Tips/tricks for wax dipping bee hive equipment

hey guys ashby at ashby farms and we're out here just wax dipping mid-summer um i still can't seem to catch up on equipment at this point in time which is hilarious but we are just doing our best so we have been man cutting uh all this took about four days of cutting another four days to put it all together four days of waxing so this is like 12 days worth of work and my dad bought a birdhouse recently so we're gonna wax dip that for him too um so just wanted to touch on some things that we have going on this is mainly updates i've got pallets have been done here since december and um we are in the process of just getting enough equipment um we're establishing three new bee yards tomorrow um what i do is just take the weed matting see here it's just some old used we matting from our produce form we put that down put our pallets down um then starting tonight i'm sorry starting tomorrow night we will bring a nuke box in and all of our nukes were two frame splits and i checked on them this morning i looked at about 15 of them they're a full five frames so we'll set the five frame nuke in the position and then over you know the next two or three days after that we will go to the bee yard put a 10 frame box in place and then move those in we like to use the um in hive feeders cap and ladders are nice we have some that don't have the cap and ladders just use like a float the little float board or a piece of uh like metal uh hardware cloth in there just as a any type of ladder will work so we run basically a 10 frame box with a two frame feeder and eight frames of bees and then of course we'll put a lid on there and we are early june like june the 10th i think june june 11th so it's time this time just think about starting to feed the bees um so we'll be going through maybe giving them you know half a gallon if it's a strong colony we'll give them a full gallon but the plan is gonna be every two weeks we want to create that false nectar flow so you know every two weeks we're just going to go around all the yards and feed them [Music] a couple things i want to talk to you about and the main part of this video is going to be wax dipping so uh this box here i've had a few questions about it um it it measures 40 inches by 20 inches that allows us to stack four of the 10 frame boxes vertically and then we've got a one and a half inch closed cell foam insulation on the outside a burner down low underneath off the lp tank and my main goal with this video is to show you some things so we're just about ready to pull this batch here in just a minute we've run you know at 212 212 degrees and these are tips that nobody gave me but maybe this will help somebody out there on youtube so 212 degrees is where water boils turns to steam and that's what we're trying to do is get all the water out of this wood so water will show itself in the form of foam so take a look in here if you would um this is this is foam it's water coming out of the wood so this this wax is currently at 240 degrees and that's where i have found in my opinion is the sweet spot the reason being at 260 i can't so let's start with how i do it so we're keeping this wood submerged on a timer for seven minutes that way if i'm off doing something else nearby or whatever it ultimately ends up being like a 10 minute soak but we used to do like 15 minutes and it was just soaking up so much wax and of course along with everything else wax has gone through the roof in price this year so it's not that i'm skimping i just found out i was using too much wax on it so recently i had a i've got a closed cell foam lid and the i we were working on something else and the wax got up to 325 degrees and i couldn't even put one pallet in there without it foaming over and that's what you see here so at 325 degrees we're getting five motors all right that's too high so we cut the heat we let it cool down got about 275 i put two pallets in and it foamed over again and this is just wax you know going on the ground and that costs money so then we went down to 260 and you can't achieve these temperatures but in mid-summer like today it's 85 degrees you know when it's cool out in march and it's high of the day is 60. you're never going to get above 2 30 but i like my wax somewhere between 230 and 240 so at 240 degrees after this has been in for about seven or eight minutes now so show them this foam real quick this is a good example so this is all you're loose from and this stuff here is actually cooling that's that's what we're seeing you see wax bubbles kind of setting up so i'm going to undo this one thing that we have learned is to use a step um while some people may say that's dangerous you just got to be careful you know we say safety third um so but it comes out do you want your wax gloves yeah i'll give them a second um you can see that the wooden wear immediately floats in there [Applause] so we got these on amazon they're a silicone glove rated to 500 degrees i wear my black gloves underneath not so much for protection as the liners on these gloves stick to your sweaty hands so getting them on and off is easier when you got a second pair of gloves underneath um so we let we're putting down these two sticks and then putting our um this this allows the weight of the cinder block to stretch across all four boxes you can see over here the amount of wax that drips off of not only the cinder block but off those two pieces of wood we're recollecting that because when i go to dip that pallet it'll all dissolve off into the to the wax so we come in here this is tricky because remember we're dealing with 240 degrees so it's hotter than boiling water and i've just this is my wax dipping shirt and pants whatever you're going to have is going to get ruined i turn them this way saw the um come around right here so all the wax can get out of the handles just let it drip there put one here take our that one's wedged sometimes they do this you just got to get two where you can work with them let them drip a second and i want this lip what is the frame rest lip to the outside so that's the outside and that's the outside so that in a minute just filming here we got all this wax is now running down into the corners like this you can see right in here it's already dried most of your end grain anywhere there's a cut so the handles on the end grain cuts that's where most of that water is escaping out of you can see it right on right in there on that one [Applause] and then i was supposed to have moved these already but i wasn't prepared so those were two uh two cycle i guess you called two batches ago this one here's our last batch so we're giving them two batches to cool and when i say cool like those are still hot to the touch but with a pair of gloves on you can handle so you can still see there's some wax right there that frame rest it'll soak in actually so usually just give them a minute you can watch all that wax it just soaks right into the wood what kind of wax do you use yeah so that's another one um we were doing a 50 50 micro crystal in and paraffin and then our second round they only shipped me um i was buying a 500 pounds of each and right now i got 300 pounds of micro crystalline so we're mixing a three three parts micro crystal into five parts paraffin plus whatever you know the tank holds 600 pounds of wax um just to fill it so if you look in here now that it's empty while those are cooling you see we've got almost 12 inches between the level of the wax can you see that i'm sorry yeah between the level the wax on the top of the tank is about 12 inches when it's empty the reason you want that is by the time you put the stuff in there it probably makes the water level go or the wax level go up about three inches you want room for foam because depending on a lot of different factors um we kind of found that sweet spot but it takes some time as far as the burner goes where that constant temperature is it once like i turned it on low this morning and cory stayed here and i went over to two of our bee yards to get some stuff for tomorrow and take note of what all we're gonna move and while i was out there i just left this down low so when i got back it was already all melted from yesterday you know normally if you put a lid on it just the residual heat maybe the top two inches will reset up overnight so we try and get two and three day blocks where we can wax dip because if you start this thing as a fresh block it takes like five hours to melt it so this morning it only took i put the i put the burner just on a real low got home it was already 170 degrees it took uh 30 minutes to go from 170 to 240 and get the wax up to temperature and then we're ready to rock and roll so um uh while i was out doing that this morning then the wax was just over here getting ready normally we don't like to leave fires going you know leave it alone but in this case cory's able to watch it so this is just a little learned trick that we do over time is how to stage them and it makes for no and lowest i caught low splash not no splash but low splash because when this stuff gets on you you see all these little droplets of wax when it gets on your skin like it's burning hot it's 240 degrees it's hotter than boiling water so it doesn't feel good um we pre-stage them like that they want to you know just like they're like floats in there they want to go everywhere so what i've found my method that works is to go in one two three start four we end up just a little bit of splash make sure that they don't stick together because cold wooden wear in hot wax the wax will actually act like glue between two pieces we used to run a fifth uh deep in between like this but it made it really difficult getting out and where the two boards would touch the wax would set up and get cold and then the wood wouldn't permeate or wouldn't soak through with wax so take our two boards here as you can see i'm moving slow because i'm still very sore from yesterday go ahead and submerge it and then i normally just set a timer so we have you know a bunch of propane units give you an idea i can run a propane unit all day for about 12 hours on on one tank and uh so you know three days in a row we required three tanks um i'm doing this and that's just kind of an update like i said i think running that wax at between 230 and 240 the micro crystalline has a melt point of 190 and the paraffin has a melt point of 130 let's show you something walk with me so last year we ran the wax early in the year at about 215 degrees just barely ever boiled we struggled a lot of times we had it like 205 i didn't have that that insulative wrap on it so we couldn't get the wax up to temp here's the results of this so these are last year's boxes you can see this wax is in the sun it's melting out it didn't permeate the wood it coated the wood so what you end up with is like this or i mean i hope the camera can pick up this is all shiny right now there's your drips right there i actually pulled a lot of this off earlier yeah i don't know you were going to video it i wouldn't know you've got wax all from last year um now one of the benefits of using last year's equipment look at all this propolis this is all propolis in the corner that's all propolis up the corner these are overwintered and um you can see where they properlized in so this makes for like the absolute best swarm traps um and that's how we that's how we do it i mean the bees have already lived in it smells like bees so anyways guys um that's just a little update on i try and do these little daily videos here's what's going on at our farm here's what's going on the bee biz is what we're doing um and just plugging away at it so i couldn't do it without miss corey in the background behind the camera or uh helping out in the bee yard and everything that she does and uh just plugging away at it every single day so hope you guys enjoyed it if you like it subscribe to the channel subscribe subscribe to the channel and uh follow and like appreciate it you have a good day where are we no it's the other way [Laughter] there he is

Channel: Ashby Farms NC

Views: 7,265

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Id: iXbc24jkeiY

Length: 15min 38sec (938 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 13 2022