Hi everybody, Cody here.
So I did promise that I would do a beekeeping video every week
and so here I am.
although I didn't go home this weekend, so I didn't get to work with my bees
and if you look around a bit... winter came, so I wouldn't want to open them today anyway.
It's kind of late for winter and the snow will be gone pretty soon, so I will be back at my bees probably next week.
in which case I want to start making queens as soon as possible.
Anyway, since I don't have a bee video I thought I might as well talk about something that has been going viral on the internet.
I don't know if you guys have seen it but it's the Flow Hive, where you turn
a tap and the honey comes out of the hive.
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I've been flooded with messages about it, people
posting links to my profile and everybody loves it and they want to know what I think about it because I am an experienced Beekeper I have been keeping bees for over 12 years.
[ bee sounds ]
And, uh... as I began telling people, I don't really like the idea.
I'm okay with, they can go do it if they want
I consider it to be a toy, it's not something that's actually going to help bees,
even though they keep saying it will help bees, it's not.
I can tell you a few reasons why.
The problems you are going to have include, the fact that the bees, they cap the honey around the outside first.
The middle of the frame is going to have incurred honey.
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And so, from the edge of it, it's going to look like it's full.
And you drain the honey, the middle of it going to drain out first
and that going to be incurred honey
and you don't want to harvest that.
It's not even honey at that point and if you don't pasteurize it, it will actually ferment
because of the high water content
and the runny honey they are taking out of the hive does look like it has quite a bit of water in it
One of the things they are saying is they don't open the hive as much
because you don't have to disturb the bees to get the hive off.
Well, the thing is, you are going to have to take the hive apart to see how much honey they have.
It's going to be very difficult to see in from the side because you have bees there.
Also, you're not taking apart the hive
well, you're going to do that anyway to check on the bees
Bee keepers do that all the time.
Granted, you won't have to brush the bees off and disturb them that way,
you know, to get to the honey and take the honey out
But then you are running into the problem that now you've got empty boxes with no honey in it
which has caps on it, so they bees will think there's honey there
So they bees are going to migrate up into the upper box
they usually go up to the upper part of the hive anyway, when they're wintering.
And they will eat a little honey there and if there is nothing there, then they will be too cold to move around
and they will actually freeze in place and they'll starve to death.
This happens to hives all the time
when you take honey out of the top box
and just leave it an empty space.
So we usually, as bee keepers, we take the top boxes off,
even if we don't harvest the honey
we'll blow the bees out, take the top box out
So that they are in a smaller space and have more contact with the large frames of honey
So they can actually, over winter, without entering an area with no honey and not be able to cross it.
Anyway, I have talked to many bee keepers about this, and many of them think the same thing.
One bee keeper I talked to yesterday, he's from Alaska, he has Alaskan bees
He looks at this as the dumbest idea ever.
[laugh]
And, uh, I kind of agree with him, although I won't hurt them at all
I won't slow them down but $4 million dollars they collected on their indigogo campaign.
And I think that is just absurd, they don't need that much money
They might make that cause it's probably going to be a fad for a while
But then bee keepers are going to find out that it really doesn't do you any good.
Commercial bee keepers aren't going to do this
You're going to get people at home that have never really had bees
they are going to try this out. You might get away with it if it's just a little demonstration hive
the bees will probably die that year
It might work great for an observational bee hive, because you can watch the honey drain out.
Might be cool to watch
But you know, $4 million dollars, I think that would be much better spent with some other aspect of bees
something that is actually killing the bees, like the varroa mite or the foulbrood.
There are some of my friends at BYU that are actually creating a cure for American Foulbrood.
I think we should be throwing all that money towards them
draining the honey out in a different way might raise awareness of bees
It might get more people into bee keeping but
bees are still going to die unless we throw some money towards some things that are actually going to save the bees, like getting rid of the mites.
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Anyway, that's my little spiel, I'll see you guys next time.
[awkward laugh]