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Thanks for your comment! I will now watch your videos... In natural beekeeping we just avoid anything unnatural within the hive and in its immediate vicinity: no chemicals, no pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, miticides, no antibiotics or other meds, no acids or oils and, definitely, no sugar-feeding other than in rare/extreme emergencies when no own honey stores are available.

bee clusters in sperical shape is due to large magazin hive boxes with thin wooden boards of 3/4 inch

The picture of the cutout of the cutout of a typical beehive in a natural tree hollow can be seen here (second from top) : forestbeehive.com/2022/12/26/horizontal-hives/ While each natural honeycomb is, obviously, vertical, the orientation of the set of the honeycombs is horizontal : any 2nd, 3rd, etc. honeycombs are about equally and definitely horizontally spaced away from the 1st honeycomb. Layens has based his design of the horizontal beehive including its depth on a typical beehive found in natural tree hollows.

Excellent question! As opposed to many Russian honeybee hybrids that often exhibited enhanced aggression, the same is not the case for USDA certifed Russian bees. The members of US Russian Honey Bee Breeders Association (RHBA ) maintain and improve the pure genetic lines of Russian honey bees and work with USDA to test genetic compliance annually. Russian bees from RHBA members are as gentle as Italians. If you are a beekeeper anywhere in US North East, I would absolutely recommend such bees even for 1st time beekeepers. Given the Russians' longest exposure to varroa and excellent wintering, I would prefer them to any 'wild' swarm many of which are hybridized (e.g. with prevalent here Italian bees) and gradually lose the above valuable genetic traits.

@@boristhebeeguy are usda certified Russian bees hard to find? Do you have recommendations on where I could order some nucs for spring? As I said in very new to this and am looking to get my first nuc or 2 in spring! Thanks for responding I’m super excited to join the hobby

These days there's a growing availability of pure russians. you can even order a package of 'pure russians' from Mann Lake (a big online distributor). Or you can search for RHBA members in your area to find a nuc.

@@boristhebeeguy and thank you for telling me about the difference in behavior between pure Russian and hybridized Russian. Very interesting to know that they hybrids can have more aggression issues

@@joshdoe7288, you are very welcome! One of the best examples of significant behavioral problems with unfortunate hybrids are africanized bees: this was an intentional hybrid (and a very bad one) by Brazilian beekeepers in the 1950s when they crossed western honeybees and African honeybees.

Good luck with beekeeping in Central Maine! I use simplified minimal intervention beekeeping with insulated horizontal Layens beehives. See: th-cam.com/video/RmTsAy7oElM/w-d-xo.htmlsi=nOye5TsPsf_MQ6_r

you can buy inexpensive Layens frames at Miller Bee Supply: millerbeesupply.com/products/unassembled-layens-frames

Thanks for your note! Big Horizontal hives are a bit harder to relocate with the bees inside but (1) they get much lighter by wintertime and (2) cold no-fly weather means there are no lost foragers out there before the move

Happy Holidays!

Thanks for watching!

@@boristhebeeguy just found your channel.

@@gameclubusa5285 thanks for checking me out!

Thanks for stopping by. I just watched your channel’s mushroom videos!

Hey there! Although I just have 6 colonies, I have eight 20-frame double-walled wool-insulated Layens hives - 2 of the extra hives are for planned 2024 expansion. 5 of the original hives were bought from Dr Leo. The latest 3 Layens hives I built following Dr.Leo’s plans.

Wow! Someone was pilfering a bunch of army supplies and relabeling them for resale…

yup and they had a load of them....kinda wonder how they got them across the border.....@@boristhebeeguy

Good day. I have such a request. Could you make a video that would show how thick the walls of the hive should be (min-max mm in the European measurement system) so that the bees have the right conditions for wintering, and in the summer so that they don't overheat. P.S. Lithuania

@@boristhebeeguy Thank you for the answer

Greetings! It might,indeed, be a good idea to address in a video both summertime and wintertime beekeeping in Layens horizontal hives that have double-walls filled with raw wool insulation. First, I want to address here the summertime beekeeping in such beehives. We certainly don’t want the bees to overheat in summertime. Thankfully, Layens hives are versatile and allow ample ventilation that can be adjusted depending on the season. In Spring, as the weather gets warmer, I remove raw wool-filled pillows around the bee nest. I fully open a single entrance that was partially closed in wintertime and later, in the heat of summer, I put 2 other entrances to ventilation setting. On the sides of the top lid there’s an additional top ventilation allowing for a full ‘circle’ of ventilation around the bee nest. If you are in the area of extreme heat, make sure to place beehives where you have mid-afternoon shade. Ok, back to winter… Increasing the thickness of double-walls for extra warmth can significantly increase the weight of the beehive. Additionally, it’s really inefficient to increase insulation just by wall thickness because the insulation factor (R value) for wood is 1.4 for every inch (2.54cm) whereas putting just the same inch of light raw wool within the double-wallsof a beehive increases the R value to at least 7. Also, raw wool insulation helps with moisture control!

For the health of both the honeybees and the humans who consume their honey, it’s good to have smaller apiaries on vast clean lands unpolluted by nearby conventional agricultural chemicals rather than have huge honey factories bordering farm fields brimming with pesticides, herbicides, fungicides.

Thanks very much for your comment. Bees, indeed, are their own best beekeepers and the less we meddle with their homes, the better.

Honeybees are the world's most versatile pollinators. The honeybees will greatly benefit, however, if you don't use any human-engineered pesticides, herbicides or insecticides in your gardens, keeping it organic.

enlighten us at the back of the class if ur so smart

Warre hives are a big improvement over Langstroth, however, the less than 9" depth of a honeycomb does not work well for climates with cold winters. See Math of overwintering: th-cam.com/video/Msg_1GPoduE/w-d-xo.html

You are absolutely right, there's no need for backyard beekeepers with fewer than a dozen bee colonies to follow commercial guidelines of treating & sugar-feeding. With lower hive density there's less drift and disease sharing. Especially with a cleaner habitat, locally adapted bees will have a better chance of developing natural mite resistance if no treatments are used.

Metal stands with wooden platform were recommended by Lazutin. Non-flying small critters like mice and ants have a harder time to disturb the hive.

Thanks for your comment, Justin! Pennsylvania is a great place to catch swarms of local wild survivor bees, far better than Maine... Two main ingredients for natural beekeeping: (1) Good natural habitat as far away from pollution and agro-chemicals as humanly possible (2) Good bees - not the ones from commercial packages of artificially inseminated non-local queens. If the bees are not your local wild survivor bees, there are a few good Treatment-Free beekeepers in Pennsylvania who would sell you nucs. If you choose horizontal hives e.g. Layens hives, your beekeeping will become far easier.

Your welcome sir there is a guy in Washington Pennsylvania That will sell me treatment free bees With a horizontal hive

Thanks, Ash, for your comment! I plan to go into next winter with 6-7 beehives.

Thanks for your comment Justin, maybe I can talk to Lucy the Beekeeper about writing a book for kids! forestbeehive.com

That would be great me and my girls would love that

Hi Richard, nice to hear from Maine TF Layens fellow beekeeper! I am almost 2 hr away from you inland: Alonzo Garcelon Wildlife Management Area (South). Do you happen to have any overwintered TF nucs for sale? forestbeehive.com

@BORIS THE BEE GUY Two hours isn't too bad, maybe sometime we'll have an opportunity to meet up. I don't have overwintered nucs this year, but I'll be trying to produce some for next year. This year, I'll be focusing on producing queens from my colonies that overwintered, and expanding the apiary.

@@Garagestead, would be great to meet up sometime! This year I am hoping to expand with local swarms, splits and, possibly, with local overwintered TF nucs from somewhere.

@BORIS THE BEE GUY Nice, I'm going after swarms also. How many swarm traps do you put up, and what's your success rate? Last year I put up 5 traps and caught 2, this year I have 15 traps ready to put up.

Last year with 5 swarm traps I caught just 1 swarm. Hope to double it this year. I bait with old comb, propolis and lemongrass. Are you using lemongrass or swarm commander?

Thanks very much for your note! A good beehive needs to provide a delicate balance between insulation, ventilation and moisture control that is appropriate for the winters in your location. On my website (link to the page below) I list most of the specifics (with pictures!) of winterizing my horizontral hives: forestbeehive.com/2022/12/26/horizontal-hives/ The bees propolize the top frames (that touch in Layens hives) AND the divider boards up to the top frames - just where the bees deem it appropriate. I do not interfere with their propolis seal - not touching beehives from late fall to Springtime. By the way, although most Layens frames during the foraging season have a mix of honey and brood, by the time you winterize the hive (and combine this with harvesting in late Fall!) there's no brood anywhere: by this time, the queen has appropriately shut off her egg laying in preparation for winter. Bee bread (fermented pollen) can be present or absent on the brood frames but it's not a criteria for selecting/deselecting a frame as bee bread is the food for the young brood which is absent in late Fall. As far as which brood frames to leave (and, more importantly, which frames not to leave) for overwintering in horizontal hives, I follow a calculation provided by F. Lazutin in "Keeping Bees with a Smile" (highly recommend this book!): during cold winters the bees on average move upwards on the same frame by 1mm every 24 hours consuming the honey. With the duration of our average Zone 5 Maine winters, 1mm per 24 hours corresponds to frames with honey band of greater than 5 inches. So, I will not leave any frame that has less than 5 in of honey band on both sides because the bees can starve on that frame, reaching its top in cold winters while unable to move to a different frame! In addition to brood frames with > 5 in honey band, for Springtime emergencies I am also leaving a full honey frame. So any frames with less than 5 in honey bands on top in my zone 5 are only great for harvesting -- see my harvesting video below where I talk about it: th-cam.com/video/4n_tanaULts/w-d-xo.html

@@boristhebeeguy Thank you Boris. Did you ever try to put frames the warm way in your Layens hives? What do you think about this idea?

Hi Konstantin, I am sorry, I am not exactly sure what you mean. Do you mean whether I tried putting the frames at a 90 degrees angle? Or in a different sequence from how the bees had the frames? I occasionally do the latter. And I do recycle the old frames - the old frames with all dark comb should not be used beyond 3 years - the old comb needs to be discarded or recycled.

@@boristhebeeguy I misspelled the word "warm", I fixed the spelling now in the original question. Warm way means that the frames run parallel to the wall that has the entrance, not perpendicular to it.

I have seen (mostly in pictures) dozens of natural tree hollows where honeybees chose to settle, and I only saw that they construct combs hanging from the top and perpendicular to the entrance. This is a standard natural setup. I am not saying that in nature the combs can’t run parallel to the entrance but I have never seen this neither in nature nor in any picture. The combs right next to the entrance are always chosen by the bees for brood rearing - the full area of these combs needs easy access for pollen-carrying foragers. This is a heavy load to carry and pollen should not fall off towards the floor of the hive. Combs further from the entrance the bees choose for honey stores. Layens style Insulated horizontal hives are mimicking this standard natural setup and instead of the perfect warmth of the ‘bell effect’, just like in nature in cold winter climates the bees thrive when there’s a right balance (as per your local area) of insulation, ventilation and moisture control. Local conditions determine the specific details of your hive setup. Example: moisture control (and by extension ventilation ) totally depends on whether your prevailing climate is too dry or too wet. With my Zone 5 ForestBeehive lakeside apiary with multiple streams entering the lake and relatively frequent fogs and rains, it is on the wet side and to compensate, I even use divider boards rigged for moisture control (as suggested first by F. Lazutin in ‘Keeping Bees with a Smile’). forestbeehive.com/2022/12/26/horizontal-hives/ As of yesterday, I can now brag that with this setup all of my colonies overwintered! Video will be done soon, I hope.

You got feral bees that already know how to survive without treatment, so I would caution against using even such seemingly innocuous treatment as thymol. It's an essential oil that does not naturally belong in the hive. Essential oils adversely affect honeybees' microbiota - see studies listed at forestbeehive.com/2022/12/26/apiaries-next-to-farm-fields/. Just like excessive smoke, any essential oil like thymol interferes with bees' communication signaling but, unlike smoke, thymol stays put and keeps interfering both with bee signalling and ... with the taste of honey.

It's nice to hear from a fellow natural beekeeper! I also never treat/never sugar-feed & I focus on providing the bees with an ideal possible habitat (lots of honeybee -specific gardening!) and on not overworking the bees - I harvest only surplus honey and only once per year.

You are a natural bumble bee keeper! They are excellent, tireless pollinators. In Iceland I saw bumble bees used commercially for pollinating tomatoes growing indoors... Not sure how I feel about it...

I film my too 🐝

Thanks very much for your note, I just discovered your channel & became a sodbuster! I am seeing quite a few similarities between our approaches to beekeeping and that's in addition to both of us sporting somewhat similar gray beards... The points you raised about other advantages of Layens horizontal hives I have actually addressed in the 1st part of this 2-part series: Vertical Hives and a Crazy Landlord: th-cam.com/video/sdWSiP8ti_k/w-d-xo.html forestbeehive.com