Laura from the urban farm is going to show you and give you a tour of our hives! We always get asked about how we grow our own honey, here’s a peek.
CHAPTERS:
0:00 Our Bee Hives
1:26 Types of Hives
4:28 Queen Bee
7:06 Tips for Raising Bees
TRANSCRIPT FROM VIDEO:
Hi, my name is Laura and I’m here at the Urban Farm and I’m going to show you and give you a tour of our hives.
If you think that the world is headed in a direction that makes you a bit concerned for the future and you’d like to be as self-sufficient and independent as possible, then you’ve come to the right place. My name is Lynette Zang. Now it’s time to go Beyond Gold and Silver.
So when we first bought our bees back two years ago in October, we bought two new hives. So a new hive is a smaller hive box and we went on a head and bought some new bigger boxes. And so these two hives right here are our original hives. This is hive number one, hive number two. And there’s a couple different points on these hives to take a notice. The baseboards are different. You can get different types of hives and the baseboard, this is apimaye hive, it has a different board base. So if you need to move the hive or limit how many bees can get in and out, you can slide these back and forth and you can even lock up the bees if you move it and turn it down and lock ’em. And this is also a honey hive, the box, but that’s just the box for the honey we keep on there.
And this is hive number two. These bigger boxes are brewed boxes. So this is where the queen will lay her babies. So see here this box is bigger and these boxes and this is a smaller box with smaller frames for honey. And this is where the honey is made.
This bucket in front of me is for sugar water and we put corks into it so that the bees don’t drown when they land to drink water. So it’s always good when you’re not having a lot of flowers blooming to feed your bees sugar water. And then this red bucket we have right here is pollen. So also if there’s not a lot of flowers blooming, another way to feed your bees is to have pollen. You can also make pollen patties out of this pollen. And then the pollen patties you put inside the hive, but we just keep a bucket of here in case they decide that they wanna pull from directly from the bucket. And it is a little messy right now. We have a couple other things going on, some frames laying around. This was a honey hive box and some we had harvested from it. So we just set the box back out here and the bees went on ahead and cleaned up the remaining honey and pollen from these frames. So we let our bees clean up the boxes and frames and then we’ll move it back down and reuse ’em later.
And this right here is our third hive. We just made this hive and as you notice, we’re on top of the roof and our, because it’s so hot here, we need to cover the boxes to make sure that the boxes don’t get too hot so the honey doesn’t melt. So we use these kind of white poster boards to cover them. So this is our third hive. It’s a brand new hive. We made it as a split from our hive number one. And we split it because there were so many bees and they kept on making swarm cells for the queen. So we knew that they were trying to leave. So we took advantage of how many bees that there were and pulled a couple frames from that number one hive and made an entirely new box. And we bought a new queen and we put her in here with ’em and the bees accepted her and stayed in this box. And so that’s how we got our third hive. So I’ll just pull a couple of these out, do a quick little inspection to show you. So this is just a frame that they’ve made with honey, with comb you can see a little bit of honey nectar being filled in right now.
So that side is empty. So when you do a hive inspection, you just basically look at every frame to see what’s going on. They’re making more honey comb just working away at it right now. And the queen will always be towards the center of the box. So always need to be careful when you get more towards the center that we don’t damage the queen at all. And you don’t hastily pull these out. This is a frame full of baby bees. I don’t know if you could tell in there, but deep down in there there’s little white larvas and there could possibly possibly be some eggs in there. These bees on top of the babies are nurse bees, so they’re taking care of the babies and feeding them and making sure that they’re growing. And the ones that are covered right here, those are capped. So when those bees emerge, they’ll be full on bees. They won’t be little larva. So I bet you the queen is gonna be on the next frame. Oh, and there she is. You see her. This queen is marked.
So when we bought her they had put a yellow mark on her just so it’s a lot easier to see her. And she was walking around probably trying to figure out where she’s gonna lay her next set of eggs. And you can see the bees move out of the way for her. And then the bees also take care of the queen and will feed her and take care of her themself. So she just kind of walks around and she’ll move where she wants to from frame to frame. So right now she’s on this frame, so we’ll just slide it real back carefully. And the rest of these frames we have in here are empty because this is a brand new hive and some of these actually did have honey in them, but they have eaten all the honey. So that’s why it’s also important to make sure that you feed sugar water to the bees because if they don’t have any honey in their hive to eat, cause they’ll eat the honey themselves in order to survive, then the hive will either swarm or just slowly die off.
So there we go. That’s our a basic inspection of our third hive. This is a queen excluder you use to keep the queen in there. The worker bees can fit through but the queen bee is too large to fit through. So if you wanted to then you would put on your honey box on top of this so she can’t get up and lay eggs inside of the honey cause sometimes that happens. And this is the lid. So you have a baseboard, the brood box. We have a queen excluder and then our lid. And then I’m going to go on ahead and put this back on to shade them up so they don’t get too much afternoon sun. And then we just put bricks on the tops of them. The boards don’t blow away.
So that’s it. This is a tour of our Bee yard of our three hives and we hope to have more. We can technically have up to 12 hives on this piece of property. Within each city you should be able to see a set of rules that explain how far your beehive needs to be from your neighbors and how many you can keep on your property. That way you know that you’re within your rights and can keep your own bees. So thank you for watching and looking at our three hives with us.
