Our Bees Survived Winter in the North

[Music] [Music] welcome back to the channel today we are out in our bog eric and i are preparing the site where our third beehive is going to go we are getting our bee package in about a week so we have a little bit of prep to do and we're going to get started we got down to the pallet quite a bit ice down here we're just gonna try to shovel this out best we can this is right where our third hive went so we have enough room for it to go here and then i think we're gonna spread some ash on this afterwards see if we can get things to melt a little more for us [Music] all right we got our ash bread that should definitely help expedite get this area you know some of the snow melted i think we have some sunshine forecasted for the next few days and then we've got to come back out here and get the third beehive all set up [Music] it's so pretty it almost looks like honey yeah and then go tight yeah it's already tight enough you just stick on everything so so little mouth guards got a beautiful spring day out here today i believe it's about 40 degrees fahrenheit and i don't think it's been this warm and i don't even know how long so we're enjoying this day out here it's been about five days since we've been out here working with the bees and as you can tell the ash we put down has pretty much melted all the snow the whole palette is exposed and we're just kind of getting things ready for the new beehive all right it is april 13th and i think it is safe to say that our two hives behind me over winter they successfully overwintered here where we are in alaska zone three very exciting stuff we were not so successful last year you know we lost our two hives and this time we had a 100 success rate so pretty cool not sure if it'll ever happen again that's my goal today eric and i are going to be starting to transition the bees to their spring summer setup so we're going to be deconstructing their over winter setup just a little bit and this is a good day to do it because we've got some warmer temperatures and some sun shining we have to first take off the styrofoam and we'll go over a little bit of how we set them up for the winter blow away if i put it over there okay so i should just pop it off like pull it straight up can we do that it should go yeah we've got our foam board insulation off and our hives are already styrofoam but that was just an extra layer of insulation for them the other things that we did is put a quilt box on the hive and that's basically something to absorb the moisture of the hive throughout the winter i think that was one of the downfalls of our hives last winter we have a pillowcase in this box and it just has shavings in it and in fact they're not even moist at all so i'm going to be taking that off today the other thing we added is a candy board and the candy board also kind of acts as something to wick up moisture from the hive but it primarily serves as a backup food source for them in case they run out of honey and they should need some extra food in the spring and i can tell that they have already broken into it but they still have some of it left i'm not quite sure if i'm going to be pulling that off today and in fact i need to just kind of take a peek in the side to see what we're going to be doing so this is the larger of the two hives and you can see that they've been coming out and some of the bees have probably been cleaning out so that's actually a good sign i know it looks a little alarming to see all the dead beets but you know that just happens we lose a lot of them over winter so i'm going to try to pop open i want to see if they only need one brood box i don't know if they need both of them right now hold on there's only about a handful of bees that came out that weren't supposed to come out so that's a lot of dead bees that's a lot of bait that's a lot of chicken food is what i say that is we managed to get the bottom box out which is awesome uh we want the bees to be combined to the smallest amount of space possible and i knew i had a feeling they weren't occupying this box they were obviously a very big hive when we you know put them to bed for the winter or put them away so we got this out and it seems as though they ate through like all of their stores on this on this box i'm not seeing any sort of honey left let me get out one of these frames so i can show you what else we did for their winter setup these are the frames that eric made for the corners we put this on just the sides to kind of help them with insulation in the hive and i mean i think it i think it all really helped i think it all came together to help them survive you can tell there's a lot of dead bees totally normal even though i've never overwintered them that is normal for a lot of the hive to die off because they had to go through such a long winter i mean over six months honestly so it looks like they are doing okay though i'm gonna pop in to check the cluster size and then we're going to give them some sugar syrup to have as well my gosh they sound they sound like there's a lot of them wow they look good oh wow a bunch of sugar left huh um i'm wondering if they're clustering over there because there we go okay that's over here [Music] okay we're closing it back up we've got a pollen patty in there and then we added some sugar syrup just one to one ratio water to sugar and i think this hive is looking really good i didn't see the queen but i didn't expect to i think it looks really good but again this is my first time so i don't really have much to go off of we're gonna hop over and check the other hive this is the inner cover off the hive that ariel just kind of disassembled and was checking on the bees you can tell this one has the reflectix on it and it also has a little screen and that's why it's out now we put just a regular one in there because we're giving them the sugar water and they can't get to it through that screen so i'm gonna disassemble this one and make it just plain how it was and then we're gonna tackle this hive and we'll stick this one in there along with some of that sugar water peanut butter yeah sure you clean off the bottom i also clean off the bottom but it's not bad is that enough space for you to work yeah i got this baby oh yeah we got shims too on this one just remember that right down the hole you didn't see the queen did you no i didn't i'm gonna put the okay please don't bite me guys i'm your friend i'm not your enemy it's a lot more than i thought they'd be babe the cluster is huge the cluster's probably yeah but if you want to hold it there it's just what happens is whichever ones fly out aren't going to make it back in unfortunately they will it's a little bit of a surprise huh [Music] you could practically leave these on honestly huh for now you can we finished up the second hive and surprisingly it actually looks really really good i'm very excited it was a smaller hive but they look they look like they're doing just as good as this hive and they've eaten through a lot of their sugar so we just set them the same way up with the palm patty and some sugar syrup tomorrow we're going to pick up our package of bees in the afternoon and i'm going to be taking these unfortunately these dead bees to the chickens even get on one scoop [Music] we're off to get our package bees we are heading to a town outside of anchorage it's called eagle river i think it takes us um under about an hour and a half to get there and i'm not sure if we're gonna install them today you should install them the same day you get them but it's been starting to get windy and we may even have some rain in the forecast and if that happens i can't install them so we'll have to hold off till tomorrow morning but for now we are going to enjoy our drive got the dogs in the back and we will see you guys when we pick up the bees well we finally picked up our bees we have the package right here they look lovely it is a little bit later in the day because the flight for these bees came in a little bit later so we're definitely not going to be installing them tonight we're not going to get home until after eight and although we'll still have daylight the weather will not be on our site it's windy possibly sprinkly back home [Music] well we're finally on the highway heading home it's a little after seven o'clock now it's been a long day and the roads out here this is called breakup season so the roads are wet they're nasty they're slush everywhere we're constantly cleaning the windshield we're cleaning the headlights off we're all ready to go for our ride home and tomorrow we'll be putting the bees in their new home [Music] it's install day for our bees we have some really nice weather for this today we kept the speed package inside overnight we kept it in a dark kind of cooler location for the bees and i spritzed them with some sugar water to make sure that they would be fed ideally i would have wanted to get them installed last night but again with the weather we just couldn't do it so we're out here today this package we have are russian bees that's also the other two hives that we have but this year we got them in a b bus so it's a little bit of a different contraption than i'm used to but we shouldn't have too hard of a time taking that apart we're gonna get our smoker lit so we can get them into their hive we've got our hive all ready we use screened bottom boards so they get a lot of air circulation in there so that's what we have going on and i just pulled out two frames and i'm going to be putting the queen in the frames just a little askew from where the feeder's going to sit because we've had bees for two years now we actually have comb for this hive very exciting this is something they drew out entirely on their own and that really gives them a like a jump start to have you know these already kind of drawn out okay nice good news the queen is alive if you've seen our other installs we have had some issues in the past but this one is alive and kicking so we're gonna smash her in between that was the wrong terminology i'm gonna smash this little feeder in there in between two frames but first i need to get out the cork i don't know what it is on this one and we're gonna put in a marshmallow with some skill and eric's help we got the marshmallow in she's very active so we were a little afraid she's gonna fly away she's numbered that's pretty cool i've never seen them i don't know if that's the right word but she has a number on her there we go perfect huh all right our queen's in and we're gonna dump the rest of the package in here eric help me open it up it's a little bit tricky but we got it open does it bend all the way back nice nice ambiance let me know if they get right with you i'm smoking this part kind of sucks i'm trying to get all of the bees out i'm trying to get all of the bees out because if you leave them in the package they usually don't come out especially just because it's kind of cold still and there's a lot of snow so if they touch the snow they're never going to make it back there's probably at least 40 in there so i'm going to try to get more of them out okay gonna put on the inner cover i've got some pollen on there for them all right almost finished we're getting the sugar water ready for the bees you take a thumbtack this one happens to be an actual thumb tack so you just make a straight line of holes and just till you get to the other side i don't know maybe like probably about 15 or 20 holes and you don't want to poke it in too much you just want to kind of get the tip in because this is going to sit upside down and you don't want it to just you know lose all the liquid in there you want it to kind of just sit there and make little drips so the bees can come up and eat it well that went better than expected with eric's help we successfully got that hive installed and it actually went fairly easy this time because we were just had the one to install in the past we've had to do all three which takes a considerable amount of time but we were fortunate this year and these two survived these bees are awesome and they have worked so hard here in alaska to overwinter this hive was shipped on a plane just like these ones behind me so we hope to have an awesome summer with them and potentially get honey that would be awesome and bring them to the winter again and overwinter them we're done for the day out here we're going to clean up thank you guys for tuning in

Channel: Simple Living Alaska

Views: 156,137

Rating: 4.9734373 out of 5

Keywords: off grid living, homestead alaska, tiny house alaska, off grid cabin alaska, winter cabin living, cabin life alaska, tiny home alaska, winter in alaska, gardening alaska, life in alaska, beekeeping alaska, beekeeping cold climate, overwintering bees, winter bee set up, installing bee package, keeping bees cold climate, bees in cold climates, bees overwintering, overwintering bees in cold climate, beekeeping winter, beekeeping winter feeding, beekeeping in alaska

Id: _0wFEdmufj8

Length: 23min 6sec (1386 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 16 2021

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