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The Mister Ed that I mention in this video is Jeff Horchoff, another beekeeper on KZfaq.
There's nothing quite like a full Saturday of fun beekeeping and visiting with good folks. We had a visit from a future beekeeper and fan of the channel and his family. They got to do their first bit of beekeeping, bottle some honey and shoot a video intro. Then they went over to Mr. Ed's and got to help him catch a swarm. I think his video with them will be out in the next week or two. I hope we made the stops worth it. :)
Did you ever wonder what banked queens are? I'll bet that most of the newer beekeepers or hobbyists have never heard of banked or banking queens. After Akiva and his family left I went through a row of colonies real quick to check that they were queen right. I ended up having to pull two banked queens and place them in queenless colonies.
To bank queens means to store them in a cage for later use. Banked queens are typically kept in a queenless hive next to open brood where there are a lot of nurse bees that will take care of them. If they are kept in the wrong conditions the workers will just ignore them and they will starve to death in short order. Queens can be banked pretty much for as long as need be. Of course they aren't being productive for you in a cage and you have to constantly care for them by keeping open brood frames next to them so it's best to find a place for them as quickly as possible.
Later in the day I worked on some hives at my house and then caught a little nap before heading out to get a late start on a hive removal. The colony turned out to either be queenless or have a virgin after a recent swarm. I didn't find a queen. I ended up introducing a queen to them the next day. It had plenty of honey though which I was running low on so after sharing with the home owner and a friend I ended up with almost a gallon.
I have a video from last year titled "Why Don't You Just Poison The Bees?" in which I make a statement about the amount of roach feces I find in the location of a hive that was previously poisoned and then was eaten by other insects and probably mice too. The feces I found is mainly from wax moths but since some, probably five to ten percent, is from roaches and that's what you see in the video I just called it roach poo. Most people wouldn't know the difference and it really doesn't matter in making my point but that one misspoken statement seems to have rubbed a small population of people the wrong way really really hard. Well watch this, toward the end of this video I give you a good look at the size and amount of roaches that come after an unguarded hive even before I'm out of the way. I'd hate to know the amount of pests living in the cracks and crevices of a house where a hive full of dead brood, pollen, good wax and all that honey was left unattended. I bet on a quiet night you can hear them partying in your soffits.
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4x10 Smoker links:
US supplier Bee Wise www.beewisellc.com/collection...
New Zealand supplier Ceracell www.ceracell.co.nz/shop/Tools...
The music was from Epidemic Sound.