Hi, I'm Tarrin Lupo from www.TarrinLupo.com
and after the success on my last documentary about quitting your job
becoming a farmer, I had a lot of people ask me to do a documentary
about beekeeping, so stay tuned.
so I really didn't have a clue where to start and I got pretty fortunate because
I found a couple
Robert and Gloria who were actually teaching a class
at the 2015 porcupine Freedom Festival
or Porcfest. The class was really jam-packed with just about everything
you ever wanted to know about beekeeping
here take a little listen to the sample. So this is a picture of the mating flight
The drone has caught a queen from behind
He does his thing and then he dies.
The worker is always a female, the worker can lay eggs in absence of a queen
but they are all infertile and will only become lazy drones.
A worker lives about six weeks during the summer
and four to nine months in the winter. The worker bees has many roles in her lifetime.
She starts out as a house bee and then a nurse bee, next their are builder,
storage bees and guard bees and finally
She is out to fly around and forage.
Robert and Gloria Leustek
Live on a small farm in Winchester New Hampshire. That's a little south of Keene
New Hampshire
On their farm they try to grow their own food
including chickens. And to guard their chickens
they got a baby goose name Lexie
who make several cameos throughout our film
Flap your wings?
(laughing)
So my name is Robert and I keep bees.
The reason I got into beekeeping is because I also make mead
and honey is quite expensive ingredient so I thought that the bees could make
honey for me.
Hi. I'm Gloria and I'm
this other half, better half and her it and
we got into be keeping one day was at work and he called me up and said
honey find a place that has up beehive and
beekeeping supplies and I did and I called.
Because he caught a swarm and that we pretty much got into
beekeeping at that point.
He's primarily a beekeeper but I've been you know helping along the way with
getting supplies and stuff like that. It's been fun
I love watching the bees and helping him going into the hive
and inspecting and checking them out.
It's a lot of fun. The first year we didn't have honey but after that
we've been having honey. extracting is fun thing but
its messy.
when we reap the harvest the up the hive and
all the benefits of it it's it's just it's a great thing. European honeybees
are actually very calm. We as beekeepers, when we have an aggressive
hive will re-queen and put in a calm queen.
Many people say they're afraid to be these are allergic to bees when in
actuality that majority and the bee stings that happen in this country
are because at Yellow Jackets. Since bees
these bees are vegetarian they
only bring in pollen and nectar
they're not the ones that your picnic, but at picnics
you find Yellow Jackets because they are meat eaters
and they're extremely aggressive. A bee colony is primarily
one queen, a whole bunch of workers and drones.
The queen is a female
obviously, the workers are also female
the drones are the only males in the hive
and their purpose, their only purpose is to mate with a queen
They sit around the hive, they eat and they do no work.
So the bee colony starts
in January by February they are laying
brewed and eggs for be progressive coming up
honey flow, nectar flow they
The Queen can lay up to 2,000 eggs a day.
and the workers go out and collect
the resources necessary to keep the hive going and multiplying.
The nectar flow here in New Hampshire lasts
from tax day the 15th of April, until
are right about are now beginning of July
is when we're going into the dearth.
The dearth is the time of year during the summer, between nectar flows
there's a spring nectar flow and there's a fall nectar flow but due to the dry
conditions during the middle of the summer
there's not a lot of flowers blooming and so the bees have less resources
to sustain the hive. The Queen cuts back on the amount of eggs
she lays every day and the hive shrinks for a short period during summer.
and then regains its strength going into the fall
for the fall nectar flow.
The bees bring in nectar during the two nectar flows for spring flow and the fall flow.
When things are blooming the bees bring in the nectar from flowers
they store it in cells in the hive.
They fan it to dehydrated they transfer it around to dehydrate it
further until it reaches its final location in the hive
where it has i believe 15 percent water or less.
Now it's honey. They cap it over and they store it for use later on in the winter
A beehive has many products,
honey bee it'll be most obvious.
but other things that come from hype would be beeswax
for making candles for making soap.
Propolis which is bee, glue they use.
They collect sap from trees and the use it for caulking
the interior of the hive
Propolis, besides being used for cold sores and that sort of thing for palace is used
for the varnish for stradivarius violins.
You mix propolis and wax with alcohol
high grade alcohol and it produces a varnish that's used on violins.
there's also
royal jelly which you can buy in health food stores
super high nutrients. Pollen is brought in
to feed the babys but pollen can be harvested
at the front of the hive and you can buy it in health food stores
itself very high in vitamins and nutrients.
so the solar wax melter is used
primarily to melt wax that comes from the hive when the bees
make a comb a bad location.
and I'm cleaning around the hive as I'm inspecting I'll pull that out and throw it
into the wax melter
old frames that are there for too many years
we throw those into the melter and meltdown the wax.
the resulting comb thats
got not much wax left in it is called slum gum
and it's exceptionally good as a fire starter for campfires
during the winter bees will
form what's known as a cluster what this is
is the worker bees let me
start this by saying that the drones
who are useless in the hive except for mating with a queen, are all dragged out
by their feet
and proud of the front doorstep at the beginning of the winter
because they don't provide anything for the high so then the
the colony is left with workers and a queen and the idea is they have to keep
the Queen alive
even during the coldest nights, so they form a cluster
which is a ball of bees with the queen at the center.
and they will keep the queen at about 98 degrees.
through the entire winter day and night. They slowly worked their way up
through the hive towards the top eating food stores
honey as they go along very very slowly
during the winter. The workers who have an average life span of five weeks
during the winter a worker can live for five months
Robert and Gloria make it sound easy to raise bees but
it's not that simple or everybody be doing it
there's a lot of pitfalls I wanna take you over to my friends over
Foggy Hill Farm to share their experiences other wins and some
hardships they had raising bees.
Hi, I'm Andy Pressman of Foggy Hill Farm in Jaffrey New Hampshire
and welcome to our bee yard, we currently have
3 hives after a a terrible loss
two winters ago, we lost the
all our hives in -17 degree weather for about a week.
and we are slowly rebuilding, but we've beenkeeping bees
for about 15 years and its been an amazing experience.
We started really for pollination as we have a small market farm.
I'm but also value there honey and other products that come from the hive
and I started to have with an herbalist in southeast Ohio
I'm who actually stung people on a monthly basis as a healing
process and now the results I saw after
some folks had several surgeries I am but the
what the bees provided was the most
amazing healing process for them
and so that really got me thinking about the important to bees
and I slowly started learning more about their community and organization
and what they have to offer a community-building and I am just
fascinated by the whole process and
different types the hives. It's been a
really great hobby turning into commercial business
but it has taken a long time and is also
an expensive hobby up until we really started selling honey and in doing well if it.
I would say for beginning
beekeepers, some of the things I really learned, is one is to really start small
Really learn what you're doing. Don't invest in tons of equipment at first.
but really get get your skills down before you start scaling up.
and also make sure you have a good mentor thats local
I like I said I started beekeeping in Ohio and down to Virginia
and as we slowly kept moving north I'm we realized how
regional specific bees, specifically the queen. So we've been part of the
queen rearing program to
localize the queen's in hives more as we move more north. So here we are New
Hampshire and its I definitely a much different climate than Virginia.
Having someone local who knows beekeeping is great to keep on your
speed dial on your cell phone and also just ask a lot of questions
and support your local beekeeping organization there's there's several
throughout every state
how many counties have a man they're just a great resource and a great connection
and I urge you all to promote them and support them and be a part of
pollination effects and great honey that come from a hive.
We have a Facebook page so you can look up Foggy Hill Farm
in New Hampshire. I believe there's another Foggy Hill Farm out there somewhere.
I will soon have a website but I am
yeah we're here in Jaffrey, New Hampshire
Robert and Gloria
wanna share some with their mistakes as beekeepers so you guys won't repeat and
when you start out
Our first year in beekeeping was catching a swarm.
and the first place we got information was beekeeping for dummies
and while it's a good resource it wasn't enough for us to learn what was
necessary to be a beekeeper
and it was finally when we joined a bee club.
We had the fortunate opportunity to speak to people who had
been keeping bees for 10 20 30 40
sixty years that we could ask them questions
and they could help us out with any issues that came along
once we had that resource have other people to speak to
that's when we started actually producing honey and having hives that
could survive the winter
Our first year when we caught a swarm
our primary mistake was we didn't re-queen.
why this is important is simply because
hives, beehives multiply
through swarming. Swarming is not the thing you read in the media where
bees attacking people. The hive when it decides it has
it's time to split, the old queen will signal the workers to create new queens
these are called supersedure cells. they'll create new Queens.
When those queens are ready to be born
the old queen will take half the workers and half of all the food and the pollen
and she'll leave with them to find a new home
and create a new colony. The key word here
is it was the old queen that left with all these things.
So you when you catch a swarm you don't know how old that queen is
and I believe that in our first year beekeeping will be old queen
died after we put them into the new hive. We should've re-queend we should have
bought a new queen and installed her and gotten rid of the old one
we would have had much more success.
Our main objective with our bees is producing honey which we use to make mead.
But aside from saving the cost of the ingredients,
you can sell natural honey
for $14 a pound in this area
you can sell the pollen, you can sell but the wax
you can sell numerous products from the hive to make money
and really when you get into a money-making venture
the real key is queen breading. If you
create new queens, you can sell them to other beekeepers in your area
and elsewhere and they go for twenty eight dollars to thirty five dollars
per queen. Another product
from a beehive that you can make money with is
nucs (NUCS) otherwise short for nucleus colony.
This is five to six frames
from a hive with workers, with honey,
with pollen, with a queen.
these go for $150 roughly
to people who want to start their own beekeeping adventure.
The key thing to remember as a new bee keeper.
for the first year you will not get any honey.
Your objective during first seasonal
is to help the bees
build up strength and enough infrastructure in the hive
so that they can survive the first winter. If you've successfully over-winter a hive.
the following spring you will get honey.
So there's different kinds of honeys that you can get.
It basically depends on where your flower sources are from
most honey that the backyard beekeeper will produce is called a wildflower
honey but you don't really know what source flowers you're
bees are getting their nectar and honey from.
you can get specialized honeys like clover honey,
orange blossom honey and buckwheat honey
because the beekeepers will put their hives
directly in the middle love in orchard or field
with clover and stuff like that but you can get all kinds a different
specialized honey depending upon where the flower sources are from.
So honey never goes bad I mean they found honey in the tombs of tutankhamun
that was thousands of years old and it's fine.
Honey naturally crystallizes and as a result what you can do if you can
seed your honey with crystallized honey and make what is called the creamed honey
and it's great you can spread it on bread and and muffins and stuff like that.
Its an awesome thing.
You can also get honeycomb.
It is another thing that people do that you can sell.
From your your wares, people that will cut actual honeycomb
and and sell it with the honey in the wax and that goes for premium.
I hope with this information
it took some of the fear out of starting your own beekeeping business
so give it a try. If you like this video please give it a thumbs up
a like and to share. Also you can find
my unlisted and private videos over at www.TarrinLupo.com
so go check those out you will see those anywhere else. My unlisted videos
include topics on how to raise and sell carnivorous plants.
and how to make your own mead, go check them out.