Rescuing the Fish Tank Beehive: Transferring to a Flow Hive | The Bush Bee Man

now you might be wondering why we're sitting on my veranda it's to show you that everybody can be a beekeeper even if you have only living in an apartment in the city i'm a victim of my own success because we had a fish tank hive that we created for to be an observation hive and the jolly thing went so well that they've exploded and anyway the observation hive thing sort of moved on we had a feed on the internet and everybody watched that and survived the bloody lock downs and all the rest of the madness but the girls have moved on they've covered up the cameras with honey and wax and stuff so we thought well we'll reinvent them and you get to come along so wasn't that so long ago and a bloke thought to himself maybe he could make an observation hive make a top bar observation hive out of a fish tank and there was much nay saying here at the bush bee bloody research center so i was not one to be beaten so i made myself a top bar bee hive out of a fish tank no less and what's more put it on my wife's veranda so and even better than all of those stories i'm still here to tell the tale which is pretty fascinating but now it's come to a moment in time when the wife said this is ridiculous you can't be harvesting honey making a mess on my veranda so i've talked her into letting me use her old flow hive so we're going to do a fish tank cut out and repurpose them so here we go let's see what trouble we can get into what might even get a barbie cover now too i've got a barbie this size let's see if we can just get this off we'll try not to upset everybody too much there's a bit of insulation now for the big reveal oh my goodness girls what have you done you have created myself a problem have a look at that there's some serious honey jolly gosh john decoy i think they've gone a little bit awry somehow anyway we're here to rescue them so what here comes the next excitement you've got to love the ingenuity of the little ladies they've plugged up this hole there was a bit of a hole here with my rough lid that i made and i've chopped that full of propuls so that's pretty groovy i tell you what normally you don't get to see a big lump like that all together so that's amazing yeah the smoke is not being very cooperative he's playing hard to get yeah now we're going to try and get the lid off i guess streuse i guess you could guess that we haven't been here for a little while yeah they filled up pretty quick i mean i wasn't that long ago when i was here so hopefully we can get the lid off this is only just meant to be sitting here professionally designed fish tank beehive here i can reckon i'm even going to get the lid off maybe tada look at that now i've got a serving tray come on you stupid smoker honestly it's our fancy attempt at some valley um b frames and where do we start i think we'll start at this end what do you reckon we'll try not to smash anything that would be good i'm tipping the fact that it's running that way it's not going to lift up with our little frames i don't think that's if the frames lift at all anyway hopefully we won't smash anything we probably will smash something i hope it's just not the fish tank though how the hell are we gonna oh i guess we'll get it off of here once it's got not so heavy goodness gracious ladies what have you done that is not quite what i had in mind goodness me john we might need some hot water to clean up our mess after we've done this well the honey looks nice hey what do you reckon you reckon we could we could make some natural fish tank mead out of this i reckon what do you think that'd be cool get some junior berries oh yeah me look at that but that's not quite they went the wrong way it's supposed to go that way they went the wrong way they're supposed to go that way with the frames of them just decided to go the wrong way of course oh man wow they have been busy we have to feed some of this back to them as well i think come on you stupid thing this is not what i need the smoker not to work ronda veranda oh god damn it what did you put in it it's just got some gum leaves in it but they were quite good but i think they've nearly run their race i didn't think i was gonna need too much but it's looking like we might need some more maybe i'll go and get some pine needles before i make a real mess that looks a little bit better hopefully we'll get a bit more smoke get a bit of smoke get the girls we don't want the girls up this end when we cut this honey off i thought i'd utilize my lid and put me blooming fabulous top bars that didn't really work in my lid that'll give the girl something to do for a minute you can go down there and scavenge that i wonder if it ever goes the right way john doesn't look promising here man they've been busy they have had a good time up here oh you can see the honey's changing colors as we're going through the season different gum trees flowering sorry girls you're going to be all right though we'll get you organized goodness me they were going the right way not so long ago aren't they incredible things bees how they can store all this food up for themselves it's amazing i'm just going to go the other way somewhere here surely i don't know how big the brood box is but they've got egg have a lot of honey up here let me make sure they just aren't here right here we go oh what a sticky mess girls i don't think my paint scraper is long enough anyway it's not completely crucial this bit i'm just trying to make too much more mess than we're already going to have just start digging i think we'll give them some of this honey back because it's sort of early well late autumn here at the minute so we don't want to get too hungry with all this hard work but it's no good where we are where did you be foraging maybe i shouldn't bother carving the bees all around the countryside i should just leave them on my veranda they do pretty good imagine that imagine that anybody comes home and i've got a freaking 100 b boxes along the veranda all foraging away gosh i think that might definitely be divorced material that'd be way worse than the screwdriver thieving i think oh doctor how are we going to get this out of here without making too much miss i was just thinking before i get any sillier i think i'm going to go and get a bucket of water because i can see here this is going to get very very sticky and very very messy that might be a bit more respectable come on keep burning your crazy thing i said that water might help me a little bit got to chase the girls back off the honey now i don't think there's any smoke coming out of that smoke though yeah there is a little bit it's just you i left you in charge of keeping it the light how am i going to get that out of there without getting completely sticky i'm not am i because that's just gone to there okay here we go once we get started we'll be right hopefully yeah what if that's how they started making glue i doubt it it's not even a corner to start with it's just a big mess sweeter than poop though i think i'm making a mess here was this your idea was this your idea tell you what man we didn't even plan all of this madness it just sort of happens i'm gonna take this and hopefully take a sheet god i suppose don't matter he has not much point in trying to stay unsticky is there i take a piece here that i can actually get started it's interesting as you can see there's fairly light honey here which is the white blossoming gum trees we have then there's they've had quite a good run on some red gum well i wasn't actually red gum but the mallees that flower that have got like more red tinge to it and the interesting thing is the honey all tastes different too so i mean you'd see if you go on the website we've got all the different colors and flavors and that's something you probably don't realize when you go to the supermarket that you're really just buying in the best case scenario it's a mixture of actual honey that would be a good good thing but when you buy when you buy from a small time beekeeper who's keeping these honey separate you get to taste all the different flavors of the flowers that the bees were working and they don't like it when you put your hand in their honeypot and they sting you [Music] what did we do down here i think we take sat the tank on the wood so it had a bit of breathing space didn't we i honestly don't remember i know there was many a naysayer that said this wouldn't work so if you were one of the people in the comments that said a fish tank cannot become a beehive think again brother ultimately might not be very practical but i think i could say that successful somewhere in here is the camera that we were doing the live feed with i don't know it's buried in here somewhere so hopefully we can get it out ah [Music] i got half of it i'll see if i can get the mount out so it's a complete thing to put on ebay slightly used honey camera well maybe it could be something it could be a famous prop isn't that what happens with the whether like props from the movie they're worth a fortune [Music] well i think we finally found the brood nest so this is the fun part this is why we made those frames so here we go i reckon i'm gonna just [Music] i've got a few bee stings my hands have gone a bit tingly i'm going to take the honey off the top and we just want to keep the brood frames like the brood nest itself on the frames that we've made because you don't want to have too much honey above that as you can see once you start disturbing the honey it runs and sticks everywhere and all the ladies get stuck together so the best approach is to keep the honey in one department and the brood in the other department and then let the ladies work it all back out and put themselves back together in a nice sensible order because you can see they've got the honey in their nice little cells and it's all nice and safe there and they can pop a cell open and lick the little bit out that they want get into a big sticky mess like this and the ladies will drown in their own hard work and that's the last thing we want that would be a negative result so just have a look if we can make a bit more mess get a bit more honey in our pots find one of our cool new cutout frames oh huh so far so good i just sit that here for a second figure out what i'm doing i think we've still got a little bit more honey here to take off and a bit off the top and then at least they've got a nice little opening for us so we should be right they do not look impressed to see us though which is a fair cop i think the fridge beehives are probably more practical except for the fact that it's very awkward to manage it's definitely a successful thing for him to live in i mean i've cut him out of lounge chairs and stuff so i figure anything's possible okay okay with the stinging go gosh no i'm starting to get the fat hand i haven't swollen up years i think it's supposed to be good for arthritis but i think i might be creating arthritis at the minute cut down the edge now i wish you could feel the warmth really like when you get to the actually where they've got the babies how warm it is it's incredible that's what you want a piece without too much honey so here's our cool frames that we've made that have got the wire on one side rather than actually trying to sit it on the actual b frame wire so if you go back an episode you'll be able to see us creating these one of our longtime supporters diane from wa sent this idea through she found this in an old beekeeper's shed called murray murray what was his name murray somebody anyway murray murray the beekeeper from wa had this bloody great idea and we thought it was such a great idea we better share it with the world so here we are yes yes yes i know it's all very exciting sort of sort of exciting they said it's more excitement than i'd anticipated [Music] it's just a bit of honey here on the edge what do you want to get rid of i don't think there's anything important on that lip which is good yeah oh there's some more crap on the veranda i'm going to be so popular i'm going to be in the good books after this project there's only so much graciousness the wife will offer hopefully this isn't the last episode ever next episode will be brought to you from a caravan out the back so at the bottom of the honey there's all this nice pollen that they've stored up so that's their bee bread that they store up as well honey is basically their carbohydrates and the pollen is basically they're meat and potatoes so they're pretty clever how they make it all happen and generally when they're trying to store the pollen they'll mix it together with a bit of pollen a bit of syrup and a bit of honey and pack it in the jolly frames so they can eat it up later on because of course in their natural environment there's a fairly long winter so they're hence why they stir up all this food so is that they can actually have something to eat while the winter's wintering that's not very good english is it i would suggest you don't do this on your wife's veranda perhaps perhaps just put the flow hive on your veranda before you put that don't go from the fish tank to the flow hive just put the flow hive on your veranda and just that'll be doing enough this is ridiculous oh just because i'm old i'm going to put it on top of this box the modern flow hives you buy have nice legs but anyway we can't have everything oh look out well they've come a long way since this old one haven't they we've had this one for a while alrighty oh stick this on here so the little girls don't fall off we'll just put our rubber band on here just to give it a little bit more stability so the little ladies don't fall off we'll just pop this in our hive for a minute so they can just chill out might shake some girls in there i reckon that'll work if i don't get too many stings i'm starting to get a bit tentative oh come on let go you bugger oh that'd be right oh well it'll be right i'm sure there's lots of different options but anyway this seems to work i like this idea of these wired frames that's a cool idea otherwise it's real fun quite can be quite ex quite an exercise in insanity doing a cutout when you're trying to get them to sit on the frame be good to come back after they've settled in and see how they organize themselves but ultimately we'll rotate these frames out anyway at least they didn't break sometimes they let go pretty bad sit that in there and let the little ladies figure it out in a minute i was hoping they wouldn't have too much brood because it's the wrong it's the sort of slower time of year here in odds because we're sort of getting towards the end of autumn so they start calming down so i thought this would be a good opportunity because it's really a bit messed up when you do a cutout there's like thousands of frames of brood to try and move around so it could be a success but we still got a few frames to go yep we got another five layers so hopefully there's a little bit more but it's actually looking pretty good [Music] i think you could safely say this is a fishy mess or a sticky mess my goodness gracious i'm hoping that the flow hive idea is a little less messy and a little less controversial but you know what you'll have to tune into the next episode and see the flow hive installation part if we happen to have an ant infestation do you reckon the wife will believe me that it wasn't my fault oh i'm sure when she agreed to this sort of conor when she got home and had already been done is that sort of belated agreement i don't know anyway hopefully this is a much more successful approach to beekeeping on a veranda the fish tank's been very successful as far as the bees are concerned a little bit less successful as far as humans are concerned but anyway all in all i think that's a success just pull the old fish tank out the way a little bit oh it's still actually quite heavy believe it or not how are we going to get this sticky mess down the stairs without making it get ourselves divorced good luck with that enjoy up okay my fingers are already swollen up enough [Music] i'm just gonna put a temporary lid on here to give the girl somewhere to feel a bit safe until they all settle down and then next week we're going to figure out how to make the flow hive look like it belongs here some bloke better find a mop down the hardware store i think to clean this veranda before he goes to jail or at least to his own bee box in the backyard anyway thanks for tuning in hope you enjoyed our fish tank extravaganza don't forget to like click subscribe and all that crazy you do out there on the internet hell strip over to the shop and perhaps buy a jar of honey from my wife just in case and make me feel like make her feel better about the fact that you're viewing goodnight [Music] you

Channel: The Bush Bee Man

Views: 434,060

Keywords: honey bee rescue, humane bee hive removal, bee hive removal, hive removal, the bush bee man, removing beehives, honey bee hive removal, bee hive relocation, rescue bees, safe and alive bee hive removal, relocate bee hive, save the bees, bees, beekeeping, bee keeping, beekeeper, beekeeping basics, flow hive, flow hive beginner beekeeping, flow hive setup, flow hive commercial, flow hive beehive, flowhive, Fish tank beehive, the bush bee man youtube

Id: kSW7Nb9vhVc

Length: 20min 56sec (1256 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 06 2022