Alright everyone, Cody here.
So I think today I'm gonna be looking at the bees
and wrapping things up so as to prepare them for winter.
Let's see what we've got in here.
You know, they actually built out quite a lot.
It's not as much as I would have liked, but...
Yeah, they've got half this top box filled
so that's, just giving it a rough estimate,
there's probably 50 lbs of honey in that box.
Which is just enough for them to survive the winter,
and there's actually a little bit up here, still.
Which they're probably currently eating out and moving down into this lower box.
So this is a good hive.
And so I hate to do this to them, but this is some formic acid and honey, mixed together,
I'm just gonna be putting this inside here,
and that could mean the difference between them dying off due to mites, and not.
See, they'll eat that, spread it all around themselves and it will kill off the mites.
Let's have a look at this hive here.
Let's see. Yeah they're not doing nearly as well but there are quite a few more bees than I was expecting.
Yeah, I'd say these guys, their biggest problem is: they don't have enough food.
First thing that's gonna happen to them is they're gonna run out of food and starve
so I might be able to feed them and get them to go through winter.
Let's pull one of these frames out of here. Do they have any honey?
They've got a little bit of honey. It's not a lot, though...
Okay, honey, honey. Okay, yeah, they've got enough that it would probably get them well into December.
But it's not enough to make it through the entire winter.
See, they've got part of this frame, and these two amounts that you can see right there.
Not very much.
So you know, I think I am actually gonna combine these with another hive.
I think that would be the best thing to do here.
I might as well put them with this hive right here.
Okay, I think I'm gonna go ahead and combine these hives. I've got some paper there,
I've got a queen excluder, and a box
and so, first thing I'm gonna do, is I'm gonna take this box, and I'm gonna shake the bees out of it
down into the lower hive, and then take the frames and put them somewhere temporarily
and from there, you guys will just have to watch.
Shake off most of the bees, into the other hive.
Look how thick those combs are!
Since I'm doing this I think I'm gonna take the formic acid, and I'm gonna move this down.
There we go, just drop it right in there. Next one.
I'm gonna lay some paper across these guys, to separate them from the other hive
there we go, just put this back on.
You thought I was gonna put the queen excluder between these, didnt you!
No, that's not what the queen excluder is for.
*bzzz what are ya doin' Cody? bzzzz*
Now you can probably guess what the queen excluder is for.
Let me see what I've got up in here. The bees are working their way through the queen excluder down into those combs
the queen however, will not be able to.
If she's here, the queen is probably hanging out on the side of this box
I'm gonna have to keep pushing the bees down
Until there's few enough of them that I can find her.
So the queen is right in here
No? Did she move?
There she is, right there. There's the queen, I managed to find her.
Let me put her in a little cage and
That will be pretty much done
There she is! Locked inside of her little box.
I'm not quite sure what to do with her right now
but at least I have her
Another dose of formic acid
And now I've got one big hive. Excellent.
I moved this bottom board over a little closer
and as you can see, the bees are kinda going into the hive.
Just like I want
Yeah, you know what, this hive is doing pretty darn good.
They've got half a box of honey up here
and that down there appears to be crammed full of honey as well.
So I think all I'm gonna do with these guys is give them a little bit of formic acid
and call them good for the winter
you know what, I think these bees are actually queenless.
You can see I'm over here at the box style hive
you don't really see the bees, but you can hear them roaring
they were actually very aggressive until I got in here and gave them a good smoking,
they would come out and sting me, even without the hive open.
Usually, when they're that aggressive, they don't have a queen.
That noise they're making is very similar to the "no queen"-roar
also, looking down in there I'm not seeing any brood at all
of any stage. This time of year they should at least still have some capped brood
So, yeah. Makes me think that they don't have a queen.
So you know what?
There's one way to find out...
That's to put a queen in there.
I happen to have a spare one that I don't know what else to do with
so I'm gonna stick here in there. I've got a candy plug
if they eat her out and she is not killed
then I know that they didn't have a queen, and now they do have a queen
If she gets killed while she's inside the cage
then.. She probably would have died anyway.
So let me find a good spot and stick her
And I think that will be good for these guys, besides the formic acid treatment, of course.
I decided to put her right there
It's a little out of the way, but
she should be warm enough that she'll survive for
probably as long as needed in order to eat her out or have the queen come and kill her
And the final piece of formic acid goes to... The top bar hive!
Yes, I really hope this formic acid does the job and knocks down the mite populations, because
there are three things that kill bees:
1. Lack of food.
2. foulbrood
3. mites
And lately I think my main problems have been the mites
so this colony may be small, taking up just a few frames here
but they've got a lot of honey packed away, I mean look at this!
That's nothing but honey.
It's still not enough that I can harvest any
but I think it will make them able to survive the winter just fine
especially if I knock down the mite populations with the formic acid there.
And after losing my bees several years in a row
I think it's time that I get on board and start actually being proactive against the mites
Obviously, breeding the bees is not working.
possibly, that's just because the breeding population is just not big enough
I'm just not a big enough beekeeper yet to breed queens effectively
Oh well.
As is things.
So it looks like the bees are doing pretty good
They've more or less found their way into the other hive here.
You can see they're fanning it, telling the other bees where to go
Excellent!
I think this operation was a success!
And I think for the rest of this day, I'm gonna go around and pick up all this bee stuff
there's boxes all over the place that I've just kinda left out
I really shouldn't do that.
yeah, I'm gonna go put those up in the attic of the shed
maybe I'll leave these fresh ones with a little bit of honey out for the bees to eat
actually, this peace of honeycomb right here
I might actually send to one of my friends
He's got a YouTube channel: PressTube I don't know if you've heard about it
I'll put links in the description and stuff
He asked me a while ago if I wanted something smashed with his hydraulic press
and put into a video, so basically like a little collab
and the first thing that came to mind, was honeycomb!
That would be cool to watch being smushed, wouldn't it?
So yeah, if you wanna see this getting smashed with a hydraulic press under 500 tons of pressure
I'll put a link down in the description, and I'll probably publish this video when he publishes his.
So yeah!
Hope you all enjoyed; I'll see you next time!
Okay, they haven't had any smoke
but they don't appear to be flying up at me, so
my guess is that queen actually took, and they've calmed down
let's pull this open and see if there's a dead bee in the cage or not.
Alright, there's a couple of live bees in there
and no dead bee
That means that the queen that I put in there actually survived
She's probably taking over this hive now
Well, good! I'm glad that worked out