hey what's up everybody i'm adrian you may have seen me in some of the previous clip videos of
SciAll uh but i'm a honeybee researcher and so today i'm going to be doing a video on how to
tag bees and so that's something that i have quite a bit of experience with i do it for all
of my experiments kind of how i start the summer but there's a little kind of added context of i'm
doing this after taking a year off because of the pandemic i'm sure you guys are aware
so i just got back in the lab about a month ago and now that it's getting warm and the bees are
getting active i'm getting back into the actual hands-on research stuff uh and so what i'm gonna
show you is basically the two days of me doing my first steps of research and getting bees tagged
um and it's gonna be kind of the whole thing so from start to finish everything that i did and
maybe with a couple of glimpses into stuff that um i kind of had a little bit of trouble with because
i kind of forgot that was part of the process or maybe even it's just i forgot where things were
in lab after not being here for a while so that's the basic idea of the video um i hope you like it
so a big part of tagging newly emerged bees is having a place for them to emerge
and that's what an incubator is for so the first thing i had to do is go check our incubator make
sure that it's running at the right temperature but it also needs to be running at the right
humidity and we do that by making sure there are containers of water in it at all times
and so that's when i opened it and realized that those containers haven't been filled in a year
so that was the first part of my day the other supplies i needed for marking the next day were
the actual paints individual number tags and cages to house bees after they've been marked
and luckily all of that's been perfectly organized since i last left lab and so i was almost ready to
actually go out and get live bees for my colonies but since part of this process involves taking
frames from my colonies i want to make sure i'm replacing those frames as well so that's
what i have here is a bunch of old hives in storage that we can use and take frames from
and what i needed was one regular frame that i could use to replace the female workers that i
took and then a drone brood frame which is where male bees are laid and since male bees are a
little bit larger they get laid in a different type of cell so you want to make sure you're
kind of swapping like for like frames and then i was ready to go so like every good southern boy
i got up in my pickup truck and headed out to the sunset slash towards where my field colonies were
once i got to the field site i lit my smoker which is always the first thing you should
do when working with bees uh i think there's kind of like weird perceptions and ideas and
a lot of myths about what the smoker actually does and doesn't do so i might address that in
another video but for this video i'm just going to say this is me lighting a smoker you should
probably do it if you want to beekeep safely and mainly it just helps me kind of spatially
disperse the bees away from where i'm trying to work and it blocks their sense of smell
and so then I actually went to the colony and so this is me blowing a little bit of smoke
at the entrance uh blowing a little bit at the top before I open up the colony
and then we're going to jump-cut a little further ahead in the process
and this is me actually getting out the drone brood frame from the colony
and so what you're going to see right now is I'm going to come up kind of show the camera what's on
that frame I ended up taking this frame and so part of the process for tagging bees is that I
want newly emerged bees so none of these bees that are actually out and on the comb that are adults
uh are really important to me what I want is the frame that has the developing bees
and so what I'm gonna does is um come to show you what it looks like
and then i think the next part of the process is actually my favorite so this is actually uh
whenever i first teach my undergrads to beekeep the first lesson i tell them
is uh bees are surprisingly amenable to just being shaken and thrown around and so that's
what i need to do because i just want the frame and not the actual bees and so then what i did is
i took that frame back to the truck put it in the box and then brought back one of the frames that i
uh had in the box to swap it with and so right now what i'm doing is putting a little bit of
extra smoke in the colony and what i could do is just replace that frame close the colony up
but i kind of figured that there'd probably be some good emerging workers as well
so what i'm doing right now is working through the colony seeing if i can find some good
emerging female workers as well apparently that's also when i realized that i should
move over to the other side of the colony for a better camera angle and so my suspicion turned
out to be true and i found a real banger of a frame and so this is me coming up to the camera
to show you what it looks like and i'll show you a picture later on of what it looks like
without bees all over it and you'll kind of get a better picture of what i'm seeing that makes
me say like oh yeah let's definitely take this frame with us and so that's what i'm doing here
and just like the previous frame, you got to give it the old shaker shake up before you
take it with you so I got two pretty good frames from that first colony but I was looking for one
more frame of drone brood, unfortunately, no other colony that I had in that apiary
was going to have that so here's me working in another apiary and this is a big part of
looking for emerging brood is sometimes it can be a bit of a wild goose chase or whatever the idiom
is what you're going to see here is me looking at a drone brood frame deciding
that it's not the best but then realizing that it's worth looking at because I
realize that the queen's on this frame and I figured you guys might want to see that
and so i realized that you guys probably didn't get a good look at her from the video so i went
and just took a couple pictures of her i think that shows a lot more clearly just
how much different the queen looks uh compared to the female workers that are sterile i'll talk
a little bit more about honeybee morphology later on in the video but it's a pretty stark difference
and you can kind of tell you get a good eye for it but this is the queen in this colony and she is a
beaut she's a good looking queen you can see that she's clearly larger she has the larger extended
abdomen for laying eggs and she's got the little uh paint mark on her which we do just to make it
easier for us to spot her whenever we're working through a colony and so this is what the frame of
female workers that we took from that first colony looks like and this is kind of what you're looking
for it's a little bit more irregular but normally what you want is kind of an empty center and then
a ring around the edge of bees that are just now coming out and essentially what that means is that
all the bees in the middle have already come out and then the kind of last bees that were
laid that are just about to come out um are the only thing left on the frame ultimately the best
sign you can get is bees actually emerging from the frame and so that's what i'm showing here
is a little bee fully developed chewing her way out of her cell you can see her get almost halfway
out and then she kind of decides that she'll do the rest of the work later i feel your little lady
and so that wraps up day one of be tagging like i said there's a lot involved in the process
so once you have the bee's in the incubator they'll continue to emerge and you can just come back the
next day and tag the newly emerged bees so that's actually what i just got done doing
and i filmed that with my friend amelia but i think we're gonna do that as a part two day two
video on its own since this is getting a little bit long but i hope you enjoyed it i hope you
learned something if you have any questions feel free to leave them in the comments if you want
to see more content like this make sure to hit that subscribe and like button hit that bell
as the kids do and uh thanks for spending some time with me and the bees i'll see you next time