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Agriculture

BeeKeeping 101

Vasiliy Osadchuck

Why Every Garden Needs a Beehive: Overview of a Beehive

I'm Vasiliy Osetchak, and in case you need the spelling, it's right there.

I come from the Ukraine, right on the border of the Ukraine and Romania.

So a little town of Chernihivci or Chernaut if it's Romanian language.

When I was 16, I was introduced to the world of bees in the Ukraine.

Since I was 16 and now I'm 52, that's almost 40 years, like 30 plus years, I've been learning about bees and still am learning.

So it's 1 of those mysteries that God put out there for us to explore.

And I'm so thankful God made honeybees, because they have lots of fun, very interesting world.

So today we're going to explore beekeeping.

First of all, I'll introduce you to my family.

I am a minister by education, ministered in Texas most of my life, about 13 years, Pastored a few churches there, then pastored in Canada for 3 years in Toronto.

And then our kids grew up to be academy age and we were looking for a good academy for them and we chose Weimar Academy and we moved there.

So I teach at Weimar Academy, I teach agriculture.

So my family, I'll show you next slide, please.

And right there, you can see a couple of my beehives right there, a few of them.

You know, God created us not to just be in the office, right?

The true education happens out in the fields, out in the open, out with nature that God created, or with all the creatures that He put out there for us to explore and learn about them.

Not only learn how they work, but also learn to care for them, because that's what God is like.

He cares for us, so he wants us to learn to care for them too.

You know that God put within us desire to be connected with those that are inferior to us, like animals, pets, insects, have connections with equal to us, like we are doing right now.

We are connecting, we are talking, we are going to be discussing things.

We also have the need that God put within us to connect with higher power, with God himself.

We need all those 3 levels of connections, with God, with each other, and with those forms of life that are inferior to ours, like pets.

Most of you probably have a pet or 2 and that's a special bond, right?

My kids were just about the age of you kids there in the back and they adopted from a pound, local pound in Texas, a kitty and a puppy.

And they grew up together and they grew up to be like friends and brother and sister, those cat and dog.

And they are still, you know, tackling each other sometimes.

The cat has so much fun tackling the dog down.

Of course, it doesn't have much success, but they still play.

And that dog and that cat went with us from Texas all the way to Canada, and from Canada all the way to California.

And that's what we need to learn, caring for others, for little forms of life, like small insignificant pets, which are pretty much precious to us today.

And then caring for each other, and then also being good children to our Heavenly Father.

And that's what's so important about being on a farm.

Like some morning, I'd come here to the colonies, you know, I'd walk, my dog would follow me, and our cat would follow me too.

So she's walking with us all the way, you know, here to the bees, I will open a hive, and I look out on the mountains, and behind these clouds there, there's high peaks, tall sierras.

And you just look at those mountains in the summer, like June or May, they are covered with snow, and it's blue sky and it's sunny, and you open your hive, and you feel so much in connection with God, with your creator.

And that's why it's so important for us to be engaged in things other than just classroom learning.

Of course, we're doing classroom learning today.

It's kind of a little cool to be outdoors.

But we would be outdoors if it was a warmer day.

And When the bears are hungry, like November, when they come out for apples and other fruit they want to collect, they can sniff your hives out too.

And you know, it's not just a cartoon story.

And Folks, if you want to join us here, there's a few more seats here.

It's probably not very convenient to sit there, but if you're good there, that's fine too.

So it's not just a funny story that bears, you know, like honey.

They go for your brood, they scrape it out, they eat the larva, they eat the honey.

So if you keep bees somewhere in the wild, territory like in the mountains, that's very important to know, that bears like honey too.

Occasionally they would take a hive or 2.

Once I came to the bees to check on them, and it was on a different location, but also out here in the mountains.

So I exited the car, shut the door, and looked down to where the hives are.

And I see a bear with a hive like this, you know.

As soon as I shut that door, he turned around, you know.

And he looked, and he was very cautious and careful as he placed that hive down, you know, because it's a two-story hive.

Then he went on all 4 and took off as fast as he could.

And they really enjoy a good meal, a good dessert.

After they gorge on apples right here, above this there's apple orchard at Wemo Farm.

They don't bother picking each individual plum.

They just tear off a branch, you know, of a tree and just sit down.

Sit down, you know, lean against the tree and just pick up the plum, you know, off the branch.

Really funny creatures, but we have to be to be to be very cautious there, right?

This is my wife, my son Eric, my daughter Melissa.

This was 2 years ago, so they are a little bit older now, so am I.

And today we will be talking about a life cycle of a bee.

How the whole cycle begins and how it ends.

And that's the focus of today's first, actually the first presentation, I'll tell you why we need bees.

How to Start Your First Beehive

All right, we'll start this class with a video, guys, for you.

And look at this amazing job that this fellow is doing.

Could you shut that blind, please, for me?

You see the body hair on the top of the bee?

The whole body of the bee actually is full of pollen.

The bee visits the flower, runs around the flower, the pollen drops on top of the bee, and the bee is grooming herself, or itself, I call it herself because it's technically slightly female.

And the reason I'm saying slightly, it's the worker bee's underdeveloped female.

Okay, so the rest of the workers are underdeveloped female.

So she actually is grooming herself, like combing her hairs.

Her body is full of these tiny little hairs, like our skin has hairs.

And combing herself and then sticking the pollen to the hind leg, right around the knee.

And brings that little bump of pollen back in a hive.

So this is like an insight in how the bee collects pollen.

Oh, I'll tell you the new discovery in the beekeeping world, guys.

You probably could hear that on a broadcast too.

It's actually exciting in a way where it tells me how wise God is, the way he created the bee.

Let's imagine you are going shopping, okay, and you are in a strip mall and it's like 8 in the morning and you're walking down the sidewalk and there's all kinds of shops and and you are just curious what's inside you are looking for something particularly but you're wondering is it in this shop and this shop on this shop and what you actually do you are coming to the door and it doesn't say open or closed.

By 9, some of them opening doors, you locked, ooh, open, you go in, you know.

Now, the bees have very interesting life.

They will have, if they went out there such a wonderfully creative and wise God, the bee would have to try the door of each flower, you know?

Closed, open, closed, every flower, and it would waste its life and its resources just trying, just like you trying 08:00 in the morning every door in a shopping mall, right?

Now, there's a wonderful discovery that was made just about 3 months ago.

Actually, those little hairs on the bee, the tiny little hairs on the body of the bee, are very sensitive to magnetic fields and to static electricity.

You remember the static experiment in high school?

Rub your plastic, take a piece of paper, what happens?

Because of the static electricity, it's attracted.

Each flower with its petals, you know, each little shop that the bee has to visit is constantly caressed by the airflow, right?

And the airflow robs the petals of some of its electrons, right, which creates static charge in a flower.

And as the bee flies by, it doesn't have to land on each flower to find out whether there's nectar or not.

It just can fly by, and the little hairs on the body of the bee will either be attracted to the flower or be neutral.

Now, if the hairs on the body of the bee will either be attracted to the flower or be neutral.

Now if the hairs on the body of the bee are attracted to the flower, that signals the bee that, hey, this flower is electrically charged.

If you studied physics, that means that nothing touched that flower.

The charge is still there, it's not discharged.

That means that the bee says, hey, I feel attraction to this flower.

Nobody landed on this flower for an hour, That means there's plenty of nectar, so the bee lands on the flour.

Now if the bee flies next to another flour and feels no static charge at all, that means that somebody discharged that flower, somebody landed on that flower just a minute ago, or maybe 5 minutes ago, an hour ago.

There was a bee prior to my visit sitting on this flower, taking all the nectar out.

So when the bee just goes from flower to flower, it actually can determine whether there's nectar or not on the flower, not necessarily by landing and looking for it, but just by sensing.

Is there electric charge, static charge on it or not?

It saves lots of time to the bees, wouldn't that?

Does cell phone towers and other things affect the bees' ability to...

The question is, do the cell phone towers and other electromagnetic fields affect the bees?

Let me answer that and we'll go into our subject of discussion because we're going to talk about starting Yonhive, okay?

But this is the last question we'll talk, you know, about the fascination of this creature, how interesting they are.

Do the cell towers affect or does some kind of magnetic field from other things affect the bees?

Any electromagnetic spectrum or any electromagnetic radiation would affect the bee, including the electromagnetic spectrum of light.

Whatever cell tower emits is very similar to light, visible light, only at a different side of the scale.

So the bee is very sensitive, and the bee's eyes can see all the colors you see except 1.

And all colors that we see are part of electromagnetic spectrum or part of same emission as cell towers do.

So the bee is sensitive to those, except the bee cannot see red and below.

Any frequency below red and below, the bee cannot see.

However, The bee's eye can see beyond what we can see.

They can see or detect frequency beyond violet, which we call ultraviolet.

Those are high frequency And the bee's eye can detect that.

Common Diseases Organically Treated

All right, I I Mentioned a few types of beehives.

I mentioned the horizontal hive Horizontal hives Not common here in the USA, but some countries they are.

Like where I come from in the Ukraine and in old Soviet Union republics, it's a very common hive.

It's like a hive that is instead of being vertical, it's like on the side horizontally expanding like this.

Now another type of a hive that is very, very good idea today.

It's called, let me shut this so we don't interfere, oops sorry, with those folks.

It's a hive where you actually do not introduce any foundation at all.

Most of the foundation that you buy from commercially producing factories, they use wax that comes from all kinds of different farms in order to coat their plastic foundation.

Sometimes foundation could be just pure wax and bees normally like the pure wax foundation better.

However, the drawback of foundation frame beekeeping is that the foundation has chemicals, pesticides, maybe even insecticides from somebody else's farm.

And if you want the purest, most organic, cleanest type of beekeeping in your home and the purest honey in most natural form, you may want to try a top bar hive.

It's a hive where you don't put frames, you just put a top bar with tiny little strip of foundation on the very top so the bees could attach their new comb that they built to it.

And that way they just build wax from nectar they just collected.

So that nectar has least contamination possible because it hasn't been processed through factories, through all kinds of additives.

So they use nectar, produce wax, so it's the most natural cleanest way of having your own wax.

And the nectar will be stored in a very, very natural manner that hasn't been touched by technology or machinery or chemicals, hasn't been processed at all.

So, it's most natural, clean way of having good, healthy honey.

So, top bar hive is something that some of you tried somebody probably you mentioned the top bar hive you tried It's a good way to do especially if you're doing it for hobby for fun of a pollination of your own garden This is great.

It's easy to do too It's you know you don't have to lift heavy boxes full of honey.

You know you don't have to you Just open the top of the hive it normally has covers like board covers, then take a bar and It has piece of comb attached Nothing else on the bottom, And then you can cut out that piece of comb and use it as comb honey you can You can just eat it with wax wax is not harmful for you Anyway, besides wax hat is coated with propolis and propolis is very good anti-fungal antibacterial Antiviral property too, So there was a question right there.

So the question is what type of hive is that?

It's probably the most natural, closest to natural way the bees would do it.

Basically you're introducing Fewer contemporary technology and chemicals into the life of your colony and your own life because you'll be eating that comb So that's that's probably the purest way so let's keep going and we'll talk about some of the Organic ways natural ways of dealing with pests and disease.

Yes Yes, self-draining yeah, we let's touch on that hive and then we'll switch because we talked about starting hives and equipment last period.

Another type of a hive, actually the hive is the same with minor changes.

The question is the hive that is self-draining hive.

About a year ago, maybe 2 years ago, a year and a half, there was an inventor from down under, as they say, from the other side of the world From Australia who came up with this new design of a comb you see how this comb is there was a foundation in the middle and There's 2 sides to the comb right Cells on both sides of the comb right?

You can you know store honey on this side and this side of the comb and then they share this common wall between them right?

Now this fellow from Australia thought a bit and said hey it's kind of a messy process to go in a colony take up the the take out the frames and then shake off the bees and Get stung maybe in the process, and then there's always a few bees left So you end up killing those bees as you carry them into your honey house to extract and then you know It's a lengthy process messy sticky business if any of your husbands extracted honey in your kitchen ladies You probably were not very happy with that Because normally kitchen becomes sticky for days as you walk on the floor You know because honey is drifting everywhere pieces of wax are stuck to your floor, and it's pretty messy So this fellow says how about we eliminate all that and so he came up with new design for the frame So this frame just as you see on this picture, he has a mechanism devised that is attached to all the frames in the hive that contain honey and a lever with the linkage to each frame where at the end of the season, if you want to employ this type of a hive, it's very expensive equipment to buy.

You can buy this set of frames for this hive, 600 bucks.

Most people probably pretty expensive too So if you bought it the idea is and I've never tried I read about it I watched the demonstrations but never tried That at the end of the season when the whole frame has been filled with honey.

And that's very important if you are going with that type of a hive.

If you're going with this flow hive, it's very important to wait until the end of the season when all the honey has been sealed or kept.

Because the honey starts with being very thin nectar, right?

So if they brought this nectar in, of course it depends on the weather.

If you are in Arizona, then your nectar is a little thicker, you know, has less water and more sugar.

If you live in Louisiana or Florida, your nectar is thinner because it's so humid.

The bees put it in a cell somewhere here, and they slowly evaporate the water out of it by fanning their wings, by heating up the temperature of the colony, evaporate excess water.

So when that happens the bees transfer it a little higher in a cell, next level and next level and next level.

The ripest honey, and The honey is considered ripe by BFDA when the honey reaches the 20% Humidity when the content of water in the honey is about 20.

It's considered ripe now Some honey in Arizona probably would be about 18% water.

So that honey is a little gooey, almost like chewy, that's how it is.

And if you continue raising the temperature and evaporating more water, that honey eventually will turn into what?

So, but the bee Society considers honey ripe when its water content is about 18 20 percent so when that happens they put it at the very top level of the cells, and when that happens, a group of bees will go and seal each cell or can each cell separately, individually, so it does not take any more moisture in.

It basically absorbs moisture from the air.

So if the air is moist the honey will become diluted with water and if you allow that process to happen and the water content increases then the honey will become fermented.

So instead of honey you will be eating mead and mead is a word that designates alcoholic drink made out of honey.

And in many Slavic languages mead actually means honey.

Now, in the mid-season, in the summer, in June, not all the honey is ripe, Okay?

So there will be ripe honey in the top and not ripe honey in the bottom.

So this honey is fully ready to be harvested.

And if you have a flow high and you say hey, I see some honey.

Let me drain it so you you know crank your lever down What happens to the frame that design of a hive actually?

Allows this portion of the comb and this portion of a comb to shift like this.

Which breaks the internal wall inside of the comb and there's a pipe on the bottom collecting the flowing honey that flows from each cell down in the pipe.

And then that pipe actually connects to the front of the hive, little spout where you put a jar and just pull the lever, put a jar and the honey flows straight in your jar.

You put a lid and that's the nature of that kind of a type of a hive.

Now what happens if it's June, half of the frame is sealed honey Ripe good consistency the bottom portion of your frame is still raw hot Roy is a bad word Still to liquid of a honey, it's nectar What happens to the moisture content in your final product?

So if you use this flow type of a of a hive, then you need to wait until all your frames are what?

Sealed all the way to the bottom that will be your sign that you are ready for the harvest Then you can crank your lever put your jar Okay So if you're going with that hive make sure you do that at the end of the honey harvest season when all the honey is ripe because if you do it in the mid season when half of the Frame is sealed and the other half is not your honey will be very thin And it will ferment and it won't be good It won't keep 1 store Unless you have a way of dehydrating the honey in your dehydrator to bring it to the normal consistency So that's the disadvantage now.

There's another disadvantage of a honey of that type of a hive If you attempted of buying that expensive hive with the idea that I don't have to go in a hive, I don't have to mess with bees.

That idea is not a very good idea because the bees actually need some of your intervention.

You know, if you think that the hive will do all the jobs for you, It's flawed thinking.

Multiplying, Merging, and Swarm Prevention

There's a few chemical medications on the market you could use.

You just go online or read the literature that's available, go to your local store.

And there's a few traps which are natural way to deal with.

And anything that is fermenting like apple cider, beer, vinegar, is a good substance to put in a trap, and the traps that are sold are one-way trap, basically.

Yeah, they are attracted by the smell of the fermenting stuff, go in, and they cannot exit.

So that's how, and then you empty it, refill it for more, and just keep trapping them, because they are bad.

I had a friend of mine, actually, since we are talking about beetle, had a friend who called me up and said, hey, come see, something's wrong with my hive.

Or why do I see this goop coming out of my hive?

And the reason the goop is coming out of the hive, because the beetle and its larva, when the population explodes, it can drill Every frame with honey, with larva, with brood, and the whole thing flows out like mud out of your hive.

You know, you have this mud on the bottom of the hive.

You have to get rid of the frames, because there's eggs.

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Series

BeeKeeping 101

Advanced Beekeeping Items and Q&A

Transcript

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

Children

Bee not Afraid

50m

Intensive: Introduction to Backyard Beekeeping

Introduction to Backyard Beekeeping Part 3

58m

Short Course: Beekeeping

Beekeeping- Part 4

56m

Short Course: Beekeeping

Beekeeping- Part 3

1h

Beekeeping Track

Basic Beekeeping Part 3

1h 1m

BeeKeeping 101

Common Diseases Organically Treated

56m

Short Course: Beekeeping

Beekeeping- Part 2

1h 16m

Special Interests

Understanding and Working with Honeybees Part 2

53m

Sound Doctrine