ok so as we start this video I want to
caution you first of all that you're
going to see dead bees and you're going
to see dead mice there's no way around
it with the topic that i have here which
is wintering over the honeybees now I
walked over to this hive and you can see
grass at the entrance and that of course
means that mice are moving in and they
are building their nests there so it's
time you put out mousetraps a lot of you
are going to wonder why don't I just put
in those mouse guards on the entry
boards and entry reducers of my beehives
well here in the northeastern United
States where I live in the snowbelt it
gets extremely cold in the wintertime
and what happens is the bees have to
come out and make cleaning flights
during winter what i'm doing here is
putting in the standard Victor mousetrap
and I'm just showing you what my
favorite mousetrap design is I feel a
little syringe with peanut butter and
wear surgical gloves to keep my sent off
the traps I don't know if it's that
critical mice don't seem to be very
discriminating i do not know how many
mice are in this hive so I'm just going
to set traps out until the bait stops
being eaten and I stop trapping mice
so back to what it was about to say
about mouse guards on entry reducers
what happens is these on extremely cold
days, bees often die inside your hive and when
they do that they have a tendency to
plug up the entrances with dead bodies
if you don't keep those clear your bees
cannot exit the hive in winter and you
could have a complete die out of your
bee colony
so what I do is put mousetraps on either
side on the landing boards and I
continue to put them out through the
winter and if the mousetraps remain
un-triggered, great but each time, in
this case, deer mice are my number one
culprit for inhabiting my beehives i
leave the traps out until they're either
sprung and catch mice or spring comes
and I don't have to worry about mice
getting inside and hibernating through
winter there with the bees and plugging
up their entrance with nest material in
some cases even a mouse will die inside
bees can clean their hives out they can
clean the colony they cannot remove a
dead mouse so what the end up doing is
just encapsulating it with propolis this
has is how I set up these plastic paddle
types are in my opinion the best you can
slide the trigger to the left and make
it less sensitive you can slide the
trigger to the right in that groove on
the plastic paddle and make it the most
sensitive because i'm outside i slide it
over to the left-hand side now I set up
trail cameras and heat sensitive cameras
hoping to catch the mice to see how many
i was dealing with but they were just
too fast for the camera so here is the
next day and i want to show you what
happened on this landing
board the mousetrap tripped flipped off
the landing board and there you have a
deer mouse so one of the things you want
to notice when you're looking at your
traps after you've caught a mouse is
whether or not there is still bait in the
trap if there is then there may not be
more mice but you need to reset your
traps and put them back just in case
some people prefer to just throw away a
trap after they've trapped a mouse i reuse
them you can get them in packs of 10 off
of amazon they're not very expensive
sometimes heavy rain or even snowfall
will trigger the trap so you just come
out and reset them make sure that if the
entry boards of your beehives are
plugged with dead bees that you clean
them out and here's another deer mouse i
think all tolled throughout my apiary this
year we've trapped 12 mice these are my
free-ranging chickens
it's only about 39 degrees in this
sequence and you can see now that the
trap is actually getting a little rusty
that's fine they still work and of
course we trapped another mouse
and this one because of his gray coat
that's a little younger mouse so I'm
thinking we're starting to clear out
that family
these are my fainting goats
and here we go again another day little
warmer
maybe it's 39 today and we trap yet
another mouse
these bes are not flying simply
because it's just too cold
although you will see bees fly even when
there's snow on the ground to do a
cleaning flight and generally they may
just die
there's an example of another colony we
just had a cold snap where temps dropped into
the twenties there are a bunch of summer
bees that are now dead on the bottom, if
you don't clear out that entrance
or if you had a mouse guard here they
would be dead inside plugging up the
entrance and you would never know for
ventilation purposes we of course have
an upper entrance but the bees often
don't use that when it's really cold so
if you don't come and clear this out all
of your bees would be trapped inside by
the bodies of the bees that have
expired
it's common to see dead bees like this
in the snow that have attempted cleaning
flights they fly out it gets cold
they drop to the ground and you'll
see that they melt little circles into
the snow as they die
this is normal to see in a cold
region where you have bees, they do die
and block up the entrance so you need to
come through and make sure that those
are clean and open so that they can do
those cleaning flights and also so that
they can remove the expired bodies
normally you don't see this because on
warm days they fly away with the and
here's a trap that tripped and you don't
have to worry about the traps going off
when bees walk on them they do not trip
the mousetrap
so you just keep resetting if you get
heavy rain that's going to set off the
trap and there's a mouse that was
trapped actually during a rainstorm even
his fur wet and I make sure I also
face the paddles outward on the sides of
the landing bored because that seems to
be the most frequently access route for
the mice now here I'm going to show you
how i get rid of the mice
I just gathered with my surgical glove
flip the glove inside out
I learned this when I was an
Occupational radiation worker many years
ago and they just keep your hands-free
of contamination just throw your mice in
the garbage if you want to, wrap them up
this way just make sure that no germs
are spread there you have it drop it
right in the trash, so wintertime is here
to stay
it is time to really pay attention to
your landing boards on your beehives
expect to see dead bees at the entrance
and also in the snow even
several feet out. On warmer days when the temperature
hits the forties or the Sun shines they
need to be able to clean out their own
hives and if the entrance is plugged with dead
bodies they cannot get out to performe
cleaning flights
I hope your beehives survive the winter
happy bee keeping