🐝 How To Prepare Bees For Winter – Episode Six – What Should Your Hive Weigh?

We're on to episode 6 of preparing colonies for winter. I've got my hive scale with me. We're going to weigh the colony, see how much they weigh. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Hive scales are such a useful, cheap tool when it comes to beekeeping. I use the simplest hive scale going. It's a digital one, it's available from Amazon. I'll stick a link up on there, you can see which one I use, but believe me, any digital scale, luggage scale, will work really, really well for this purpose. In this video, I'm going to show you how to weigh your full colonies and tell you how much they should weigh going into winter. Now, before I do that, I need to make this clear. I don't go around every single colony weighing every colony various stages throughout the autumn. Getting them up to weight. I use my method, which is trickle feed, trickle feed, trickle feed from middle of August to middle of September, even back end of September. And then when the weather turns, the ivy's coming towards an end, I backfill with invert sugar syrup, get them up to weight. But even at that point, I don't go in with my scales and check them and say, oh, this one's a kilo underweight and this one's a kilo overweight. All I do personally is I go around, I lift them up by the ratchet strap, I give them a heft and I can just feel from my experience if they're light or if they're heavy. However, until you know what a heavy hive feels like, and until you know what a heavy hive that is up to the correct weight feels like, very, very difficult to do that. So I use the hive scale as a calibration mechanism, and I suggest anybody who's in their first year of beekeeping, taking your colony into winter, it's a really good habit to get into weighing your hive just to give you the confidence that they're up to weight for winter. Next thing to say is it is completely dependent on what you have your colony in, in terms of a single national wooden hive, a double national wooden hive, a single national poly hive, a double national poly hive, a 14 by 12 single, a 14 by 12 poly, a Langstroth, a commercial, a Dadant. Obviously they're all going to have completely different weights. There's lots of good information on the internet in terms of how much each of those should weigh. All I'm going to talk to you about on this video though is a single national deep poly hive and a single national 14 by 12 poly hive. And the last thing I'll say before I get my bee suit on is I wouldn't fret too much about winter weight. If you're hefting your hive or you're lifting it up and you walk away and you think that's really heavy, you're probably 95% of the way there. Right, let's get my bee suit on. Let's go and weigh some beehives. So like I said before, I love this time of year because Beekeeping is so, so easy, and it's one of the top 10 mistakes. Done a video on top 10 mistakes recently, and I covered this one in quite a lot of detail. But people going into their bees unnecessarily, it really can cause damage. I've not gone into these colonies in about 6 to 8 weeks, and all of the rest of my colonies, I just don't touch them after August, after they got the Apivar strips in, after they got some feeding. After I've done my checks to make sure they're queen right and everything's fine, disease-free, all I'm doing every time is I'm just going and giving a heft like that. And for me, that tells me everything I need to know about my bees. And anything that might go wrong in the hive, like there might be a supersedure going on, it's completely out of your control. Fix the things that are wrong in August, early September. Don't go into your hives in October unnecessarily. The only real reason I can see for going into your hives in October is to take the Apivar strips out. That's it, there's no other reason. Right, weighing the colony then. I was surprised how much weight this colony had put on because the flow here is just tremendous. It does honestly feel like a summer's day, it's about 18 or 19 degrees, and it has been for the past few weeks. We've had really good highs and they've been out foraging ivy, so they've been very, very busy going out foraging, I've had a few comments about this apiary saying I need to get my strimmer out, and yeah, hands up, I'm really bad at that. But the bees don't care, they are not fussed at all. I'll clear the entrances a little bit just to give them a good flight path, but I'm not going to knock down all of these weeds just for the sake of it. Good for biodiversity to let the plants and the weeds grow. Right, getting on to weighing this colony then. As I said, I do not use a hive scale religiously, but what I do is I use it to calibrate my expectations And I would suggest if it's your first year as a beekeeper, you should do the same thing as well. So this is the luggage scale that I use, and I referred to it as a hive tool before. It's definitely not a hive tool, it's a luggage scale, and it's the simplest thing in the world. Turn it on, make sure it's got the batteries in, and then you hang things using the hook there that latches round, and then it gives you a readout up on that scale. Make sure if you're going to buy one that you get one that goes up to 50 kilograms That's going to be about the absolute maximum of any hive that you're going to need to weigh, and that's going to be really heavy to lift anyway. Right, so it's the simplest thing in the world. I'll jump behind the camera now and I'll just show you how easy it is to turn on, how simple it is to work it. So couldn't be simpler. You just press the on button there, turns it on. Hopefully you can see that. And then you pull down and it gives you a digital readout of the weight. This one goes up to 50 kilograms. And then all you do is you make a little hook here, hook that round, and then you can weigh anything you want just by hanging it on that little hook. Let's go and try and weigh a 14 by 12 National polyhive. Right, so first thing to do is, if you haven't done it already, get a ratchet strap on. If you've got a ratchet strap on, try and center it a little bit because it does go a little bit skew-whiff if you lift it up and it's not centered. So just get that ratchet strap straight, makes lifting it up a little bit easier. As you can see, middle of October, the bees are so, so active because it's still warm. Do this in other years and it may be like 3 or 4 degrees by now and they will not be ready to come out and greet me in the way that they're doing. It's really, really good weather for getting your bees through the winter though. Right, take your luggage scale and you just want to feed it through the ratchet strap like that. All you do is you lift it up and you might want to brace it a little bit. Can sometimes be a little bit difficult to lift. I just lift it up with 2 hands like this. And then it tells you that the batteries are low. Fantastic. Happens every single year I come out here and I don't have the batteries. So I do apologize for that. What it told me though, and you have to believe me, it told me this hive here weighs 37 kilograms. This is a polystyrene National 14 by 12 hive. And it's telling me it's weighing 37 kilograms. Now, I used to be a little bit more fussy with this, and if you look back on previous videos, I used to say a national deep in poly like this should be around 40 kilograms, and a national 14 by 12 should be around 45 kilograms. So you could argue here that these are a little bit underweight, and I will give them a top-up here. But what I will say is colonies like this where you've got a poly Ashforth feeder on, a A full national colony where you can feed fondant later on in the year, I don't find feeding fondant is that bad a thing at all. And I'd prefer to let them go in around 40 kilograms, no matter whether it's a 14 by 12 or a national. And then if I need to, I can give them a little bit of a feed come springtime. And that might seem a little bit strange. You might think, well, surely just give them a little bit more. And this is completely down to your judgment as a beekeeper. So what I've found is it's quite easy taking off any surplus fondant at the end of the year, but if I've got 7 frames of stores in a 14x12 like this, I've got to take out the 14x12 stores and I've got to go and store them somewhere. It can set the colony back, doesn't give me the rapid spring expansion that I want, because in the spring I want empty space again in order for me to stimulate the bees, stimulate the queen to grow as quick as they can to hit the spring flows. As always in beekeeping, it's a very fine balance. You need to do what's right for you, and for me, I like to get it just about right and then top them up with fondant if needs be at the end. Just find out what's right for you. If you want me to give you a target weight for a colony this size, I would go anywhere between 40 to 45 kilograms. That's for a national poly hive on a 14 by 12 format. If you're on a standard deep format, so a standard national format in a poly hive, you want to go around 40 kilograms, somewhere like that. This one here is about 37 kilograms, maybe a touch light, so I will top them up with a little bit of sugar syrup, see if we can get them up to around the 40 kilogram mark. But as I said, I wouldn't fret too much about this because I don't use this religiously. This is not something I use, as you can tell with the low battery symbol. What I do is I go up to a colony and I push it like that, and I think, yep, that's got a decent amount of weight. If I want a more accurate measurement with my ratchet strap, I go in and I lift it up, and I think, that's really, really heavy. It's a heavy box. It feels heavy for its weight. That's good enough for me. I'm going to monitor them when I come in to do apibioxal treatments in December, and then into January, into February, I'll continue to monitor that weight. By coming in and lifting it, and you'll be amazed when they get to January, February, that is when the majority of colonies starve, because now probably not going to be much brood in there. January, February, March, there's loads of brood, and the, the rate in which they consume their stores is quite phenomenal. So I'm just going to go into the colony finally, see if they've taken down all of their sugar syrup. Hopefully there's not a drop left. Hopefully we see bees up in the feeder as well. That shows it's a big strong colony. And then we'll give them maybe another 3 kilograms of sugar syrup just to get them up to that target weight. So there we go, completely empty. They have taken down all of that sugar syrup. And then you look in the feeder slot as well, and there's lots of bees in the feeder slot. Really good to see. So very happy with that. I'm gonna get away now and give them an extra 3 kilograms of syrup. So just got some more invert syrup here. You don't need to go wild. Like I said, if this was me, I probably wouldn't bother putting any more in here. I'm just using this as an example though. They weigh 37 kilos. See if we can get them up to 40 kilos just by adding some invert sugar syrup. I think that goes to show how difficult that is trying to do it one-handed. I'm gonna go for it one more time 'cause there's a little bit of battery in there. I just wanna give you a screenshot of how much this weighs. Probably gonna be around 39 kilos now. Right, sorry, couldn't get it on camera. I just can't do that one-handed. 39 kilograms this colony weighs now, and it goes to show you how difficult that is to lift. I would say I've got reasonable strength, I'm quite high, I can lift it up like that, but it is hard work lifting that up with 2 hands and getting it off the ground. So if you can't lift it, get someone else to lift it for you and to give you that reading to say, right, that one's 40 kilograms. You know that That's at 40 kilograms now because you measured it on the hive scale. And then go in, do your hefts, and then hopefully that should give you a really good reading in terms of how much that hive weighs. There are other ways of doing it as well in terms of taking a reading on one side, taking a reading on the other side, and then doing some maths to kind of work out roughly what the weight is. I'm not a massive fan of that because I've never found it to be overly accurate. I think you're better off just doing some hefting. You're gonna do that. So there we go, simple as that. It's such a simple method. And if you wanted to, if you had like say 2 or 3 hives in the back garden, there's nothing wrong with going and weighing them using a luggage scale. If you wanna get into the habit of doing that and you're physically able to lift them up off the ground, 'cause you do need to get all 4 corners off the ground to get an accurate reading, then no problem. You can use that luggage scale just to track the weight throughout the winter, even into the spring, and see how they actually consume those stores going through the winter. But for anybody who's never felt a heavy hive before, just good to calibrate your expectations in terms of what the bees should weigh going into winter, to give you the ability to lift them up and say, yeah, that's about right, or give them a heft and say they're feeling light, they're feeling heavy, and then you can take appropriate action. So I hope you enjoyed that video. We're very nearly towards the end of this series now. Going to come back next week. I'm going to take the Apivar strips out, but I've not been into this colony for about 6 weeks now. Great. I love this time of year. It's the easiest time of year for beekeepers. A lot of the time, I don't even put my bee suit on. I just walk along, pop the lid, give them a little bit of a feed for a trickle feed, get them up to weight. It's so easy. Really is a nice, easy time of year for beekeepers. Obviously, got to do all your honey extraction first and get that out of the way. But once that's done, it's a nice time of year. You can get out and go and do some other things as well. Hope you found it useful though. 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. Bye.