How To Weigh A Beehive - Ep 12 Making Splits for Winter - Weighing Beehives - How To Weigh Bees

We're on to episode 12 of the Making Splits for Winter series, and we're weighing our hives. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. The leaves are falling off the trees, it's so windy here today, really does feel very autumnal, and a real timely message for weighing your hives at this point of the season. So I'll just summarize it again, we've taken a really small We've been trickle feeding them, we've fed them for varroa, we've allowed that queen to build up to a really nice strong colony. And then the last episode, we went to go with a really big heavy feed of invert sugar syrup to boost them up to weight. And then the final thing I'm going to do, and this is what I'm going to show you in this episode, is I'm going to show you how to weigh your hives. I'll give you all the target weights in this video as well, but what I will say is that I do not go around every single one of my colonies weighing them with this hive scale. What I do is I use the hive scale to almost calibrate my expectations of what a colony should weigh. And I think that's a really important piece of advice because if you want to get really scientific with it, you can work out exactly how much a nucleus colony should weigh or a big double brooding national colony should weigh, and you can go out and you can weigh each one of them and get it to within a few grams. But in reality, it doesn't make a huge amount of difference because what I like to do is is give them some additional contingency to ensure they've got food to get them through the winter. All you're really doing with a hive scale, getting it so exact, is trying to save maybe a couple of pounds on feed. You're best off just going a little bit over, making sure that the bees get through the winter. However, I do think anybody who has never weighed a colony before, anybody that has never got a colony through the winter before, using a hive scale is actually a really good way of calibrating your expectations of what that beehive or that nucleus colony should weigh like. And I say this, and I've said it on a few videos before, when you lift up your boxes when they're ready for winter, especially nuc boxes, because you'll struggle to lift up a full hive, it should feel heavy. And that is such a subjective term, but the way that I explain it to people is you look at the size of the box and you think if a box like that came from Amazon and you lifted it up, it would feel light. You want to lift up that box and walk away thinking I did not expect that box to feel so heavy. If you're getting that from your nucleus colonies, you're probably halfway there. But in this video, I'm going to take a Payne's poly nuc. I'm going to show you how to weigh it. I'm going to show you how much it weighs, and then you can go away, weigh your own nucs, and see if they come anywhere close. So that's it. Let's get my bee suit on. I won't get my smoker lit. Let's go and weigh some beehives. Right, so it could be the middle of July today. It's about 18 degrees, the sun is shining, the bees are just having the best time in the world going out and foraging on that ivy still. In terms of an update from last time, 2 things to say. One, I didn't come back and feed them. 2, I've got another camera that I can talk to now. So hello, second camera. Maybe do some face close-ups every now and again. You have to tell me if that works. I'm not sure which camera is best, but anyway, the bees are going crazy for the ivy. I keep on looking at the weather forecast going ahead one week and saying, well, I'm not going to do that final top-up just yet because the weather's so nice. Why would I backfill that brood box with invert sugar syrup when the bees can go out and collect ivy nectar and honey for free? You can see this is no joke whatsoever. The bees are this busy and we're past the middle of October now. It's the 17th of October today and that's how busy this nuc is. This is A small nucleus colony of bees, but they are jam-packed to the rafters. So I'll just reiterate what I've said in previous videos is don't feed too early. The bees take advantage of these late season flows, and if you don't get them, then they're in polystyrene hives. You can feed them invert and get them up to weight anyway. That's what today's video is about though. We're getting the bees up to weight for winter. So I can take off my amazing roof weight, which is a piece of wood. Because I finally brought down some ratchet straps, and this colony needs a ratchet strap in order for you to weigh it accurately. So this is the hive scale that I'm going to use. Like I said, I'll stick the link up, but you can use any hive scale whatsoever. Make sure it goes up to 50 kilograms though. You'd be hard pushed to get a hive above 50 kilograms, but some of them are a little bit lighter. And when you're weighing national colonies or bigger colonies, they can get up to kind of 45, close to 50 kilos if they're on double brood. Right, first thing I'm going to do is I'm going put my veil up because they're active today, the bees. They don't like people messing around with them late on in the year. So I'm going to get my veil up because what I'm going to do first is I'm going to lift the hive up and do a little bit of a heft. Right, so first thing I'm going to do a manual way, which is I'm going to lift them up, see what I think they're like. Now they've definitely increased weight since the last time I was here. If these were in any other nuc, I would say They don't need any more additional feeding because they're there or thereabouts. Like I said before, I don't fret over one or two kilos because normal situations, any other colony, any other type of nuc, I can feed fondant in the winter really, really easily. With my Payne's poly nucs, it's a lot more difficult to feed fondant. You either need to go and buy an eek, which I don't have, and I don't like to go and buy an eek just to feed, or you need to put the fondant down into the feeder. Which they do work really well, and we covered that on separate episodes of this series. However, in the middle of the winter when it's -5 degrees, the bees won't venture out of the cluster to go and feed on that fondant. So if you get to a point where they're low on stores and it's really cold, you need to get the fondant directly on top of them in order that it's making contact with that cluster, and then they will feed on it. So I am going to feed this colony again here. What I'm going to do is I'm going to show you how to use the Hive Scale. I'll weigh it before, I'll weigh it after, and then I'll give you the hive weights in terms of what I think you should get a Payne's poly hive up to for overwintering. Right, so first off, I'm going to get a ratchet strap. Really simple ratchet straps. I've sent you out the links to these before. Don't pay loads of money for them, you can get them cheap. I like the actual ratchet style ones. Other people hate the ratchet style ones. Just choose one that's going to keep together when you weigh it though. Right, so get your ratchet strap on like this. Make sure it's nice and tight. That's the colony secured for winter. Obviously don't strap it to the pallet. Now we're going to use the hive scale in order to weigh this hive, and it couldn't be simpler. It's the simplest thing in the world. So here's my luggage scale. You can see you've got a tare button, a set button, and then a power button. I'm just going to turn that power on. Right, there we go. Hopefully you can see that. If I start tugging on it, you can see— there we go, it's working. So really, really simple luggage scale like that. All you do is you take the bottom clip, you put it in there, and then whatever you weigh is going to show up on that luggage scale there. Nice and simple. So what do you think this Nuke here is going to weigh? And I have to say, I forget this every year. I have to go back and look through my notes in terms of target weights because I don't use these. I do not use these anymore because I'm just able to feel it. And I guarantee within a couple of years of doing it, you'll be the same. It's a little bit of a faff doing this on a number of colonies. If you've got 2 or 3 colonies though, absolutely no problem. You can use this every year to give you really accurate information about the weight of your hives. I'm going to give it a go though, and I'm going to see how much this one here weighs. I'm going to guess it's somewhere around 12 kilograms. So all you do is you hook it around the hive strap. When you lift it up, it is going to go off-center like that. There's no problem with that. The frames in there will be really well propolised together, You just want to get it completely off the ground, hold it still for a couple of seconds, see what the reading is. So there you go. Hopefully you can see that. I promise I did not cheat. You can just get used to the weights of these. 12.5 kilos that weighed. So I would say if your nuke's weighing 12.5 kilos, you're there or thereabouts. If you've got the ability to feed fondant in that hive or in that nuc later on in the year, you can probably leave a nuc at around 12.5 kilos. But it's still warm at the moment, they're still foraging, so there's no problem just giving them a little bit more syrup. That's what I'm going to do here. I'm going to give them half a container full of syrup, probably go up like 2/3 of the way into that feeder, and then I'm going to weigh them again and try not to spill the syrup. To give you an indication, you want to get them up to around 15 kilos. That's going to be for me the optimum weight of a Payne's poly nuc. Right, let's get the lid off the nuc then, see what they're looking like, see how big they are. I'm predicting they're going to be boiling over here today. They're going to be a big strong colony by now, and we'll get some syrup in halfway up the feeder, see if we can get it to around 15 kilograms of weight. So it's always really interesting this time of year. Sometimes they're boiling over, sometimes they are not interested in coming out at all. These bees are getting ready for winter. They're so, so ready for that cold snap to come. You've got a few going out and feeding still. You've got a cluster that it looks like in the middle, but if you go up every single frame there, you can see bees all the way up to the feeder edge. And then all the way down this side here as well. There are lots of bees in here. Not going to pull out any frames yet, I'm going to leave that one to next week because I do need to come back in and get that Apivar strip out. This one here should be able to just pop out nice and easy, but some of them are embedded a little bit further down. But very happy with this nuc, it looks fantastic. Going to give it its final feed of the year now. And say goodbye to them until we see them again in winter. So I think you'll agree they look really good. It's really funny, I've seen a lot of stuff on Facebook this week, and I've had people messaging me as well saying they've gone in and did an inspection and they couldn't see the queen, couldn't see any brood, couldn't see any eggs, and they're really worried. And I completely understand the, the anticipation of people wanting to make sure that their nucs get through the winter, but I haven't gone into any of the colonies Apart from the ones that I'm doing on video, since maybe middle of August, because I've done everything I need to do by the middle of August. I've got my Apivar strips in, there's queens in there, they're queen right, there's brood, there's eggs, the colonies are fine. I've weeded out all of the drone-laying queens, anything that was a little bit suspect, so everything should be fine. The way I see it is that you shouldn't really be going into your colonies that late on in the year There's no need for it, and all it can do is give you the impression that something is wrong. You can't find the queen, there's no eggs, there's no brood, something must be wrong. Where in reality, that's quite normal at this time of year, and I'm sure lots of my colonies are displaying exactly the same traits. However, back to this video. Let's get these fed up, we'll do a final weigh on them, and then we'll leave them alone until we take those Apivar strips out. So I've not gone all the way up to the top in the feeder for 2 reasons. One, they definitely don't need it. I've probably put in 2 to 3 kilograms there easily. And also, when I lift it up, I don't want it to fall all over the place to do this final weigh. But I'm really happy with this nuc. I'm gonna close it back up, do a final little weigh on it, and then we'll see them in a week or so to get that Apivar strip out. Right, so there we go, they're fed. I'm gonna do a final weigh now, and I'm gonna do my very best to keep it level in order to not spill that syrup. So we added about a couple of kilos of invert syrup there, anywhere between 14 and 15 kilos. That really is gonna be a good target weight for a Payne's poly nuc. So there you go, really simple, cheap, and effective way to weigh your nucleus colonies for winter. Now I'm doing a separate video at the moment showing you how to do that for a full colony as well. I can lift up a full colony using that method. So ratchet strap over the top, hive scale on, lift it up. Tends to be quite heavy, but it does work and it's an effective method. I do appreciate though, not everyone might be able to lift that up because it is a little bit awkward, especially if you've got your hives quite high as well. Getting it up and getting it off the ground on all 4 corners can be quite difficult for a full colony. So what I would suggest is get some help from someone. And use that technique of using the hive scale as a calibration method, and then you can go back and test it and see how it feels. So go back to the beginning of this video. I do not go around with that hive scale lifting up every single colony saying, oh, that's an 11.2 kilogram one, it needs an extra 600 grams of feed. I definitely don't do that. All I do is I go and lift up the colony and I say, yeah, that's about right, or that's light, or that's really heavy, good, I definitely don't need to feed Feed that one anymore. They're the kind of 3 things that I look for, and the same with my big national colonies. Now again, I can get in there, get the ratchet strap on, which is always there, lift it up, and I think, that's really heavy, great, doesn't need to be fed. Or you lift it up and you think, wow, that's really, really light, that needs to be fed, or there's something wrong inside the colony. And again, I'm not expecting everyone to be able to lift up a hive, because a full hive, a 14 by 12, can kind of weigh up to like 45, 50 kilos if it's Absolutely jam-packed full of stores. But I would recommend ratchet straps. Done a separate video on that. I ratchet strap everything up— nucs, full colonies, spring, summer, autumn, winter. It's always a ratchet strap on, and a big proper ratchet strap, not one of those little clip ones that pull apart as you pull it. And that does help when it comes to hefting your hives. I'll do a separate video showing you how to heft a hive, but we'll go back to this video here. If you can get someone to come along, show you how much a colony weighs, and says, look, that colony there is up to weight, it's 40 kilos, 45 kilos, whatever target weight you're shooting for, then all you need to do is give it a heft. And pretty much everybody should be able to push a hive forward and just to give it a little bit of a heft to feel roughly what the weight is. That then gives you an indication of what a heavy hive should weigh or a heavy nuc should weigh. And then all you need to do is build on that experience, that muscle memory, year on year, and you should get to the point where you don't need a scale anymore. You can just heft, and then you can feel if your hive is low on weight, medium on weight, or fed up for winter. Talked on a little bit there, but I did want to give you that. Do not mistake me going around every single colony and lifting it up with a hive scale. That is not what I do, but it's a really good way of calibrating your expectations. I hope you enjoyed that video. I hope you found it 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. Bye.