➡ We prepared our beehives for winter by securing a new lid, wrapping them with a thin layer of insulation, and adding entrance caps for the bees. After a successful first season of beekeeping, we harvested a lot of honey and learned many things. If you’re interested in beekeeping, stay tuned for our upcoming video guide. Support us by visiting CanadianPreparedness.com for quality survival gear and use the discount code ‘prepping gear’ for a 10% discount.

Today’s video is the third and final part in a series on beekeeping. In this series we walk you through in simple steps what to do from the time that you get your hive, maintaining the hive, extracting the honey, and now we’re going to talk about how to winterize your beehive so that they make it through the winter. Let’s get to it! Before we start preparing our hives for the winter, we’re going to jack the bees one last time and do one last round of extraction. Don’t worry, we’ll make sure that the bees have enough to get through winter.

Trust me, I want to keep these guys alive because they’re really hard workers. So there’s still a lot of frames that have honey so we’re going to extract what we can. Removing the honey supers and leaving only the brood chambers is going to make it easier for the bees to regulate their temperature through the winter season. If there’s too many honey supers stacked on top then that means that the bees are going to have to heat that space. So we want more bees in a more confined space so that they can keep each other warm.

If you want more information about the actual extraction process, check out part two of this series. To reward ourselves, we extracted and jarred the honey from the frames that we removed. Okay, so this is a five gallon tub of honey. I got about six of these this season from two hives. We actually have three hives, one didn’t produce much because it was the hive that split off and it swarmed. But let’s see how many jars of honey we get out of this stuff. Take a look at this. There’s no real good way of doing this that I found.

It’s kind of just a matter of, I mean, you can use a funnel. This will prevent the honey from going on to the glass, I suppose, but it probably still will. Doesn’t take much to fill up one of these jars. Oh yeah, almost went a little overboard there. A lot of the time is spent doing this. Waiting. That was actually pretty friction-free. If I can do that 50 times. So this is actually lighter honey and I think that’s because the bees were collecting it from different flowers, whereas this is mostly canola and clover honey.

Tastes just as good, but may not have the exact same amount of nutrients. They say the darker the honey, the more nutrients there is in it. Because honey is antimicrobial, I’m not going to like water bath or candies. I’m not going to heat seal them because this stuff is pretty antibiotic antimicrobial. With our hives now reduced, we’re ready to start testing and treating for mites. This is absolutely essential to do because if you don’t, it can lead to colony collapse and all of your bees will die. There are several ways to treat your hives for mites, but today we’re using a combination of oxalic acid treatment as well as essential oils.

Now to test for the mites, we scoop half a cup or 200 bees into our shaker and you need to be very careful not to accidentally get the queen in your test sample because unfortunately, these bees will die in the process, but that’s just the cost of making sure the entire colony doesn’t die. The few must be sacrificed for the many. After doing the tests, the mites will fall to the bottom and you count how many mites are in your sample of 200 bees. I believe we counted about three mites. That was enough to warrant a treatment.

So we put on our personal protective equipment and we got our diffuser. We plugged it in and we waited for our diffuser to heat up to 230 degrees Celsius before adding the oxalic acid. We gave it a test shot and it looks as though we’re ready to go. Now there is some debate on the best way to apply oxalic acid, but we’re putting it in through the top entrance way of the hive. That way we can see the vapor coming out of the bottom entrance. We’ll know that the entire hive has been coated.

Now while the bees aren’t directly affected by the treatment, they don’t like when something new is introduced to the hive. And of course, this is potentially very dangerous to humans. So I’m sure that the bees don’t like it much either. You can see the bees starting to pour out of the bottom of the entrance here. Now our friends over at strewn road apiaries also brought along a herbal mite treatment for us to try something like this is a lot cheaper and could be a better option for beekeeping hobbyists. Normally you would do multiple oxalic acid treatments, but because we have these essential oils, we’re only going to do one treatment of oxalic acid.

This is the hippy dippy. AP life bar. Thymol, eucalyptus, camphor and menthol. Does it actually work is the question. We have not tried this because we do oxalic all the time, but I did buy extra when I bought this for you. I’ll be your guinea pig, I guess. And I’ll be a guinea pig too, because I’ll do one or two hives with it and see what we think, right? So we put them on the four corners of the lid. Right, right. So here we break off pieces of this wafer of herbs and essential oils, and you can see that the bees scatter where the wafer is placed.

They don’t cause any harm to the bees themselves. They’re just not happy about having something foreign in the hive. Now we’re going to do this herbal treatment three times over the next couple of weeks. So with a combination of our one oxalic acid treatment and three rounds of our herbal treatment, we should prevent any might issues from arising over the winter in the spring. We’ll have to wait a few weeks as we complete the herbal treatment. Then it’s time to wrap up our hives and hunker down for the cold prairie winter that awaits.

Now, because we stole all of the bees honey, we actually have to feed them to make sure that they can get through the winter. We do this with corn syrup. Now in an SHTF situation, you probably wouldn’t have the luxury of having corn syrup available. So you would have to make sure that you kept a certain amount of honey in the hive. So these feeders are basically just a food grade bucket. And on the top of the bucket, there’s a screen in which corn syrup can flow through when you flip it upside down.

You flip it upside down and the corn syrup for the first few seconds will pour out. But because eventually air can escape, the corn syrup will stop flowing quickly. And you just put this on top of the hole on the top of your hive. The bees then are going to fly up to the screen, extract some corn syrup and systematically extract all of that corn syrup from that bucket and put it into their hive for the winter. This will probably take a couple days, but it’s amazing how fast they can go through one of these feeders.

We’re going to give them two doses. So two feeders over the course of about a week and a half. So what we have to do first, gotta go like this. We got to let all that drip until it stops leaking. Once it stops leaking because the air pressure. So we’re going to put it on there and we’re going to feed these. Looks like that. This corn syrup. One, last one. We don’t want them to drown. So there we go. These empties who will go and fill. That should be it for winter. Hopefully they are all right.

All right, we’re good to go. Shut her down. So guys, we’re wrapping up the bees for winter. It’s getting cold outside. We got a nice balmy three degrees going on. Old man winter’s rearing his ugly mug. So that means it’s time to get these boys wrapped up. The first thing we want to do is bring all of the hives onto one pallet. Bee hives produce a lot of heat. So wrapping them all together will allow the hives to keep each other warm. It’s kind of like putting multiple people in a single sleeping bag.

We’ll also put entrance reducers on the bottom of each of our hives. This is going to limit the amount of cold air getting into the hive through the bottom, as well as prevent mice and other types of intruders from entering. An important step in winterizing our hives is switching out the wooden lids for specialized insulated lids. This provides an additional layer of insulation and also prevents condensation from building up and dripping down into our bees. So insulated lids we use them on all our hives. They’ve got a top feeder hole. They’re really good.

And so there’s calm in there. Oh yeah. Yeah that’s just it’s being used. Oh it’s not brand new. Yeah we use them all year. Like Trevor said it keeps them hot in the winter. Warm in the winter and cool in the summer. We have to remove some of the wax that the bees have built up to ensure that our lids sit snugly on top of our frames. Now with our new lid secured we’re ready to wrap. These are western wraps? Western wrap is yeah. So this is just tarp and then some insulation? It’s just yeah and it’s very thin like it doesn’t really insulate them very much.

So the joint I usually put on the east side for wind wise so we’re gonna walk this around line that up. Oh yeah I see. Look at that. Easy peasy. With our wrap on we put on what are called entrance caps. This is so that the bees can get in or out if they need to and this also keeps the insulation hard and fast to the boxes. We now throw on the insulation for the top and wrap this thing up like a Christmas present. So we just bring it down and hook it on the pallet.

As long as it doesn’t come off it don’t matter. Yeah that’s perfect. That’s that hey? Yeah. That’s it? Yeah So these are all the steps we took to prepare our bees for the winter and this also marks the end of the first season of beekeeping and I gotta say it was a great success. We got a lot of honey and we learned a lot of things. It was a bit of work but all in all it was a relatively hands-off process and I was actually blown away by the volume of honey that we were able to extract.

I again want to thank our friends over at Strune Road Apiaries for all the help and expertise they offer. If you want more information about what they do please go through the link in the description below and show your support. If you’re interested in getting into beekeeping stay tuned for our abridged first year of beekeeping video which will be coming out soon. That will include all three parts of this series into one. A simple easy to follow and understand guide for how to get into beekeeping from start to finish. Thanks for watching.

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