The making of a log hive - Treatment Free Tree Beekeeping in Great Britain

here we have a log hive made to this event dimensions of n style the cavity is about 10 to 11 inches about 12 inches at the maximum about 11 minimum and it's 3 feet long so it all may be 55 litres of volume colony has been very strong and is quite defensive especially if you threaten the brood nest which is why you see me dressed in protective suit because I have looked at these bees before and if I go anywhere near the brood nest they will let me know they don't want me to be there without without going into the brood nest the bees are okay we walk around the garden there's not a problem and they are strong and I haven't treated them with any of our treatments I haven't fed them any sugar I haven't taken any honey there these are and if necessary I will use them as a source of varroa resistant bees and I'll just collect the swarms but we want to see how they will do in this log hive with walls a minimum of 4 inches thick I haven't treated bees now for seven years and I've noticed that other people who are treating their bees have more varroa and the varroa is stronger having to treat the bees with more chemicals stronger chemicals and more often more times during the year before people treated the bees in the autumn and now they're treating in the spring as well and I even know some people who have to treat their bees every nine days with some sort of our side it's very expensive but it's not actually going to help the bees adapt to the road just going to be breeding a super varroa if you do your side a bit more it'll spin it together chocolate a second yeah okay is it good me hello my name is Matt Somerville I live in England north of Andover in the South of England and I'm going to show you how we make a log hide for the bees and scribe it with a pencil this is a circles for the hollow that we were going to be cutting the entrance is probably going to be this this side here and then now I'm going to do a series of vertical lines to mark where we're going to be cutting the next to the center line and making a couple of other parallel lines which again will be following with the chainsaw we're just going to roll it 90 degrees I can do the cuts on the other lines this is now the the plunge cutting is done now for this side if you are going to use a chainsaw funds cutting is probably the most dangerous way of using a saw and you have to take a lot of care to avoid the saw pouncing back and hitting hitting your head maybe so not advised for the beginning chainsaw using at one out it's coming the bodies before we did it we did it some the logs in the ground it's much easier distressing of course work from from an edge and work my way around okay so this this logs started but it'll take another three hours perhaps to hollow it out to a cylinder and I want to show you the other processes involved in making the top and the baseboard so I've got another log that we've done which I can show you and we'll do that we'll do that next this is the baseboard which I made and I'm just going to mark out with a pencil whip what I need to cut out okay okay so this is going to be the bottom of the hive and I'll just clean it off with a plane so that manage my router can follow easily around the bottom okay so I've traced an outline of where I'm going to cut my rebate for this normally I would have a this comes from another hive but I'll show you what I'm going to do normally I allow about two centimeters rebate all around here it's a bit thin but it'll still be okay okay and first first of all I'll do by hand but first of all I I plunge it it is series of plunges and then I go around afterwards and take it off to the line so you can see I've routed it with a router it's slightly bigger than the ball so that it won't swell up and it's slightly deeper than the thickness of the wood and then this is held in place with two wooden turn buttons that lock it in place complicated okay and then you can tighten it up with it's not bad a little bit more work and then that'll be all right good you can even if it's well the wood swells up you can release it well your worries abyss yeah so beddin okay so I'm going to put that this is another log hive which is on legs and I'm going to put the baseboard back in the bottom which has some little wooden buttons to keep it up there this log hive was was populated with the swarm that we find and seems to be working quite well we can see pollen coming in to the hive inside you can see a lot of comb being built covered in bees and it looks like this should go through the winter none of these log hives are treated with any of our asides or fed so it's a total natural process you you

Channel: ruchebio

Views: 311,931

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Id: pBikO86q130

Length: 9min 19sec (559 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 21 2015