um but this is something i wouldn't buy before you have your bees buy this after you've been keeping bees for a year or two a lot of bee associations have an extractor and they have extraction days where their members can come use their extractor and so then you don't need to buy one it's a very large object to have to store in your house just for using it you know like one or two days out of the year and if you do have a little bit of honey and maybe you just have one bee hive a really good way to harvest honey that's super easy and cheap and fairly fast actually is a crush and strain method what you do is you take your honeycomb you put it in a flat container and squish it with a fork squish it with a fork the honey comes out of the comb then you pour that into a strainer a round strainer that fits over a five gallon bucket is what i recommend and then you buy a bucket that has a gate over it so you put the comb with the squished honey inside your strainer it drips into your bucket make sure this is closed when you put your honey in the strainer and then um when it's done straining you give it a few hours when it's done straining you use this to easily pour honey into your jars this bucket was twelve dollars a pretty pretty cheap item and you know the strainer is fairly inexpensive as well and a really fast and easy way to harvest a small amount of honey uh pretty fast without requiring a lot of equipment now you might uh be familiar with the flow hive or be considering purchasing a flow hive and a flow hive is elantra style beehive it's made of boxes with frames inside but one box has a different kind of frame than these wooden frames you would be seeing in the rest of your beehive and these frames take a key and it splits the comb so that honey can pour right out of the beehive without having to take the frame out and harvest it in your home everything else about the flow hive is the same as the langstroth style beehive you still have to open it you still have to check on it so if you're hoping to buy a flow hive and not have to learn too much about beekeeping or having to open the beehive sorry to say you're still going to have to open the beehive and check on your bees even if you have a flow hive and if you have trouble lifting heavy things it is really the only time i don't recommend that people buy the flow hive it does make harvesting honey easier and faster by far but it is incredibly heavy the flow high frames are over two pounds a piece you have eight frames in your box the box is made from a harder wood it's a deep box you're looking at over a 20 pound box before they even put honey in it versus one of these boxes is i think about 11. it's even for me and i'm in pretty good shape picking up a flow hive honey super is incredibly difficult and i actually avoid even checking the beehive because i hate picking up that super it gets really heavy so if you have difficulty lifting heavy things i do not recommend the flow hive but um otherwise the rest of the components are the same okay so next what you want to do is buy your bees and you want to order your bees from somewhere as local as possible there are places that will ship you bees do not do this please please please do not order your bees and have them mailed to you i know beekeepers who have had bees arrived dead half of them were dead they did not receive reimbursement for these dead hives the bees get really stressed out in this process so please do not do this what you want to do is buy them from a local farm now this farm might be driving down south and buying them from another local farm but at the very least this farm is taking bees that are put on a truck they're driven overnight to their location and you're picking them up which is way better than them going through the post office system i you have two different options when buying a beehive you can buy a package or a nuke spelled nuc short for nucleus hive and a package of bees is just a box with three pounds of bees and um one of them is a queen and a cage and the rest of them you just have thousands of worker bees in there and this is a fine way to buy bees but if you can buy a nuke a nuke is a mini beehive you're going to have three or four frames of baby bees you're going to have a healthy queen bee walking around laying eggs doing her thing and you're gonna have one or two frames of honey it comes in a box that is half the size of a lancaster style box and the frames are going to have honeycomb with bees all over them walking around doing stuff it um there's a lot less room for error when installing a nuke into your beehive there's no releasing your queen out of the cage and hoping that she stays in there and takes to the hive and that the bees take to the hive so if possible go with a nuke at the very least your first year it also um if you live in a place that has a shorter warm season uh maybe your winter starts and when it gets cold starts a little bit earlier in the year if you're in those northern states a nuke is incredibly helpful because the bees already have four frames of comb all drawn out they already have a full frame of honey you don't have to well you might not have to feed them to start because they should already have pollen and a frame of honey in the hive maybe later on in a few weeks you might have to add a feeder or a little bit of pollen but there's a lot less you have to do to start if you buy a package of bees you're just putting bees in an empty box they have to start to build combs so that the queen has somewhere to lay eggs they have to figure out where they're going to find food and start bringing it in it's um it's a lot for them and if you are bringing them to an area where there's already a lot of flowers blooming then great i mean if you live in hawaii and there's flowers where you are year-round package of bees is sufficient but for most of the world a nucleus hive will be so much better for you and give your bees a jump start to the season when you want to purchase your bees for the united states you're going to do that in january maybe as late as february but you do not want to hold off until like after mid-february to look into buying these so a lot of these farms do sell out beekeeping is becoming more and more popular hobby and so you really want to make sure that you have your bees you're on a list to get bees and if you can't find a place to buy them or even if you are finding some places online this is where a bee association really comes in handy or at the very least knowing some beekeepers nearby because this is where you want to just go to the facebook group associated with the beekeeping association and just ask or become a member of the association and if they're not having meetings send them an email or go to some of their meetings right now the associations almost all of them have zoom meetings and so you can just post in the comments which is super easy to do that you want to know where you can people recommend that you order bees expect to spend at least a hundred dollars on a package at least 150 on a new nukes are a little bit more expensive but i'd say it's better to spend that extra money for a nuke than to potentially have that hive not make it and then to have to buy a whole another one come the next year okay so you have your equipment it's on its way once it arrives assemble it and paint it make sure it has some time to air out you have your bees ordered they are scheduled to come on a certain day they may or may not come on that date this is mother nature so you're on her schedule she's not on yours keep that in mind the next thing you want to do is learn how the hive works you want to know what the queen bee looks like what the worker bee looks like what drones look like what signs of infestations look like what they do in the hive what is the queen doing what are the drones doing what are the worker bees doing you want to be able to be able to tell the difference between honey versus nectar you want to be able to tell the difference between a baby bee versus food you want to be able to tell the difference between an egg larva or pupa which are the three different stages that a bee goes through before she hatches baby bees they're called brood and male bees are called drones the queen is the mother of all these bees in the hive and there is most of the time just one but sometimes you'll see two usually just for a little bit of time before that situation gets figured out and she is the only one that is laying fertilized eggs but really you need to learn how the hive works and for this part you can learn this in a book youtube videos there's documentaries there's a lot of ways you can learn about bees we have a podcast called the buzz about bees where we talk about the bees in the hive um there there's a lot of ways you can learn about this and you don't have to know everything when it comes to bees but you need to know what worker bees do in the hive and you need to know you know how to tell the difference between what's going on in those frames and the hives so when you inspect the hive you know what you're looking at otherwise what's the point of inspecting a hive and we have in our free ebook that you can download and that link below the first day we send out the getting started guide the second day we send you the id guide the id guide has photos so that you can see a picture of the difference between an egg larva and pupa between a worker drone and queen and all those things that you can print it out put it in your book so that when you go check your hives you have all this stuff so you can refer back to it you don't have to have this all memorized you just have to have an idea of the differences and then have a way to be able to refer to it when you need to once you have your equipment and you have your bees and you install your bees into your hive then it's time to be a beekeeper and a big question is what what does the beekeeper do like when i'm opening the hive and pulling frames out what exactly am i doing well in the most basic sense i'm gonna take off your lid use a little smoke if needed if you see bees looking up at you or flying up at you if you hear the buzzing sound changing when you take the lid off and then once the smoke has been put in the hive look just a little bit over where you're going to start usually start with the first frame closest to you and you use your hive tool to get it out you don't want to just yank it out and break your frame or your box in the process you want to be gentle about it pull it away from the side pull it away from the frame next to it and then you can use the hook to pull it out now when you pull out these frames you're looking for stuff you're looking for signs of a healthy hive and you're looking for signs of a weak hive so we have a link to our inspection sheet and this is a guideline for you so week after week when you're opening your hive and checking on them it helps guide you so that you remember what to look for see we pull out this frame it's a frame of honey and it's good to keep track of how much food is in the hive so that you know if you need to give them some food i'm going to put this frame down on the ground clean it up against the hive and pull out the next frame now you're going to keep on pulling frames out of the hive and checking to see what's going on if you need to find the queen or in the first few months with your bees as you're learning how to find the queen before you even take off the lid remind yourself i want to find the queen and that is my number one thing watch your queen spotting video there's a link to it in the video description first thing when you pull out a frame take five seconds for each side of the frame look for your queen bee and then you can look for other things and when you see other things that you're uh on the frame you can write them down in your beehive inspection sheet now you do not want to pull out every single frame in your hive every single week you're first starting out your beehive is going to be very small it might just be a couple of frames or five frames so then yeah you pull out all five frames but once your beehive this one is three boxes tall i'm not going to pull out all 30 frames this upper most box is that shallow honey super looking right down in there i can see these five frames have honeycomb and some honey in them there's another five frames that are empty and i do not need to pull out every single frame in a honey super so once you're done looking in that box you can put that one frame you took out and put on the ground put it right back in this frame happened to have baby bees on it or the queen you do not want to leave it out you want to put it back in the hive just want to leave out a frame of honey or a frame that's empty or that has some kind of food on it out you do not want to leave a frame out with baby bees to get cooked in the sun you could damage them so once you're done looking in the uppermost box take your hive tool and you want to find a spot like a little gap that you can wedge your hive tool under the box and between that box and the box below it it helps to pry it up you'll hear a little bit of a noise when you know that you're starting to crack that propolis the hotter out it gets the stickier the propolis gets remember propolis is what bees gather from plants it's plants up very sticky high in antibacterial properties they're plugging up holes they're making it difficult for predators to get into the hive but they're also disinfecting their hive they line the cells with the baby bees with propolis they're essentially disinfecting that crib for that baby bee before the queen lays in it but for the beekeeper it is something that will stain your clothes and it is something that will make the beehive more difficult to open hence why you really need a hive tool and you should have a couple spare ones with you in case you lose this one but in a pinch flat head screwdriver can usually help so then you take the box off once you've got it unstuck go try out a few corners first to make sure it's unstuck pick the box up you're going to put it on the ground i like to put it on its side so that you don't squish the bees on the bottom you're going to do the same thing for the next box now if you want to you can pull out every single frame if you like once you're getting used to things but every single week it's not necessary to pull out every single frame you'll hear that the sound of the bees buzzing will get louder and louder as they are less and less okay with what you're up to you'll find that they are less and less okay with what you're up to the closer you get to the baby beets the baby bees is what they are really defending and they do not want the babies to be bothered that's why when you go through your checklist once you find all of the items in the checklist you don't have to keep on going through and looking at every single frame you see signs of a healthy queen you don't have to keep on looking for eggs you're good um you don't want to bother them too much it does take a while for the bees to recuperate from the beekeeper going in and always remember when you pull a frame out put it back in the way you found it try to avoid rearranging frames and swapping them around if they went in with the eggs facing this way and honey facing that way put them back in that way if you don't remember it's not the end of the world um you're not going to get alive but you want to try to leave the beehive the way that you found it unless you're changing the order of frames for a specific reason to help the bees accomplish something that you think that they're trying to do now of course as the beehive gets more full as these frames get filled you add another box and another box in another box until you're ready to harvest and then you take the honey supers off that's the basic week to week you go through the hive inspection see if there are problems you might see a problem and then you have to troubleshoot what to do about the problem and so sorry to say you have to take a class to learn how to troubleshoot problems or you need to shadow an experienced beekeeper for at least a few weeks or maybe one weekend a month for a few months um take an online class we have an online class you can take an in-person beekeeping class with one of your local associations or you can shadow a beekeeper for at least a handful of times but you really want to learn how to troubleshoot those problems the other thing you're going to have to learn to do is keep an eye out for pests we have a spot on inspection checklist for this you want to do a monthly mic test and we have the my test video like i mentioned down below so that you know how to make the test how to do the test and what the results mean and then if you have an infestation there are lots of treatments out there that you can use to help your bees that is another thing another big reason to take a class because there's quite a bit to dealing with mites to preventing infestations or at least keeping the infestation level not incredibly high and then there's certain treatments you want to use depending on the time of year the temperature outside and whether the bees are actively bringing in honey the other main pests you're gonna have to deal with a small hive beetle if you live in a state that gets cold long winters you might not even have small high fetal but if you live in warmer climates it's going to be a big problem just keep in mind that the small heart beetle for the most part is an opportunistic pest whereas the varroa mite can go into a hive and take a strong active hive and really weaken them small hive beetle will take a week high and diminish them so in the middle of summer your hive is active and strong and heavily populated you do not have to worry about small high beetle one you have to worry about small high beetle is when it's in the fall or early spring when your population is pretty low so he's mad at me and you have maybe a lot of honey on your hive and in those cases there are lots of traps you can use and so that is how you become a beekeeper if i could offer just like two bits of advice if there's not actually three okay three things three pieces of advice if there's nothing else that you do these are the three things i really hope you do one is you find somebody to talk to when you have your bees if you have problems now in our online class we offer mentorship so you can email or call or post comments and questions in the class and you can talk to us you could join a bee association or just you know if you know what beekeeper that you can actually call or contact when you have a question because um you're not going to know everything before you get started it's impossible i still don't know everything i was just talking to a beekeeper who's been doing it for 20 years she said she still comes across things she doesn't know what to do so it's just better to have somebody to at least ask hey have you seen this before and even if they haven't somebody that you can troubleshoot with second if you open your beehive and you don't know what to do don't do anything if you open your beehive and you think you might you should do something but you're not sure don't do anything if you are not positive that what you are about to do is going to help the hive don't do it you have to remember that ultimately the bees are in charge here and you can do a lot of harm trying to help because you think you need to do something and so it's really maybe the biggest mistakes beginners can make is intervening too much and doing things that actually do more harm than good third piece of advice is to take a beekeeping class our online class in-person classes whatever it is take a class or make sure that you have a mentor that will let you come out with their bees over the months and to learn everything not just once or twice because books and youtube videos will explain a lot but there are just certain things you need someone to tell you all the things you need to know in a course format otherwise there are questions you might not know you need to ask youtube and if you have a question youtube is great hey how do i prevent robbing a million youtube videos but how do i keep bees it's such a broad topic something that takes us over five hours to explain in our class it's not something that anyone can fully explain in a 20 30 minute one hour video much less the average youtube video was 11 minutes i had read you really need to take a class and if you're still with me here's my story i got started keeping bees because a friend of mine thought we should i knew absolutely nothing about bees i didn't know any beekeepers i took a five dollar class at the local rec center that taught me pretty much nothing even though i was there for two hours i read a million books but i made the mistake of trying to find the answers that i wanted not the best answer and so i didn't want to spend a lot of money so i built a top bar hive i regretted it almost immediately it was cheaper to build but i had a lot of time hard time finding information and a really hard time overwintering the bees my hive absconded which means all the bees left in a week so i was super excited told everybody i was going to be keeping bees the bees got there they stayed a week and they left and then every time someone asked me how are the bees i was like they're gone they're gone people would laugh because it did sound ridiculous like yeah they just took off um and so my second year i tried again i built a second topper hive i bought two packages of bees and i put them in they both stayed and i had a great time but i still just wasn't completely sure i knew what i was doing and that i was helping um i didn't treat for varroa mites the right times and i lost one of my hives to mites over the winter and the other hive starved to death and that's when i was actually going to give up because i was just over killing peace losing bees wasting a hundred dollars per package of bees and that's when i found out about an internship at a bee farm i was a graphic designer who worked from home and so i took this part-time job interning for a bee farm and learned from experienced beekeepers what to do and i learned a lot on my own but they were there to give me the basics there's things you really need to know those things they prevented me from doing that could cause a hive to collapse and that was crucial for me and so with our beekeeping classes and these youtube videos i really hope that i can prevent other people from having the same experience i did because i almost gave up i wasn't really enjoying it i was feeling stressed out and guilty and then once i had somebody to go to to talk to to ask questions it was a game changer and i really enjoyed it i fell in love with it i ended up working for another farm down the road for the next seven years with this commercial apiary starting my own apiary and now give beekeeping classes because if me who grew up in the city knowing nothing about bees hadn't even gone camping until i was 21 years old parents never took me hiking all my family are very much city people and i ended up figuring out how to keep bees starting my own apiary working for commercial apiaries and selling my honey to resorts and chefs at these five star restaurants you can do it too i lived in a studio apartment i had no yard i put the bees on a roof of a parking garage and i am so glad i did it and my life is definitely for the better because of it so that is my very rocky getting started story and your getting started story is probably going to be rocky too but i hope you stick to it and have somebody that you can talk to when you have problems because it will make getting started a lot more fun and better for your bees one last thing another recommendation you need to start with at least two hives easiest way to get started beekeeping is to have three though but to have the equipment for up to five and i know that it's going to be like oh that's a lot of money but in the wild a beehive has a one in three chance of surviving the year now as a beekeeper you can do some things to help increase their survival rate to maybe two out of three chance of surviving but not all hives are going to survive and you can't prevent every problem and you can't guarantee that a hive will survive people who have 50 hives and have been doing it for decades still lose bees and some of it is due to mistakes and some of it is just due to genetics and how the hive is and how good they are at defending the hive and dealing with pests and gathering honey and so if you start with one hive the odds are definitely against you that that hive is going to make it a year even if you were an experienced beekeeper the hives are against you the odds are against you if you start with two hives you have a much greater chance of one of those two hives surviving the year but what you're going to want to do is when the summertime comes and those hives are really full you're going to want to split them so that you have three hives go into winter with three hives chances that one of those three hives is going to survive come spring is considerably greater so you have you know just nature coming along you have the genetics of the bees you're just buying it bee hive and hoping it survives the year you are new and you could be making mistakes all of these things are kind of piling up against you and making the chances that your hive is going to survive your first couple years slim so the more hives you have going into winter the greater your chance that you will have one come spring and the reason why you want a beehive in the spring as opposed to buying a new beehive in the spring is for one the cost uh you buy two or three be hives your first year and never have to be buy a beehive again that's considerably cheaper than buying two one or two beehives your first year then another one or two b has your second year potentially another one or two b has your third year the other thing is is that you start with a few you figure out which ones are strong which ones are weak you help the strong ones and you start to build an ap area off of these strong bees when you have napierio strong bees that's when your bees are have a much greater chance of surviving the winter now you don't have to buy all of your packages you can try to collect swarms you can try to lure swarms you can put your name on a swarm removal list uh in your county or with your bee club and you can get more bees that way they don't have to be purchased but at the very least i would buy the equipment for three beehives so that [Music] at some point over the course of the year whether you're splitting bees catching swarms you have the room to accommodate three hives so that when you go into winter you'll have at least three hives with you and have a very good chance of at least one of them surviving into spring don't forget to download the freebie book and thanks for watching you can subscribe to our channel and get notified about all of our new beekeeping videos that come out we usually post one every single week bye

Channel: Beekeeping Made Simple

Views: 4,421

Rating: 4.8938055 out of 5

Keywords: how to keep bees, beekeeper, beekeeping, beekeeping for beginners, beekeeping equipment, langstroth beehive, honey bee, beekeeping in hawaii, intro to beekeeping, introduction to beekeeping, beekeeping near me, how to become a beekeeper, free beekeeping class

Id: YYf-9hq7ejU

Length: 44min 6sec (2646 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 18 2021