ROOKIE BEEKEEPER MISTAKES Advice After 12 Years of Beekeeping

hey I'm Melissa from beekeeping made simple and this video is about the things I wish I knew about honeybees and beekeeping before I became a beekeeper some of these are you know big things to prevent your heart from dying which you know my first three hives died my first two years and some of them are just like oh how come no one told me that that would have been nice to know all kinds of things these are things that I learned on my own as a hobby beekeeper as well as things that I learned working for a fourth generation beekeeper who had a commercial apiary with 4 000 hives the first tip I give people is to start with a langstro style beehive now if you live in the United States I say that because it is the most common beehive and if you're looking for equipment if you are looking for help if you're looking to Shadow a beekeeper ask questions from people in your B Association find a mentor it's a lot easier when you are using the most common style equipment if you live in another country where a different style beehive is the most common go with that style beehive second thing is Queen spotting I had a hard time finding the queen my first couple of years and it wasn't until I started working for a commercial apiary that I learned the proper way to spot a queen so I do have a queen spotting video here's the link for it it's also in the video description below where I give you all of my queen spotting tips but first when you first get your beehives make it one of your top priorities when you are getting a package of bees or that nuke and the hive a small it's going to be a lot easier to spot that queen bee than when the hive has 30 or 40 000 bees in it come summer so the every single time you open your hive you want to make it one of your jobs to try to spot the queen because once you get a hang of it and you get to know what she looks like it'll be a lot easier to spot her later on in the year when you have to spot her the second thing is that you want to pull out their frame and spend five seconds looking for your queen if you do not see her on that side of the frame flip it over and look on the other side spend five seconds looking for the queen there then you can look at other stuff you can spend more time looking at the other side but some Queens slow movement they don't care they're in the hive outside some Queens are skittish and when you pull a frame out she's going to start running she's going to hide under bees you're going to look on one side she's gonna go to the other you're going to flip it around she's going to go the other side you're going to do this like five times she's gonna flip from side to side trust me it's happened to me many many times so if you spend just five seconds count to five flip it over look at the other side you have a much much greater chance of spotting your queen bee so speaking of queen bees another thing that I didn't learn until fifth year seventh year I don't know it had been a while but I didn't know until a while that you should not hold a coin cell upside down if you think that the hive might be making a queen or know that they're making a queen or you see a queen selling your hive if you want that Queen to hatch and be a viable queen that can go out on a remaining flight and come back and start laying eggs you do not want to hold that Queen cell upside down so when you're pulling out a frame and you see a queen sell on it do not go like this look at it like this and then look at the other side that way do not turn it upside down next thing very important and will not cause your hive to die but will just cause you a lot of aggravation is remembering b space this is especially important in the langstro style beehives Lange draws and you know a few other people invented the style beehive around the same time but he's the one credited and given name the hive she realized that there was a space in between honeycomb and the space we call b space and it's about 3 8 of an inch and when you have this much space between coolness just enough space for the bees to get through so when you put your frames in your boxes or your top bar Hive or whatever you're using you want your frames to have that b space between them if you put 39 frames in your 10 frame box or seven frames in your eight frame box and you allow more space than having your frames right up against each other your b space is going to be bigger and why do you care about this well if there is more than 3 8 of an inch your B's are going to make comb where you don't want them to make it I do have a video here's the link to it on what happened to me I had some hives at this Resort and I just ran out of equipment I you know I'm driving like an hour to get out there I didn't have an extra box but the bees needed space and I didn't want them to swarm so I well actually I had a box I just didn't have enough frames for the box so I threw the Box on I had like two or three frames I threw in there a lot of wide open space and the bees build a whole bunch of Comb everywhere I have a video of what I did and how I got the comb out and cleaned up everything but if you lay like nine frames in a 10 frame box what they're going to do is build a cross comb or a bird comb and they're going to start to build comb like say off of the front of your frame instead of in the center or they you might see it if you have Foundation they're going to build the comb off of the foundation as opposed to building the comb on the foundation so Langston realized that if you have 3 8 of an inch between your frames the bees will build comb in the frame and you can pull the frame out inspect it Harvest honey put it back without damaging the comb and that is the beauty of the langstro style Hive is the movable frames before that people weren't inspecting their hives they were just cutting comb out and harvesting honey and just destroying lots of comb in the process so thank you langstroth and everyone else who realized that b space exists and use this to your advantage your hives will die it's a part of beekeeping not every Hive is going to survive there is nothing that you can do as a beekeeper that would keep every single beehive alive forever there just isn't you could do everything perfect but you can't control nature and you can't control the genetics of the Beehive that you're getting you can only work with what you're given and so you have to accept even if you lose your first half or your second or your third Hive survives there will be a time when a hive will die in nature about one in every three hives survives which is why bees swarm so often for the average beekeeper you should shoot for a 70 survival rate and except that 30 of your hives probably will not survive an entire year it's important to just be realistic and understand that that's going to happen you're also going to squish bees it doesn't mean that when you get your first package of bees and that first bee that you squish like you know it doesn't matter to you it's okay to still be upset to feel bad but it is going to happen and it is a a part of beekeeping next you can put a shallow frame in a deep box only if it is the first box of your beehive but if you're using a Lancashire style Hive and that first box on your hive is a deep and you do not have any more deep frames you can put shallow and medium frames in that deep box once you're adding your second box soap and every other box after that you have to have the right size frame for that box Orbeez will probably build comb off of the frame and connect it to the box below but when first starting out with that first deep box it is okay to have any size frame you want in that deep box speaking of equipment and boxes if I was to start beekeeping all over again and had to buy all of my equipment because I I got some free stuff from people here and there but if I had to buy all of my equipment I would buy all medium boxes medium boxes medium frames and that would be it next do not buy a fabric Veil or any cheap beekeeping equipment for that matter you'll see a whole lot of them on Amazon and you're like hmm why is this forty dollars and this is 15. I have had Hive tools snap in half literally uh and I have just hated every single Veil I got that was fabric now you'll get some veils I got one from daydance.com that was wire mesh and then I got one from man Lake that was fabric no it was Amazon and it was fabric the whole it was the whole jacket and the veil part was Fabric and it rips and it was broken fairly fast I put duck dream over but you don't really want duct tape over your Veil that's not ideal if you're buying the suit then see if you can get a suit that has the wire uh in in the veil part because it will last a lot longer when becoming a beekeeper one of the things you are turning into is scientists you are breeding bees whether you like it or not because bees are constantly wanting to swarm and reproduce that's how we have more colonies that's how they account for Colony walls over winter and that is something that you have to acknowledge as The Beekeeper so what this means is that when your bees are getting ready to swarm hey you can let them but if you live in a have your hives in a residential area or an area where there's enough places where uh you know they could go somewhere where people were going to then try to kill them uh and have them removed that's not being um responsible beekeeper what you should do is split your hives and that means you have two smaller beehives instead of one large beehive so you're essentially swarming the bees before they swarm themselves and that is the ideal way to keep these but there is a butt here not every Hive has good genetics and it is really important as a backyard beekeeper to figure out where the good genetics are and where they are not and this might be the most important thing that you do as a beekeeper because first I thought being a beekeeper was helping the bees oh I'm going to get a beehive I'm going to help the bees that doesn't help the bees just buying a hive and keeping it alive that's not helping the bees and then I worked for a commercial e period I said these backyard beekeepers are all wrong they are not helping the bees because half the time they're Hive dies how is that helping anything there's no more bees um that the bee population is not greater because people have one or two hives in our backyard it's a commercial Apiaries the ones with thousands of hives they're the ones that are keeping the bee population alive and then I got to know the queen breeders the ones that are producing you know thousands and thousands tens of thousands of Queens throughout the year monthly and um then I realized that it actually is the backyard beekeepers who have the potential to really make a difference to help the honeybee population but only if we help breed the right kind of bee because genetics are really important and in nature the bees with the strongest genetics the ones that are dealing with variola mites on their own the ones that are bringing in lots of honey and swarming to break that rural might brood cycle and surviving those are the ones that need to survive the weak hives uh yeah you can feed them and you can keep them alive but that is not helping Nature by keeping those genetics around you want to keep the genetics around the strong hives the bees that are dealing with stresses of nature all on their own without human intervention so as a backyard beekeeper it is our job to one monitor for Rural mites do a mic test on each Hive you know choose a different Hive every month and see what their might levels are because if one Hive has high Mite levels and the other Hive doesn't the hive with the low Mite levels is the one with good genetics you want to see how well are the bees bringing in honey all on their own without you having to feed them yeah you can feed these early in the spring when you first get them but then come into late spring summer time you should not have to feed them you want to see what bees are bringing in all on their own without your intervention you want to see what bees are lazy and what bees aren't lazy you want to see what bees are growing which ones have the good genetics and those are the bees that you want to split now you can actually technically split every beehive you have because you can still use the B is from hives that aren't doing well but what you don't want to do is let them make their own Queen because that's how their genetics get passed down to more and more Generations so when you have really strong hives you want to let those hives make their own Queen take eggs put them in hives without Queens so they can make more Queens if you have Queen cells in the hive put those other Queen cells in splits and the hives that don't do well you want to split them but buy a queen from somewhere else you want to catch swarms do cutouts put your name on the list at the local beekeeping Association so you can go down with them to do cutouts or catch swarms you want to experiment with buying queens and packages of bees and nukes from Apiaries all over your area do not have them shipped in but buy them from your area bring in as many genetics as you can and work on building an apiary with Stellar genetics because that is how us as hobbykeepers are going to help the honeybee population not just by having bees and keeping every single Hive alive but helping the ones with good genetics Thrive and reproduce okay now on to some less wordy ones if you have a queen cell in your hive when you're opening it leave it don't open it for a while it's about 16 days from egg to hatching if the cell is a decent size so that you can see it she's probably at least seven days old if it's capped she's at least nine days old you want to give it until you think she is definitely at least 16 days old plus another week you do not want to open a beehive if the queen could potentially be going on her mating flight the odds are low that you're opening The Hive when she's going on a mating flight but that's the way life works things happen when you don't want them to happen so leave it alone because if she comes back from her mating flight and her Hive looks different because now the lid is all from the boxes are off and there's a beekeeper standing there she might go to a neighboring Hive and they're gonna kill her when she arrives so leave those hives alone they will be just fine if you do not open them for a couple of weeks next lazy beekeeping is a hundred times better than over eager beekeeping my first year I always wanted to check in on the high see what they were doing pull all their frames out and next year I got a job working somewhere that was an hour and a half away I ended up renting an apartment there so I didn't have to drive so much and I didn't check my hives as much you know maybe once maybe twice a month and they did a million times better me leaving them alone these actually they don't like you they don't you're not their friend they're not going to be happy to see you they don't want their lid taken off the hive they don't want frames taken out they really really hate it when you pull Brute out and you disturb The Brood Nest so the less time you spend opening a hive you know 20 minutes uh is great or less the better and you do not want to open up a hive more than once a week um once a week to once every other week is really best when it comes to spring and summer beekeeping now on to location I looked at a whole bunch of different places to put my bees my first year I was living in Philadelphia West Philly so not like right downtown Center City but about a mile west of Center City and I thought about putting the bees on the rooftop of the parking garage next to the building I lived in which was super convenient but I also had a friend that worked at a retreat center about a 30 minute drive outside of the city from where I lived and a lot more flowers and there even was a guy with a wood shop they had old bikini equipment they said I could use and I chose to still put them in the building next to the building I lived in you can put your bees at areas places that are most convenient to you if you like but if you start to see that the hive is not growing you test it for mites and the light levels are low but they're just not bringing in much honey instead of blaming a queen which is what everybody does everyone blames the queen for all the problems in the hive consider moving them before you even get your bees you should really have a backup location just in case a neighbor gets angry someone gets stung it just doesn't work out well in your area have another place to put them grass is not helpful for bees grass is a food desert so suburbs tend to be really bad places for bees and I found that the city was not great for bees either there's a lot of talk about Urban beekeeping and a lot of people that want to keep bees in cities it might be is it okay but they did not bring in anywhere near as much honey as other beginner beekeepers I was talking to at the B Association that had their bees out outside the city your queen could be just fine your bees genetics could be just fine maybe they don't have a mic problem but that there's just not enough food for them they're not going to grow much they're not going to bring in much without much food coming in the Queen's not going to lay much because there's nothing to feed them that's irresponsible for the queen to have all these babies if she isn't there's no food to feed them so before you go killing your queen and putting into money you really want to consider the location and especially if you're in the suburbs or the city there's a good chance that the location is a problem now maybe one Hive is doing great and the other Hive is not so great that could still be a location problem because I had my bees in South Kona and there's a lot of commercial beekeepers down there I put my bees all over the place in South Kona and I would have say like if I had 10 hives in an area one or two of those highs would do great and that would be the majority of my honey Harvest one hive we just be like a brew box for a year and not do anything and the rest of the highs would be one brood box one full box just brewed in the second box would be half brewed half Honey one third Brew two-thirds honey maybe a super on top that had a little bit inside and that would be the way it was until I moved my bees 20 minutes down the road into a different town and they did amazing and I brought in so much more honey and the location makes a huge difference if you only have two hives it could be hard to tell if it's the location or the bee's genetics if one Hive is strong and one Hive isn't but if you have five hives and one Hive is strong and all the rest aren't and there's no mic problems then there's a good chance that it is your location and not only is this in terms of bringing in lots of honey and maybe you don't care how much honey you bring in but beekeeping is so much more fun and enjoyable when your bees are healthy and happy when there is food together and they're out busy doing what they want to be doing the bees are not angry when you open the hive they're busy they don't care that you're opening The Hive you can open the hive with no gloves on and a t-shirt and shorts like you'll see me in some of these videos they don't care because a lot of the foragers are out and the bees are happy and busy and when the bees are busy and they're happy and they're bringing in lots of food the bees a beekeeping is just a lot easier it's a lot more enjoyable there's a lot less problems and The Beekeeper is going to enjoy it as well next every Hive is different and it doesn't matter how many years you keep these you are always going to see different things I had a student once say in my beekeeping class I just want you to tell me what to do and I wish it would make teaching beekeeping and making my online beekeeping class so much easier if I could just tell you what to do but I can't just like in my um Queen Choose Your Own Adventure chart that's the best I can do is say what are you seeing in the hive if it's this go this way if it's this go that way because there are so many variables not only with beekeeping but in nature and so the only the best thing I can compare beekeeping to is being a mom because you have one child and you start to get a hang for okay how you deal with nap time and Tantrums and feeding them and then you have another kid and their personality is totally different and what worked for one kid it doesn't work for the other kid and what was really easy for them is now really hard and it is the same thing with beekeeping there is no one solution for a problem and one Hive might do really well when it comes to one area and another Hive is going to do really poorly and so as The Beekeeper you can't you're never going to think that you've got it all except for maybe your first year and then you're going to realize that you're wrong when you get another Hive and they're totally different next you're probably not going to harvest any honey your first year and if you do you probably shouldn't have but you did anyway and also on the subject of Honey water is Honey's arch nemesis so whenever you are going to harvest honey wash jars out to put honey in anything has to do with honey make sure everything is dry I like to wash it at least one full day in advance so that everything thoroughly dries on its own and and the strainers and everything all those little crevices that everything dries up so that I don't have to deal with any moisture getting into my honey okay I'm coming down to the end of it just a couple more things another one is that you are told when you get a package of bees your queen is going to be in a cage with a cork in either end and they always tell you to find the end with the cork with the candy and to pull the cork out and let the bees eat through the candy and the queen will be released by the bees do not do this this is how Queens get killed and you're left queenless I cannot tell you how many students tell they just go through Queen after Queen after Queen and I'll make way to take it wait wait wait it's like your third Queen this summer what what is going on wait what are you doing and then I tell them either to use a push cage which is a cage you make I make it from hardware cloth I have a link to how to make a push cage in this video or you just don't do anything and you put the queen in her cage with all the corks in it into your beehive after three or four days you take her out and you see how she's doing in this video at this time stamp if you click the link it automatically goes to that part of the video you don't have to start at the beginning I show you how to do this part you look at the queen when you take her out after four days and you see if the bees like her or if they don't you see their proboscis sticking out they're trying to feed her they like her you can release her if it looks like they're biting in the cage or they're being really angry towards her or if you shake it lightly or blow on them or take a blade of grass and rub it on the top of the cage and they're not so fast to leave or you shake the cage and the bees leave and then immediately come back on like there's a strong magnet drawing them to the cage that's my Telltale sign that means they have not accepted her put her back in and then you wait another four days or three days and you take it out and you do it again if they have accepted her pull the cork out hold a cage down in the hive and let the queen slowly walk out once she's walked out close the Beehive up as fast as possible if you can't tell or she doesn't seem like she's accepted then you're still going to let her out but first you're going to take a spray bottle with sugar syrup and that essential oil mix um with the honeybee healthy is one brand but um there's lots of brands that you spray every side of every frame in your hive with it if you have a huge Hive then just do you know the frames and the brood boxes at McDonald's and um changing the scent of the hive I found always works to help the queen be accepted all right so there you have it my 13 years of um mistakes slash things that I learned later on that I wish I knew before I got started beekeeping I hope this helps you and if you have any extra ones that you want to add in please do so so that we can have lots of tips for beginners or you know seasoned beekeepers that always like to learn new things if you're a beekeeper and you've been doing this a while then you probably are one of those type types of people that just loves feeding their brain with new knowledge thanks for watching check out my online beekeeping course at beekeeping made simple use the YouTube code YouTube three five for 35 off and this includes mentorship so you are able to email me set up a chat a phone call and we can talk and troubleshoot any problems you might have so that you have someone to go to that knows what they're doing to help you when you're getting started

Channel: Beekeeping Made Simple

Views: 95,054

Keywords: beekeeping, how to keep bees, beekeeping 101, beekeeping class, beekeeping for beginners, beekeeping mistakes, what not to do when keeping bees, backyard beekeeping, hobby beekeeping, honeybee, honey bee, intro to beekeeping, free beekeeping course

Id: yKUJ2fx14Y0

Length: 28min 30sec (1710 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 23 2023