4 of 5 Beekeeping 101 - The Basics

[00:00:00]okay let's talk about the pest of the hive the  varroa mites probably the the big Bugaboo would be these days like I mentioned earlier but there's  also a few others like I talked about the wax moths and the hi beetles but those aren't gonna  cause you to lose your bees normally the thing that's gonna cause you to lose your bees if you're  not treating for mites is the viruses that the mites cause mites are much like a tick that would  get on your dog or cat and they're gonna cause you know the be some irritation and they're not  they're not necessarily comfortable for the bead but they're not gonna kill your beat what's gonna  happen is they if their numbers are large enough they're gonna cause viruses and spread their  viral loads and your colony is going to dwindle and become weak based on the fact that it weakens  their immune system and it knocks them back in and it puts them in such a stress that they can't they  can't perform and it can't function properly and next thing you know you your colony will collapse  what do we do about night well there's several treatment methods out there there's a few that  have been outlawed because they no longer function properly the real problem with that is not so much  the chemical that was the makeup of the treatment but the beekeepers there's beekeeping is a huge  industry I don't know if you realize it or not but there are some beekeepers out there that have  30 40 50 thousand colonies I've personally met a couple that have upwards of 20,000 colonies and  they're great guys and they care about the bees just as much as somebody that has one or two  colonies the thing is they have a huge huge workload so one of the guys he lost approximately  half of his twenty thousand colonies one year but he was able to rebuild how about making splits  into spring and by making more Queens and rebuild it but it was a huge start teen thousand colonies  was what he told me he lost one year and it was due to the varroa mites very expensive lesson he  learned he was of the opinion that you know the bees should be able to handle it and take care of  themselves he has some good genetics he has some of the most gentle bees in fact I like his Queens  as Italians they're so sweet you don't need to dress up to work to work them unless you do some  release you know heavy banging or really make them mad they're they're pretty sweet bees but point  is if you're not checking for mites you don't know whether you need to treat for my some guys just  treat anyway and some guys what happened with some of the chemicals them kuba vas was one of them  that it wore out its efficacy became null and void based on the fact that the mites became immune  to it much like some of the pesticide companies when they treat the hotels and apartments and  such for rodents or roaches or whatever they have to switch their their treatments practically  every month to keep the roaches for or whatever they're treating from building up an immunity  to it and they call it into beer or they call it breeding for resistant mites if you're treating  with the same thing going after over and over again there's a couple of products out there one  of them is is a chemical called a probe are the chemical is actually called a mattress but the  label of it is is a Pagar this is what it looks like this is a 50 pack you probably won't need  that we sell these in 10 packs this will treat several hives up to five or six hive depending on  how Bigfoot's what size they are this is like $35 it's very good insurance for your bees health how  do you know if you need to treat well I know based on experience that that a colony will go about  three months between treatments before they build up enough to become a problem where you need to  treat again is that always a case no that's not a hard number that's a round number that is very  very flexible in other words you may have a mite problem one day you treat you get your might  level under control and if your neighbor has a my problem and he's not treating or there's  a wild beehive under a shed somewhere or in a tree somewhere and they start to collapse due to  my problems those bees abandon ship they have to leave there's no reason to stay in that colony  dead tree anymore and they start looking for a place to go and it's what you called might drift  might mom drift is very common now in fact Randy Oliver has done a lot of research about the drift  of might say Eve and took little magnetic strips it glued him to the backs of bees and color-coded  of and just to see how far they would actually drift they they did it on might loaded loaded  down colonies that they knew where might bulbs and just to see how a fresh colony that had  zero mice they did with a mile away or half a mile away they did um at different intervals  of distance to find out how fast a colony gets infected infested with mites when somebody in the  neighborhood is not treating the point is please treat for mice please don't be a mite bomb if you  do let me know where your bees are so I won't put any of mine in your area I'm saying that kind of  jokingly but the truth of the matter is you can be a problem if you're not treating for mice  to the rest of the bee community a lot of the commercial guys just really really don't like to  be around backyard or hobbyist beekeepers because there's a lot of hobbyist beekeepers that don't  think they need a treat for mice there's a camp out there that wants to be treatment free in  fact there's two camps out there that want to be treatment freezing them in one of those camps  because I want to breed for mite resistant Queens in genetics that don't require treatment but we're  not there yet as a community we're still working on that there's some really great work going on  in some of the bee laps LSU has some great we're gonna we actually have some of their genetics in  our lines if we actually sell some Queens and and use some Queens from the hell su genetics it's  a it's a fantastic research program and they've come a long way but it's just not quite there yet  across the moor so to speak there's some folks in Clinton endures their treatment free and I don't  doubt that but I haven't seen results of them own eyes so I still try to breed in fact our own  Texan line of bees are more mite resistant than some of the more gentle bees but they're a little  more aggressive to work they're a little bit more of a defensive B so they require me to put on my  gloves and it bailed to work in the summertime it if all I can get by with wearing these types of  gloves in fact we found these these white ones work really good the blue was the bees they  you know they're little darker the bees may notice them a little bit more but I can wear these  and like with my jacket I don't even have to use those gauntlet gloves in fact I would just get to  some of these when you're allowed when they start selling up again I get them on Amazon Amazon I  used to get them 20 bucks for a hundred of them now you can't get them anymore but I've still  got a few packages that I've had around it but something like this is all you need to work most  your bees with but of course you want to use this anytime you're handling the Mike chemicals these  are chemicals always go by the label never never never never ignore the label it could they change  check it every year this label might changed next year it might require a different time period to  leave them on and take them off according to what their current research is right now these you  put them in there at my strip they hang between two of the frames and you leave them for 14 days  you put two in the brood nest if you have a really big hobby put two in the top two in the bottom  you leave one for 14 days take them off you're required to leave them off for 14 days be let this  typical cycle out of the system before you put a honey super on to make table honey if it's just  if you're not pulling honey for table honey and it's just gonna be bee food you couldn't treat  these any time and not have to worry about that but as far as making honey for your own personal  use or to sell in the market you can't put these honey boxes on until you've waited at least 14  days after pulling those mite strips out there's a couple of other treatments of there's formic  acid there's oxalic acid they're both natural treatments they're considered organic but they're  a little harder on your bees the formic acid has to be used in in low temperatures under 85 degrees  for 14 to 21 days depending on which product you're using which method which application method  that's hard to find in South Texas it's hard to get a stretch where there's 14 or 21 days with no  temperature over 85 degrees why is that important well they're hard on the bees they're hard on  the Queens if you're gonna replace your clean anyway which we recommend doing annually or at  least checking her if she starts to decline you want super strong colonies young Queens are going  to provide you with a lot higher brood production so when your Queens start to age and decline  a lot of times the bees will ask the Queen to step down they'll have her lay special eggs and  what's called supersede your cells they look more like an emergency so which we talked about that  more to but the point is as your Queens age they decline in food production their egg levelling  laying abilities drop off and to the point to where they may cause your colony to be a little  bit weaker or not as strong as it could be so we take them out and replace them I like to consider  doing that when I'm going to use a hard treatment because I'm doing something hard and it's hard on  my queen when the treatments done I may not have a mite load but now I don't have as good of a queen  so I try to time those two together oxalic acid requires back-to-back treatments it's not gonna  penetrate the capping of the brood cells brood free the brood has got the cap like I said when  and when the egg gets to about seven days they cap it with a wax kept that's got some fiber in it  does allow some air to come and go so the formic acid it's the only one that that will finish rate  that cap and kill the mites that are inside what happens in lights they know by the smell in the  stage of the development of the bee which instar that bee is and they know not to go in too early  because they'll be detected and ejected by a bee especially by some of the more advanced lines of  varroa sensitive hygienic bees those lines can detect and find cap bees on infected might invest  in Cuba under capsules most normal lines do not they haven't developed that ability yet but some  lines do have that ability ones that don't the mites are gonna get in here right before they cap  it so they can go undetected and the first thing that happens when the female mite goes in here  she hides under that B until he gets capped in him but she feels safe she's gonna lay an egg and the  first egg she lays as a male beat in male mic then what and then every 30 hours or so she's gonna lay  another egg she's got two weeks now once they kept this you got two weeks nice I said it's gonna be  a 21 day cycle so she she takes advantage of this and the male bee the drone gets her an extra three  or four days so if she has that opportunity she'll go into that so she goes in there with a with a  mindset of laying as many eggs as she can so about every 30 hours she lays another angle all these  a substantial eggs are gonna be female the male is going to mate with all the sisters before  they all hatch out and you're gonna have some pregnant mites running around in your colony if  this is allowed to happen and this is the common life cycle of the roller bite they come out on  average a couple at least 1.7 or whatever the averages are that come out pregnant ready to go  get into another cell and repeat the same process so they won't double their population about every  10 to 12 days inspect it's what the research says here's one of the problems when your honeybees  are going full-blown in the springtime and then the Queen's raises a couple of thousand eggs a day  your colony brood production on this photograph would look like a roller coaster going up up up  up up up but in a June comes along it's going to kind of peak and it's going to start to go back  down and decline in your as your population drops off because bees don't live that long a worker bee  he's going to live approximately 21 days after it emerges as an adult it goes through the cycles of  it kind of like kids going through grade school in fact I I use the analogy of a bees day is much  like a person's year by the time they get when they hatch out the first thing they do is is one  of the early job duties is kind of cleaning up in their cell and cleaning around they're getting  some other cells ready for the queen delay polishing them and such as that and after they're  a couple of days old though the older nurse bees will teach the young nurse bees how to feed the  older larvae they'll start to get to develop they eat protein the pollen and they can create what  is called royal jelly which is their version of mother's milk and they'll start to feed the larvae  as they developed and then they can feed the young girl or but the older larvae are gonna eat bee  bread which is more of a pre mix of pollen and nectar and it's it's got some bee enzymes in it  that's gonna help it keep it from permitting and such but anyway the point is those bees are only  gonna live in that event that little they're kind of like elementary kids I mean that's the window  when they're most productive and feeding those those young larvae then they graduate next thing  you know they start to develop some other duties like cleaning up the hive Undertaker duty taking  out any dead bees and they get to about fourteen or fifteen days old they may start to become guard  bees and by the time they get about eighteen days they they guard the entrance they learn to put  their fingers for it now don't be on alert and red alert if somebody comes they put out a called  the alarm pheromone and after about 21 days they get kind of like us as kids 21 days old we didn't  burn it out to go to work well they become CEO bees and they go out into the field and collect  pollen and nectar and in the prime time of this spring in early summer they just basically wear  themselves out after about two weeks of hard labor maybe three weeks if they're you know just  depending on how much actually miles are putting on depending on availability of resources in a  in a drought season they may not be as flying as much or they may be flying more further to go  find resources that the scouts have located a few miles away instead of something close by but they  make multiple trips every day back and forth to the water yard back and forth to the field to get  pollen and nectar etc so they basically only live about six weeks as an adult be that time of year  with that said what happens is in March there's a boom of baby it's an explosion of babies so your  pollination your colonies climbing to pollinate population numbers are extremely fast well if  you don't have a mic control thing going on if your mites are in their breeding and doing that  they're gonna grow right alongside of population to population problem is in June and July when  the summer comes and the flowers all dry up the bees usually quit laying or quit raising as many  young so what you have is the roller coaster goes back down a hill for the bees but the mites do not  they continue they continue to breed and populate so their numbers are gonna escalate and all of  a sudden your ratio of mites to bees becomes a lot higher the economic threshold for a safe level  of mites in a honeybee colony is about 2 per 100 beats to mites to a hundred bees is where they  draw the line in terms of you'll start to see it drop off in your honey production if you're  a honey farmer and you have more than two bites per 100 the regular health of a hive is about four  per 100 now they used to say six is a big they've kind of decided that that's a little bit high  the science has what we try to do is keep our numbers two or less if I can do it might wash and  check them and they've got one I don't really get excited about treating that hive when they get I  want to treat them I don't get all caught up in if it's 2 or 4 or 6 or whatever if I've got more  than 2 I know I need to put a treatment on there because those mites are gonna start to populate  and Nick and they grow really fast so I'll put a treatment on and usually that treatment whether  it's a treatment like this it takes 14 days to go that's gonna usually last about six weeks in  oxalic acid treatment they oxalic acid again it doesn't penetrate the wax capping zone on these  closed cell or capped larvae or capped brood so we have to treat with an oxalic acid about  every four or five days they used to say seven days but they're finding that that's really too  far stretched apart it give us too many time to hatch out in fact a lot of people don't even like  to treat with oxalic acid where there's a lot of brood in the height it's not as effective you can  do it you just have to be more diligent and treat more often so what will happen is the bees the  the babies will hatch out you treat them runs that hatch out you'll catch those you can just do  it for about three or four times and you should be able to get a clean bike wash what I say it might  wash we take this little device there's multiple options for this this is one of the devices we  use put alcohol in here it's got a line you put up it's got a basket we're gonna catch a half a cup  of Beach just take a regular little measuring cup we shake a frame of bees into a tub catch use a  bunch measuring cup and pour them in here and you swirl this round for about a minute i sprawling  it around you're gonna get all the bees shook up and wash the bees basically and them dead the  mites will die and they'll follow us start to drop off the bees and after about a minute oliver gonna  be off and they'll drop through the holes in this basket and as they go through those holes in the  basket to be stay in here and then you can pull this basket out and you can pour the alcohol off  and you can pour this out on the white paper towel or you can probably just see them with this white  plastic and you can count how many mites you have again if you have a half a cup is the equivalent  of about 300 beats a half a cup should have no more than six mites or if you do the math and  divided out 100 would be two mites per 100 or six per the 300 if you see more than that now  it's time to get a treatment on it I check them about every three or four months they be sooner  if I'm in an area that I think may be suspicious of having some lightbulbs so doing your alcohol  washes diligently is highly recommended there's a sugar roll did people that have started doing they  actually would some people prefer to do that cuz it doesn't kill beats it's not near as accurate  it's gonna kill some bees anyway it has agitated and you don't get an accurate reading there's a  sticky boards I do not rely on those they're very complicated to do and get accurate numbers you  have to I mean as a beginner you're probably not gonna get the correct reading from those until you  totally understand how many frames of bees you're alright you have and it isn't understanding what  that means I'll show you when you come out what it means what a frame of bees officially is in  terms of grading in hive but if you don't know those things it's very hard to rely on the sticky  boards to give you a true understanding of how much your might load is because you're gonna have  mice are dying every day just like bees are dying every day mites die every day you're gonna have  possible frost false readings I'm not saying they don't work I'm saying you have to understand  them a little bit more than you do this is a lot simpler test yes it kills 300 bees and like  I said the Queen to lay in 2,000 eggs a day I think it's worth to sacrifice 300 bees and most  experts agree that it's a very worthy sacrifice that's what a couple hours worth of the Queen's  working in one day and you've got 300 bees so you have to know which bees to get you had to get  them out of the brood nest you can't get the fiel bees you want the nurse bees because those are  the ones that are gonna have the mites of them because the mites want to be in the nursery isn't  in the nest where the babies were being fed and raised that's where they want to go in and hide  and lay their eggs so the ones that are in the brood nest are the ones that are containing the  mites that would give you your true readings with that said having a reliable mic treatment is only  half the battle following up with another check to make sure your my treatment was effective is the  icing on the cake you have to follow up if you want to make sure you can usually tell your hot  your hive will stay a lot healthier and robust if you get a few hives in a couple of years from  now you'll get to the point if you neglect to treat them you'll get to where you can recognize  calling for mites you're probably going to start to experience the Maxwell's problem I have a lot  of people come to me want to buy bees it tells me that Rex Moss got their last colony well the wax  moth or a secondary problem they are the result of a weak colony the wax models are not going  to take off take on a strong colony they can't infest a strong enough colonies almost all your  experts when you ask a question about how do you fix this or fix that with a bee hive the first  part of their answer is keep strong colonies and then they'll elaborate based on the question  some of the other things but does this mice this might wash things there's like 20 bucks 25 bucks  they come with a little instruction booklet it's very simple to use very quick like I said Randy  Oliver has a video and shows you how to use this in about 4 minutes - of the vid - of the minutes  you're talking about it get yourself one of these we sell them we have them I'll have them in stock  rent man lake sells them if you can get them right now it's very hard to get everything right now  where everybody's in the same boat all supplies are in short hand during the spring anyway and  now with the virus thing going on we everything is really backlog backordered and backlogged  but it's important to know that your mites are gonna be your downfall of your honeybee hive  if you're not doing something about it I'd like