Beekeeping Seminar - January 12, 2019

Good morning. I didn't I didn't really expect such a large crowd.
I was looking at maybe twenty or thirty people, and I'm looking at probably close to a hundred.
So that's a sizable increase in what I expected. Anyways, my name is Gary, Gary Brabant.
My wife, Mary, we're local beekeepers, we live in Fellsmere, we have a little twenty acre farm, hobby farm out there,
and beekeeping is one of my hobbies. It's not a business by any means,
but we do make a little bit of profit off of it because as much honey as the bees generate in a year
and as much honey as we like to consume, we cannot consume at all.
So, we sell it to the public if they're interested, which we have some up here we can talk about later on.
Beekeeping become a a hobby for us about, four years ago. I've always been interested in beekeeping.
And finally, after I finally retired, I decided to go to work as a hobby beekeeper. And believe me, it's work.
It's not just sitting there watching your bees flying in and out of a hive, it becomes work.
But what we wanna talk about today is backyard beekeeping.
How many people are interested actually in having bees in their backyard? Wow, it's a good number, really good to know.
I passed around a couple of brochures that talked about bees and one of them was on the decline of
bees and what's happening and why why bees are so important to us.
If we didn't have bees, you wouldn't have the volume of food that we have to consume.
The citrus industry, for example, was really concerned with the die off of the bees.
The citrus industry citrus industry was dying slowly, not only from greening, citrus industry was dying slowly,
not only from greening, but from lack of pop, pollination with the plants.
So now there's a great number of beekeepers in the Fellsmeer area and there's a lot of citrus out there
and it's all being taken care of, so they're doing pretty fair. But it still affects a lot of other places.
California, for example, has a real big problem with, honey bees.
They don't have them, they they spray too often, they kill them off basically.
So what a lot of people do is they ship their bees from other states into California to pollinate
the almonds or anything else that might be growing and there's pretty good money in that, but the return is terrible,
you send one hundred hives to California, you might get fifty viable hives back, so that's the chance you take,
but they pay you pretty fair for the amount of pain that you go through with your losses.
If you're interested in being a backyard beekeeper,
some of the things you should probably do is go on to the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.
It's FDACS. Go on to their website and look at the information that they have with regards to keeping bees in your backyard.
You do have to register your hive with them and there is a fee, one to five hives is like ten dollars a year.
You do have to register your hives with them and they will give you a certification number that has
to be put on your hives and I'll show you what that number looks like here shortly.
Chapter five eighty six of the Florida statutes requires that you do that.
So if you have a beehive, you do have to register it.
Now if you live in the county, Indian River County, you should talk to them.
If you live in Sebastian or Vero, talk to the government there, the people downtown, and find out how many hives you can have.
Some people, tell me that they can have two or three hives in Sebastian, I'm not sure which, so you might wanna look into that.
If you're gonna have bees, make sure that you at least check with the city or county and make sure you can have them there.
Permits, some of the cities require you to have a permit. I don't know if that's gonna affect you or not either.
And, also you wanna think about how far your hive is gonna be from your neighbors and how close they are to your house.
If, a bee just happens to sting your neighbor, you know he's gonna say, they've got the bees, they need to get rid of them.
And not knowing that bees are wild and they're gonna go wherever they wanna go anyways,
even if they aren't coming from your yard and stinging your neighbor, they're still gonna blame you,
so keep an eye on that, just take that into consideration.
Today, today our topics are going to be hives, hive components, hive inspections, tools and equipment,
protection equipment, which I'm wearing a bee coat right now, terms and pests, feeding references,
and live bees if you need to purchase live bees. I'm wearing this and I'm gonna get out of this real
quick because they do get hot after a while. This one's ventilated, it's got a mesh screen on it, to protect you.
It's a three layer mesh, which works out pretty well. And there's a veil on the back that you could pull over to cover your head.
Gloves, dirty because I do work with them. And, the gloves will go all the way up your arm.
They're supposed to be bee proof, sting proof, don't bet on it.
I get stung and I get stung fairly regular, not as often as I did without a bee coat, but much much less actually.
There's other bee coats that you can get, this one here is just solid cotton and it's pretty effective,
it works pretty well, but it doesn't have the ventilation on it.
And when you're working with bees in Florida, particularly in July, August, September,
you wanna have something on that's gonna breathe. You're still gonna sweat, get me don't get me wrong,
but a lot less with a ventilated suit than you would with the regular one.
And then, for those who care, a full suit.
This goes all the way down to the ankles and it's got the hood, the the veil just like like this one does.
So you've got all the protection top to bottom here. Okay. What is a hive?
And on the handout, it's got there it's got it written out for you,
but it's a structure in which bees are kept typically in the form of a dome or a box. In this case, we're talking about boxes.
A Langstroth hive is the one that I'm going to be showing you today.
The, Langstroth was developed, I think, in Germany back in the early parts of the nineteen hundreds,
and it's been a a mainstay for beekeepers pretty much, for the last decade. Hive components.
And once again, keep in mind, this is all used equipment so it's not gonna be pristine like the stuff
you'll buy here at the store if you buy a if you buy a hive. But this is a base, the bottom board.
This is what the Langstroth hive will mount on. Alright? If everybody can see it.
It's a bottom board and I'll I'll assemble it as we go.
Other options for bottom boards, because of the heat in Florida, you have the screen bottom board.
Basically it's the same thing, but it's screened in so during the summertime the bees have to work less to keep the hive cool.
Beehive usually runs around ninety five degrees all year round.
Dead of winter, zero degrees outside, ninety five inside.
They work their butts off, or their wings off to, to keep the queen comfortable and alive so that when spring comes,
she can go ahead and start laying again. So you've got your screen bottom boards and you've got your solid bottom boards.
The hive body, which actually sits on top of the bottom board, is this one right here.
So you set your high high body on top of your bottom board,
and then you have an entrance reducer depending on how free you want your bees to go and come out of
the hive or how much you wanna control the safety of the bees because there's certain pests that will
get in there including mice that will get into the hive, particularly in the winter.
We don't really have a lot of problem with mice getting into hives around here, but as you go further north,
the problem becomes more and more of a of an issue.
You have a reducer here, which is pretty wide, and then you've got a narrow reducer. Some people switch these around.
Summertime, they'll use the big one. Wintertime, they'll use the small one.
I figure they're gonna with a ventilated or a screen bottom board,
they're gonna be able to get all the ventilation they need and the bees are gonna get in and out no matter what.
So I try to stay with the smaller opening as much as I can so that the bees can, are accommodated.
It goes right here in front of the hive body. Inside the hive bodies are frames.
These are what the queen actually lays her eggs on, worker bees put the pollen and the nectar in, and make the honey.
So this is what you're looking for in frames. A frame breakdown is That's your frame. These are foundations.
There's black ones and yellow ones, and then there's green ones and there's others, but I use the combination of the two.
And I'll pass these around so you can look at them and you actually can feel the wax that's on here.
These are coated in beeswax so that it gives the bees something to start with and they can actually pull it out.
I'll start with you. You can imagine how much work that they go through to create the honeycomb that goes with that.
Then you have the assembled frame, your foundation and the frame itself. And somewhere around here. Why the different colors?
I'm gonna get into that here in a short minute. She asked why there was different colors, and I'll explain that in a second.
I'm trying to find a frame that's got actually has drawn comb on it.
This is a frame that the bees had already started drawing out to create the honeycomb.
The reason why I have two different colors, The black ones and the yellow ones,
I try to keep the yellow ones on the outer edges of the hive.
The queen has a tendency to want to stay in the middle of the hive, and that's where she'll lay her eggs and create the brood.
I can see the eggs a lot easier with the background that's this color than a background that's yellow.
So I can look in there and see that she is actually laying and we are getting new brood and if she's not,
then we have to replace the queen. So we're constantly checking our hives to make sure that the hive
is viable and that it's productive. If it's not, then all's you're doing is feeding bees that aren't doing anything,
and that's when you don't destroy the bees, you just relocate those bees into another viable hive that's strong,
has a good laying queen, and now they've got a whole slew of new workers out there. Any questions so far?
Yes, sir. What type of wood is usually used for the hive? Pine. You can use cedar, pine.
You can get some very expensive ones, but are they gonna last? Do you wanna invest that much money into it?
If you put a good, exterior paint on them, they'll last for years.
And that's why I just And I go to Home Depot or Lowe's and those rejected cans,
gallon cans of paint that you see that are nine dollars a piece and it's a color nobody would ever want,
that's what color I paint my hives. And, last week Danny was asking me why I use Key West colors.
I use Key West colors because it's nine bucks a gallon. So you don't wanna use pressure treated wood?
Where's pressure treated? Pressure treated is treated with a chemical that will actually kill the bees.
Creosote. Yep. So you wanna stay away from that. They've actually done away with creosote.
Now they're using something else, but it's still as bad because the bees will chew on the wood, And,
you just don't need to have that. How do you go about replacing the queen? Okay.
I'm gonna talk about that a little bit more in detail, but what you do is you have two options.
You can buy a new queen or you can rear your own.
And the way you rear a new queen, is you take a queenless hive, or for example, you you have a hive that's got a weak queen.
A hive that has a weak queen, the bees know it. She will lay an egg and they will start to develop a queen
cell and a new a new queen will hatch from that, emerge from that.
Before that that cell hatches, they will kill the queen, the existing queen.
They will kill her, the new queen when it hatches will orientate to the hive, go outside the hive, fly around for a few minutes,
figure out where the hive is located, and then she'll take off and go to what's called a DCA, a drone congregation area.
You don't need to know this, but that's where all the drone,
the male bees will be hanging out waiting for a virgin queen to show up, she'll mate twenty, thirty times,
and then come right back to the hive and not leave that hive again. She'll just continue to lay eggs for the rest of her life.
And it could be three three or four years sometimes.
Two years is usually the average, but they can go two or three, four years of for laying. Yes, ma'am?
Okay. The question was, if you put a hive in your yard, how much area do you need? Well, how big is this box?
I would say a quarter acre, maybe a a city, well, Sebastian here, a lot, just a regular lot would be fine.
I'd put it out away from the house so that when you come outside the bees don't feel threatened and
they're not gonna come and defend their hive. If you put them out in your yard, put them up against a fence,
not close to a neighbor's house, and give yourself a little bit of room for for them to fly around, without you being in their way.
Keep in mind, when you do your yard work,
you wanna have your bee suit on because that loud music that you create from your lawn mower, your weed whacker,
or whatever else becomes a threat to them, and they're gonna come out and they're gonna protect their hive.
Alright? It's not the old thing you hear about these Africanized honeybees that attack in thousands.
You'll have eight or ten or twenty bees comin' at you, trying to quiet that lower that mower down.
So be cautious about working around them. And if you can put them in a an area like if you have something
like this in your backyard, you know, where there's trees and stuff, put them in there,
but try to find a sunny place if you can or something that's gonna get quite a bit of sun during the day
because they can use the heat. Are they bothered by barking dogs? Question was are they bothered by barking dogs?
You can't put a bee suit on a dog. No. But I think after a while, the the dog would realize that when he barks,
he gets stung. It'd be like, it'd be like putting a shock collar on your dog. Yeah. That's not bad. Good point.
If you have a barking if you have a barking neighbor, then put it closer to her house. Yeah. There you go.
Any other questions?
If you wanna just like help the bees out, can you set this up and not harvest the honey and The question was,
if you wanna just help the bee population, can you just set up a hive in your yard and not worry about the honey,
not worry about inspecting? Sure. What's gonna happen though is the bees will eventually overpopulate,
there'll be too many bees for the hive, and then they do what's called a swarm.
A swarm is when the old queen lays an egg, they turn it into a new queen,
the old queen and fifty percent of the hive just eat as much honey and pollen as they possibly can carry,
and they high aqua out of here. They go find a new place to live, the new queen hatches, goes to the DCA,
comes back, and everything starts all over again. That's called a swarm, and the new queen is called a supersedure queen.
And then when that happens, you might even have swarm queens,
which will in turn hatch and she may take half of the existing hive with her and go do the same thing.
So the hive will reestablish itself, it'll still be a healthy hive,
it's just that half of them have left and new bees will be born to replace all the ones that went away.
Does that answer your question? Honey harvest aside, is doing that a benefit as opposed, you know, for the bee population?
Is that a benefit as opposed to harvesting the honey and letting status quo take The swarm? Yeah.
Is the swarm a benefit to the bee population? Yes.
It's not a benefit to the beekeeper because if while I'm inspecting my hive, if I see that my hive is getting full,
I'll add another one of these boxes on it. So you can imagine this two times this height,
and that gives them more room to have brood, store honey, store pollen, less likely that you would have them swarm.
But if they do swarm, yeah, they're gonna go somewhere, probably up into your soffits, under your shed,
and then you'll be calling me and wanting me to remove them from your soffits or your shed.
So and then I charge you dearly and you'll thank me for it. And I go home happy with another another beehive.
Typically, how many bees are in a hive? Wow.
I would an average hive, if this was a healthy hive right here in front of us, you could be looking at about twenty thousand bees.
Yeah. That's a that's a full bee. That would be just prior to putting another box on it to to discourage the swarming.
Yes, ma'am. So if I lived in Connecticut in the summer and I'm down here in the winter,
you couldn't do it because I would need to have someone feed that hive up there?
Or You're down here in the winter and you're worried about your bees in Connecticut. In the winter.
When you get close to winter, you winterize your hive. You leave it closed up until spring anyway.
You won't you don't wanna get in. The question was having bees in Connecticut coming down here in the summer,
in the wintertime, how are the bees gonna fare up in Connecticut during the winter? Well, you winterize your hive.
You get it insulated so that they stay warm. You leave an area where they can come out, on a on a warmer day,
you know, forty forty forty five degrees, they'll come out and they'll do what's called a cleansing flight,
They'll go out, do their business, come back to the hive.
And when you winterize your hive like that, you're not gonna inspect it because if you open your hive up during the winter time,
you're letting all that heat that they have built up inside, you're letting that heat get out, putting a cold top back on it,
then you're gonna get condensation and then the water's gonna drip down inside the hive and then you're
gonna end up killing your bees and you don't wanna do that.
So winterize your hive in Connecticut before you come down here and then take all the insulation off
when you get back home in the spring. The swarm season here usually ends around November,
and then it starts back up again in February. So you've got December and January that you may not now
rarely on a good warm day like today, you might have a bee swarm somewhere.
I've got two beehives that I have to remove on a golf course over here in Vero on Tuesday.
And they probably swarmed in during the fall, but they're overpopulating now.
So I would imagine if they don't get removed from the golf course and put into a hive,
that they would swarm again probably next month. There was another question. Yes.
When you say you winterize a hive, is that true for specific temperature areas, temperate areas or?
Winterizing a hive, is that how does that apply? Where would you winterize?
If you lived up in an area that has long periods of cold spells like below freezing, I would consider it.
If you're living in an area like South Georgia, Florida, don't even have to worry about it.
We might get, like, you know, we might get a few days down in the low forties, we might even touch freezing one or two days,
but at four thirty, five o'clock in the morning you might see those cold temperatures.
By this time of day, you're back outside in your flip flops, shorts, and tennis shoes, or whatever, your t shirts.
So, you won't have to worry about it here, but the further north you go, the more you wanna consider it.
If you if you see a lot of extremely cold nights, then, yes, that's that's time to, winterize your hives.
Yes, ma'am?
When you know that a hive is getting so big that you need to add another hive on top The rule of thumb,
how do you know when it's time to add another box to your hive?
The rule of thumb is when you've got ten frames in here, when eighty percent of them are full of whether it be nectar,
pollen, or brood, or the combination, when you have eighty percent of your hive is full,
that's time to put another box on top of it. Once they swarm or once they've got the mindset to swarm,
it's too late. So you should inspect your hives periodically to make sure that they are healthy,
and if they're honey bound or there's too many bees in the hive, to accommodate them to prevent swarming,
you would put that additional box on. A sign to look for that your bees are gonna swarm as they start building,
you have a healthy queen in your hive, but they're gonna start building new queen cells.
That's telling you, you better do something real quick because they're getting ready to go away.
If a queen cell is developed like up in the top middle part of the hive or the frame,
that would be considered a supersede your cell. That's telling you that the queen that's in there is weak.
This is gonna be the new queen. If you see one down on the bottom, that's called a swarm cell,
then that's an indicator that your hive is getting ready to swarm. How high do you wanna stack your hives?
How many boxes can you put on there? I've seen five and six, hive bodies on top of it, but keep in mind,
if they start filling those boxes up with honey, they weigh about fifty pounds when they're full.
And I'm six well, an inch shy of six foot tall,
but if I wanna pull a fifty pound hive body off the top of my hives that I've got in the yard, I've gotta reach up here to get it.
Taking fifty pounds from there and bringing it over could be quite a challenge.
So it it you can go as high as you'd like, but I would keep it at a minimum. I I would keep it as as low as possible.
I put mine up on cinder blocks just and I have cinder blocks and then a pallet on top of them. So we're talking maybe a foot.
So you got eight inch cinder block and a four foot pallet, so we're about a foot off the ground. Another question was just here.
What does a a queen bee, The queen cell or queen cell look like? Okay. I Thank you. It looks just like a peanut shell.
It it extends out away from, if you get a chance, and I'll I'll give you some references to look at later on,
but if you get a chance, go on the internet and you could actually look it up, but they do.
They look like a peanut shell that sticks out quite a ways away from the frame, the honeycomb that's already been drawn out.
And usually it's kinda pointed down. Yes, sir.
In your bin, what do you do with bees in this area, how often do you get the swarm cells for? Or how often?
Every three months? Every four months? I would look for if you had a hive right now, I'm already inspect question was,
how often will you see qua swarm cells? I'm gonna start looking for swarm cells the first part of February.
I'm I've been in my hives, I was in half of them last week,
my wife and I went out and did hive inspections on half of them to see that we have a viable queen, that they're laying eggs,
that I have brood being established.
We've got a lot taken care of and we also have to look for, pests like varroa mites, wax beetles, hive,
I'm sorry, wax moths and hive beetles. So we have to look for those things because they are detrimental to a hive.
So we did half the hives last week, probably do the other half this week.
At the same time, I'm looking for swarm cells, but I don't expect to see any until maybe next month when,
when we get our nectar flow going again. Right now, the nectar flow is on citrus,
and then we go into various other things as we go.
So we're gonna be getting a good nectar flow, the hives are gonna build up, they'll start looking at or thinking about swarming.
When they do that, then we wanna start looking for swarm cells.
If you have a weak hive, you've got a very good chance of a wax moth coming in there.
If you got a strong hive, the bees will kill the wax moth before it lays any eggs.
So the key is to make sure you have good healthy hives.
Hive beetles on the other hand, it's a matter of control and they've got we've got things like beetle busters,
beetle traps, the Swiffer pads that you use for dusting, but you have to use the non scented ones.
And what they do is the bees get, I mean, the beetles get their feet into that swiffer and they can't get out and they just die.
But the beetle trap is a, it's a little plastic thing that mounts on the between the frames,
and you put some Wesson oil or something inside there,
and the beetles go in there to get away from the bees because the bees will push them in there. They'll they'll crowd them in.
They get in there, they get in the oil, and they die. And the beetle busters is just another, method for controlling beetles.
But beetles become a very big issue. One second. Yes, ma'am.
If your whole if your whole pie leaves, is that still considered a storm or was that because there was
potentially a hazard to them? The question the question was, if your hive leaves, your whole hive just up and goes away,
and trust me it's happened to me. That is not a swarm, that's called absconding.
And what they do is the bees in the hive will consume everything that's, been stored, pollen and nectar,
the queen will stop laying, they'll hatch that brood, they'll consume all the pollen and nectar, and they'll just go away.
And the way you know that they've done that is when you open your hive up and you look inside, and there's no stores,
no bees, no anything, but that's called absconding.
I I think that the primary reason they do that is they don't like the tenant manager.
Why why they do it, I really don't know. Yeah. I I just always figured they didn't like me well enough to stick around.
Yes, ma'am. How much money will a, a a cool, I know, a healthy hive produce? This one here can produce up to about a quart.
And there's ten of them in here.
So you're talking two and a half gallons of of honey if you have ten frames of of stored honey, honeycomb,
built up honeycomb. Around here about twice a year, you can harvest in May and again in November. Wow.
We've gone a long ways beyond backyard beekeeping.
We have, what we have is called an extractor, and it holds three frames, and we take the honey frames out of the hive,
replace them with empty frames, we take those honey frames back to the house, we scrape them, put them in our extractor,
and then my wife just cranks that thing until her arm's sore then she uses her other arm and then she
tells me she's tired and I tell her I have to go get a cup of coffee and but we work it where we get
all of the hives extracted and we extract the honey.
Then you have drawn comb like what we're passing around here, it it's a little bit beat up,
but you can put that back into the hive and it'll encourage the bees to start filling it back up with nectar.
But, we do it twice a year and we do it with an extractor. You don't have to use an extractor.
You could just scrape it all off and just let it go into a bucket and let it sit there.
And then what I do is, if I'm doing it that way,
is I squeeze it all out into a Ziploc bag and then just cut a little tip of that off and then just let
it drain slowly into a bottle, and it works out pretty well if you're doing just a small quantity.
The question was how much honey do you leave for the bees? Keeping in mind that the bees, that's their food source.
So if you go into my into my pastures or my bee yard, this box here on the very bottom is theirs, everything in it,
the pollen, the nectar, everything in it is theirs.
We try to exclude her from going into another box by putting a queen excluder on here.
So if I have two beehives, two of these boxes set up, on top of the second one I'll put a queen excluder,
And that looks like this. I'll put that on top of the top hive, and then I'll put a honey super on top of that.
She cannot fit through these holes. The worker bees can, the queen can't.
So you put this on top of the top box, and then you take your honey super actually,
that was a good question because it took me into the next step of what we're talking about today.
You put your honey super on here, and now the bees will come up here to deposit their nectar,
and you don't have to worry about the queen coming up here and laying eggs.
That way when you extract your honey, you're only getting honey out of here, not baby bees.
Because once you cut that frame open to let the honey out, you don't wanna have any any brood in there.
Does that answer your question? How many boxes of bees do you put at the bottom? Do you put, like, two and then the honey?
I will have two deeps, two of the deep boxes, the queen excluder, and then a honey super.
And then the two lower boxes, just leave those alone outside of inspections? That's the bees. That belongs to the bees.
They can do what they want. Because she'll start laying in both boxes all the way up to the queen excluder,
and if she can't get past the queen excluder, she'll stay down below.
But then you, but you have to put new frames in there every so often to give her space? No.
That's when you do your hive inspections, and if you look like you're getting overpopulated, as a beekeeper,
what you at that point would do is split your hive.
You would create, you would take the old queen and a number of good frames, put it into a new box with the baby bees,
and the bees that are in here now will create a new queen and they'll go through the process of replacing the one that they had.
And when I said baby bees, that might that might raise a question, what's a baby bee?
A bee's lifespan is about thirty five days during the summertime.
And the first, say the first week to ten days, that bee, when they're born, does not leave the hive.
They have no orientation of where they're at. They only know the inside of that hive.
So when you do a split and you take the old queen and a bunch of the new baby bees and put it in a new hive,
wherever you locate that new hive, once those new babies come out and do their orientation flight to
figure out where to where their hive is and then start becoming worker bees and going out to the out
to the pastures and pollinating and bringing back nectar,
they'll always come back to the new hive because they don't know the old hive. Alright?
Bees fly off a navigation system, they use the sun as a navigator, then they can see it even when it's cloudy.
So that's why a bee will leave out of its hive, go three miles to do some nectar gathering,
and come straight back to its hive and not have a problem with that. How many different varieties are there of bees in this area?
How many different? How many different varieties of bees in the area? Not considering the Africanized honey bee.
Alright? The Africanized honey bee, which is a honey bee. Don't get me wrong.
They do the exact same thing, but you can't have Africanized bees in Florida. You have to destroy them.
There's a European honeybee, there's an Italian honeybee, and then there's a Russian honeybee.
Those three are the more common varieties of honeybees that we have in Florida.
There may be one or two other hybrids and there's some that, they're working on right now that are, they consider them hygienic.
But there's a lot different bees out there. So, the three common ones are the Russian, Italian and European.
Of the three, which is the hardiest and strongest? That's a question that's up for debate.
What what are the three of the three, which one's the hardiest, strongest?
If you've got a person who raises Italian honeybees, they'll swear up and down that they're the strongest,
best bees to have. And if you have somebody who keeps Russian bees, they'll tell you the same thing.
Personally, I like the Italian bees. Do they all have a lifespan of thirty five days? Yes. Lifespan's about the same.
How do you tell them what type of bee you've got? Well, there's, you you can take one and send it to the lab up in,
Gainesville and they'll analyze it and come back and tell you. But you really need to, I look for the the darker colored body.
If it's a real dark, dark, that good possibility it's a Russian bee.
Now, if you've got dark bees in your hive and most of your bees are orangish color, then there's a good possibility the queen,
when she mated, mated with a Russian drone. And there's all the possibility that she mated with a Africanized drone.
So those are the things you gotta watch out for. So now we have the bottom board, we have the entrance reducer on,
we have the high body, we've got the queen excluder, and now this is my honey super. Right?
And as the gentleman asked earlier, how high can you go?
I would normally have two deeps, an excluder, and then the honey super on top of that. That's my ideal.
You've got, your frames and foundations, and I think we've talked about that, Your frame and your foundation,
and that's what they use to put their pollen or their nectar in.
You have a inner cover, which is a cover that goes over the top of your hive,
and it's got an opening in it so that the bees can come up, and it also allows for ventilation to the hive.
On top of the inner cover is the top cover. That is a complete hive setup right there.
Now, we get windy days, I put a block of, whether it be a cement block, cinder block, or a paver, or something,
something heavy on this to keep the wind from blowing it off.
You wanna do your hive inspections monthly, at at the least.
You can do them like every week or every two weeks, but just remember, every time you get into your hive,
you've got a very good possibility of rolling the queen or or killing the queen, and if you do that,
then your hive is is gone pretty much until they create a new queen,
if there's a viable egg in there that they can make a queen from. Times to not be doing inspections.
Cloudy days because when the weather is gloomy, the bees are miserable. Alright? Rainy days.
Don't want any moisture to get into your hives. So stay stay away from your hives when it's raining
and on windy days because when you pull your frames out to inspect them, you don't know what that wind is gonna do.
If it's gonna blow it out of your hand, if it's gonna blow the queen away or or something might happen.
So avoid the the windy, windy days. A day like today, where it's just a mild breeze, not a problem.
But also, when you're doing your inspections, try to do your inspections over the hive body.
So when you're inspecting your hive, be over the hive body.
That way, if the bees fall off, they fall off back into the hive, and they're fine.
But if you're inspecting them out here like this and they fall to the ground, you don't know what fell to the ground.
And if it's your queen, you've got a problem and you don't wanna you don't wanna encourage that.
You just, do your inspections over your hive body. Okay. The hive tools, the tools that you're gonna use.
First of all, we talked about a, the bee suit, and you wanna make sure you're wearing one if you're just an,
a newbie, or newbie, should I say that? A new person to the beekeeper's, business. You wanna have a smoker.
This is a smoker and you wanna use organic fuels.
Some of the ideals are pine straw or paper, crumbled up pieces of paper to get it started. How many have horses?
How many people have horses? Nobody? Okay.
You can use like pine pine chips or anything like that once you get the fire started and you can get this thing open.
But, Newspaper okay? Newspaper's okay as long as it's white paper. Try to avoid the colored paper because of the chemicals.
No plastics, nothing that's not organic. But this is all horse bedding.
It's the, wood wood pellets that people put in their horse corrals and it gets moist and it expands,
well, you wanna use it straight out of the bag, just throw it on there and keep this thing going, once you've got it going,
your smoke is gonna be your friend. Smoke does a couple of things.
It'll settle the bees down, it'll drive them back down into the hive, and if you get stung by a bee,
smoke the area that you got stung, and it'll mask, after you scratch out the stinger, it'll mask the sting pheromone,
because the bees go by pheromones, various pheromones. So you wanna make sure that you spray yourself with some smoke.
You may walk in the house smelling like a forest fire, but you shouldn't get stung again in the same place.
They'll find another place to to sting you. For removing your frames, you have hive tools.
This is the kind most commonly seen, and you go down between your frames and you use it as a as a wedge to to move your frames.
The bees will glue these in with stuff called propolis. It's like a pine sap.
You can go in there and then you can also use it to lift out your your frames.
I prefer a different type of hive tool, serves the same purpose.
You go in and you can finagle your your frames as you see necessary.
But it's got a little j hook here, which I can get down in here and get under my frames and I can lift them up a lot easier.
Instead of trying to lift them from the middle, I can lift them from the edges. So I use this one and it's preference.
Another way to get your frames out is using a hive a hive clamp. You stick it down between them and you just lift it up.
Now you can do your inspections. You're doing a one hand inspection. You're doing good. So those are some of the tools.
A bee brush.
If you have, you're doing an extraction, for example, and you bring this up and it's full of honey,
but it's also got a bunch of bees on it, gently knock the bees down into the hive body.
And once you've got all the bees off, separate this from the rest of them, put it in another box,
take it to the house for extraction. My next thing on here is the bee suits,
and I think I've talked about bee suits three times already.
But make sure you got your coat, the veil, some of your options are coat with the veil, some people just wear a veil only,
some people don't wear gloves. I know one guy who goes out and does his inspections, he wears a ball cap,
a tank top, shorts, and clogs, that's his bee suit.
And I know another guy who just goes out there and does everything, and I know others who get almost like they're putting on,
like they're getting ready for war, they put on the full suit and they go out there thinking they're gonna get beat up,
which they probably would. But, gloves, make sure you got good solid heavy duty gloves and the ones that you you would get here,
for example, appear to be very long, but you want that coverage on your on your arm.
You want as much coverage as you could possibly get.
Some of the terms that you'll probably hear and if I haven't already covered them is a queen and a viable
queen would the term there would be queen right. Your hive would be queen right because she's a laying queen,
a productive queen. And then, you'll have queenless hives.
And another one you might hear is virgin queen, which is a queen that had just hatched, hasn't mated,
and isn't isn't laying eggs yet. So you'll have all those options. You've got your worker bees.
The workers are the ones that have gone beyond the house cleaning and the tending to the queen and the guard duty.
Now they're full fledged workers, they're the ones who go out and do the pollinating,
they're the ones who bring back the nectar and pollen to the hive. You have a drone, drones are male bees.
Male bees or the drones do not have a stinger. So if you go into your hive and you see a bunch of
drones and you wanna test me on that one, just pick it up and see if it stings.
If it doesn't sting, it's a drone. If it stings, you mistook it for a drone.
Brood, generally in the middle of your hive, on your larger frames on the on the brood chamber,
the brood will be mostly in the middle. You wanna see a nice tight pattern.
If you see a brood that's kinda spotty, a little here, a little here, a little here, or on little on this one,
little on another frame, good possibility they're gonna be replacing that queen soon because she's she's weak.
She doesn't have the desire to build up that hive and that's what that hive wants. So they'll supersede her.
They'll get rid of her, kill her, hatch a new queen out.
And we talked about hive beetles, black's moths, and varroa mites, other things that we might, encounter,
and that's why you have to register with the state of Florida, is they will,
I wanna say they're supposed to send an inspector out to look at your hive and make sure everything is good,
but they are so backlogged now it might take two years before you even see an inspector.
But they're gonna inspect your hive for those three pests that we talked about, and then they're gonna be looking for foulbrood,
which is a virus that gets into the into the hive, and there's European and American fowl brood.
And all of this stuff will actually kill a hive off.
If they detect foul brood in your hive, the only way around foul brood is to burn it.
Kill the bees, burn the whole hive. You can't salvage them. They've got the disease and they'll just bring it to another hive.
So you have to destroy the bees. Robbing.
Robbing is when you open up your hive, and I don't know if you've seen that bee that was flying around here earlier,
but she could smell the honey that we have out here or or something and she was looking for that source.
If she would've found it, she would've gone in, absconded as much as she possibly could, eaten all the honey she could,
then she'd go back to her hive and then tell her friends where she got it.
And they would all be here robbing this thing out, taking all the honey.
That's why I didn't bring anything with raw honey in it, because if we had, I'd be pushing bees away right about now.
And another term is dearth, not darth like a Darth Vader, but dearth.
Dearth is a period of the year where there's no pollen, no nectar for the bees to to acquire.
And that's why you wanna keep your brood chambers.
Leave them alone because that's where they've already stored pollen and nectar to get through those
periods that they don't have any outside sources. So you wanna be able to make sure that they have food to survive the winter,
survive the dearth, get get rid of everything. So you wanna maintain a healthy hive that way.
If you have bees in your backyard and you are in a dearth or a weak hive and you think you need to feed them.
If you've got one hive, you would get a honey, I'm sorry, a nectar feeder, like this, and I believe they have them here too.
Yeah. Yep. But this is the nectar feeder, and this slides in into the wide section of the, entrance reducer.
It slides into there and it mounts right up flush to the to the hive, so bees from outside, robber bees can't get in here,
but the bees that are in the hive can go in here and obtain the sugar water that they need to create nectar to feed their queen,
feed their brood, and feed themselves. Yes sir? Top feeder?
I actually have an open feeder where I fill up a five gallon bucket and I've got it about two hundred
yards away from my hive and off my hives. That way, they have to fly to it. And the same thing with pollen.
I've got a pollen feeder that holds thirty pounds of pollen, substitute pollen.
And right now, I am not feeding any nectar because the honey flow or the nectar flow is on with the citrus.
So I'm letting them work that. But this would be the alternate or if you have one hive, this would be perfect.
If you put an open feeder out in your yard to feed your one hive, you'll be feeding your hive, your neighbor's hive,
the wild hive down the street, and every bee in the county will find their way within two miles,
will find their way to your nectar, and this'll be gone in no time.
So that's why you wanna have it in a position to where it'll only feed this one hive and not everybody else's bees.
We just came out of a, we just come out of a mild dearth because a lot of the Mexican clover has been
in bloom until we got the last, cold spell, and then it just set back the Mexican clover.
Fortunately for us, the citrus came in right after that. So, we really, out where we're at, didn't have much of a dearth.
If you're in an area, around here, well, particularly right here where you've got flowers everywhere,
you'll never see a dearth at, Busy Bee Nursery.
But, when you get out into other areas like out in, like Fort Pierce on the west side of Fort Pierce,
where there's quite a few bees out there, a lot of that is just pasture land.
There's no citrus immediate area, so they're probably still in a dirt.
The dearth will last probably until flowers, the wildflowers come into bloom.
And then, we'll have it again in, mid to late summer for about six to eight weeks.
And then the, palms, the, palmetto, etcetera, will all come into bloom and then we'll go back and do an and then the pepper,
the Brazilian pepper. And we'll go back into another honey or sugar flow, honey flow at that point.
And that'll then end about maybe mid to late November. Yes, sir.
A lot of times you see those bottles on the very tops of the hives. Yes.
What a lot of beekeepers do is they drill a hole the same size as the cap, and then they just set this right in there,
and it serves the same purpose. It only feeds this hive.
But So, yeah, there's I mean, you can go down to dollar store, buy a box of what, twelve quart bottles and do the same thing.
Drill a hole the size of the cap and just set it on there.
But, keep in mind, when you're done feeding and you take this off, you have a hole here.
So you gotta put mesh screen, that number eight hard wire cloth. Right? Hardware cloth.
Number eight hardware cloth on here on the inside.
And then, have something to cover up that hole so that when it rains, it doesn't rain down into the hive because once again,
water would water would be your worst enemy for your bees. During the dirths, what you wanna do is inspect your hives.
Like I said earlier, if you've got a very good store of honey and pollen, until they deplete that, No.
If they deplete their pollen and nectar stores, then you when it gets really low,
then you wanna start feeding so they can build that back up to get through the dearth.
Well, how long would you expect that to last till one? Maybe a week. Yeah.
So, you just go in and the and the mixture for this around here, it's like one to one or you can go two to one,
that's one part sugar or two parts sugar to one part water, depending on how you want to mix it.
And when I say mixture, it's by weight, not don't don't consider a cup of sugar and a cup of water as equal.
It's sixteen ounces is a pound of water, so you want one pound of sugar.
So So that gives you your one to one or two pounds of sugar to give you your two to one.
And then you boil the water, get it to clarify, put it in here, let it cool down, and feed them cool,
nectar, not the boiling hot nectar, because they probably wouldn't like that so much. I didn't miss any quest Yes?
How do you stop robbing? How do you stop robbing?
Put your feeders, if you don't have one in the hive, like like this, or on the top of the hive, and you're doing a open feeding.
Okay. If, for example, if bees wanna rob out this hive, that's what the guard bees do.
There's guard bees that watch the entrance to the hive. Every bee coming back to that hive has a pheromone for that hive.
They know that hive. They they know who lives there by how they smell.
And if you don't belong in that hive, I don't care if you look exactly like her sister, because they're all girls,
they're gonna kill you if they can or if not, just run you off. They're not going to let you in that hive.
So you're not gonna find bees going in there unless you have a weak hive.
If you have a weak hive, then you're gonna have bees coming from other hives that's gonna go in there
and they're gonna kill the residents and take the, take the stores that are in there.
So to protect it, you wanna make sure you have strong hives so that you can protect they can protect their own hive.
Local bee clubs. Anybody interested and wants to learn a lot more about backyard beekeeping, there's two local bee clubs.
If you live up north, up in Brevard County, Brevard County has a, bee club called Brevard Backyard Beekeepers Incorporated,
and they're out of cocoa. And then Treasure Coast Beekeepers Association, in which my wife and I are both members,
They actually meet this coming Wednesday at seven o'clock down in Fort Pierce.
It's Treasure Coast Beekeepers Association, and you don't even have to be a member to attend a meeting.
If you're gonna go in as a guest, feel free to show up and come in, but we always talk about beekeeping.
Where do they meet? They meet at Pico Road. It's, part. The extension office. The extension office off of Pico.
Right. Yeah. You take, Kings Highway. Kings Highway. Right. And, yeah.
But, you go to the meetings and we're always talking about we have a an apiary that has six hives in it and we use it for training.
And now, it's every other week, we have two people, they do hands on training with bees.
They actually let you you bring a bee suit, you bring your equipment,
they let you go ahead and and physically get in there and and see how things are working.
They may not let you take a frame out of the hive, but they will let you see it all and get a good experience out of it.
They do have a website. TCBAR, Treasure Coast Beekeepers Association.
I think if you just Google that, it'll take you directly to the, to a link for the website.
I would strongly suggest attending a meeting at one of your local bee clubs, talk to some people who have bees,
and believe you me, there are more people at these meetings that have virtually no experience in beekeeping,
physical beekeeping where they have a hive in their yard, but still go to the meetings because of the interest.
And they go and, number of them, after they've attended a few meetings,
have found that just going to the meetings encouraged them to get beehives for the yards.
And they also have a hive giveaway program.
If you you go through a certain number of, steps in in learning how to work with bees,
and after they feel that you've reached a good satisfactory level or experience level with bees,
they will actually give you a hive. You have to have a hive body, they'll give you a nuc, which this is a nuc,
and I'll explain that in a minute. They'll give you a hive, a nuc, you take it home, put it in your,
in your bee hive itself, bring back the nuc, and then in about a year when your hive gets ready to be split,
you split that hive, put it into a nuc, and bring it back to the club.
You have a viable hive, they got their hive, they've got a hive back so they can give it to somebody else.
And it works out pretty well.
We talked about the big beehive, and when you have a small, weak hive, ideally you would keep them in a nuc,
a nuc stands for nucleus, And this is basically the same thing as this Langstroth hive, except it only has five frames in it.
Doesn't have the ten. So, you put them in here and allow them to grow, and once again,
when they've reached strength of about eighty percent, then you would transfer, and that would be four full frames,
or in this case, three full and two halves, then you transfer these five frames to the middle of your Langstroth hive,
and then you would be able to build up from there. So that explains what the nuc is for. And it has the same features.
It has a bottom board, an entrance reducer, your hive body, and a cover. YouTube, how many people know what YouTube is?
How many people don't know what YouTube is? Okay. YouTube.
If you have access to YouTube and a lot of people won't do it because it's social media or whatever
or it's opinionated or something, but, there's a lot of beneficial information on there.
In fact, I learned how to change the oil oil filter on my tractor off of YouTube.
Sure that was exciting to know, go in there and search for beekeeping.
And, I'll tell you, some of the people that I have a great deal of respect for is a gentleman named Jeff Horchoff.
God bless you. He goes by, also goes by the name of Mr.
Ed, and he's funny, entertaining, he works for a monastery out of New Orleans. He does all of his bee recoveries.
He does bee recoveries and he doesn't charge a dime because the, the donations that he gets all goes towards the,
towards the church. But, he he's, very knowledgeable in what he does.
He he's very entertaining, but he not only does bee recoveries, but he does a lot of online training on what to do and how to keep,
how to extract and various other things. He's very good.
Another one is Randy McCaffrey and I have it all in the handout so you can see it.
He goes by the name of six twenty eight dirt rooster, has something to do with the motorcycle he owned when he was younger.
And then, another guy at the very bottom of the page, it's, David at Barnyard Bees Incorporated.
He's out of Chatsworth Chatsworth, Georgia. The first guy, Mr. Ed, is out in New Orleans. The second guy is out of Mississippi.
And this guy's out of Chatsworth, Georgia. David does a lot of training, a vast amount of training.
In fact, his focus is mostly towards the new beekeeper.
And he doesn't show anything with regards to, going out and recovering bees.
His is focused on his bee yard and training the new guy.
And he does coffee clashes, he does online stuff, he he the guy is just amazing at how much energy he puts into his beekeeping.
And beekeeping to him is a is a hobby. It's a part time job. He's also a construction worker.
So you wonder where he finds the time, but he does and he's he's sincere about everything he does.
So David at barnyard bees is is a good source. He also rears and sells queens.
He also sells packages of bees, so you would have a nuc, you would buy a two or a three pound package of bees from him,
you would install them into the nuc, and he gives you step by step procedures on how to do that.
So, he would be the first one to go to for learning how to work with bees and the other two are my
second source for going to them for learning, but I also go to them for the sheer entertainment because the,
Mr. Ed and the dirt rooster are always at each other in a friendly way.
You know, they try to outdo each other and you'll hear little innuendos as you watch them. And, it's just funny.
Very entertaining. I enjoy it. Maybe you won't, but I do. I got a sick sense of humor anyway. Plants.
We have pentas up here right now, and if you go in on the entrance, there's basil.
Those two particularly are, bees are very fond of them.
The basil will always be in bloom, it seems, as well as the pentas.
They they seem to stay in bloom and they they provide a great deal of nectar.
But the thing is is any flower, any flower that you may have in the yard, if you see a butterfly go to it,
it's also access, acceptable to bees. Anything that, hummingbirds go to is acceptable to bees.
That would be the bottle brush or anything else that you might think of offhand. The, cape honeysuckle or star jasmine.
Anything that puts off a, a nectar source. The, if alfalfa blooms, yes.
But, the the around here, mostly Mexican clover is one of the big ones. I have some white in my yard.
I I seeded my whole yard last year with, white and red.
And I have some of the white clover that popped up, but it'll stay probably until maybe June, and then it'll go away.
But, it it didn't come up as plentiful as I was hoping. But it could be me.
I mean, it it, I just threw it out in the yard, scattered it like it was grass seed.
And, but but, yeah, anything that flowers, anything that'll produce nectar is acceptable to bees.
A free course for beginners, beginner beekeepers, write this down, perfectbee dot com.
The question was, can you buy bees locally? If you wanna start your hives, can you buy them locally?
Not to burst anybody's bubble, but the, state of Florida said that anything, any wild bee population,
wild bee meaning something in a tree or up in your soffits or under your shed floor or whatever,
has a very good chance of being Africanized, if not, had Africanized traits.
So anything south of I four, that's an awful lot of Florida. But there are a lot of beekeepers in Florida.
I know people down in Palm City and down that area that are beekeepers and they do sell bees, they do sell queens,
they sell everything with regards to beekeeping, but as Danny said, David up in Chatsworth, Georgia,
he prides himself, and if you go to his website, he prides himself on how docile his bees are.
There's not an aggressive trait in them. Now periodically he'll get stung,
but it's probably for something stupid like bumping into the bee or or doing something that aggravated
the bee and the bee felt threatened so they defend themselves. But he, he prides himself on the fact that his are docile.
I wouldn't discourage anybody from buying locally if you know a local person,
but I would also like to go out and see how their bees are.
If they're if they're easy to be around, then you might wanna consider it. And because it'll be easier for you.
If you're gonna buy a nuc, if you need a nucleus of bees right now,
buy it locally because if you're gonna buy it from somebody out of state, you have to go to them, fill up your bee nuke,
and come back. But they can package mail through u US Postal Service,
they can mail you the two and three pound packages of bees or queens if you place a queen. You can do that in the mail.
The rest of it, you have to actually go to the beekeeper and buy them. Yes, sir.
How do you know the difference between an Africanized bee and the other bee?
Well, the other bees, if you go out to the hive and you just, this is my, my way of doing it,
I'll go stand out there in front of the hive like I'm dressed right now,
five or six feet away from the hive and look at it in flashlights or whatever, because they're attracted to light just like,
any other bug. But I'll shoot up into the hive if I can see inside and see how big their population is.
And if they don't come out after me en masse, then their chances are they're European honeybees.
If they come after me en masse and there's like fifty, sixty, a hundred of them coming after me, I would consider them Africanized.
So that's how I would do it, but I wouldn't recommend I wouldn't recommend you doing it that way. What if you do it that way?
And and Africanized bees will chase you up to a quarter of a mile.
Domestic, the not domestic, but the European honey bee will probably just chase you far enough to get you away from its hive.
One or two might follow you to your house and sting you, but, not a mass.
The whole mass will actually, Africanized will actually come after you. That's why.
And and the honeybee venom, by volume, is ten times more deadly than the bite of a rattlesnake. Alright?
So if you have a rattlesnake bite you and put two milligrams of poison into you and it's gonna kill you,
you have to have tenth of that from bee stings.
And that's an awful lot of bee stings because the venom that they eject is just enough to probably irritate.
So there'd be an awful lot of bee stings. The reason why people die from Africanized bee attacks is
because they get stung in volume, and if they're not going into anaphylaxis, they actually die from the poison of the bee sting.
And that's because the Africanized bee stings in such volume. There's so many of them. There's so many of them.
They only put out the very same amount and the same kind of poison as the regular European honeybee,
but the amount of of, poison that they inject with multiple stings is what's gonna hurt you or kill you.
Do bee stings help arthritis? I have arthritis and I've been stung a number of times.
I actually, most of my arthritis is in my hand and they always seem to sting me on the leg or so.
I mean, I guess if you could direct it to a spot, you know, take the bee and put it where you,
but I don't I I I'm not in a position to say yes or no. I I I've heard stories that it does. Mary, what do you think?
I don't know. Some people believe it, and some people actually go get treatments from a beekeeper.
He just takes the bee and lets it stick, you know? Sir?
You said, you did half of your inspections, like, last week. How many active boxes do you have? Twenty six right now.
Yeah. Yeah. And most of them are the ones we did last week, we put if they didn't already have a double deep,
we put another deep on. The ones that had double deeps,
I put a queen excluder and a honey super on it so that I can get benefits of the nectar flow right now.
Okay. I am pretty much done. We still have to do the drawing. Don't go running off. But I am open to questions.
And I, I will let you know, like I say, besides being a beekeeper, I'm also a I I do bee removals.
I have my business cards up here if anybody's interested.
And if you may not have a bee problem today, you may have one next week.