What to look for 1 Week after Installing a Package of Honey Bees....pastured poultry talk

Hey guys, it's Josh Stony Ridge Farmer. Happy spring. Gosh, springtime is really in full bloom here. I've been gone. I had to take a trip to Wyoming. If you haven't seen the last few vlogs, back here they are. Boom. I went out to Wyoming to a place called the Highar Homestead. It's a friend of mine's place and we tried to get that place ready. Had some clients coming in. He needed help. I came to the rescue. Stern Ridge Farmer helped him out a little bit. Want to take you guys around the farm today a little bit. Show you what's going on. I've been gone for 4 days. My grass is like this tall. Springtime is in the air. Flowers are blooming, the dogwoods are blooming, the roosters are crowing, and I want to show you what happens when you don't move your mobile chicken coupe for at least 4 days. So, I wasn't able to move this coupe for 4 days or 3 days. And let me show you what happens if you don't do that. We're also going to take a trip into the honeybees. I'm a few days late on checking the bees that we introduced to the honeybee boxes. So, we're going to go ahead get in those boxes, make sure they release their queen, make sure we're laying eggs, and we may add another super, which is a box, on top of our honeybees. So, come along with me today, guys. We're going to mess around on the farm a little bit, show you what's going on, and show you why you need to move your mobile chicken coop every day. [Music] Woo! Stony. Well, here we are. That's the result. The birds dug into the grass. They dug into the dirt a little bit and they pooped a lot. That's a lot of poop. It's three days, maybe four days worth of poop. And uh these birds are getting big. So there's a lot of poop. If you don't move your coupe every day or at least every other day, this is what you're going to get. Now we're going to have a dead spot in our yard for probably a good two and a half months. Kind of a bummer, but that's the way it goes. I had to go. I had to go help my buddy. That's the way it goes. We're going to move the coupe. And every day what I do is come out and I feed the birds and move the coupe at the same time cuz the birds will follow the feeder and they won't get hung up underneath the coupe. I should have made this thing a little bit lighter so my wife could move it, but she couldn't handle it herself. So, way she goes. Let's go down and check on the bees. First, let me tell you what I'm looking for when I'm looking at these bees. I got sent out of town this weekend to help a buddy out and I was unable to check my bees the way I should have. I should have checked them at like day three. This is day five. I'm going to go ahead in and check these bees. Day five here and what we're looking for is we're making sure our queen is released. We're seeing that we have eggs. We're seeing that they're starting to get some nectar and that they're getting some pollen. We may go ahead and put another super on the top. If it looks like they're getting well established, we'll go ahead and put another super on the top. I've got supers with honey already in them. And we're going to put an entrance reducer on one of the hives because it really needs it. Okay, so it's about 2:27. I should have gotten into these bees sometime around noon to 1:00. They're starting to come back in for the afternoon right now. So, it's going to be a lot of bees. It's okay. I'm going to get my smoker, calm them down, go ahead and get an entrance reducer on one of them. Check them out. Make sure they're doing well. Take that spacer out that I put in to let them release the queen. There's a little spacer that I put in there. And we're just basically checking the general health of the bee colony. While I'm looking in the hive, I'm going to walk you through exactly what I'm thinking and what I'm looking at. Okay, first I got my smoker and we put a little bit of smoke. It's kind of windy out today. So, we cracked the hive. We put a little smoke in there to calm them down. Try to smoke the bees down a little bit in the hive. They do not seem happy. I don't know why. So, we're going to reach in here, check our queen cage. We're looking at our queen cage and the the bees have eaten the candy out and the queen is gone. Okay, so that's good. We'll just toss that to the side. I'm going to get rid of this. This is a spacer. I think you need to know not only what I'm doing, but a lot of what I'm thinking while I'm doing this. Okay. So, I'm looking in here and assessing the quantity of bees that I see, the activity of the bees, and I'm getting this old burr comb off of here, which if you're a big- time holistic person, this stuff right here, you could uh set it to the side and make lip balm and stuff out of it if you're ready to start doing that kind of fun stuff. I'm going to pull my frame out, the one that looks like it has the most bees on it. And what I'm looking for on this frame is I'm looking for bee activity. Everybody looks great. I'm looking for eggs. I'm looking for honey. I'm looking for larvae. And I see all of that. I need not see anything else in this hive. This is very healthy. This is very good. I don't need to see the queen. She's in here. She's laying. She's doing good. How crowded is the hive is the next thing that I'm thinking about. It doesn't seem very crowded. Everything seems pretty pretty mellow, pretty chill in the hive. Actually going to add another super. The reason I'm adding another super is that this super is full of honey. It'll give the bees a good start. Put my entrance reducer on in the lowest setting right here. And then I'm going to put my hive top feeder on. I put my hive top feeder on with the cage right here that the bees climb up to in the back so that if I do have robbing, they can't just go in and go up the front. They can they have to go through the hive to get right here guys and gals. It's good to have two hives. Okay? So, you can compare what the health of one hive is to the other hive. We're going to open the other box up now. Okay. Once again, we've got our smoker. Let's smoke the entrance. Crack the top. Smoke inside. Smoke these bees down. Look at all the bees on the lid here. They are 100% not happy. Hard to smoke your bees on a windy day and you really shouldn't work with them on a windy day if you can help it. It's supposed to rain tomorrow, so we got to get on it. You'll see the bees that are smoked down here. Bees trying to eat on this on this burr comb. And basically the smoke is driving them to eat. They'll fill their bellies full so that they can leave the hive in case that there is a forest fire. What we're going to do is we're going to taste that honey. Once we get this burome off, everything so far looks pretty darn good. We don't want this burr comb in here. It just is useless for us. Okay, pop out one of the frames that looks the busiest. And what we're doing is checking our frame to see if that the queen is laying. So, we get this frame out. We already have capp brood in here. So, everything looks great. this hive. You can see that capped brood and then you can see the little worms in there and that's larvae. We have larvae in various stages. Right here we have larvae in various stages. This hive is healthy. This hive is doing great. We will add the honey super to the top of it. Give these guys all the food that they can handle. Slide our hive top feeder on just like so with the screen to the back. Our queen cage was stuck on here. Peel that off. Set it to the side. We got to get these bees off before we put the lid on. What we're going to do is just shake them off in front of the hive. Just like that. Boom. Guys, that's kind of it for the first check on the bees. This should be done about 3 4 days after you introduce your new package to your hive. Normally, we won't put another super on, but I happen to have supers full of honey. So, we're going to go ahead and put them on there because I don't want to harvest the honey. I'll use it for the bees and let them get a good healthy start. Good practice in your bee yard is to make sure you keep things all picked up and cleaned up. If you don't keep your bey yard all cleaned up, it'll look like a total disaster. And if you guys haven't been to beyards that are total disaster yet, and you're just getting into beekeeping, get ready. You're going to see it. We're going to go ahead and set out some cinder blocks to get started on another hive right here. We're going to do a split. Next week, we're going to split our big hive and we're going to make two or three little hives. Now, you might say, Josh, why are you going to do a split on a hive that's healthy and looks good? Well, if we don't do some splits, guys, we'll end up with swarms, and we may catch them and we may not. We need to build the population of bees here in our bee yard because we lost so many. So, we'll split early in the year, just before the big peak nectar flow, and give them a great chance of awesome survival, and that way we'll have more hives. Our goal here on Stony Ridge Farm was to have 100 hives within 5 years. We're on year number three and we only have three hives. So, we got to get to it. We got to get our stuff together and we've got to start splitting hives and making new hives and making sure they survive the winter. The guys would take my hood off, but right now there's a bee trying to get me in the face. I want to tell you before we go what I do with my queen cages. Hang on to these guys because sometimes you may need an entrance reducer. You may need to make your entrance really, really small. And these things work great to sit right in the front of your entrance reducer if you need to make it even smaller. And the next thing I want to tell you is how to get rid or what to do with all the leftover stuff in your smoker. And basically, I just take it and I set it in a safe place out in the driveway or in the gravel. And I pump it until it gets to flaming up good. And I just let the burlap that I use in here go ahead and burn completely out. And you can see that thing shoots up a big old flame. So that's what we do, guys. That's how we check our bees for the first time after we've introduced them into the new hive. That's it for the farm vlog today. I thank you for watching. Come back and see me. Don't forget to subscribe to the channel. Check out some of the other videos. We've got chicken videos, goat videos, pig videos. Everything that goes on on this 150 acre farm is going to be documented and you guys can watch it grow into a money-making organic farm. So, thanks for watching. This is Josh Stony Ridge Farmer. Subscribe to the channel, click the like button, and stick with me, guys. Leave me some comments. Thanks a lot. Stony. Bring your wife. Bring your kids. Stony. Stupid bee. Right here. Right here. Hey.