- Hey there!
We're going to talk about a beekeeper's knot.
It's a knot that was taught to me by Fred Smith, the first beekeeper I worked for, up
in the Peace River in Alberta.
He called it the California Bee-knot.
It's got some really unique advantages, easy to tie, easy to un-tie, that's particularly
important.
We like to use, or I was taught to use it with a hook.
So we have a hook underneath the bed of the truck and there's a hook that corresponds,
they're mounted in a way that they correspond with where the supers will sit on the truck.
So they automatically have that rope in just the right place.
The kind of rope that we use is a hollow core rope.
Doesn't particularly matter, just a good, strong rope.
The older one, they get, the easier they are to work with.
Much more pliable.
But we'll start with this.
And what we're going to do is be securing these honey supers.
So, I'm on my way out to Bee Art this afternoon to add these supers to colony.
So we want to secure them down.
We have the supers all set up here, on pallets to keep the goo off the truck and and then
we have covers on top here to keep bees from robbing.
And they tie down really well.
We always tie against the side of a box because it's much stronger than the front end of the
box and the lids do help with that a bit.
But we try from, we tie rather, from the side.
So we'll just get our sides up there.
And then we'll undo our rope and we're gonna show you, in real detail how this knot is
put together.
Okay, so we're gonna secure the load on the truck here.
Now we use the loop end of the rope, we put it on the hook down here, and then we turn
that around to loosen off our buddle of rope there.
What you're gonna do is do a double throw here.
So I'm gonna put my foot on one end of the rope, and throw the rope over.
A good overhand throw works well, because you can place it properly.
So you've seen now that I've thrown the rope over, and I've saved myself the time of throwing
it back by throwing it over all at once.
Now, we'll go and do the knot from here.
So we got that rope in place, and we'll tie the knot.
So we're on the other side of the truck.
First thing we center the rope at the top of the load here then we bring it down to
the hook, and just hook it on.
That's the advantage of the hook.
We don't have to feed the end all the way through a loop or around a bar.
We just drop it under the hook.
We then bring the rope up, and we make it into a T. Or you can consider it like an upside
down 4.
Then we grab the bottom, and just let go of the rest of the rope and pull that up, making
lots of slack so that we get a loop there.
I call that the rabbit.
There's the rabbit in front of you there.
And we grab a hold of that rabbit, and then we need to make a little home for the rabbit,
a little hole in the ground.
So we twist the rope in a way that the rope going across the load, is on top of the rope
going down to the hook.
Do you see what I mean right there?
That's on top of there, and then the rabbit goes down into the hole, and you've got your
knot in place.
It's a good idea, especially with a new rope, to give the rabbit a second hole.
So he's not happy in the first home, he's picked another home, and we've just done that
same twist, and the rabbit goes down into the hole there.
Then we can get some tension on the rope.
Once you have some tension on the rope, you can let go of this part, and it will stay
in place.
Now we're really gonna tighten that rope out, and rather than pulling on it with your hands,
it works great to slide your hand down the rope, drop a loop down here to where your
foot has some room to push down.
Wrap the rope around your hand, so you don't have to have a death grip on it, it'll just
kind of hold itself there.
And then you can pull down on the rope, and you can put in an amazing amount of tension
on the rope using your foot and it saves a lot of strain on the hands and so on.
We're now gonna pinch that knot right there, to prevent the tension from escaping from
the rope.
So we pinch that right there.
And that's the first part of the rope done.
We then move on to doing two half hitches around the hook.
So we'll do those next.
To do the half hitch, we get a twist in the rope.
So that it's lying like so.
With this piece in my hand underneath.
So I'll repeat that.
We give it a twist like that, something you can do with one hand, and then you just put
that on the hook and pull tight.
And that will now hold the tension.
I then make another half hitch going in the opposite direction just bring your hand up,
bring the rope under, and now we've got a half hitch going the other direction.
And we pull securely on that.
When you look at the knot, the double half hitch when you're done.
Up close, you'll see that the rope goes into and out of the same hole in the knot.
Then you know you've done that properly.
From there, we move over, catch our next hook and as you can see, our ropes all ready to
go, because we did a double throw the first time.
You don't have to do the double throw, just single throw across works fine too.
That just saves a little bit of time.
Now we'll go over to the other side of the truck to do our next knot.
Now we're back over on the other side of the truck, we're gonna off, up that's all the
slack there keep the rope in the center of the supers and come down, and we're gonna
catch our hook and it's just a matter of repeating the same knot so we bring it up, we make it
into a cross here, or an upside down 4.
And then we grab the bottom, we pull it up, we make our loop.
You can see there's lots of slack in it here.
You need that slack to be able to tie the rest of the knot.
Then we grab our rabbit there, we make the hole for our rabbit.
Again, the rope going away is on top, the rabbit dives down in, we repeat, and twist,
dive down in, and then we take the slack end of the rope and we pull that down, make it
snug, wrap it around our hand, stand on it.
Secure the tension.
One half hitch, two half hitches, oops, that way around.
And we've got our knot there.
Now if we look down here, let's have a good close look and you can see the rope going
in and coming back out the same hole.
So we know we've created that double half hitch perfectly.
Onto the next knot!
So we've got our ropes securing the load down, We've got them nice and tight, you can hear
them kind of sing there.
We got them secured down, but we want to hold the load to keep it from shifting back.
If you have a higher load than this, one that's catching the wind and wants to push it back,
it's a good idea to do a cross tie on the back of the load and that keeps the load pushed
forward, so you don't lose the supers off the back of the truck.
So we'll bring that rope from here, from the last hook, we'll bring it up to the next hook,
so that it puts, it positions the rope in a good way to do our X on the back.
So we've got it hooked there, then we walk around the truck, and we secure it to the
first hook on this side of the truck.
And we just do our normal beekeepers knot there.
You'll note that there's a bit of space between here and here and a bit of space between there
and there.
You don't want that too close together, or it makes it hard to untie the knot.
I'll show you what I mean in a sec.
We pull that nice and tight.
And half hitches there.
And now from here, we go to the next hook, again to get that X position in a way that
it's going to secure the load.
It's forward so that it's at an angle that helps secure that load.
We then just tie this off just like we've done the last several knots.
We have our ropes cut to a length that works for the variety of different heights of the
load, but I basically have them cut to a length of 50ft.
That goes I can do two stacks with that.
I've got a shorter load today, so we've got excess at the end here, and we need to be
able to get that up out of the way and keep it nice and safe.
So we do a little coil, like so coil it around like that, fairly small coil.
And then we bring that coil up here, hold it crossways.
And then feed it through behind the rope, and then into itself.
And that creates a nice secure bundle to travel down the road with.
So now we're gonna untie the knot.
This is where the knot really shines.
It's so easy to untie, that you can undo it with one finger.
Everything falls apart, there's no ends to feed through.
No matter how tight you have that knot done, it's easy to untie.
So first we'll get rid of our excess rope here, off to the side.
Then we'll grab on there, we'll give it a pull.
See how easy that broke?
Basically what we did was we flipped that rabbit hole upside down and then that created
all this slack so the rope can then be undone.
And we just undo the rest, push it off the hook and it's undone.
Easy peasy.
So now that we've untied the knots, we've got this mess of rope to clean up here.
What we're going to do is coil it in a way that eliminates any chance that we'll be putting
a twist in the rope as we go.
When you get a new rope, this is a little bit harder to do.
Just make sure you don't ever get a twist in the rope, so don't let anybody else coil
up your ropes for you.
Do it yourself, and I'll show you a good way of doing that.
You start with the loop end, give yourself maybe three feet of slack.
Something like that.
And then you use your arms, the length of your arms, to get the same distance of coil.
And you just drop it down like so, and leave it lying flat in front of you.
We'll do that again.
Arms length, drop it down flat, and you'll notice I'm twisting this hand a little bit
this way or a little bit that way to get the rope lying flat.
Twist it like so, same length.
Extend our arms.
Get it lying flat by twisting our hand a little bit this way or that, and out and so on.
This works great for electrical extension cords, any kind of rope that you're using
where you want to avoid twists, because those twists lead to kinks, and a lot of frustration.
So we just keep on going with that.
You definitely don't want one end secured to anything when you're coiling because there's
no way of working the twists out of the rope.
You need to have the whole rope free, and then you can work any twists out towards the
end of the rope.
So now I've picked up the rope and bundled it in my hand.
Like so.
We've got that length there.
And then we hold it nice and tight, there's the end of the rope.
Then we wrap it around, like so and then cross over right there.
Crossed over the rope, and now we pull that really tight.
And that will hold.
We then cross over the rope again, right here, pull it tight again, and from there you just
wind your way towards the top of the coil.
You want about four or five rounds there to get it, make it good and secure.
Hold it with one finger, like that so you don't lose your tension.
And you can see we've got a nice bundle of loops up at the top, and we just feed through
through all those loops there and pull that out and then we loosen off that last coil,
slide our loop under, pull it nice and tight, and that will now hang on our truck and the
weight of the rope tensions that coil and it won't come undone.
And then we can truck it down the road and not be worrying about it dragging behind,
and creating issues.
So there's a bit about beekeepers knots and handling rope that works well for securing
loads on a truck.
It's a really important thing to make sure your load is good and secure when you're going
down the road.
Thanks for watching, see you another time.