How To Heft A Beehive - Hefting A Beehive - Beehive Hefting Finger Method

In this video, I'm gonna show you how to heft your beehive using the finger method. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Earlier on in the year, I did a video about how to weigh your beehive. We talked about weights, we talked about how to lift it up using a strap, how to calibrate your feeling of that beehive by lifting it up and getting a feeling for the weight. And I do appreciate that method is not for everyone. So what I'm going to do in this video is I'm going to show you how to heft a beehive using the finger method. Now, this isn't something I've developed. This is something that's been passed down through generations. I'm just going to show you how it works, talk to you about it, and tell you why I think it's a really, really good method and a really quick, simple method that I do use when I'm going around to assess the weight of beehives. So the method couldn't be any simpler. I find it works better if you strap your beehives up. I like to strap my beehives up all the way throughout the year anyway, but doing it with a strap just gives you the ability to go around and really get A good indication of how big and strong your colony is and how much stores they've got throughout the winter. Now, the reason it's called the finger method is that you're not just lifting up your beehive, doing a heft, a straightforward heft, to see what the bees feel like. You're trying to put some sort of calibration method in there, and the way that you do that is you do it using your fingers. So the way that I learned it is that you can either have a 4, a 3, a 2, or a 1. You go and heft that beehive using 4 fingers. If you can't lift your beehive up easily, and that is a little bit subjective because I know some of you are proper bodybuilders, but if you can't lift up the beehive easily with 4 fingers, your bees do not need to be fed. Simple as that. That is a big, strong, heavy colony of bees with lots of stores if you can't easily lift it up with 4 fingers. So if you go around, you do that, 4 fingers, you're struggling to lift it up, No need to feed. Now, I won't go through all of the scale here because again it's a little bit subjective, but you've got this scale of four down to one. So the first thing that I would try and do is go and see if you can lift and heft your beehive with one single finger. Go and try it on your beehives. It's surprisingly difficult to lift a big strong colony of bees in a beehive in winter with one finger. If you can do that, you've got a couple of issues on your hand. One, you're Your bees might have gone and they've been robbed out and you've been left with an empty beehive. Hopefully it's not that. But if you can lift your colony of bees in a beehive with one finger in the winter, you're really in a bit of an emergency situation there. You need to open up, you need to see what's going on, and you need to get fondant onto your bees as an absolute priority. Really is emergency situation there. Now the fingers 2 and the fingers 3, again, it's a little bit subjective. Number 4 is no action required. Your bees have got lots of stores. And number 1 is action required immediately, your bees are dying and they're starving. And 2 and 3, like I say, a little bit subjective. I would say if you want to put an actual figure on it, I would say if it's 2 fingers, your bees are light, and I would suggest feeding fondant as a bit of an insurance policy. And if it's number 3, I would say you put them in the monitor category, which is maybe they're running a little bit light on feed. I won't feed them for the time being, Instead of coming back in 4 weeks maybe to do a check, you'll come back in 2 weeks to do a check. So it's a little bit of a red flag to say this one needs a little bit more attention. So you've got these 4 categories: 4 fingers is do nothing, 3 fingers is keep an eye on that one, 2 fingers is feed with fondant as a precautionary measure, and 1 is feed immediately, they are starving. I'm going to go over now and I'm just going to pick out some random beehives in this apiary, and I'm going to do exactly that. I'm going to use the finger method None of the colonies up here have got any fondant on them, so they are just being fed up with sugar syrup going through the winter. And I'm just going to use my judgment, use that 4-finger hefting method, and see where we stand in terms of weights. Right, here we go, beehive number 1. Another thing I forgot to add is that if you are really strong and you're thinking, I can lift all of these with my right hand and I can do 4, 3, 2, or 1, I can lift them all, there's no issue, and they're big strong colonies, maybe do it with your left hand if you're right-handed. Definitely going to be weaker. My left hand's like fully weak. You need to do something that's repeatable, something that you can do really, really easily, and I'm going to show you that now on this beehive. So for anybody that's not hefted before, a lot of the way that people teach you to heft is you go in 2 hands and you kind of just lift it up like that. And okay, that's a heft, that's giving me an indication there that there's stores in the beehive. I can get a bit of a feel, but the way that you heft with the finger method It's one-handed. I'll show you it with my left hand. And you get in underneath the roof like that, and you're lifting the colony up. So here I can lift it with 4 fingers. I can lift it with 3 fingers. Now, 2 fingers on this one here is difficult. I can't quite lift that with 2 fingers. Like, I could if I put a lot of effort in. And this is where I come back to this being a very subjective term. You just need to get your feel on that. This is a poly hive, so if it's a wooden hive, it's going to be different. If it's a 14 by 12 hive, it's going to be different for national deep. You need to understand, and this is why it's good to simplify and standardize all of your beehives, because then this becomes a really simple muscle memory task that you can get used to every year. So if I was going to categorize this one here, I couldn't do it with 2 fingers, I could do it with 3 fingers. So this one here would be probably going to keep this one monitored. Just going to monitor it. I think we can get it through without feeding fondant, which is definitely the preference. Like I know in a lot of my videos I say we'll just slap it on, it's not going to cause any issue, and I do stand by that. I don't think putting fondant on causes any issues. I know some other beekeepers do. Beekeepers never agree, but that's just my take on that. But this one here hasn't been fed fondant, and I don't want to have to feed fondant if I can do without it. So on the finger method for hive hefting, this is a number 3, and it's just to keep an eye on it. No action required. Right, onto the next hive then. And as you can see, same roof, same feeder, different queen excluder. That's not going to add a huge amount of weight, and it has got a different floor, but it's there or thereabouts. I'm going to heft this one again, see where it comes out. Right, so I've just got to do that with 4 fingers, and I immediately looked and thought, I've strapped it to the pallet again, haven't I? Stupid. Every time I do these videos, I'm strapping the hives to the pallet. And I've looked down and it's not strapped to the pallet, it is absolutely nailed to the floor. So heavy with stores, that one. I couldn't lift it with 4 fingers. So that one there definitely doesn't need any fondant. It is so, so heavy, and I'll probably have to end up removing stores in the spring just to get that expansion going again. So although I've said putting that fondant on there doesn't cause any issues, if you've got a colony like this, It could cause you some issues. You don't want to give them unnecessary amounts of fondant on there. You only need to put the fondant on if they're light or if they haven't been able to take as much syrup as you would like to get into them. These ones here, couldn't lift them with 4 fingers, so they probably overfed these ones. Again, no action required. Right, another colony here. Again, you can see where the standardization comes in really handy here. It's exactly the same as all of the other hives. I'm going to go in again, left hand, and I can just about do it with 4 fingers using that same amount of force, and I can just get it off the ground with 3 fingers. So again, this one here, I would categorize that as a like 3.5, definitely doesn't need any action, probably doesn't even really need close monitoring either. They're looking good in this apiary, they don't need to be fed, Some apiaries I've got, they do need to be fed a lot more. It's a really good method though for just quickly assessing, calibrating how much stores are in each of the colonies. Let's go and see if we can find a light one. Right, maybe this one's a little bit light. Let's get in. We'll start it off with 3 fingers. And again, I only just got that one off the ground. I probably put a little bit too much force into that one. So that one there, 3 fingers, no problem whatsoever. And if I lift this hive up here, which is how I've showed hefting before, Like, that's easily 30 kilograms there. Just waiting for the bees to come out and hammer me in the face because they are a little bit active in this hive. But it just goes to show, the 3-finger method, the 4-finger method gives you a good judgment call, and you just need to learn that for yourselves on your beehives. It might be a case that if you're not strong, you develop your own maybe 8-finger method and lifting it up with 2 hands like that. And if you can do it with 2, then you don't need to feed. But if you can't do it with one, then you need to feed. All a little bit subjective, and it all comes down to how much strength you've got and how much effort you put in and the standardization of your kit. I've gone around all of the colonies up here and I can't find any that need feeding. So I'm just gonna go over to one hive over there that's not got any bees in it, but I'm just gonna show you how easy it is if you've got a colony in there that's not got any stores in. They fly up with one finger. So I'm gonna go and set up one that's empty now and just show you how easy it is if the bees are running dangerously low. Right, so this beehive here, This is an empty beehive. It's got frames in, but there's no bees, there's no stores. And if you've ever looked inside a beehive that's starving, like, there's nothing there, there's no stores. So you do get instances where you just have the weight of the beehive, the weight of the frames, the weight of the bees, which is maybe like 3 or 4 pounds at this time of year, not a lot of bees, and nothing in the frame. So this isn't that far off a colony or a beehive that's in like an emergency state. And you watch just how easy it is to do. That's with one finger. So if you're finding your colonies like that with one finger, I'll just do it from this side as well, just so you can see. One finger, you lift it up. It's so easy. Now obviously you can do that with 4 fingers, that's really easy, but I'm just going to jump back to that heavy one over there and I'm going to show you how difficult that is to lift up with one finger. Right, we're back to the really strong heavy colony again. You've just seen me lift up a pretty much empty beehive with one finger, how easy that was. You look at trying to lift that up with one finger, Absolutely no chance. Like, I will genuinely— I will do it as hard as I possibly can here. I am trying with all my might to lift this up with one finger. I just can't do it. Even if I went for my right hand, one finger— oh, just about got it off the ground. But you can see it's all subjective, it's all about calibration. You really do get a feel for these things. It's a very, very useful method. It's one that I use pretty much every day in the winter when I'm going around my apiaries. I said before, I don't carry that luggage scale to weigh the hives with me because it's time-consuming. If I had a couple of hives in my garden, I probably would use it, but it's difficult to do. When I'm measuring the weight of my bees, that's the method that I use, the 4-finger heft method. So that's it for the video. I hope you found that one useful. Get in the habit of using that method. And you'll soon become really, really accurate as to when colonies need a feed and when they don't need a feed. Hope you found that video useful. 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.