Installing Package Bees the Easy and Stress Free Way

hey it's Doug here in this video I'm going to talk about installing packets be is the easy and stress-free way and make sure you watch the video to the very end I'm gonna give you four or five great tips on how to keep your packages alive now let's get started well I just picked up the packages I got 30 packages and when you pick up your packages this is what you want to see these are fresh bees that we're just shaking in yesterday in Georgia when they truck them up overnight to southern Indiana and I picked them up today so you can see down here that very few bees on the bottom that's what you want to see there's a few down there and most of them are even still moving here's a good shot just a very few this one not so good I got one out of all of these that's like that so I'm not sure it's not looking good but I mean that all the other ones I checked they look good got 30 packages in here just fits in my SUV so I'll be installing those this afternoon here's our cart of packages just chilling in the shade well Doug the bee guy is getting the first box ready so that we can introduce these girls to their new home so these are three pound packages that I got from southern Georgia that I picked up yesterday and I'm just gonna Friday this guy off of here and we're gonna install these I'm gonna show you the the simplest way to install the beam with the least amount of stress on the bees and you and this is the way that I have found that works really well I've done the shaking of the bees in previous years but I've decided that I like this method a little better and I'm gonna demonstrate it right so usually I have these already and I'm checking these to make sure that these are frames are good here's one it's got some old brood in it this is a nice dark comb they'll clean that out if you have like a whole frame that's totally covered with brood they probably wouldn't what you're looking for something like that that's a really great frame it's dark and they will lay in that the Queen will lay in that right away so I got the four frames in there and we're gonna install a package of bees so the first thing that you want to do is you want to pry off this little weight here that they use to cover the can and then you want to get the can out so I just tapped the bees down I don't try prying the can out like you always see everybody do I just do this usually like that hand just comes right out put your pull your pan out and put your lid back on you go like one or two bees and that's it so what we're going to do is we're going to cut the Queen off and pull her out of there I use this razor knife because again you know he's trying to like pry this off and everything and it's just pain so I just used this cut this right off and now she's loose it's a lot easier to do with the brand new glove so you want to pull the Queen out shake her off and there she is gonna make sure she's alive she's running around in there and that's all you want to do and then we're gonna pull the cork out that's on this side where the sugar is and we're going to insert her into the hive it's best if you have a little screw to pull that out but I don't have that right now so I just use the end of the knife but I opened the candy end of the Queen cage and now I'm going to insert that inside the high there's a lot of ways to do this I usually take this little thing off because it's in the way and what I usually do is I I put the candy side either up or this way so that if one of those attendant bees in there dies she doesn't block the hole when the Queen can still get out so if you do it this way with the candy side down and one of those attendants dies and blocks that hole then your queen is stuck in there for four or five days and if you don't get back to your hive and check it sometimes she will die so I usually do it sideways or up and I usually push it right into this like this right into the comb it's cold today so it's not really sticking so that's problematic so one of the other things that you can do is just try to put it in there I can do it sideways there we go you just kind of like have to really push it in you just want to make sure that it's stuck in there the other way to do it is to use that little strap with a thumbtack and you put that strap over here and put a little thumbtack in there and that's another great way to do it so there you just going to want to put her down in there like that you want to make sure that the attendants can get toward the feeder like that so you don't want to push that other frame all the way up against that screen you want to leave obese space between there so that the bees can get there and feed her and attend to her so next thing you want to do is you want to invert your bees upside down holding that lid and you should probably have a glove on I forgot to put my glove on but it's fine just pull those bees out like that shake any extra ones down put your empty a hive body lid there and they're all gonna go down around that Queen and since I do two side by side piece of foam I just cover this so they don't come flying out there very few would come out anyway but I just put that out in there and if it's windy you want a little piece of board today it's not windy but it's windy or if you have a piece of board obviously the size of this or if you have if you're doing eight or ten frames you're gonna put it in put your thing on and put your lid on so you're not going to do this but since I do side-by-side I have to have an extra cover so now that I have my Queen down in here and she's properly oriented all I'm gonna do is take this box of bees and tip it over and pull this little this little piece of wood out right here then what this empty box over them like that and they all go down in there and if you're doing a bunch you can put another cover on here like this and move on but I'm actually going to put this since I did both sides I'm actually going to put the final cover on and I use these little seed bags as inter covers I just put that on here put this on so here's the hive that we did about 15 minutes ago and you can see the bees are now starting to orientate themselves they're coming out their hole they weren't there in this package up here that's upside down I didn't shake them they've come down all the way they found the only opening they're coming out they're going to the bathroom but remember a lot of these bees are nurse bees and so they can't even fly yet so what's happening is all your older bees that are going to be your first foragers are coming out and they're figuring out where this hive is in relation because they came from Georgia and now they're in Indiana so they're lost and they're figuring out where their hive is as long as you don't move this they'll be fine so they're coming out the ones that can fly or go into the bathroom they're probably looking for water because that's the first thing they're gonna want and we'll start feeding them right away but they probably gonna look for water and they're going to look for flowers obviously they're going to look for pollen once their queen is released you'll start seeing it we'll bring in some pollen so as you can see there's very few bees flying around if you've ever shaken a package before you know that they'll be thousands of bees everywhere and this is just a lot more stress-free on the bees and stress fee on the beekeeper if you have you know 20 30 40 or 50 hives in the same area that you're shaking packages look how happy they are they were put in yesterday and they are loving the sunshine on their boxes alright so it's been 24 hours since we put these packages in here if you remember we put the package upside down in the top box and then the frames go down here and we put the Queen down in here so we're going to take this off and we're gonna take out the boxes one of these up look down in here this one I did a little earlier is already out so we're just going to take it out as you can see all of the bees have come out there's not a ton of emus up in this box there's a few stragglers on there all you got to do is pop them out and then set this box out here and those bees will all go right back into the hive because they already have orientated themselves over the last 24 hours and figure it out where they live so like I said I did this one a little while ago let's take this off pop the box I'll go back down in there at this side let's see they're divided one queen on one side one on the other side and we're not gonna mess with the Queen's right now cuz it's only been 24 hours so we're not gonna try to see they haven't been released it takes about four days so we're just gonna put this on here put the cover on and they're happy and they will take them a little while to figure out that the top box isn't here because they were going inside but they'll be happy now and in about ten days I'll put this box back on with some more comb but right now they're just gonna release their Queens and build up so there you go you can see the Queen caves they've eaten the candy and they've released the Queen and she's somewhere on one of these four frames and she's probably they don't start laying right away it takes them a day or two they got to get fed their abdomen has to swell so their ovaries swell up and they spread their scent on every comb so they for a couple of days they just go back and forth on every song and they kind of get fed and so we'll just take that off so that we can push the frames back to their proper distance and we'll get rid of that and they're ready to go in about ten days I'll put another box of comb on top of this hi you well I hope you enjoyed that video and if you've got some value out of it please hit the like button and leave me a comment if you install your B's this way or if you install your B's a different way but now I'd like to give you some tips on how to keep your packages alive because that's the most important just installing them was the first step now you're gonna take care of them since they're your bees now the first thing that you have to do is you have to feed them one one sugar syrup continuously and this will stimulate their wax glands so they can build the wax in the hive and I suggest feeding them until they build at least ten full cones of wax out depending on where you live in the world maybe you want to do 20 frames if you're going to house them in too deep so you do have to feed them pretty much the whole season unless you have a really good honey flow and they're bringing in lots of lots of nectar I suggest feeding them for the whole year second tip is you should feed them some kind of pollen substitute whether it's dry pollen or patties or something and this stimulates brood rearing because the carbohydrates in the sugar syrup will stimulate the wax glands for them to build wax but until they start taking in protein and all the minerals and the micronutrients of a pollen or a pollen substitute they will not raise brood and in great numbers a small amount I'm not a large amount so I suggest feeding them pollen patties and there's a great article on the mega bee website and I'll link it down below that tells you that you should probably feed your bees about six weeks of pollen you don't want to just feed them like one little time and it doesn't really do the trick you need to do about to brood cycles and you'll see a definite benefit from feeding them the pollen substitute the third thing that's really important is you need to check your queen has been released after about four days and for about four days her pheromones have traveled through the hive and if she hasn't been released it's safe to release her on her own and they won't hurt her you don't want to do it any sooner than that but a lot of times depending on how long your package was being the candy can get hard and they can't eat it out in four days and then she's trapped in there and she's not getting fed as much so that's one of the number one causes of packets failure it's the Queen's not being released and people don't go back and check them so definitely check their the Queen has been released sometimes your package will want superseded its Queen and this usually happens about 15 to 20 days after you install the package and the reason is the honeybee colony consents that there's not enough nurse bees in the colony and they think something's wrong they don't understand that you're just as small to install the small amount of honeybees and they're ramping up and they're going to be fine they think there's a problem because there's not enough nurse bees and sometimes they'll try to supersede your queen so if you go into the hive and you see Queen cells you don't want to kill them right away because you want to make sure that your queen is still in there if she's still in there and you can get rid of those Queen cells the best way to prevent this super seizure is to add a frame of brood to the package about 15 days after you've installed it if you have a partial from a brew from another hive that gives them those bees will hatch out and give some of those nurse bees in that critical time and they'll think okay everything's fine we have nurse bees to take care of the eggs at the queen is laying and everything is good if you don't have a frame of brood to add to your package the only thing you can really do is continue to get rid of the queen cells until they accept that queen or let them raise a new queen but then you're going to be a few more weeks behind and the problem is then you're gonna have the same problem that hive is not going to have enough nurse bees and so sometimes it turns into this never-ending cycle and that's cool one of the biggest reasons that packages fail so I usually just kill the queen cells but I make sure that the queen is still in there if you want to check out a video that I did I'll put it up in the cart about marking your queen so you can find her easily I'll put that up there last tip is and this is a hard one cuz I know you're excited I know you got some bees and you install them and you want to check on them every day but you don't want to go in there that much when they're first getting established like I said check them after four days for their queen then maybe check them another after ten days to see if she's laying but try not to go in there every day and look at him and definitely don't use a lot of smoke because you want the Queen to be accepted and you want the hive to get established after about two or three weeks then you can start going and they're more they won't they won't be bothered by you because the queen is laying they've got their nutrients you're feeding them everything is rolling they're building wax and everything should be good so I hope you enjoyed this video if you want to find out more about feeding your bees I'll put another video up in the card and please leave comments about installing your packages if you have problems leave a comment I'll get back to you as quickly as I can thanks and as always be extraordinary well if you'd like to become a better beekeeper consider subscribing thanks for watching you

Channel: Doug the Bee Guy

Views: 118,945

Keywords: installing package bees the easy and stress free way, installing package bees the stress free way, installing package bees the easy way, installing package bees, installing package bees on drawn comb, installing package bees without shaking, doug the bee guy, bee keeping, installing package bees in a beehive, honey bees, honey bee package, bee package installation, installing honey bee package, package installation, installing bees, installing package bees for beginners

Id: DVz26rW7hjY

Length: 18min 55sec (1135 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 24 2019