 Hi It's been a while since I've checked out my bees. I found out that they had a queen a few weeks ago I thought it was dead and I came to clean out the box and there are bees in it. So Let's see how they're doing They have two deep boxes which are where they lay their brood and store up honey for the winter and hopefully I'm gonna find a whole bunch of baby bees brood in here But it looks pretty quiet on the second floor, but that's okay. It's the second floor second floor isn't usually very active At least not this time of year Many in the spring many bee colonies will be in a single box and I put them in too just because I have it I've got the space and I can give them some extra honey All right, so pretty empty up here. That's fine. Those are dead From a previous colony So I'm just gonna take this whole second box off and hopefully There's gonna be a Hive of activity in the basement, right? They could be better. So a fairly weak hive right now. This is my last remaining hive from my original stock of bees That I bought five years ago I only ever bought one hive of bees and I split it into more and more bees In every winter some of them die and so every winter some of them survive in this winter. I'd unusually high die off Let's see. Oh We have here a little brood Off in the corner. What the heck are they doing? Let's set this off to the side Have a look and see where the rest of the brood is because this is unusual Kind of like to find the queen to confirm I have one. I don't always have to find the queen many times I can just look for fresh Larva, but it could be that I have a laying worker which happens sometimes when the queen dies What the heck is going on here? This is weird-looking colony. I don't know what's going on. I wonder if the queen died Which would be real bummer right now Since I don't have any other hives I can't raise a new queen So it may not be possible to see on the screen there's a whole bunch of eggs in different cells This tells me the queen probably died and one of the workers all the workers are female started laying eggs Which sometimes happens? I think I have a laying worker. So now I have to get another queen Dang it It would have been nice to keep my original genetic live lying alive after this many years It's a real it's a real shame and kind of kicking the pants to lose them Unfortunately for my beehives. I think I finally lost my genetic line Which is a real bummer because I've been working to develop a treatment-free type of bees for years and I Just didn't have enough of them this year to survive and be able to split out It's the first time in five years. So five years from one package of bees is pretty good record. So I'm just gonna have to get some fresh bees from a neighbor and start all over again But that's how it goes. It's been another pretty busy week here. We've gotten a lot of garden beds into place And while a lot of this does actually look pretty nice, which is kind of unusual for me I'll definitely show you some of the places that are not so nice because a lot of times online you see all these like beautiful gardens and Everything looks like it's perfect and it's not here for sure and I don't think they are either I just think you know, you can frame the camera to avoid some of the uglier bits So why don't we take a quick tour through garden? I'll show you some of that And later this episode we're going to see the chickens moving into their new spot We're gonna see what happened with the bees when I checked on them. We've got planting out of wheat planting out of oats and a few other things that you might want to check out. So So let's keep going through the garden here so the peas they're looking pretty good and These beds are already but the problem is we have a big frost coming up at the end of the week So I can't move my beans out or my other things. I just really have to wait until this weekend Which is really late for us. Why don't we step back here behind the greenhouse where things have gotten a little bit hairy So I'll be the first to admit that it looks like a bomb went off behind my greenhouse and while I got some greens and some lettuce here into this bed up on top of here and we've already gotten out a salad or two still not back to Where I'd like it to be there's a lot of scrap wood and I'm just out of loss of a place to put it So right now it's just kind of piling up here and getting blown over by the wind Some pretty terrible wood anyway One neat thing I've got is that the chicks are right here and they haven't been outside yet So I'm not gonna I'm not gonna bring them out right now, but this is gonna be a playpen for the chicks here Probably next week. So we'll check back on that Why don't we pop into the greenhouse and take a look at the starts So my greenhouse is looking pretty good. My beans look great. They're really ready to be planted out But like I said, it's gonna freeze Cilantro parsley my greens are looking good got some cabbage here my yet again I failed I think on my onions and I do not know why I Try and keep them wet. I try and keep them watered. Maybe I over water them. I don't know And up here, I've got cabbages and broccolis cauliflower's that are actually looking like Plants that are gonna work Here we've got Cucumbers they're ready to go in the greenhouse next door and I have a whole bunch of lettuce ready to be planted out I have so much stuff. It's ready to be planted out But with the coming freeze this weekend I I have to wait a little longer and they're kind of outgrowing their pots And I don't want to up pot them because that's just so much work for you know Just a couple of days so hopefully they can hang on and it's not gonna be too detrimental So usually when we come in the greenhouse, I like to show you this side because it's got the the plaster or the Cobb wall and the shell and the shelves and things but here let me turn the camera around and you can see just the absolute pile of unorganized Stuff that there isn't here And again, I think it's important to show you the good and the bad so yeah, obviously this is not as organized or put together as I'd like it to be but It's only so many hours in the day unfortunately, and I probably take on too much But that's another story my fava beans are looking really good. I'm hoping to get them out soon Because they are totally ready to go on the ground They just can't do it until this freezes through Now as I come out of the greenhouse and start moving back over here This is a potato plot and Then over here, we've got a whole bunch of beds that need wood chips put down here on the pathways So the beds are ready. They're ready to be planted, but I've got to wait until this cross come through I'm gonna have potatoes over there. I could probably get those in. I've got carrots over here And then moving on this way. We have our raised beds So right in here. I've got the potatoes that you saw me planting Or that you will see me planting later in the video and we've got a couple more raised beds There's my garlic But these definitely need to be Rejuvenated before I get planting in them And if you follow me around a little farther, you can see these currents that we've planted out some this year and some previous Years you can see the smothering that I'm doing and hopefully getting this barrier in the berry area into shape But if you look over here, it's a mess This is a large area that I've grown potatoes in and I want to turn it into garden beds One of the problems is this big tree that I don't want to take down, but it shades this whole area It's got a lot of invasives and a lot of work for me to do But this isn't even as bad as what I have over here, which is Random fence Wood that I need to get undercover Brush that needs to be taken out of here. This is supposed to be garden space and it's not so I need to get on it or we're not going to have enough space to grow food To provide for us this winter. So this used to be our chicken coop when we first moved here The back of our garage had this little Shed type thing built on the back of it. I thought perfect. This will be a great chicken coop and it was and But as you've seen in other videos probably and I'll link to it here I've built a timber frame chicken coop and they live out in the back half the yard now They have a lot more space. They're not in our garden. It's just better for everybody all around But I've got this great space that I've been using As a storage area So now what I'm gonna do because the chickens on the inside of the house are starting to produce enough Excrement that they stink I'm gonna move them outside So I need to clear out enough space to put eight little pullets in here Well, that was less painful than I thought so I've got some old screens here To keep the chicks off of my Off of my stored stuff. I built them a more improved a larger roost for them as they're getting larger And the really cool thing about this although I got a really great chicken door Behind all this stuff over here that rises and falls from when this was a chicken coop Also, even though that's inaccessible right now. I've got this thing Which is a little bit of space where it opens up right to the back yard behind the greenhouse and so what I'll be able to do each day as they get older is Open this up and I'll put screens off on the side so that they are safe from Running away and running into raccoons or other things that might eat them But they'll have some unfettered outside time each day, which is gonna be really exciting I think for them It is fun to watch them the first time after they've been living in a box for their entire lives To see the Sun to come outside to eat clover, which is what I'll have for them to eat And just to dig around dirt. It's a it's a fun experience to see them seeing that for the first time Unfortunately since I'm not a mother hen. I can't take them out as soon as they're born like the mother would be able to but We do what we can And now there's just a few things left to do first of all bedding They're a whole bunch of shredded newspaper or shredded paper For the ground here Just so they're not on the cold concrete, but they have Something to dig through and run around in Got my old chicken feeder which I made Years ago, I know a bigger feeder in the coop Use this one for young chicks Now we just have the water And a new chick habitat is all ready to go. Just need some chicks I'll get the school bus Patented chicken transport. It's actually a cat carrier. It's certainly fun to have chickens in your house for a little while But as they grow older They grow stinkier So what I'm gonna do now Is put them into the chicken transport This one's got nice barred rocks that might have interesting coloring It's a brave one. Well, I'll check it out in the bus. Nope. So here in the back 40 I've got my beans planted this week and I have Peas that are coming up Just growing up through the mulch here and I'll have to put some strings and trellis for them to grow on pretty soon. And if we come over here I've got potatoes growing in these rows Under here under mulch and compost Here I have my flax that's just starting to sprout. I see some Some flax starting to come up here and it will over top all of these weeds pretty quickly If we go this way You can see where I have Solarized some of what's gonna be the corn patch and so this is using old plastic To heat up and dry out the ground underneath it and this kills a lot of the weed load behind me You can see the hoop house where I've got tomatoes planted that you saw last week and on this side These are all the community potatoes that we put in to share with our neighbors later this fall when things get even tougher And then just yesterday I put oats in this whole quarter of the the garden plot So this is going to be about three or four times more oats than I grew last year And hopefully I can keep the deer from getting them all again So I have a lot more I need to take care of this week and in the coming weeks But in the world at large things continue to move on it's now May And our grocery shopping has really been cut down because not only are we running out of gas to be able to get to the grocery store It's just getting so expensive Everything at the grocery store is starting to get expensive and we can really only count on About a buying a quarter of what we used to be able to buy because the prices have gone up so much We're spending the same amount of money at the grocery store to get a quarter of what we used to be able to buy just because fossil fuels Underwrote everything in our previous food system and now in a new food system without fossil fuels it's Surprising how quickly we deplete everything we had the grocery industry been working under what's called the just in time model So instead of having a warehouse full of bags of flour and different canned goods and all these things stockpiled They've been shipping the directly from the manufacturer To or the producer to the grocery store and what this does essentially is Streamlines everything, but it also makes it more susceptible to hiccups because there's no slack in the system There's not an extra a couple days worth of food sitting in a warehouse to be sent to the grocery store It's just all coming directly from the manufacturer to the Grocery and when there is a disruption in that food chain We feel it at the grocery store immediately We don't have that safeguard to fall back on and so what we're having to do with what we have here is to try and fill in the gaps Time to plant some fingerling potatoes. There is chicken mulch in here from last fall And the only problem is the assillia that I have to hoe down And I'm gonna try and disturb the soil as little as possible and plant the potatoes mostly on the surface Cover them up with mulch I'm planting these close to our house because these are fingerlings We're gonna eat them throughout the summer the ones that I planted in the last episode Or two episodes ago are over bigger field potatoes that won't be ready till the fall As carefully as I can so I don't disturb these these starts. I'm gonna drop these fingerling potatoes every foot Get to work now because These are all invasives That reproduced prodigiously garlic mustard You can make pesto out of it, but you can only eat so much garlic mustard pesto before you get sick of it So this all has to come out and All of these are second-year plants I got to find all the first-year plants and I had to find all the plants that are just starting out this year so This is just part of spring every year. It's gotten less and less believe it or not This is less than it was last year This whole area we refer to as the barrier. So we've got a whole bunch of currents here Behind me. I've got apple trees strawberries raspberries, and we're gonna make this into a perennial fruit area So I got to clean it out and then smother all of this vegetation because this is largely decorative slash invasive Vegetation and he's got to move these logs out. Unfortunately. These are walnut and walnut has a compound in it called Jugglone that doesn't allow other plants to grow so I can't rot these or burn them and then put them in the garden They have to be taken out of the garden or maybe used as the the edge of pathways here So last year I used some of this like carpet and other heavy mat Opaque mat type stuff to smother different areas So now what I'm gonna do is lift them up and see how they look underneath and hopefully I'll have pretty bare ground It's not quite bare, but it's certainly very easy to Take part and chop this stuff up what I'm gonna do now is Do the work this same magic over on this green area my goal is to have an area that is More weed-free we've got things like creeping Charlie, which if you had creeping Charlie in your yard You know how frustrating it is to deal with and a lot of other well-intentioned, but just ecologically aggressive ornamentals back here, so they It's all got to go and then we can get a clover or some other Ground cover down that will work with our our backyard system the clover will be eaten by the chickens And put nitrogen back in the soil So most beekeepers just keep their bees out in the open But I built something similar to a Slovenian or a Swiss bee Shed and So they actually go out through this small hole, but I use American style Well, they're called Langstroth named after a French Clergy person clergyman who came up with this this system, but it's what's commonly used in the US, but I Just put mine inside of my shed here The problem is I put to the bottom the base that holds them right up against the wall And then when I do inspections later in the year the bees come out and they crawl up the wall And then I can't put the next box back so I need to build in a space So I'm gonna put this spacer there to keep the box to give them a bit of a gap here and then I'm gonna add a Bit of box here to hold the back of the box So basically the box can come back three-quarters of an inch and it'll just give me a little better work The only good part about having a dead-out, which is when a hive dies is I can then take apart and refurbish and Adjust what was or wasn't working with the hive. So this is one change. I'm gonna make now when I put a box on Instead of running up straight against the wall There we go Now there's a bit of a gap there for the bees to be safe and they're not gonna crawl out the back. So there we go Luckily my neighbor or a friend of mine who lives nearby had extra bees This year and so he sold me what's called a nucleus colony, which is about five frames of bees with brood and Honey and pollen is basically a mini colony and this is one way to start your bees I have enough resources that I could have just got a package which is a box of bees And you can see a whole video on how to install bees and how we're doing a research project them I'll link to that here, but This is what he had and I Need to get my bees going so That's what I purchased and I probably don't need to put my veil on But I don't know these bees. I don't know if they're calm. They've just been driven across Oh, I don't know a couple miles to get here and they've been stuck inside all day. So when I open this they're probably Gonna pop out pretty quick Wondering why the heck they were closed up in there in the first place. So Better safe than sorry. I'm gonna put my my equipment on Probably don't need it, but Doesn't hurt anything Actually realized I have a hole in my thumb so I'm gonna have to make myself some new Bee gloves not that it really matters. I don't think I'd get Stung half the time I go in or I've gone in without the veil and things on before when I had to and it wasn't as bad as I thought but I Don't know. It's like a safety blanket. All right, so let's see what we got here Well, they're active The main thing is I want to keep any brood fairly Close together oops our girls So they can keep it warm So the population of this hive is about to explode and all these and all these bees hatch When it's capped it's in the final stages of of pupation. I don't know if pupation is a word Clumsy that's the one thing about gloves. They do make you clumsier as a beekeeper And I bet half the time my glove gets stung It's because I'm wearing a glove and if I had my fingers free ah No one got me through my thumb Hang it out Now I'll knock the remainder of these bees in Set this outside. I'll give these girls plenty of food I've given them the equivalent of a furnished house and they're moving out of a furnished apartment, so Before long I'll have a couple be hives because they'll be able to split them into more than one That's kind of one of the secrets to keeping bees and not busting the bank Learning how to split one hive into two or three or four Depending on how strong they are. That's how I've been able to go for five years on one hive We'll see now that I have a bit more experience How long this hive will last? You know, I may have said this before but the reason I keep bees is because of sugar a Few years ago. I started looking at our Grocery bill every week and trying to figure out how can I make things on our grocery bill so that we don't have to buy them? And obviously one of them was sugar and I thought well I could Plant a whole bunch of maple trees and wait 40 years until I can get enough maple sure sugar And then I thought wait a minute. I can keep bees So that's actually why I started keeping bees was for the sugar not for any other environmental or Botanical reason, but just for the sugar so It's been a really fun hobby And if you do it right it doesn't cost as much as a lot of people say it does it's just you got to be real careful if that's Something you want to avoid but it's certainly something that's gonna come in even more important now without fossil fuels available to work sugar beets and cane and other sources of corn other sources of Sweet sweetness into our diet aren't gonna be available. So we're gonna go back to basically medieval sweetener, which was honey Cain sugar just wasn't available until the industrial revolution So we're gonna have to go pre-industrial honey and maple syrup and a lot less sweets in our diet I can already tell me afternoon. I don't have my sweet pick me up. I used to always have something sweet Around four or five o'clock and I can definitely feel it in my body where it craves something sweet right now so Well, thanks for joining us for another week We had a lot more to do this week than last week and that's just how things go next week It's gonna probably be even busier because we have to get all those starts from the greenhouse into the ground Once this frost danger is over so you're gonna get to see all of that happening as well as oh Probably chickens are the chicks getting to go outside and some other things so stay tuned for that Make sure you subscribe below so that you will be sure to get that when it comes out probably next Friday Send us to friends. Please do share us. That's really all we ask in exchange for all these videos that we make And you can check out our blog at low tech Institute org You can sign up to get that in your inbox and that will be things not only food-mageddon related things But also other work. We're doing here at the Low Technology Institute So I hope you're all doing well and staying safe out there and thanks for watching