Pierce Grafting Tool After Half A Million Grafts

all right darren i'm gonna introduce you to the mother of all grafton tools i know you hadn't seen one of these before right pierce sent me a grafting tool you probably never handled before no it's a beauty holy cows feel tension on that spring that's custom that's a good one that'll work but you notice something missing no swarm what happened to it it hasn't formed yet i'm gonna go get a man lift this year awesome so we'll get up there and get some good footage we'll try to make a few get pretty oh look who it is the boss man what's up dude yeah so um i'm brushing up on my spanish i got my grafting tool can i come work for you yep [Music] 25 25 years old yeah is it do you have it extended that far on purpose or is that no i keep it i keep it out when i during the night because it sticks in there and then it's so hard to get out so i just take it out every night and then we just put it in there to keep i went through a few springs and a ton of tongues a tongue will usually last me half a year but i do do probably uh [Applause] 8 000 cells a day and unless you have a year yeah and that's so every day of the week i'll never wear mine well you'll break it before i mean from mashing it okay see my my curl is oh it's pretty close i usually bend that a little more for my style yeah but it's uh it lasts a long time you can see my hand print on there you can see that you hold it between your fingers don't you yep like that yeah it's almost almost looks like it's wore out there you see it's got a tapered yeah it's beveled just from my thumb over the many many years rounded off and squared that's just from usage yeah i noticed they've narrowed up the uh tab on it it looks like i think or is it just the color of it uh this one's brass and this one's not i think that's just war from over time that's a lot of use there yeah seven to eight hundred a day for me as well does that many too yeah it's about fourteen fourteen hundred cells a day wow and then there are on these cars yeah we're just re-racking bars there welcome back to the 628 dirt richter channel where hobby beekeeping is a way of life we're going to talk about bees today look on this video i'm gonna show you how how big of a fool bees will make out of you they make you look stupid you think you know bees they will pull a rug out from under you let's go see what i'm talking about saturday afternoon spent the day on the tractor i was supposed to do some splits today i had about 10 boxes i wanted to go through this being one of them this is a nuke that overwintered on medium frames just a few days ago i did some splits on a box that i thought i overwintered two mediums stacked turns out it was all just one hive but i was gonna spit a split about 10 more today and just got sidetracked been on the tractor been running errands so right now in the last week and like i said i don't go in my bees watching mr ed's live stream he did earlier today and i'm about to fire up a smoker and get gold and been cleaning equipment and cleaning off junk around this old mobile home and tearing down tearing down that shed over there i got a 20 yard dumpster around the other side i've been shoving stuff in get this place cleaned up and in order ready for our new building that's coming but right now i'm gonna go in this box and see what it looks like [Music] [Music] bye [Music] so [Music] we got a bright and sunny 59 degree morning it's windy is the only bad part i've got a double stack medium overwintered double stacked and for its size is probably the most populated box i've got as far as most bees per square inch or whatever so i went in and split a couple other boxes day before yesterday they weren't ready just yet and i'm gauging the rest of mine by what i'm seeing in those other two this one right here is a little different as of yesterday it was bearding pretty good it's not this morning may just be the temperatures and the wind i hope i didn't miss a swarm yesterday because i did get busy chasing swarm calls i may have missed my own i don't i haven't seen it in a tree anywhere and about to go in here and find out if in fact i missed anything double stack medium overwintered screen between hey four beetles five beetles that's not bad let me show you something right here this ring of propolis we call them corrals because they'll corral any pests into an area where they can control them and they'll put them in these little bitty corrals and hold them in there and starve them out a lot of times we'll find dead high beetles laying up in these smaller corrals but that's what this instead of and they propolize the whole outside of course but this right here is a pest management technique that they use corralling beetles another corral here a small one here look at that inner cover sticking they've got this thing glued down with wax and propolis it's sticking all the way out in the middle here comes another beetle out i'm going to interrupt another beetle corral when i open this thing oh winter cover seen better days hadn't it you're being kind of nice i got a couple of them trying to get me i'm gonna puff a little bit of more smoke on them a lot of anti-smokers might not like that but i like smoke i like smoke better than these things you see all the bees just kind of back off just doing a once over for my queen on my inner cover don't want to set her off to the side anywhere and lose track of her she will hide under this stuff now these two boxes have opposite entrances the bottom box entrance on this side top boxes on this side i'm going to separate them and just set the top box in this apple may bottom oh i had it right to begin with set it on this half of my bottom with the interest facing this way and i'm i'm going to move it over close to that box so they can find their hive pretty quick that's the only thing i'm going to do to separate these two but i'm also going to split them i believe from what i'm seeing i'm fairly certain we're going to have a good split here on both the upper and lower right here we're just doing quick inspections on some of the older drone brood looking for varroa not seeing anything yet it's not uncommon because these are treatment free but even got one trying to get me in the eye even treatment free around here and i'm not recommending this for everybody treat me free around here you can get away with it pretty darn good i've been treatment free for all intensive purposes for a dozen years now and it's working out quite well i'm gonna try to be real extra gentle with them this morning if i can with this cold wind blowing on them they're probably gonna be easily upset so i don't have a heck of a lot of time to hold them up in there and show you look at all the look at all the nectar all the honey in there that's some first outside frame we're going to take this as a feed frame another good feed frame and brood frame they get a good patch of brood right here and a queen cut right there that i can't tell that it has anything in it yet because not wanting to get face stung while i'm up here close inspecting this thing i don't see any egg in it we're gonna leave it there there cool windy conditions i want to make this as quick as possible a little bit of drone brood a little bit of capped worker plenty of honey this is a light frame right here because it's got a lot of brand new young brood on it this whole side's laid up fully in larva i'm sure this side is too yeah so now we're looking for the queen we got a a good frame right here to move over just kind of want to know where the queen is when we move everything as i move these frames over i'm keeping them in the same orientation i'm pulling them out in front to back and i'm not uh flipping them just want to make sure the frames fit together right make sure everything's workable i'm not crushing cells or putting tighten it up something too tight for them to work in no queen yet good amount of older cat brood there's a queen cell right here i gotta get around here in the light get that bee off of it so i can see if there's anything in it yep that cell right there has got a larva in it so this one right here could be a good walk-away split they already got a queen sale going i already got a larva it's past the egg stage already got a larva in it so you talking about another week and a half before you got a queen walking around in there another couple weeks before to get look mated and start laying uh but they're not gonna have that much time to be without a queen because i'm gonna put a queen cell in there with them probably tomorrow and i'm certain the queen is still in here but i'm just going to go through real quick do a quick inspection on the rest of this find the queen real quick for you if i don't drag her off on this overhanging wood from this inner cover i may have moved the queen over by accident but i'm just going to look on this corner right here and show you the beetles hiding in that corner down there same thing down here they're fighting these beasts i got them corralling these corners i was just disturbing these to make sure that queen wasn't in there and all i was doing was interrupting a beetle corral and i've been through quite a few drone brood there's no varroa on any of the drone brood that i've uncapped and there's no varroa detectable visually on any bees no deform wing no short body no nothing like that you wouldn't see much of that anyway this time of year uh not here anyway uh completely treat my free colony doing real good got a few beetles in it though and although they've got them corralled and they can handle them no beetles is better than a few beetles so we're gonna try the little trick that the hillbilly beekeeper and walker b ranch has been testing out on youtube and i'll link their channels below you can go check out their videos peppermints in the hive we're going to leave peppermints in the box and see what that does for beetle control i dropped that by accident but it's going to stay let them chew that up so i'm just gonna put four peppermints in this box i'm not gonna break them up just drop them in the bottom because they won't fit under the lid yeah if i put the inner cover back on they will this half that i moved seems pretty chill so i'm wondering if i didn't move the queen by accident just missed her maybe she's a dark when dark ones get by me pretty easy i think she's in the other box so i'm gonna put a cell in here [Music] got those housed up in the finest of accommodations moss growing on the box kind of i don't know it's got some rotten spots in it i don't have a screw to that app of my bottom because i want to put a good box on the bottom this box has seen better days and we'll probably go the way of the burn pile before long it's got termite damage in it real quick tip for anybody working hoodless it's easier to go hoodless when you're in the box is doing your inspections than it is when you're carrying boxes you got your hands full and a big it's on your face and is about to sting you not a whole lot you can do about it just gotta take it see the beetles start to move i didn't think about that not being on the bottom already so now i got to move my peppermints over they're gonna lay on top just like that you know what's funny is i this is a screen that's a screen separation this was originally two separate colonies and i i don't know what chewed this out a mouse maybe that gap wasn't there before so this may just all be one colony now my queen is down in here i guarantee you this is all one colony that is funny i thought i had overwintered two nukes stacked [Music] yeah see that was a double screen originally and something has well it still is the screen's not compromised on the bottom so we do have two separate colonies now take that back the screen's wide open right here all right one colony again we're back to one colony oh well i thought i'd done something special these frames are tight in here so to get this person out i'm being real gentle with them bumping them around so they'll move so i don't i don't want to crush or roll anybody not likely i would find a queen on this frame but yeah this is all one hive this is not too definitely not two so she's probably down here in the bottom somewhere i gotta move some of these resources over into that other split this right here i normally would clean off the bottom of the frame but i'm putting this in a deep box so it really doesn't matter if i got danglers if i got dingleberries on my frames if you don't have one of chris kinser's hive tools check out that hook here is here's a i got a j-hook in my back pocket this right here is a lot easier to get in them frames can't do that with that j-hook you got to lay it down almost flat and then work it in i mean it'll do it but this one right here is just easier i am late to the party there's two two uh chewed out queen cells one of those ones i said was real thick you wouldn't think they'd do anything with it son of a gun yep [Music] i knew i should have done something with them that's all right we still got plenty of bees in here we're gonna make four splits off of this and put queen cells in each one of them yeah there's several several chewed out queen cysts so we do have a queen in this box somewhere in one of these boxes another one that's at least four chewed out cells four emerged queens so far maybe a couple of queens running around this box but i don't know where they are another there's another chewed out cell over here i don't know where they are i'm not going to worry about trying to find them i'm just going to split them all up and put queen cells in them all and let them figure out who goes where like i say these bottom frames here got a lot of danglers hanging off of them but we're gonna stick them in deep boxes so i'm not cutting them off and since i don't have to worry about them swarming now i'm not worried about adding extra frames to those other boxes i'm splitting up i do need to keep them a little bit extra something to build on but i'm not worried about them running out of space right now because they going through a brood break at the moment all right we got everybody's piling traps out now one two three four out of the one double medium if it was a double deep it probably would have split into six they all have queen cells in them but i'm not willing to wait the time it's going to take for those to mature and emerge so i can take a trip up to darren's place pick up some that are ready to pop now because he started grafting a couple weeks ago well unfortunately you're gonna lose one once in a while no clue where they swarmed to i haven't seen anything in the trees anywhere i'm usually judging my uh work in my colonies in the spring and early spring based on what i'm seeing in feral colonies and cutouts because we're already doing cutouts and i just haven't seen any swarm cells or any significant amount of drone brood so i really didn't expect much except for that one hive i knew they were going to be farther along than the rest just by what i was seeing on the outside of the box the rest of them i've been into and i've done splits on two of them two others already and inspecting a few others and they're all about the same they're another week from need to be split and jeff's seeing the same thing over his place mr ed he called me two days ago and he's saying the same thing he's he's kind of parallel with me uh as far as how far north we are so you know we're both kind of in the same boat and he's usually seeing swarms a little bit before i am too so i really didn't don't expect any of the rest of mine to be ready to go just yet uh we're a little late in the year we're usually making splits a little before this so uh uncharacteristically slow this year which is not terrible you know we'll still still get it done still gonna have the same blooms still gonna have the same uh pollen production same bee production it's just gonna be a week or two behind get out my walter t kelly frame grip i'm not sure they make these anymore but i've got one that's never been used brand or new i've never even used it pierce beekeeping equipment also makes one ex i'm almost identical and they're a very good tool to have especially if you're one-handed and videoing like i do [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: 628DirtRooster Bees

Views: 39,296

Keywords: Pierce beekeeping, grafting tool, hive tool, medium frames, deep frames, queen bee, making splits, splitting bees, queen cells, capped brood, feed frames, grafting bees, beekeeping, grafting, how to make splits, how to split bees, hobby beekeeping, beekeeping as a hobby, best hive tool, best grafting tool, inner cover, apimaye, apimaye bottom board, apimaye beekeeping equipment, bee swarm, swarms, swarm, beekeeping supplies, beekeeping equipment, grafting tools

Id: xEkv-bZjnTo

Length: 28min 14sec (1694 seconds)

Published: Sun May 01 2022