As you might now, I am a huge fan of pollinators and bees.
And this past weekend, I got to watch a beekeeper as he set up a new hive, and it was super
awesome.
So in this video, I'm going to show you a little bit of what that entailed.
Here's a hint: there were three pounds of honey bees.
Honey bee hives are amazing, complex things, though on the surface they're just a wooden
box with a series of frames inside.
The complexity and amazingness really comes from the tiny, social insects that occupy
them.
Honey bees have been around for millions of years, but the European honey bees that we
keep in hives are not native to the United States.
As colonists traveled, they brought honey bees with them, establishing hives as they
went.
As a result, there are now European honey bees all over the world.
Like I said, the construction of a bee hive isn't that complicated.
It's a wooden box containing a series of frames, like this one.
It's essentially a wooden frame with piano wire suspended across it to support the foundation.
The foundation is the surface that the honeybees will build their comb on.
This one is made of beeswax, though some beekeepers will use plastic.
The frames sit vertically in the hive, so that they can be removed to be checked on
and also so that the caps on the honeycomb can be removed later in the season to harvest
the honey.
This supply of honey is what honey bees use as their food during the winter.
They can't go out and forage, so they're completely reliant the honey that they have to survive.
Bees make honey from nectar.
They also collect and eat pollen, but only nectar is used to make honey.
The foraging bees go and they store nectar in their honey stomachs, and then return to
the hive.
In the hive, they regurgitate that nectar, and use enzymes from their stomachs to turn
it into honey.
So, yes, basically, honey is honey bee vomit.
Delicious, sweet vomit.
Please do not quote me on that.
As I've discussed in previous videos, honey bees are also really important pollinators,
so there's a lot of reasons that they're important.
Honey is just the sweetest benefit.
And that brings us back to hives.
What I got to witness this weekend was the establishment of a new hive.
So what the beekeeper Peter needed to do was set up a new hive, with fresh frames like
the one I mentioned.
All that was missing, was the bees.
So the first thing Pete needed to do was remove the Queen.
She's shipped in the same container as the worker bees, but in her own individual cage.
It also contains a small layer of fondant, a sugary material that she and the workers
will eat through.
She'll emerge from that little cage in two to three days.
You can see that there are worker bees clustered around her, they're attracted to the pheromones
that she gives off, and they're being gently brushed off.
Just rest that gently down in there.
With the queen added to the hive, next the worker bees have to be added.
And really, there's no graceful way to do this, so here's three pounds of honey bees
being dumped into a hive, as gently as possible.
So there's my three pounds of bees.
You can see they're all stuck in the top.
Basically I'm just gonna put it in there.
Tap them in, as delicately as one can tap three pounds of bees.
And try not to piss them off too much.
Which is, you know, a tall order when you're pouring them out of a plastic container.
Oh, is that?
Yep, that's wax they had started building.
I guess they were stuck in there and they were like "well we might as well."
Right.
Um, so it's not particularly graceful.
Which, you know, understandably.
So I'm going to get as many out as I can without standing here for twenty minutes.
Honey bees that are being transported like this generally aren't as aggressive because
they don't have a home to protect yet.
So even though they've flying around like mad, they're not really going to hurt us unless
we piss them off.
So the hope now is that those honey bees will choose that hive as their home and begin building
comb.
You may have noticed a jar inside of the hive, that's sugar water, which will function as
an initial food source for the bees, so they can get the energy they need to build a lot
of wax comb very quickly.
It was really amazing getting to be that close to honey bees, and watching them as they landed
on the bee suit I was wearing.
Experience beekeepers will be able to read the mood of their hives, and of course they'll
sometimes use smokers to calm them as they inspect the hives.
But if you encounter honey bees in your day-to-day activities, they really won't do anything
to hurt you unless you threaten their hive or accidentally piss them off.
I hope you enjoyed this brief glimpse into the art of beekeeping.
I'll definitely be making more videos about different aspects of beekeeping, because I
really enjoyed this and really want to learn more.
I also have an announcement to make, I've started a Patreon page.
If you're not familiar with Patreon, Patreon is a way for viewers to support creators who
are creating free content.
All of my content, blog posts, videos, will remain free, but this is a way to help me
get better equipment, travel to cooler places and just make better videos.
If you're interested, you can click through to my Patreon page, and there's a video there
that gives more information about how that works.
And if you can't support me, that is totally fine, all of my content will still be here
and you can check out that page for updates.
I created a Patreon because I really love making these videos, and I'd like to make
them sustainable and better.
Thank you so much for watching, don't forget to like and subscribe, and I will see you
next time.
I got to watch a--
*screeching noise*