Honey Bees: How I prepare My Bees for Winter

hey this is Josh Donnie rich farmer I want to talk to you a little bit about what we're doing today in the Beehive and the supplies that we need when we start getting into our bees it's fall it's October the 1st and I've got some birds making noise up here I've got the goats eating little food pigs are behind you and I'm gonna show you what you need to get into your beehive first thing you need to know in the fall we're looking to make sure that our bees have enough pollen stored and enough honey to last through the winter so if they don't we'll probably feed them a little bit of sugar water I don't use high fructose corn syrup a lot of beekeepers do it's cheap it's crap and I don't use it so we use sugar we mix sugar and water we use about two thirds of a gallon jar of sugar and we mix it with warm water shake it and pour it into our hive top feeders which you'll see me install in a few minutes so here are the things that we're gonna use in our beehive when we go in we got a smoker neill lighter this goes inside the smoker it sits in the bottom right here we also need a hive tool and I used to smoke my bees with all sorts of things leaves and stuff like that but I find the easiest and best thing is a burlap sack you can find burlap sacks at most of your like farm supply stores if you can't find them there then just ask them about it and you most likely can order it if they can't get them then you need a new farm store that's not a farm store that's a city boy store and that's not where we go to get our farm stuff burlap so we got the beehives here behind us time to change hats put the bee suit on and get into these hives and we'll give you a little tour of what's going on in the Beehive here in the fall Stoney Ridge farm Stoney Ridge farmer we're all suited up with our bee equipment on and I'm gonna show you how to light your smoker so we've got our burlap sack we cut it in half you got our cigarette lighter and we have our smoker we're going to take our burlap stuff it in our smoker just a little ways and we're going to turn it up and light it and it immediately catches up this is why I've been using burlap stuffing in a little bit light a little bit more get it burning good like this got a good flame going there stuff it in my smoker give it some puffs put that flame ketchup feed it some oxygen we're burning good I'm going to turn it upside down a little bit so it catches up and that's how we light our smoker now we got the smoker rolling Cheech and Chong style one thing I may not have mentioned is to make sure that your zipper is not open because bees love the crotch they like the crotch it's warm its cozy and a great place to sting things swell up down there even when they're not stung so check your zipper buddy so here's our bees going into our hive looking pretty good getting this smoker going nice I'm gonna smoke the front of the hive lots of good smoke this is my lovely delectable assistant she is going to hold things for me here's the front of our hive we've smoked them they've got a little bit active and they're a little grumpy today lots of pollen coming into the hide we're gonna open it ears how I open I take my hand like karate and go boom and pop it open [Applause] this is our screen top board and our hive appears to be doing pretty well can tell so we're gonna see what's going on here in the hive for the fall what I want to see here and the top of the hive is a lot of honey so we've taken the hive tool here and broken loose this frame and we're gonna slide it out see if we've got honey maybe a little bit of brood up here but mainly honey it appears to be stuck in pretty good so that means I've got a lot of Berk home down in the bottom but we're loaded down with delicious honey and that's what we want looking down in the hive it looks healthy I am NOT going to disturb this hive any further so now that we've checked inside the hive I'm gonna clean up a little bit on the top I'm gonna give them a high of a little lift get myself a guesstimate of how heavy it is it's probably at about a hundred and fifteen pounds ten frame hive one two three four five six seven eight nine ten should weigh about sixty pounds per super full of honey so we should be totally good here we may crack down into one one one layer down so at this point we're one super down from where we were before I'm gonna take a frame out in the center here and see if we have any brood so I've got my frame out and I'm seeing brood here okay so it looks pretty good a little patchy wouldn't expect it to be amazing this time of year don't see my queen and I don't see any fresh eggs we're gonna close it up and call it good so at this point we're gonna put our super back on the top and these are all medium supers ten frame medium sit her back up there she's full of honey a good 60 pounds will install our hive top feeder will be installed with the screen part down the hill so all the nectar flows that way or the sugar water flows that way next thing we're going to do is we're going to put in an entrance reducer to help discourage robbing I hope we're gonna put one in so we're going to reduce our entrance down later on will reduce our size of our entrance down to the smallest size so that we prevent robbing there's our entrance reducer and our bees are bringing in lots of pollen our goldenrod is in bloom right now so the bees are loaded down with pollen kind of cool to watch want to talk to you a little bit about city bees versus country bees city bees are nice and sweet Nilla not sting you and you can sit out there I used to sit out in front of my bees in the city and drink cup of coffee five feet from the entrance and everything was great now I moved to the country the bees don't see me as much and they will sting me right in the mouth ah right in the mouth because country bees are mean going into hive number two this hive is much weaker than the other hive this hive has no honey really to speak of that's the very center of the hive which is normally the last to go we really don't have much honey to speak of so this hive will need to be fed we're going to put a hive top feeder and we're going to feed it sugar water and we're also going to put a entrance reducer and we're going to put a robbing screen because these bees are weaker than those bees and there are only two together so the potential to rob is great so since this hive is weaker than the other hive we're going to put it down to our smallest hole on our entrance reducer this is a robbing screen see do I look like a robber no because I'm behind the robbing screen so robbers can't get behind the robbing screen right here is an entrance the bees go normally in and out through there once I start feeding my bees I'll have this entrance open right here so it'll be closed for now but once I start feeding my bees this will get closed and this one will be open okay it's blocked so robber bees can't see what's behind here that the other bees are going in right behind there and not being seen okay so they'll stop robbing and this hive will do well I'm going to start feeding this hive today so there'll be a lot of activity around it putting this in I'll open this robbing screen I'll open the top it's that easy okay at some point we may end up zipping a screw in here but that's it right now so once we start feeding we'll cut them off and open here about three weeks ago we stopped seeing activity in this hive right here we've lost this hive so we're gonna get into it and see what happened if they're dead bees in there if hive beetles took over or varroa mite I do not treat my the highs for varroa mite I do not treat them with anything other than essential oils and I give them a little sugar water now and then where are bees want to survive naturally and we're not going to use chemicals or antibiotics for our bees that's just the way it is on Stoney Ridge farm alright we're gonna crack into our dead hive immediately I smell foul smell and I have these thinking dirty malls what does that tell me I've malls okay pop the lid off here this one really hasn't been touched pop the lid off here and what you have is disgusting gross pipe moth damn damage you can see the nastiness you can see all the way through so what I'll do is clean these up I'll either burn them for reuse them we'll just see how it goes but that's what's happened I don't see any dead bees in the hive which is good I don't see any honey in the hive either so that means they've probably been robbed out and they died or these bees just left this colony but it's not colony collapse disorder it is bees left the colony and the malls took over so this is Josh Stoney Ridge farmer and this is Danielle my trusty wife and we thank you for watching I hope you enjoyed it learned a little something subscribe woo give me your best oh come on give me a good one so is the gaseous farmer of them all that would be Josh the Stoney Ridge farmer who likes the beans you like the beans I like the beans oh yeah