How To Start Beekeeping And Avoid Common Mishaps

and i noticed this in front of the hive i'm gonna see if you can guess what it is i know what it is i mean it just snowed finished snowing last night so this is all new stuff this morning do you know what that is i bet you can guess i'm going to give you a clue those of you that are good trackers will know exactly what this is and let's walk all the way over here and look at this so you might say that perhaps this is bees making this but it's not no well now i'm inside where it's warm and my ham radio shack much warmer in here couldn't stay out there below zero i think it was one below and snowy and uh if you're anywhere probably in the midsection even in the south in the u.s you're noticing the same problem i'm having too cold outside to be out there hi i'm david burns eas certified master beekeeper good to be with you for another video today i want to talk about first what are those funny markings in the snow around my hives i want to talk and kind of show you that i'll go back out there and show you what i'm looking at and see if you can guess what's causing it kind of a mystery huh and then i want to talk about how you can avoid the mishaps of beekeeping this time of the year i'm getting so many emails so many phone calls from people around the us that are really worried about their bees this winter since it's so cold outside this cold blast the snow this ice everybody is freaking out about their bees and asking what they can do and so i thought i'd just go ahead and tell you i want to answer that not so much as to what you can do because i've answered that many times before about getting your bees ready for winter but i want to answer why are people asking those kind of questions and uh and i think it's because a lot of people maybe don't have a totally good grip on understanding beekeeping ahead of time so i'll answer that we'll talk about how to avoid the mishaps of beekeeping and one big mishap is just not having your bees ready for winter getting hit with cold winters and then worrying about worrying about your bees are they going to be okay but before we get into all of that let's head out there and let me show you something that's going on in front of my hives so you might say that perhaps this is bees making this but it's not it's birds that are eating bees that are at the end of their life and fly out and die it's not an uncommon thing to see in the time we suspect these bees know they're at the end of their lives and they just fly out and die and you can see some of them out here like right here so the birds are coming and eating up these dead bees that are just out here interesting huh yeah so you'll see bees do that in the winter time i don't really see any bees not coming out much today not yet anyway at this cold temperature i see some right at the entrance here not coming out though back in here where it's warm again wow i want to talk about the mishaps of beekeeping how to avoid those there's a lot of things about beekeeping that is kind of made to sound easy and made to look easy and i admit that i probably make beekeeping look very easy on my videos and it's because i'm experienced i've done it for a long time and so for me it's comfortable i enjoy doing it and i'm not frustrated i'm not worried i'm not freaking out because i i have a lot of experience under my belt and i'm not saying that to brag i'm just saying that i don't want to mislead you as a new beginner if you are new to think why isn't it so easy for me it seems to be easy for him well it wasn't easy for me at all when i first started i was freaked out i was like oh my gosh what am i supposed to be doing now that it's so cold outside what mistakes in fact when i first started there weren't a lot of books and classes available certainly not like there are now and i didn't have a mentor i didn't have anybody to go to much to say oh my gosh i don't know what to do next so i just had to fumble my way through it and i made a lot of mistakes and those mistakes sometimes were financially costly losing a lot of hives or losing you know a lot of packages installing them too early losing bees in the winter because i didn't know how to prepare the bees for winter all of that it just took me a lot of years to understand that and it's frustrating because you know they're bees it's not like you buy some an inanimate object and all at once let's say you bought an expensive um you know coffee cup or a china cup or something that's beautiful and you drop it and you break it okay you're out 50 bucks or however much it costs you get over it but something about a living organism like a pet like your bees have become you know important to you because they're living and you don't want them to die certainly not under your watch and so you're a little more easily freaked out and worried about something that's alive it's like a pet i i get that i totally understand that and so this is going to sound like uh it's redundant but i cannot stress enough of how important it is that we are well educated before we start beekeeping it is not as easy as it looks there are very very a ton of challenges it's very challenging to keep bees now it's fun it is a hoot and it is enjoyable but if you're the kind of person that can't take a loss if you're the kind of person that is going to be really worried about your bees the entire winter then you're the kind of person that really needs to do a lot of training take a lot of education before you jump into beekeeping or else you're just kind of guessing your way through it and you're gonna you're gonna have some mishaps along the way that could have easily been avoided now i mentor about 200 people around the u.s and it's in a program called be team six that i created and these people can call me or email me anytime they want to on my cell phone they can email me personally because i don't answer my own email my staff answers my email and they decide uh what emails should come to me that's how it normally works but for my mentorship program these uh b team six members actually can call my personal cell phone and i'm the one that answers and says hello what's the problem and it has been very helpful i've ran it for several years now and people have really enjoyed having somebody on the other end to answer those questions but that aside it's um difficult to know what to do sometimes and you know we don't always like to ask for help either and that's why it's important that you really become well educated in keeping bees now before you shut down the video thinking oh no you know here he is just telling me i need to get smarter i need to do more i need to do more research you know you can research stuff all day long you can research beekeeping all day long you can watch a million videos but you're just watching uh pieces of video you may watch somebody install a package you may watch somebody on a video i don't know mark a queen you may watch somebody harvest honey right you may watch another video by another beekeeper so the way this is kind of complicated is you may watch a beekeeper do an inspection of a commercial hive way out west in commercial pollination yards or you may watch another individual a hobbyist inspect a hive in the deep south of florida or you may watch another person inspect a hive way up north in canada and you may get all these variations of how to inspect a hive and you're you're seeing what's represented on youtube is a lot of variety of different types of approaches based on where they live and what their operation is made of and how they particularly have to do it based on whether they do it full time whether they're commercial beekeeper are there a hobbyist doing it in their backyard when they have a spare minute so you'll get a lot of different opinions by watching all of these kind of if i can use this word pot shoddy videos and if that's your training your training is kind of pot shotty it's kind of just a piece of this a piece of that a piece of this um so that's not how you learn to drive that's not how you learn to uh fly an airplane that's not how you learn to do surgery you don't just grab pieces of information from various people with various ideas and then try to sew them all together and be successful you've got to have a particular start to finish proven beekeeping program that's established to take you from the beginning to the end and cover all the bases in between and steps like if you learn this much you need to learn this much more and this much more that's how you become a beekeeper and when you do it that way you're not worried about your bees in the wintertime because you know exactly what you needed to do to prepare them for winter and you did it there's nothing more you can do i mean you can still worry and think okay you know you can do everything you want to with your own personal health and you can still die from an unknown disease or from covid unexpectedly just pass out right and die i'm not saying that everything is perfect when you do everything perfect but with bees there are so many things we can do and the majority of mishaps that happen with new beginners could have been avoided and it's only because they didn't take the time to really invest in a good solid way of being trained or taught how to keep bees now some people ask me questions because they've taken classes here and there you know back before covet hit people were taking classes at their i don't know their local clubs or their colleges universities around the country but they would still ask me questions and uh some of these courses i felt like uh left some of these students wondering like did they did they even talk about that now it could be that they did and the student just had to go to the bathroom and miss that section or they weren't paying attention or they forgot about it after it was taught but i have had some students tell me that courses they took never address key subjects about beekeeping and that was really disappointing to for me to learn about that and i'm not being critical of other uh teachers or other courses but i'm saying if you can't teach the fundamentals of varroa mic control and and how to properly use the uh chemicals or chemical free approach to keep mite levels down if you don't use that in a training course that's the number one reason bees die in the winter so if you don't give your students hands-on information as to how to prepare for that how to evaluate it how to test it what to do with your test results what chemical agents are non-chemical approaches to use for the veromite your students are destined to fail because those mites are going to spread viruses that will just weaken the hive so much in the wintertime that cold air and cold you know temperatures will cause those bees to perish so there's a not just mites i mean don't think that mic control is the only thing you need to learn if you learn that then bees will be great that's not true either you you need to learn so many key things about bees before you start so this video really is geared toward those of you that are scratching your head thinking i want to start keeping bees i've watched a few videos i read a book or two and my wife and i published a book last year but the book that we publish is a book to help you get motivated to start it's not a complete book to take you all the way through from start to finish because it would have to be this thick and most people wouldn't make their way through it it's a it's a primer to help you kind of prime the pump to get you interested in beekeeping but after that you really need to focus on some courses that you can take about how to get your bees through the winter what to do with your bees in the spring a lot of you hopefully will find your bees doing very well after this cold blast passes but then you're left with this gigantic hive in the spring and you don't know what to do it's your first year do you split are they going to swarm i got news for you they will swarm if it's a nice healthy colony that is natural reproductive tendencies instincts and your bees will swarm you're going to lose half of them you're gonna it's gonna make your bees half the size after they swarm and they won't have a queen after they swarm they'll be raising their own queen therefore the new queen will be once she emerges to be a virgin queen she's gotta go out one time take a mating flight fly amongst birds that are hungry to eat bees dragonflies that love to eat bees she's gonna fly a mile and a half away to a drone congregation area mate with 20 or 40 drones and fly back to her exact hive being mated and be your new queen seven percent i heard once that seven percent of virgin queens don't make it back they get lost in a thunderstorm high winds eaten by a bird dragonfly other insects get them or they just lose their way home flying to the wrong hive and the bees will kill her because she's in a the wrong hive so anyway there's there's just a lot of things that goes on even in the in the spring that can happen that you make it through the winter and you think oh everything's gonna be great now plenty of plenty of hives have problems uh re-queening getting queens going in the spring so it's important that like i said you have a beginning class and takes you all the way through it i think here are the things that you need to learn and to know to avoid the common mishaps need to take a solid beekeeping beginners course a beginner course should tell you about the honeybee anatomy should tell you the basic uh parts of a honeybee it should tell you the anatomy of the hive of the of the actual colony of the group of bees you need to know the anatomy of the bees at the single organism of the actual colony how do they work how do they what are their functions how do they raise queens how do they provide food how do they defend the hive what are their swarming tendencies when do they swarm how often do they swarm what do i do if they swarm you need to know the anatomy of the single bee and the anatomy of the colony those two things are essential as well you need to know a really good basic hive anatomy and i mean the wooden wear i mean you need to know everything from bottom boards or screen bottom boards better do you need to take might test off the slide in boards sticky boards on the bottom are those necessary which is better solid bottom board screen bottom board you need to know about the hive components a deep box a medium box a a deep brood box a super an illinois super you need to know about the frames the wooden the wooden frames plastic frames you need to know about the foundation what's the proper way of of judging which foundation is going to be best for you plastic foundation all wax foundation and then you need to know about um not just the equipment but the equipment that you need to operate that hive like smoker hive tool hat and a veil protective gear harvesting equipment that you need to purchase and just add all that together about what is involved with the equipment of operating the bees and the hive and maintaining that colony you need to know about positioning where do i face it which direction is going to be best for the winter or for the summer do i need to keep them in the shade do i need to keep them in the sun i need to keep them in the shade so they don't overheat right you need to keep them in the sun so that you don't have an invasion of small high beetle but if you put them in the sun they might be too hot and the wax might melt so how do i keep my hive cool on really hot days and see these are things i'm just giving you a kind of a repertoire of all of these things that are important for you to know as a beekeeper before you start keeping bees or certainly learning as you go along if you have a plan to start and keep learning i'm okay with that that's fine i get that get started learn along the way that's not a bad idea but you need to know other things like what do i do in the summertime how do i give enough supers to allow my bees to start putting enough honey on board when do i put a queen excluder on how do i use this queen a queen excluder where do i put it do i need a queen excluder somebody said it's a honey excluder that it keeps honey from being brought in through the worker bees because they don't like struggling through those small screens on the queen excluder so should i use that or not tons of questions related just to supering a hive in the spring how many supers one three five you know how many super frames should i have some people say i should have eight frames of honey super so they break them out wider some people say 10 because you have more cells you know it just goes on i'm just throwing all this at you once just to let you know that there are a lot of things to know about beekeeping now we haven't even touched on the most essential things of beekeeping how do i evaluate a hive how do i inspect it when i inspect what am i looking for um how do i know how to measure the queen's ability to lay well how do i judge her brood pattern is it spotty is it a solid brood pattern what does that even mean how do i evaluate that i could have a bad queen and the whole colony can be gone in 30 to 60 days because my queen just can't lay enough eggs and all the bees die every 30 days so pretty soon my hive's gone how do i control the pest and diseases varroa mite small high beetle infestation american foul brood a very contagious disease where your whole hive has to be burned to the ground european foul brood that attacks the developing uh brood in the hive and is very contagious as well wax moths just keeping mice out of the hive and then how do i deal with queens if i don't if my hive doesn't replace their queen naturally where do i buy a queen how do i introduce a new queen for them because without a queen they don't have any brood production they need lots of bees and then you get into fall where how do i keep my bees building up when the nectar flow starts i don't know how to feed them what do i feed them one to one two to one do i add protein do i not add protein do i feed on pollen patties or not ball and patties seem to attract a lot of small high beetles is that a good idea then you get into winter like oh my gosh how do i feed bees in the wintertime do i wrap do i not wrap close the bottom board leave the bottom board open i don't know how to feed them i don't know what to do with the dead bees that are being pushed out of the hive is that a good sign is that a bad sign on and on goes the list these can all be handled if you take a beekeeping course you these are all answered in courses that you take now i understand that it seems overwhelming and like anything whether it's a the sport of fishing whether it's a an athletic sport it takes a while to learn all the ins and outs the rules the nuances how to do it beekeeping's the same way so you got to set your mind on starting with the basics and work your way through various classes that can really help you become a good solid well-educated well-knowledgeable beekeeper now we have online courses that you can take from the comfort of your home you don't have to worry about the covid 19 pandemic contagious environment of a lot of people around you that you don't know if they have it if they're you know it's kind of iffy whether or not you can catch it by being in crowds with other people having to wear a mask and travel these online classes that we have produced years ago are available you watch them me teaching you from the comfort of your home and it's um you might think oh there it is he's pitching his sales of his classes again i assure you i'm i'm not so motivated about sales as i am about helping you really understand beekeeping because most of the mistakes i made you can avoid because i made them i'm going to tell you how to avoid those mistakes you can't avoid everything that could happen but at least gives you enough background information to make a solid approach to beekeeping so that you can be like me right now i'm not worried about my hives going through winter if you want me to we can walk out there now i can actually lift up my winter be kind and you can see that my bees made it through 20 below temperatures and heavy snow and all that bad stuff that we had because i knew what i was doing because i applied what i learned and i applied it to my hives and my hives aren't going to die in the winter in fact let's go out there let me just stop what i'm doing here and we're going to go out there and lift up a winter be kind and i'll show you what the bees are doing right now all right well it's february 17th we've had our big snows and uh you can see we got huge icicles a few days ago we were filming my bees the birds were out here eating up some of these bees that fly out and you'll see a little bit of that all the time they'll fly up get caught in the snow this is so common um so i'm going to open this winter be kind up and show you that these bees are going to be up there eating the candy and you'll be able to see that the cold weather did not affect them at all you see them hanging there eating are you convinced pretty cool isn't it see the winter cluster moving the top of it all right all right so we're back and you saw what the hive is doing so i don't have to worry about it i know how to feed them i know that i did the right things in the fall to help them make a lot of bees of winter physiology which is another method that i teach bees of winter physiology live four to six months instead of a summer bee that only lives about 30 to 40 days so i know i have plenty of food with the winter be kind on there i'll keep monitoring that to make sure they have plenty of resources and i know my my levels were low i monitor those all year long i did the right things that's a hive that's not even wrapped and it went through that horrendous cold snap that we had here in the plains where it's windy in central illinois anyway my point is i'm not worried about it i'm not freaking out it's okay i i know that i did the right things because i applied my education my knowledge to the bees and uh they're gonna be fine because i know how to manage the bees and i i teach all of these things now look i'm going to make last year in 2020 the horrible year of 2020. we'll never forget 2020. we started offering our courses our online beekeeping courses at 50 off somewhere around march or april i can't remember but we held them there for several months in order to help beekeepers who were planning on taking on-site classes at their clubs or at universities colleges and it was all cancelled because of social distancing uh people were not able to take courses to help with that we offered our courses at 50 off and that's a chunk that's that's a lot because we only make our living off of bees off of our classes and things that we do for the beekeeping community and so we need to make a living and so it took a little bit of bite out of the income of offering those 50 off but it was the right thing to do we felt it was a good and right thing to do well the pandemic really isn't up much better this time around and so we feel like that beekeepers are having a hard time finding the right places to go and impossible in many cases to take classes at clubs or colleges universities uh as it was before covet and so what we've decided to do once again is we are going to start offering these courses at 50 off all the courses will be offered 50 off we're going to start on february the 18th 2021 so i realized that this video is is seen by a lot of you as soon as it comes out others may watch this five years in the future i i know but i'm just time stamping it a little bit for those that may watch it in the next few days we decided on february the 18th 2021 gonna go 50 on the beekeeping online courses and we're going to run it through the the start of the beekeeping season that we feel is february march and april so all the way until april the 18th we're going to offer 50 off of these courses we hope this is our way of letting you know that it's important to us that you can be educated that you can have the knowledge you can experience what i've experienced you can tap into my knowledge and you can apply these things to your bees i'm an eas certified master beekeeper by the eastern aquacultural society of north america that originated in cornell university uh with roger morse a well-known beekeeper endemologist and that continues to this day and so you're getting good information and i i'm proud of what i've done over the years to gain a lot of information to share with you i'm not just giving you folklore i'm not just giving you my thoughts or my ideas we're looking at real good scientific facts that helps you really know how to keep your bees through the winter how to grow them in the summer and and so forth so anyway i hope that would be helpful to you and some of you have taken all my courses i appreciate that and if you uh don't have any more that you can take do consider being a part of my mentoring program my coaching beekeeping coaching program for less than five dollars a week you can be on the other end of my cell phone send me an email personally and ask me for advice about what's happening with your bees and if this is right or wrong what's the next step and so forth so consider b team six i'll leave links to my classes in my mentoring ship program in the description down below okay so be sure to click on the subscribe button down below and the bell as well so you'll be notified each time i make a new video i really do appreciate you subscribing to this beekeeping channel and by all means please be safe please stay warm stay healthy and i'll see you next time

Channel: David Burns

Views: 8,101

Rating: 4.71875 out of 5

Keywords: Beekeeping, how to start beekeeping, beekeeping classes, beekeeping mistakes, small hive beetles, varroa mites, bee swarms, david burns, winter-bee-kinds, feeding bees in the winter, supers on a bee hive

Id: 2wP2mAkrC_A

Length: 30min 16sec (1816 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 18 2021