I killed the QUEEN to save the hive.

throw it off [Music] [Applause] can you get a smoker [Music] [Music] we gotta get a new one in there because she's mean you ready to go [Music] well a week or two ago we went out to our high we're at the wild swarm hive in the back of our property we caught this wild hive at our neighbor's property earlier this year it was on a tree branch and we brought them home and they were doing really well but a couple weeks ago we came out to get some honey to check on them and they were really aggressive like really aggressive so when you have an aggressive hive you've got a couple options you can euthanize or kill the entire hive eradicating it from from our farm so we don't have an issue with this aggression because when i even just drive by them with a mower or anything they immediately swarm me and that doesn't happen at my other hive we could let them be and just not bother them and just let them pollinate things but not be able to collect honey from them or we could take out the queen and put a new queen in we actually had a company lassen queen bees reached out to us and said they could replace our queen with an italian or carniolan queen and so we can actually go in remove the queen and put this queen in its place i'm not sure if it affects the mood of the current bees or just the offspring but either way will help make the hive calmer overall over time so the first job i've got to do before i put the new queen in is to find the old queen and once we find the old queen then we've got a killer because we've got to take her out of this scenario before we can bring a new queen in so they might accept the new queen the problem with this is that queens can be really hard to find and some hives that you get mailed to you a lot of times they'll put a dot on their back so you can easily identify them in this case being a wild swarm they probably don't have that i haven't seen one in here and so i'm gonna have to look for a couple specific details a queen is longer than all the other bees and it has shorter wings i've got to look for a couple key things maybe some other bees around this bee to be able to identify it that one's long but it's got long wings that's not it so this was my biggest fear is that we'd get all the way through looking at the frames and we wouldn't find the queen the first attempt was a bust went through every frame twice and we could not find the queen i want to get rid of these bees before i go back to the vehicle so i don't take them over to your ride so i'm gonna give them a break i think i'll wait till the morning and i'm gonna come back and try it again tomorrow see if i can figure it out then [Music] hey you got a cream leg bar there can you say cream leg bar clean weight leg bar these delawares are super friendly they just want to follow me around now where are we going guys where are we going look at this big guy he looks mean but he's a sweetie that one's a red shouldered yokohama red shoulder welcome hotter nailed it all right we're coming back for day two of trying to find this queen and we've got a second box over here we've been doing some research or some video watching over the past day to get some tips on uh better methods to find the queen and one of them was to move frames from one hive to another and you can actually hear the box without the queen will make a lot of noise well anyways we brought our one hive that's empty we brought it over here and actually has some comb in it but no bees and check it out [Music] it's actually got some wax moth infestation in it so i'm glad i was able to notice this before i ever had any bees move into this and so we're actually going to take this wax off and burn it because we don't want these wax moths to procreate or to take over any hive we have first we're going to take care of that and we'll find our queen all right so now our wax moth problem is free in here and so we're going to start to come over here we're going to remove frames we're going to work a lot more quickly than yesterday they're going to work their way towards the bottom they're going to work towards the dark the queen could have fallen on the bottom i'm not sure and then i'll start moving the frames over to here that'll be our last line of defense to find this queen is to figure out which hive doesn't have the queen we can start to do some process of elimination by their sound because they will get very aggressive and angry when they don't have a queen they'll be much calmer where they do so we'll try that as well [Music] [Music] there she is there she is oh you did find her oh my gosh there she is okay she's right there moving really fast long abdomen i get her i got her we got her the queen is right here there she is there's our queen no doubt about it with that that abdomen the short wings and then everybody's attention to her once we grabbed her all right well we've got our queen here i haven't been really careful holding her if you needed to keep a queen alive uh you're definitely supposed to be more gentle holding their abdomen but we've got a new queen to take her place and hopefully make this hive a little bit more calm [Music] so for the sake of saving the hive we are removing this queen from the hive and by doing that we've got to squish it it's always a little scary because of how important a queen is to a hive this hive could ultimately not accept the new queen and if that's the case the hive will end up dying out or they'll try to produce a new queen so the lassen queen bee company was nice enough to send us this queen and now after three days of traveling and then a day of waiting until we found the queen we're not gonna see if this queen is still alive and open it up wow that's cool so they are all hanging out with this queen here our new queen is right in here does she have a daughter or anything [Music] she's still alive she's still alive these guys mark queens by request this one is not marked i didn't know that they would do that but we can always go back and do that if we do the same process and find her again in here in the hive we could always put a dot on her back so we can mark our queen i think they include this piece of metal so i can hang it somewhere by a frame usually they have like a sugar cork that they can work their way to chew to get to the queen this is a a wooden cork here i'm not sure if they're gonna be able to chew their way through that or not we're gonna take this over and we're gonna hang this on a frame we're gonna put it back into the hive and then we'll check on them in a day or two and see how they're doing with their new queen i don't know where to oh gosh oh i gotta be in this i'm gonna be in the thing i'm wearing yours yeah i you have them all over your head throw it off real quick [Music] [Music] hmm [Music] can we get a smoker okay so we cut it so they don't know what happened so they just think that everything went really smooth and we just got the queen switched out and nobody stung me i explained your face uh do you think they can tell just a little bit well i don't want to have to tell them about it so i got i got eight bee stings and i just got a ninth here a day later so i got one here this was the scary one because i thought that was on my eyeball and it's somewhere like right and right there real close number three right in the middle number four by the ear number five on the neck uh number six was like a couple of them felt like on the top of the head seven was on this side of the neck and then eight is right here on my wrist wrist is swelling up and then i just got number nine here on my forehead because i just came back here and yeah it just came and i thought we were good and came right at me and stung my forehead oh my goodness yeah the face is a little ridiculous so i thought i could deal with one probably letting it sting me but three i didn't know how many were in here and so at that point i kind of panicked and decided to throw the mask off i think it was after it almost stung your eye it was right around the eye and i decided to throw this off because it had just stung right around the eye threw it off and then they all swarmed the back of my head i tried to cover my face but i got this one and that one right around the same stinging all over and there wasn't much i could do at that point except for to take it so [Music] that gotta got a little out of hand but let's go find a queen get zipped up don't let bees get in your suit that's my advice for this video but i want to point out i didn't get a single sting so it must mean just jake and we washed the suit so we wouldn't have any pheromones or anything on it so it should be okay even though we just got stung again so you're out oh no what she did i think she's dead so her queen was in there could almost get out but it died i'll see what i can do to get a new queen so we can try to save this hive they'll have some brood for a while to hatch out but without a queen they'll have no way to keep growing so about to get a new queen the girls got the big water [Music] so lassen queen bee company was able to get me another queen out today and we're going to try this again they did say that there is a sugar cube to use actually inside this that i'm supposed to plug up inside that hole they just i didn't know about it this time we're going to get it right ironically enough there's no sugar cube in this one not sure what happened to it the bees already ate it or what but i think there's ones on the old packet here's the pack that came with the first queen so we can use that one it's a big cylinder that's got sugar right down the middle so what i need to do is try to take that cork out and then get the new cork in all without letting the queen out so i got the cork actually pushed into there i can get this cork right in the end now she's in there with the cork and now we can take it over to the hot and that'll give her some time to eat through the sugar on the way out and the bees can get to know her and try to get into her all right so you're ready to hear how it ended we moved the queen in and after a day the queen was able to eat through the sugar cube we tried to look for and the bees were still upset at me i got stung three more times they found another little gas i'm wearing my zipper to get through the next day we went looking for her and it looks like she's there but they also have some queen cells started hopefully they have accepted her and they don't try to grow a new queen meanwhile at our other hive in the aviary we went and collected some honey we took one frame of honey that was pretty well capped and becky scraped the wax to drain the honey all right time to harvest [Music] so [Music] all right so we built a little device right here to hold our honey and let it drain and so it's just uh 30 inches tall 16 inches wide and then we put some screws with rubber bands so it'll hold it up here allow it to drain so we don't have to sit here and hold it and then soon as that's done then we'll be able to pour that into some jars how's the honey taste really yummy [Music] and the best part when the honey is harvested you get to like the ball ah

Channel: White House on the Hill

Views: 9,431,063

Rating: 4.8780932 out of 5

Keywords: White House on the Hill, queen bee, dangerous bees, Lassen Queen Bee, exterminating bees

Id: DXuzQkXVKXI

Length: 15min 56sec (956 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 06 2020