Clearing Supers Using a Petrol Blower

Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Today I'm reviewing the Makita air blower, and I'm going to show you how to blow bees out of your supers to save time. So as always, if you enjoy our videos, please hit the subscribe button. We post videos 2 days a week, Wednesdays and Fridays, and we've got plenty of videos for everyone. So please hit the subscribe button in the bottom right-hand corner. Right, today's video, the Makita BHX2501. So this is a Makita air blower. It's a 4-stroke petrol engine, and it's got absolutely loads of power. First off, we need to say there's a few myths that need busting about blowing bees off supers. It's not a horrible practice. It doesn't damage the bees. It really isn't a big issue, but it seems to have got a bit of a bad rap over the years. It's widespread throughout the commercial bee farming industry, and it saves you a huge, huge amount of time. So it's a really, really good time-saving technique, but it's not cruel to the bees. I mean, there's no damage to the bees whatsoever. You're not asking them to go through any kind of difficult positions or cut their wings or anything. All that it does is it blows the bees off the frames and pushes them out in front of the hive. So what you might get is a little bit of drift. You might not always get the same bees going back into the same hive, so you need to be up to date with your varroa control and any disease management. But you can get drift just in a normal situation anyway, so this doesn't add to it a huge amount. I've cleared hundreds, if not thousands, of supers with this. And I've been back the same evening in which I've cleared them in the day, and there's never any bees on the floor. There's never any bees in front of the hive. They always manage to either go back into their hive or they just go back into another hive. Do you know what I mean? If I was going to go back and there were hundreds or thousands of bees on the floor and they didn't know where they were going or they were disorientated, I certainly wouldn't use this because I don't want to kind of do harm or damage to the bees. So it's a really quick, simple method Normally when you're clearing honey supers, you need to use a clearing device. So there's various different clearing devices on the market. The one that I do use, so I often use this in conjunction with a clearing device, but I like to use a rhombus board. So a rhombus clearing board, and I'll do a separate video on the rhombus clearing board. But all that is, is that say you've got a brood box, a queen excluder, and 3 supers, you'll lift up your 3 supers, Put the clearer board in, put some space for them to congregate in, so maybe another brood box or another super or any other box for them to congregate in, and then you just give it kind of like between 12 and 24 hours, and all of the bees from the top boxes gradually migrate down, go out, do some stuff, go to go back up, and they can't get up. So your boxes are clear. Now I found when using the clearer boards though, you never get it perfect, so I ended up Using the clearer boards, I'm having to go back 2 visits per hive. So I'd have to go there maybe in the evening, put the boards on, and then go back the next afternoon to clear them. So it's 2 visits, which is a bit frustrating, but there would end up being bees in there anyway. So I'd either need to brush them off, which is really damaging to bees if you don't do it correctly, or I ended up using the blower. So I thought, well, I'm just going to skip out the clearing board step because although It's clearing a percentage of the bees. It's kind of doing a bit of a poor job of it. It's not a perfect way of doing it, so I needed to use the blower anyway. So now I just use the blower. It's a really, really strong, powerful blower, and it does an excellent job in clearing bees. So in this video, I'm just going to show you that. I'm going to show you how to clear bees using a Makita blower. I don't blow them into anything, into any kind of fancy devices, which I've seen Chris Manson do. Really, really like the idea of that, so I'm going to whip something like that up next year. I think that's a good idea to get them back into the hive in which they came, but all I do is I just blow them out in front of the hive, and I'll show you a video half an hour afterwards, and they're all back in the box again. They'll all be either back in the brood box, or if I put another super on for them, they'll be back in the super. So we'll show you blowing out some bees, and you can judge for yourself how effective it is. Right, so when you're clearing boxes using a Makita petrol blower, Or any blower, make sure it's warm, make sure the bees are flying. Obviously, really busy colony here, you need to make sure the bees are flying, otherwise they could just get left on the floor. So don't do it on a horrible day, make sure that other colonies in your apiary are flying at the same time, and then you'll be certain that all the bees will come back into your hive or into another hive and you're not damaging them. So all you want to do to turn it on, hold the lock in place, Push down there, prime the engine, couple of pumps, close the choke, and it starts first time. These are really reliable machines, so you can open it now. So I'll just leave it there idling. Then it's a really, really simple procedure. It looks a bit graphic, it looks a bit harsh, But trust me, all the bees will come home. So shake any excess bees off your crown board or your feeder. I position it on the queen excluder. Another blow 'em out. It's as simple as that. The box is now clear. Nice frames of honey, you know what I mean? You get the odd bee left on it sometimes, either side, but that's pretty much done. So it's as simple as that. The box is now clear. What I always go and do is put that straight into the back of the truck as to not to attract any robbing. Terrible this time of year for robbing, so get that out of sight and out of the Smell of the bees. So that's it. There you see it, blowing out the bees. It's quick, it's effective, it's a really, really good use of my time. And it doesn't do any damage to the bees whatsoever. So I hope you've enjoyed the video. As always, please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.