hello YouTube friends so happy Wednesday and it's been four or five degrees here
where I live and I'm taking a quick walk out to check out my beehives and I want
you to notice it with the snow piled up around them there are little chimneys formed
in the snow that allow the bees to ventilate the colony here so this is
very interesting and if you look closely there you'll find little outlets where
the bees ventilate and it keeps the snow melted away
we've had several feet of snow about a foot in half in this location here if
you've seen my apiary videos before you know that these hives all stand very
high off the ground so for the snow to be up this high is pretty heavy and we
can see that some bees have been doing cleansing flights all the bees are alive
in each colony we do thermal shots and I am out here with a spatula and scraping
off the landing boards because we have a warm-up coming so notice though if you
left the snow if I knew that we were gonna have 10 degrees 20 degrees for
several days on end I would not clear away these landing boards but the minute
we're gonna have a warm-up we need to scrape it out so that the bees will be
able to fly out and do their cleansing flights and of course get rid of some of
the dead bees most of the dead bees we're looking at here are the late
summer workers so the winter stock is still in there and they're about middle
of the boxes here based on the thermal images that I've taken look at the back
here you can see little openings where they're venting out their hives through
the snow and it's a lot of fun to just get out I'm shooting this whole thing
with a GoPro Hero 7 Black Edition so it's a little jittery
look at these little chimney spots you can see the vents so unless as I said
unless there was going to be there's gonna be a melt off that's why I want to
scrape them away if it was going to stay cold
I would not remove the snow because the snow is a fantastic insulator but we do
have to make way for the bees to do those cleansing flights it's going to
get into the 40s and all this is gonna melt away so that's what I'm doing today
scraping them out get the dead bees out of there and make sure
they have a clear flight path and my camera course shifted into time warp
mode on its own you know I'm pushing the buttons with my mittens here so I messed
that up sorry about the jittery action Time Warp
is kind of a time-lapse sequence here at two times normal speed anyway I'll go
back to normal here in a minute this is a standard flow hive bottom board there
you notice they have that raised Ridge there so you really can't scrape the
bees out very well but they're doing okay too and that was the late-season
swarm this is my tiger hive standard hive I'm also gonna scrape off the
landing board here but you can see they are already vented on their own and
we're gonna make sure that they can do a cleansing flight there they are lots of
dead bees on the snow there but the colony is still strong the numbers are
still high so if we can just get this camera there's also my electric fence
electric fences off this time of year now we're back to normal finally thank
goodness now this is a Norway spruce tree which provide shelter for the birds
and that tall skinny box there is a winter roost for the birds so like Black
capped chickadees titmice things like that are going in there to shelter from
extreme weather which we have had recently we've had wind chills in the
minus 20 minus 30 degree range here's a blue spruce Colorado blue
spruce covered with snow again makes a great insulated area for the birds the
tracks around here are from the bird activity another thing I love about snow
cover is I can see what animals have been in the area there you can see my
shadow holding my hero 7 there on the end of a selfie stick but I'm not gonna
take a selfie with it of course now because the snow is deep and fluffy it's
running anywhere from a foot and a half to 3 feet deep so I'm wearing snowshoes
today all of these sequences are just in my yard there's some squirrel tracks
here going up this tree and this is my largest bird roost that I put out this
year also again to provide shelter for the birds this is an ongoing experiment
I have an upcoming video showing you how I made it and put the put the perches
inside and things like that and I'm gonna wait till the end of the season to
report on what used those sanctuary boxes in the
snow and hopefully I'll have some good video there because I have a camera
inside that box all the audio is straight from the hero seven so here we
have a dead tree woodpeckers have made lots of holes here I like to look at
them and see what kind of animals might be using the space usually it squirrels
sometimes woodpeckers we have Dawnie and Hairy woodpeckers here in the area and
of course the deer have been tracking through here steady and they use the
same paths over and over so they're very easy to find and of course they bed down
in the lower wetland area here and here's where I have a hose going over
the pond and the water is running even though it's only five or six degrees it
did not freeze in this spot so this is where the wildlife come to drink and I'm
glad to see that it's still draining here and keeping a nice water resource
for them you see where the deer have just been traipsing all through here and
that's one of my chicken coops off to the right there chickens were all doing
great the pond is frozen over this pond is only 120 feet across the top and of
course there's a wood duck house they're sticking up with a predator guard on
it
and one of my trees fell I'm gonna have to cut that up probably in the spring
and look at this track from the deer they're using this every day and around
this time of day - we'll see some deer coming out maybe and these are my woods
everything of course knows I'm out here walking around the air so still and quiet
that you really can't move in a very sneaky way so you're not gonna creep up
on any wildlife this is a big hemlock tree one of my favorites and the Native
Americans used to use hemlock roots and stuff as thread for stitching and things
like that these are very cool trees
the advantage here today is while I'm out here the the wind is not strong you see
little squirrel tracks some Mouse tracks in the snow here as well a lot of small
mammals here if I were out at night I would see more I did come out I wanted
to record sounds of owls and things at night and didn't get much recently so
glad to get back out here and try again with better audio gear I'm not super
impressed with the audio in this Hero7 and look dead center there in the
frame if you can see it there's a deer and because I can't zoom in with the
GoPro you just have to see a little speck there I'm gonna try to walk
towards them a little bit and see what happens oh there it goes it's just a doe
and then I'm gonna sit against this tree deep in the snow it's amazing how
insulating the snow is when you have the right gear on here's my snowshoes I'm
just gonna sit in this corner and see if I can see any wildlife thanks for
watching my video clear those landing boards and get those dead bees out to
make sure that your bees can do a cleansing flight this winter thanks for
watching as always
you