First we start with our bottom board. This is going to serve as the base on which the hive body sit, and this is where bees are going to enter and exit the hive. The second layer is going to be what’s called the brood chamber. This is the area of the hive where the queen lays eggs. For bigger hives, you might even have another brood chamber stacked on top. The next level is our queen excluder. This is a mesh-like material that’s going to prevent the queen from going up further levels to lay eggs.

Only the worker bees are going to be able to make it past this layer. Next comes a honey chamber. Honey chamber supers are where the honey that you are going to harvest is going to be made. In some cases, these can go five or six high. Because we’re relatively new to this, we’re only going to have two honey chamber supers. It’s important to note that contained within all of these chambers are what’s called beehive frames. These are removable rectangular structures that fit into the hive boxes. There are typically eight to ten frames per chamber.

They hold the honey comb where the bees store honey, pollen, or raise brood. It’s important to understand that honey comb is not only used to store honey, but in every honey comb in the brood chamber, a queen will lay an egg which will grow to be a future worker or drone bee. Over-wintering bees may require extra coverage and insulation. We’re not going to talk about that today. In terms of the other tools that you’re going to need, it’s recommended to have a bee suit. This is a full body suit worn by beekeepers to protect themselves from bee stings.

You’re also going to want beekeeper gloves. These are protective gloves that are made of leather or synthetic materials. You’re also going to need a hive tool. This is a really simple multifunctional metal tool used to pry apart hive boxes, lift frames, scrape frames, and perform other maintenance tasks inside the hive. You also may need a bee brush. This is a soft bristled brush used to gently remove bees from frames or hive components without harming them. And last but not least, you might need a smoker. This is a device that burns materials like wood chips or pine needles that produce smoke.

This smoke calms the bees by masking alarm pheromones, making hive inspections safer. Because we’re completely new to this, I had to enlist the help of a family of veteran beekeepers. Robert, Trava, and Amanda from Strune Road Aperies offered their time. They helped us select the proper equipment, and even agreed to come out to explain and demonstrate the proper way to set up our new beehives. Like most people, I had no idea what to expect when taking delivery of our beehives. Basically what you get is a sealed hive that is delivered on a truck, and the beekeepers then brought them over to where our hive was going to be permanently established.

We then pried off the protective screen enclosure of the hive and let the bees get acquainted with their new space. You have to understand that there are tens of thousands of bees contained in each of these hives. I didn’t realize how many bees were in there. How many did you say there was? Oh, it was 15 to 20,000 and 20 bees. Wow, what? Yeah, you probably don’t want to stand right in front. Sometimes they’re angry, sometimes they’re not. Okay, so this is where we’re releasing the bees, and they are trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

So yeah, they’ll just fly around, figure out where they are, figure out where their home is. They were actually not too bad, pretty calm. So when one stings you, do the others start stinging too, is that how it works? Yes, they release a pheromone when they sting, so then you’ll get another couple coming. Oh, do you know where the queen is? Oh, we marked both of them for you. So she’s marked with a blue dot on her back. And so when you close that thing, do you risk crushing them? You do. But you know, if you try to be so careful and get every bee to come in for every bee that’s going back in the hunt, three are coming out.

So every once in a while, you lose. Worst thing to do is to open and close it, because you’re going to kill a lot more than… Okay, we’ll let those guys get calmed down. One of the first things we did was light the smoker. The reason why we use a smoker is because it helps keep the bees calm during the transfer process. We start with some paper and a cardboard roll, and then add alfalfa cubes for a long, slow burn. While that’s cooking, we get started on sorting our beehive frames. We wanted to transfer the beehive frames into our own beehive boxes, which are essentially the same boxes, only they’re painted white to reflect the sunlight and keep the bees cool in the summertime.

First, we had to look at all of our beeboxes and all of our hive frames and decide which ones we’re going to use in our honey chamber and which ones are going to be used in the brood chamber. So what we want to do is we’re going to go through all this comb and find some brood comb. So we need two boxes of brood comb, nine frames. Lanceroff hives were designed for 10 frames, but it’s too hard to get them in and out all the time, so a lot of us run nine frames instead.

And I noticed some have wax, some have, like, looks like honey on them. Right. This is a honey frame. When bees are raised in comb, they leave behind the pupa, and that’s what makes it dark like this. So what is this? This is a brood frame. So this is a brood and this is a honey. So the darker is the ones that have, like, the babies in it, and this is the one that has the honey. Sometimes the queen will lay into the honey frame and it’ll get a little bit dark. It’s still fine as a honey frame.

Once it gets too dark, like this, if you did this for honey, the honey would be a bit of a browner color. A color which doesn’t look as nice. And then the other thing, this is foundation. So this is basically, this is this after they built the comb out. So they’re going to maybe put that into brood or comb? Yeah, it’s better just to have brood in a brood chamber because you want the hive to get as strong as it can, as fast as it can. We purchased pre-used frames because they already had honeycomb wax on them.

You can likely get these from your local apiary. It’s recommended that you do this if you want to accelerate the development of your hive. Otherwise, the bees are going to have to build all of this stuff from scratch. So there’s a brood. So we’d call that a honey brood. So they usually go on the outside edge. This is a honey. Okay, so we have honey in the brood chamber as well. For the bees to eat. And you never extract that. Okay, that’s where they’re eating it. That’s only for the bees. The way a normal box will be in a hive is it’ll be honey and then brood in between.

Okay, all right, we need another box. Okay, let’s use this one. We’ll make another brood chamber. For our setup, we’re going to have two brood chambers and two honeycomb chambers. So we started to transfer the frames with thousands of bees into our boxes. First thing we’re going to do is we’re going to move all the frames out of the box that we brought into your box. Okay, because our box looks prettier, guys. We want to make this look nicer. It’s painted nicer and it’s not, yeah, it’s better. And then what we’re going to do is we’re going to add a second brood chamber.

And we’re going to expand the brood nest. The reason we expand them is so that they grow faster. It makes both boxes of their home instead of just the one. Open this one up again. Triv is smoking them to calm them down a little bit. So does it only take like one dose of that smoke? Yeah, they’re pretty good. Unless they’re really, really angry. If it doesn’t seem to be doing the trick, you can give them another little one. But the more smoke you give them, the more agitated they become. So we loosen it and then we pull it out.

Plop that in there, grab the next one, more bees. If you want to move, I can’t really see, so I just blow on them and that makes them move out of the way a little bit. And that queen is in there somewhere. The queen is in here somewhere. We’ll try and spot her. Okay, and what if she dies? What happens? So if she dies, that’s one of the things we have to be really careful of is not to kill the queen, right? Because if we kill the queen, what they’ll do is they’ll make an emergency cell so that they’ll basically take a newly hatched egg or a larva and create a clean cell out of that and make a new queen.

It’s okay this time of year, you’d lose about a month of production. But if you kill a queen in the early spring or later, the hive’s done for. They can’t reproduce a queen. Unfortunately, when transferring the frames, there could be collateral damage on the way, meaning that some bees are going to die in the process. As we’re transferring each of the frames, we’re trying to keep an eye out for the queen. There is one queen per hive and we want to make sure that she is transferred safely into the new box.

I’m going to shake this off just so we can see what’s on there. These brown cappings are capped cells. These bees have pupated. Here’s a bee just hatching. You see that little one coming out? So this little guy is just coming out. And they look just like cats and dogs. It’s like little cute little things when they come out. Just about out. I’ve got the queen. Oh, you got it? Oh, do you? Oh, good girl. And you can tell she’s larger. Yeah, she’s significantly longer than the workers. So that’s her there? That’s her there with the green dot on her.

But what makes it tricky is the drone bees are also rather large. So this one, that’s a drone. So there, that’s the male bee. They can’t sting. Okay, and she’s walking around plugging the holes with pupa. She’s laying an egg. Laying an egg, yeah. And that’s all she does all day long. She can lay 2500 eggs a day. Wow, what a life. We expanded to add another brood chamber on top of that one. This one is going to be empty for the time being, but eventually the queen is going to migrate up to this brood chamber and start planting eggs.

We then swap two empty frames from the new box with two full frames from the established box. Okay, so we’re going to take out this brood frame, put it in the middle, not quite the middle. Welcome to your new home. And then Trevor’s going to put blanks in there. The queen will come along and she smells her brood, she’ll go up there. And then she’ll go, oh, there’s an empty frame there, I better start laying in there. The workers actually clean them out first and then she’ll lay in there. What we’re going to do now is we’re going to put the lid on top of this and we’re going to wait until the brood chambers sufficiently populate.

Then we’re going to take the top off and we’re going to replace it with a queen excluder and on top of that, we are going to put a honey chamber. This process is probably going to take a couple weeks. So a queen excluder normally is used between the brood and the honey. Yeah. You can use them, you cannot use them. It’s probably best for you to use them. We don’t use them. Although Trevor would really like to because we’re interested in production and the queen will actually go up and lay eggs in the third, sometimes the fourth.

And you just get a higher population. Can she not get through this or? The queen cannot get through that worker can, but a queen can’t. And then the lid. Once this top box looks basically like the one box did when we first started, pull the bees to either side, then you can put a box on. Basically the beginning of July is when the first week of July is when the flow will start. But yeah, so then basically if you want to use a queen excluder, put the queen excluder on top, then throw a box on top, throw the lid back on.

If you’re going to be looking at them once a week or something, I would just put the one on. Just put the one on. Once it starts getting full and full of bees and you can put a second one on. And then you just keep stacking them. Just keep stacking them. And how long would it take them to fill up one, would you think? Well, that depends a lot on the environment and that kind of thing. But if there’s an abundance, they can fill a box in a week and a half, two weeks. Really? Yeah.

And then this is for when you put a feeder pail on. You take that plug off and you pop the pail on the top of it. In the fall? Yeah. So in the fall. We’ll come back and we’ll show you how to do it. Yeah. Then we’re going to repeat the process with the other box. We transferred the frames. We swapped out two empty frames from the new box and put them in the established box. And now we just have to wait a few weeks for us to start stacking honey. How much honey can you get from one hive? The Saskatchewan average is around 170, 175 pounds.

For a hobby, that’s probably a little high estimate. My guess would be you’ll get probably a hundred pounds of hive this year and then next year, maybe a hundred and fifty. It’s a lot. And so where we have it here, we’re in an orchard at the edge of the orchard. What is the range of a bee? A normal range under normal circumstances is about two miles. They’ll forage two miles easy. Under bad circumstances, they can go up to five. It seems like a more complicated process than it is. Now that you’ve shown me how to do it today, I feel a lot more confident about it.

Is this going to be a relatively low maintenance thing once we get this going? The general rule is once a week, once every 10 days. Spring is fairly easy. The only big time is getting Donnie on, really. All right, guys, so I would strongly encourage you, if you need any bees, go to Strewin Road Apiaries. Hopefully next time we see you, we’re going to have some honey to show for it. Thanks for watching. Don’t forget to like, comment, subscribe. Canadian Prepper out. The best way to support this channel is to support yourself by gearing up at CanadianPreparedness.com where you’ll find high quality survival gear at the best prices.

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