What happens to honey bees in the winter?? Walk with me and learn something today!

hey folks its Josh Tony rich former welcome to the farm vlog today I think I got a hole in my glove thanks for coming to stern you rich farm today I want to talk to you a little bit today about compost I got something very special right here in this bag and will tell you about it when we come back we're also gonna go up check see if we have any new baby goats I'll give you a little bit of goat footage and just tell you what's really going on here on the farm it's freezing cold and I had two crowns done yesterday on my teeth Oh my mouth has been totally totally sore been kind of just laid up trying not to do a whole lot but it's driving me crazy to sit still in the house so let's go out together and go have some fun all right come on with me [Music] [Laughter] the something you may or may not know is that your local coffee shops have black gold and a silver package this is from Starbucks okay and it's called grounds for your garden the Starbucks has a program where you can go in and get the old spent coffee grounds and use them on your compost pile or use them in your garden helps your tomatoes to pop just something you might not know but most of your coffee shops will give you their old grounds and Starbucks is definitely a promoter of it they even have their own special bag and if you walk right in the door and a lot of Starbucks and you look down on the ground right there will be several bags of this wonderful black goat and you can get it at Starbucks or most any of your coffee shops also a lot of micro breweries around guys lots of micro breweries you can go get the spent grains from these micro breweries if you have a large operation like a cattle operation or a pork operation or even just a small farm you can set up with these guys where you can come and get their old spent grains from local breweries you know these micro breweries are popping up everywhere and a lot of them are just having to throw this stuff in the dumpster it's good it's good for your garden it's good for your farm animals it's fermented probiotic it's awesome and so is this let's go check the goats folks the reason I'm telling you about this kind of stuff is because I don't like to see waste I don't know how you are but I just can't stand to see stuff go to waste it could easily be used in someone's garden so it really bothers me when stuff goes to waste we don't let anything go to waste here on the Stoney Ridge farm if we don't eat it we feed it to the dogs we compost it or when we have pigs we'll feed it to the pigs nothing goes to waste that's just the way we choose to live I'll tell you what's going to be in a future vlog look back here look at that mess good gracious so right in here is where the forestry guys came in and all they did was thin they thin this little area out and I got a lot of brush to clean up so we'll be cleaning up brushes and have bonfires all summer long folks if you saw that vlog where I showed you the squirrel trail look at that not amazing that's a trail where the squirrels have been running I'll post a link to that vlog right up here the squirrels have been running from the woods right down this trail into that tree I'm not crazy maybe we'll just call this an educational vlog but another thing you might not know when you drive by farms out in the country and you see it all turned up all plowed up in the wintertime the reason they're doing that is so when it rains on it it soaks into those big dirt clods and it breaks them up so if you look out here the ground is much more smooth after it's frozen a few times so the ground freezes out here and breaks up and turns from big clumps into little powder and smooths itself out pretty neat it's around here and check on the goats I just tripped on the rock goats are screaming at me check them out where you gonna go when you win the Superbowl this mama goat right here is due to have babies anytime right now fYI goats love to climb on stuff and these little babies look at them they're just dying to climb up on something see that barrel and we'll flip it over watch they just love to jump in climb each and every day when I feed the goats there's always a murder attempt these goats do not like each other when it comes to food time you'd think they were starving to death but you can really tell the hierarchy of goats who runs a show around here where's old Billy so the second thing we got a handle every day when it's cold like this is putting some water in that water container right there okay we got to go get the Gator bring some water up here put it in that container go water two chickens [Music] so folks while we're back here behind the shop at the hose bill I posted a video on how to install a wood-burning stove in your steel building I'll post a link to it somewhere up here but the pipe and the seal has all held up very very well I've got a nice fire going in there right now really really happy with it okay so if you want to learn how to put a wood stove in your steel building I've got a video out there very informative takes you step-by-step tells you all the parts you need and everything I'll post it up here somewhere Stoney Ridge farmer Josh why didn't you fill the buckets all the way full because they'll splash out all over the back of the Gator make a big wet mess and we don't want a big wet icy mess in the back of the Gator let's go water the chickens right now the chickens are doing that me so thirsty dance dude give us some water so lots of folks have asked me what do you do to keep your chickens warm in the winter time and I asked them what do down comforters do to keep warm in the winter time because that's what they're full of his feathers right he's pretty much wrapped in a down comforter chickens do fine in the winter time guys these chickens will huddle up together at night just like the goats and they grow a winter coat just like the goats so just FYI chickens aren't people and dogs aren't people and goats are people and cows aren't people and ducks aren't people folks that's what this farm vlog is all about educating yourself good gracious how many people just have absolutely no understanding of livestock and farming and where their food comes from and how it's made and how it's all done and the work that goes behind it so I go into work and I tell people well yeah I posted a video the other day about how to process chickens and how to take them from the field to the fork and they are disgusted I don't want to know no I'll eat chicken but I don't want to know something is inherently wrong with that it really is let's talk about honeybees right there they are honeybees 16° what are the honeybees doing let's talk a little bit about it I hate this glove you're just love I cut the finger out of this glove so I could use it for hunting and now my finger is freezing don't like that glove so a question I get asked a whole lot of times is what are your bees doing in the wintertime what do they do okay are they alive did they die every year do they come back what is it that your honeybees are doing well let's talk a little bit about that what do honeybees do in the wintertime so right now inside each one of these hives there are four hives right here all the honeybees are huddled up into a tight ball we've had temperatures as low as nine degrees up here and the honeybees basically sit there and vibrate together okay they vibrate and that vibration produces heat so if we had a little laser and we could point it to these hives right here we would probably see that the temperature on the outside of the hive is fairly low but if we could shoot up into the bottom we'd find out that the temperature is probably in the 80s or 90s in there now I am no absolute honeybee expert folks if you know anything about honeybees and you want to post something down there in the comments go ahead and post something in the comments but it's my understanding and I've had honeybees for seven years now it's my understanding that the bees you got to keep them well-fed which is their honey their protein source is the pollen okay so they take nectar from flowers they dry the nectar and make honey and that's their carbohydrate source and they take the pollen that comes collecting on the backs of their back legs and that's their protein source so the reason you don't rob the honeybees of all their honey is so that they can survive through the winter now I didn't rob the bees hardly at all this year I think I only took two boxes of honey out and everybody around is hitting me up for honey but I just don't have it I'd rather my hives do well and my orchard which is right here let's do well okay so this next season my orchard will do very well because my honey bees are positioned right here and the gardens right here it's all planned now hope you know a little bit about what honeybees do in the wintertime now this is just gonna be a little walking talk guys this is this is really nice to be able to walk and talk with you a little bit what I've got down here are my fruit trees okay so this is a row of apple trees and this is a row of pear trees right here now let me show you something about the pear trees that you may not know we've got to prune these trees back a little bit this winter to keep the growth from criss-crossing all over each other and to keep the limbs down from breaking off let's look at the trees real quick we'll kind of get into this a little bit and maybe in a future vlog we'll dedicate a vlog to just trimming trees so let's look at this tree together what you seeing what I see may be two different things here and what a true professional orchard owner might see may be totally different than what I see or any of us see so let's take a look at a couple trees right here this tree right here if you see down here these limbs are undesirable they're growing out there kind of criss crossing over top of each other and what we want to do is establish two or three major branches and right here we would probably choose this one this one and this one is our major branches and we get rid of this this and this let's go to another tree now here we have an example of what we don't want also see this limb it's about to cross over this limb we again want three two or three major branches on our trees and you can see here the deer have gotten to that one so we'll cut this guy off we'll cut this guy off and we also have an issue here so see how these two limbs are touching criss crossing over one another we got to get rid of one of those okay the most likely candidate to get rid of is going to be this guy right here so we want to take the tree back to have three major branches now here we have a tree that we planted this year we planted it about a month ago okay let me show you something that you might not know three things that you may not know about these new trees first thing you may not know this is a piece of rebar this piece of rebar is to keep the deer from scraping the tree up the deer will hit that rebar and they won't scrape the tree when they get their horns in there on this rebar they won't scrape the tree up with their horns now we got a limb right here see how it grows straight out this has to go because if it ever gets any weight out here it's just bend and snap so this one needs to go you want your lambs to grow out and up like this okay this limb needs to go to and the third thing is you see that piece of pipe right there that piece of pipe needs to go around the tree so that rabbits don't eat the bark off your tree and it also helps to deter deer you got to have it I didn't put it on the trees before we had some rabbits come in here and decimate our trees we lost like 15 of them folks there's a lot more science to this than I can explain but we'll come out here in the orchard sometime in a future vlog and we'll show you exactly how we're going to trim our trees up we're just going to get in here and we want to thin them out probably don't want to do this every year as the trees are growing up you want to let them get good and established and then start going in and thinning the limbs out let me show you a nicely established tree that's just in need of trimming so look right here see all those limbs we got to take about 3/4 of those limbs off and basically the reason we're doing that is to establish the trees health okay to get a good root set so that this tree will produce for years to come limbs like this guy need to go see how this one's sticking straight out and kind of hanging down it needs to go the fact is you got to get in you got to thin your fruit trees for future production okay we're not gonna be selling apples at least I don't think we will now if we plant about a hundred more fruit trees we might end up selling apples and pears and all that stuff but for now we've got to just help our orchard to get established very well established orchard that way our kids will be able to pick apples when they're walking through the yard that'll be awesome alright let's ride up here and take care of our goods as you can tell guys goats are really thirsty now the baby goats won't need any water for several weeks they drink our mama's milk but he's cold dry days really make animals thirsty they were in need we might have to give him two buckets of water Oh check this out I told you the baby goats like to play king of the mountain they love to jump and run and climb all over stuff so maybe we'll find a play set or something like that and put it in here for him to play with folks I hope you've enjoyed this little journey around the farm with me today it's a vlog it's a farm vlog there's not a lot going on right now but come on back and see me probably tomorrow the next day we've got some new solar lights that we're gonna put up on the back side of the house it's just really really dark here in the winter time and we need to know when something's coming around the house so the best way to keep your house secure is to have lights so we have two different types of solar gutter lights I guess is what you'll call them and we'll put those up probably next vlog so come on back and see me here on the Stoney Ridge farm guys click that like button if you like what you see subscribe to the channel if you're not already subscribed and just follow us on our farm journey it's wintertime it's cold the ground is frozen the water is frozen the chickens water is frozen just a lot of just a lot of just general maintenance and we have an attention loving goat right here so come on back and see me guys I appreciate you watching we'll see you next time on the Stoney Ridge farm thanks a lot [Music] Pierce we had some waves at least Illyria [Music] hey pepper hey pepper scream bloody murder [Applause]