Male: Hi everyone, it’s a beautiful fall day and it’s time to get our hives ready for the winter. A couple of things we’re going to do here. We’re going to a powdered sugar treatment for our Varroa Mites and then we’re going to add a sugar feeder and we’re going to feed them a syrup and—mixture which is based on my favorite Beekeeping book which I have right here which is Beekeeping for Dummies. I mean you might roll your eyes at the whole dummies set of books but I should think this one is written really well. It’s by Howland Blackiston who actually lives here in Connecticut and we’re a member of his Bee club, Backyard Beekeeper. Well, a very good book. I mean I have four books and they’re all very good. This one I think is written in a language it makes the most sense to me and it is really helpful.
So, we’re going to smoke the top here, we’re going to take all these off and we’re going to dust the powdered sugar on each of the supers the powdered sugar causes the Varroa Mites to loose their little suction or little clingy things on the bees, they fall of. We have a—this is a screen bottom board, the bottom of the hive here is a 1/8f screen, the Varroa Mites fall out of the hive and they can’t crawl back up in and then they die and that’s a good thing, right?
Female: Right.
Male: There is a bunch of ways to do a Varroa Mites, this is one that’s pretty simple. You have to apply the powdered sugar once a week for three weeks; people suggesting the Spring and the Fall. And again, we’re beginning beekeepers we’re not the experts here are How to Harvest Honey video, I’ve got a few comments from some of my classmates from our Beekeeping class, I thought that was interesting.
Female: And professionals.
Male: Yes. They don’t like that noise by the way. There are couple of guys in there, girls. So, you do your smoke and then you wait for maybe 30 seconds or so and let the smoke kind of go to the hive. There’s different opinions about what the smoke does. In our honey harvesting video we said that the bees sense fire and they’re gorging on the honey before they have to flee. But our teacher Jim, if you’re watching Jim suggested that that is not true. He said that they’re actually taking the honey because we’re pulling the frames out and they want to put the honey back in their hive I mean we’re not experts.
Female: And the smoke confuses their signals, right?
Male: Yes, the smoke does confuses signals. Take out top off. They don’t like this popping sound by the way.
Female: Do you?
Male: I don’t know, it’s not my house. If my house is cracking like this I’ll be—you are learning from experiences, you want to take the outer and inner cover and put it somewhere where it’s not near your feet. What I have to watch out for in the Fall and Winter in the hive is the amount of condensation in the hive because the interior of the hive gets to be 90, 95 degrees. Yesterday was really rainy and really humid so the interior of the hive eventhough it’s vented right here built up a lot of moisture. And so, it’s basically kind of like raining inside the hive and you don’t want that, you especially don’t want that in Winter time. So, there are number of ways you can do that. We can prop open the inner cover with little shims of wood. You can also get a Styrofoam cover which we might try because Styrofoam—and allows the condensation to go up the top. I’m probably smoking too much because Jim says I smoke too much. Okay, now, they get a little—
Female: Be careful.
Male: Okay, we’re going to do it very quickly.
Female: Very gently.
Male: We want to brush powdered sugar down in between the frames. Okay, I run on our powdered sugar here. Now, we’re going to put a sugar feeder on the top here because their food supplies are doing the—there’s not a whole to collect out in the plant world. So, we’re going to help them with a two to one sugar solution that’s two pounds of sugar to every pound of water. So, that’s five pints of water to 10 pounds of sugar. And you boil the water, take the water of the stove, put in the sugar and I used a hand blender, electric emersion blender to mix it all up, pour it in slowly and this is the sugar feeder, there are a number of different kinds. The big thing is you’re trying to keep the bees from drowning because bees can't swim. So, we can slide this along. I’d put a little—material on here because we’ve been getting from—to seal it in.
So, this is a two to one sugar syrup solution with fumigallon and your first feeding in the Fall, you treat the gallon with fumigallon and then subsequent feedings you don’t need to but this goes in. We’re also tilting these hives slightly forward for the winter. And what I do is I take a little bit of the syrup and I pour it down in the little slots and it goes into—it goes down into the hive and I know that there are some sugar up at the top. So, while our sugar feeder is on, the inner cover will not go on. This goes on and there you go Fall feeding. You want to check on this; we’re going to doze some with the powdered sugar again in a week. We’re going to do that three times this Fall and you feed until they stop taking the syrup down. I mean you can pour any galloon and notice where the line then if you come back a week later and it hasn’t move then you know that they stop taking the syrup you can take the sugar feeder off, put your top on, set your ventilation. A lot of people put a gap on the inner cover. I think we might try to start it from covers because that adds some insulation. And it also, it allows it to condense the water to come out, the moisture and vapor to come out.
Alright, so there you go. Again, we’re just beginning Beekeepers here. This is how we’re doing our Fall feeding and our Varroa Mite powdered sugar thing. We’re also going to put grease powders in here for the tracheal mites. But these guys are going great. We had some really nice honey coming this year. We have to close up the entrance too, we’re going to close the entrance, put an entrance reducer in there. This is a great thing it’s not too much work. You’re going to—you have to do some maintenance, you can't just ignore them but they’re great, they’re creatures. So come to our site gardenfork.tv, you go listen to gardenfork radio it’s on iTunes, listen those in the car whatever you want. I think there’s some fighting going on there. I think it’s time to throw the—out.
Female: Yeah, good job girl.
Male: Throw the guys out. Alright, make it a great day. I’ll see you later.
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