Installing Bees a Different Way

[Music] uh [Music] uh [Music] uh so [Music] so guys welcome back uh today we're going to get ready to install some packages of bees we're going to pick them up tomorrow and you might be thinking well why in the world are you even buying packages of bees when you've got all these hives you could just split the hives and make and save a whole lot of money well a few weeks ago a friend texted me and said hey i just bought some beehives some packages of bees and i'm just not able to deal with them this year do you want them and i said sure i'll take them so he sold them to me and now we're going to get ready to install them tomorrow so what we need to do is take those concrete blocks that you just saw me loading up and transporting and what we need to do is make three nice level foundations for three more hives to go on i've already got one set already out here that's just sitting there ready to go from a dead out that happened a while back so all we need to do is make three more spots to put these hives and we should be good so i'll show you how i do that and we'll get ready to get those packages tomorrow so guys bear with me this morning i had to switch to the internal mic on my camera because my lapel mic is having some issues so what we're going to do is and there's nothing fancy about this at all these are just concrete blocks that i had lying around these particular blocks were left over from when my parents built their house and that was like 15 years ago but concrete blocks are relatively cheap and i like to use concrete blocks because they're not expensive they last forever and they do a perfectly fine job of being a foundation for a beehive that's kind of why i like to use concrete blocks and what i like to do since i've got the space i'll take these and i'll space them seven feet apart and that just gives me space to work between the hives to put down boxes and stuff like that when i'm expecting the hives and stuff this gives me a lot more space to work that's kind of how i like to do it so let's measure seven feet between these two hives and start putting our blocks down and of course you want to make sure your spacing between the two blocks is right otherwise the foundation of your hive just will not sit in the right place so what we'll do is we'll just measure what we have here from the outside of one block to the outside of another block and we got 22 inches so we'll make sure the outside to outside of our new blocks are 22 inches apart so we managed to land right back in the middle of a fire ant bed so i'll have to come back out here and deal with this later but let's just shovel this ant bed out of the way so we don't have to deal with it right now but this actually works out pretty good because what we need to do we don't want to set it directly on top of the grass necessarily and this bed goes deeper than i thought we don't want to set it on top of the grass necessarily we want to have a foundation on the dirt so what we'll do is that right there and we're nowhere near done but we'll just kind of get a rough we'll do this one also and then we'll just kind of get a rough uh level on them and see how it is all right so we're going to call this one complete this doesn't have to be absolutely perfect but it does need to be really close it's just like everything else in life if you don't have a good you don't have a good foundation it's not going to go that good for you so basically you need to take extra time on this foundation just to make sure the rest of the hive is able to function properly so basically what you need is several different planes of this being level this needs to be pretty darn close which it is we're only about a sixteenth of a bubble out back to back needs to be right and that's dead on this right here of course needs to be right and we have a slight angle towards the front of the hive which is good and this one needs to be ants the same way so we've got it on this one like i said it doesn't have to be absolutely perfect but you do need to get close but the reason that it needs to be level and it's not super super important if you're using foundation like i do but there are times when i might want to use foundationless frames to make comb honey or some other reason and you have to have a level foundation to make that work if you don't what they'll do is they'll build the frame they'll build the comb with gravity so your frame might be sitting like this and your comb is going to be off to the side like this so you have to have these a level foundation for any of this to work right so guys that is going to do it for laying these foundations it took about an hour and a half to get these three foundations down plus i had to do a little bit of stuff with that one to make it better as well but we are ready i need to get my wooden wear together and make some frames up and a couple of bottom boards and we'll be ready for tomorrow so uh yeah i guess i will see y'all then are you helping looks good to me [Music] good job thank you thank you for your help where are we going we're gonna go get bees we're gonna go get bees all right who's going with us is she going with us what time are we supposed to leave eight o'clock right on time cause it's fun so what was that thing you were telling me yesterday about a new extractor go ahead and get one no you told me what did you tell me about it it was worth it no you told me something else what'd i say oh he's gonna run to the street hang on i said you're worth it no you said i deserve it you deserve it [Music] that one's doing the waggle dance see them shaking they shake then they walk around in a circle and they shake again which one's your favorite yeah you show me your favorite me that one's your favorite beer he's following the same one too he keeps pointing at the exact same one it's that one right there that's your favorite b b right there hey he's trying to get the stragglers out from around the packages so they're not loose in the car that's what happened last time yeah there was a couple of loose dragons got some stragglers i can't believe you just stuck his hand back here [Music] so guys we successfully made it back to the house with our bees and what we're going to do now is install them and ordinarily what i do is i just take these packages and do the traditional pull a couple frames shake all the bees in with the queen in there i will put the queen cage in there first of course then dump all the bees around that and uh plug them up for a while come back the next day unplug them and uh and you're good but today i'm going to try something just a little bit different i don't remember where i saw it years and years ago i saw a picture of somebody installing bees with a sheet in front of the hive and basically i think what happened was they put the sheet in front of the hive put the queen in the box dumped the bees on that sheet and they just all kind of walked in so i was researching it last night and trying to figure out where i found that and i came across barnyard bees of course he's got a huge huge youtube channel where he does his honeybees and he was doing basically the same thing he just put the queen in the box dumped about three packages in front of the hive and they all just marched in so i'm going to give that a shot on this very first hive since i don't have a sheet or anything and since this one is pretty high off the ground i'm just going to use a poster board i'm going to take this empty hive body right here i'm going to kind of make a ramp for them you know nothing real fancy i may have to cut this down some but nothing real fancy now we've got a little ramp there and now i'm just going to take the boxes apart put the queen down in there and dump the bees on the front and see what happens all right so the first thing we'll do here is get these bees wet down pretty good with some sugar syrup and basically what this does is that it prevents them from flying away it gets their wings wet down really good and they will not be able to fly away so easily and it gives them a little snack too of course all right let's see if we can get our queen out of here so your queen is going to be attached to this right here and the challenge now is to get our sugar syrup can out oh that wasn't too bad actually and we don't want to release a whole lot of bees here of course all we want is the queen it's really really bright out here i hope you all can see her let's get some of these out of the way there she is a little white dot on her back she's marked so now what we'll do is open our hive up and put our queen cage down on one of these bottom or between one of these bottom frames so we have to remove the cork before we do this and basically what we have here is a cork on one end and we have a cork on the other end and this cork right here is what has to be removed that cork is covering up some fondant basically a sugar cake soft sugar cake and what we'll do is we'll find something to poke a hole through that and the bees will eat through that and release the queen all right so i found something to get through there i poked a hole in that fondant and that'll help them release the queen a little bit quicker we'll just hang her right there and let's dump our bees and see what happens all right so i doused them again real good with this sugar water and let's give it a try i don't want this to collapse so let me make sure this is positioned well enough and i don't think it is i don't feel good about that hang on just a second guys all right guys i think we're good now let's try it um so [Music] all right guys so we're just going to watch and see what they do i uh the weight of these bees pushed down this part of the poster board and caused that portion oops excuse me this that portion to flip up so i had to find some weight to stick to stick there just to open the entrance up so that's what that's all about so let's go ahead and install the other three packages and we'll just do that the traditional way and we'll come back to these and see how they're doing so um check up on these really quick they are beginning to go in you can see right there you can see they're all kind of facing the same direction and they're starting to march so yeah i think we're going to be good here let's install a couple more so so guys these bees i don't know if they're supposed to do this faster or if i'm just being impatient but they really don't seem to be going in like i had wanted them to let's look inside and see what they're doing i think they're going in very slowly there's a lot of them gathered around the queen down there it's kind of interesting here it looks like they're trying to go in between the two boxes i think i'm going to put a stick between there and make a little gap for them my phone fell so i just removed it and what they have now is that crack right there to get into and uh i don't know i'm not so sure about this they're going in it i mean i believe it does work they are going in but i don't know i think it may just be easier to dump them in you know there's a lot of things that are tried and true that have been done and tested for decades if not centuries and i think installing b packages the old traditional way is one of them we try to reinvent the wheel like this and that's just may not hurt anything but i mean why try to i try to reinvent the wheel right they're going in y'all can see down in there it's hard to see with this sunlight but they are going in they're just doing it awfully slow i'm going to leave them and uh quit harassing them come back and check on them later i hope that this is going to show up i just really wanted you all to see the volume of bees coming out of these boxes just amazing all right guys it's been about 20 minutes since we left these and they are moving from the bottom here up to this front of this hive and scooting in so i think we're going to be okay i think i'm just kind of being impatient we do see quite a few right here bearding on the side of this poster board but i think we're going to be okay i think they're gonna go in there and see but we're off to church right now when we come home i will check on these again so that'll give these bees about three hours no probably four hours actually so we'll check on them then all right guys so it is 8 45 it has been what four hours and something bad to do math on camera and it looks like it's like it worked they are in there you can see right there they are in there and uh of course a few dead ones that's that's normal so we'll go ahead and just take this off take all this junk out of the way and uh i'd like to take this stick out as well but i don't want to smash any of these things that light's probably not helping them go back in let me keep the camera down and see if i can do this all right so we got the stick out and we can see that these bees are in this package i'm sorry in this hive and they're doing their thing so it looks like that was a success we'll come back in the morning and check them out again all right so it is the next day at it's 1 pm and i am happy to report that these bees it looks like they have taken to their new places of residence and are going in and out and just kind of doing their thing some activity in front of that hive let's take the lid off of this one and check the uh sugar syrup so that was full when i put it on there yesterday you can see they are going through it so that's good they're working on that and i should be building out comb they've also got a lot of nectar sources out there right now but i will keep them fed until they get a little better established i don't know if the queen has been released yet or not i don't want to harass them uh just to see that so we're going to leave them alone and eventually i'll take this hive body off of the top here this was just just to kind of use as a funnel and also to be able to get a feeder in there but i'll take this off eventually and move that boardman feeder to the front so these boardman feeders these hive entrance feeders they kind of get a bad reputation and it's really not for the worst reason these feeders can incite robbing uh i don't have never had really huge problems with that because when i put these on i'll do an entrance reducer as well that kind of takes care of the problem but right now that's not going to be an issue anyway because there's a nectar flow going on and uh they're gonna be too busy getting nectar from natural sources that they're just not gonna they're not gonna bother with uh with a feeder like this on the front of another hive see i say stuff like that and then i second guess myself and get nervous that maybe i'm wrong so we will go ahead and reduce this entrance just for safety's sake so i wanted to walk down this road and let you all take a look at the rest of my hives here we've got some right here on this hive bearding down on the bottom board but so far this has been a most successful year so far my most successful spring and i'll tell you what i attribute it to here in a minute but i had no winter dead outs this year i had zero winter losses and once the spring came around they just started building up like gang busters i mean they just really went nuts on the uh on the winter i'm sorry the spring buildup and uh i attribute it to a different treatment that i started using last year this is obviously nothing new but i started using oxalic acid last year and i did that for my fall treatment and it really produced a lot of really really clean pest free hives and that's the first time that i had really used it with uh with any seriousness i guess you could say this hive is the only weak hive i've got i think the queen is getting old in fact i know she is but i really attribute it to that and uh this is a swarm that we got a few weeks ago they're doing pretty good that's a new package that one right there is a split from last year so guys one more thing before i go this is the hive that i mentioned earlier was the weakest hive that i had and the last time i was in this hive um i did find the queen and she was really bad looking she had frazzled wings tattered wings and she was very old she just looked rough and i didn't note quite a few queen cells in this hive and i thought well i'll just let the bees be the bees and i'll let them do their thing and uh you know that's kind of what they do they be they are bees you know and this is what has happened they've superseded the queen she just laid an egg there they've superseded the queen and we've got a nice fresh young queen who has successfully mated and uh it looks like this house gonna be okay there's still a reasonable enough population in this hive for them to bounce back and uh yeah that's some encouragement right there they the bees i heard i've heard it said that bees make better beekeepers than beekeepers make bees and in this case i just kind of left them alone and shocker they uh they did what these do so that's pretty cool you

Channel: Fall Line Ridge

Views: 92,821

Keywords: bees, honey, honeybees, fall line ridge, beekeeper, bee keeper, homesteading, homestead

Id: z8Tf3fi0ONk

Length: 29min 19sec (1759 seconds)

Published: Mon May 03 2021