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Friday, January 24, 2020

46 Videos To Answer Your Questions That WILL Come Up In 2020

In the spring of 2016 I started a mentorship beekeeping coaching program, inviting 200 people. It filled up so quickly. Starting Feb. 1, 2020 I'll be presenting my material known as, "Hive Insight Is 2020", providing you with how to get past your beekeeping limitations and advance into truly understanding how to best manage and succeed in beekeeping in 2020.

For less than $5 a week, beekeeper receive information, videos and access to me personally at any time. 

We have several openings and now would be a great time to join heading into spring and going through my material, "Hive Insight Is 2020".

3 Spots Are Now Open.

How About 46 Beekeeping Videos For 2020!
Help At Your Finger Tips

1st Year Of Videos From BeeTeam6

This resource is a very unique opportunity for you to have at your finger tips as issues come up in 2020. The first years’ worth of BeeTeam6 videos, a library of 46 short and informative beekeeping videos by EAS Certified Master Beekeeper, David Burns. Here are the descriptions of all 46 Videos, questions you are going to need answers to:

-How To Control Mites. David explains several methods to help reduce varroa mites such as the use of a green drone comb, screen bottom board, powdered sugar dusting and breaking the queens brood cycle.

-Finding and Marking Your Queen. Being able to find your queen can be challenging. In this video David will give several tips on how to find your queen and how to place a mark on her so she is easier to spot.

-When a Hive Is Louder Than Normal, Are They Swarming? What does it mean when a colony is flying around the hive like crazy? Many times the bees are simple taking a play flight. See what a play flight looks like.

-How To Remove Queen Cells & Move Them To A Queenless Hive. Queen cells can form if the colony is preparing to swarm or if they need a new queen. In this video you’ll learn how to cut a queen cell out safely to use it in a different hive.

-When To Add The Next Hive Box. Timing is everything in beekeeping and knowing when to add the next box can keep your bees growing rapidly without swarming.

-Lighting a Smoker & Keeping It Going. Your smoker will become your best friend in the bee yard. A good running smoker will help you keep your bees calms while you inspect your hives.

-When To Add The Honey Super. Queen Excluder or Not? David will show you how to add a honey super to a strong colony. Is it better to “top super” or “bottom super”? Queen excluder or not?

-Bugs and Other Creepy Things Around Your Hive. Wasps, ants, roaches, earwigs, spiders and moths can be around the hive. Is this a concern?

-Beekeeping and Farm Spray. Many beekeepers are surrounded by farm fields that are often sprayed with chemicals. Should you be concerned? Learn in this video what to do if farmers are spraying near your bees.

-How To Keep Your Colony Cool On Very Hot Days. When it tops 100 degrees (f), colonies work hard to stay cool to protect the brood from becoming too hot. In this video, David will show you how to help Keep your bees cool on hot days.

-How To Keep Your Grass Trimmed Around Your Hives. Keeping your grass mowed around your hives. Do bees like mowers? No! The noise of equipment can upset your bees. Learn how to do it.

-Your Bees Will Do The Weird Wash boarding Thing. What Does It Look Like? You need to know what this looks like when bees are doing the wash boarding thing.

-Beekeeping Means Knowing When To Harvest The Honey? How To Be Sure It’s Ready. If you harvest your honey too early, it will ferment in your jars and turn to vinegar. How can you be sure it is ready to harvest?

-How To Remove The Bees From Your Supers To Harvest The Honey. Getting bees out of the super that are ready to harvest can be tricky. Learn the most common methods: Brushing bees, bee escape in an inner cover and using a fume board.

-How To Harvest Honey. Learn how to cut the cappings from honey super frames, place them in the extractor and how to strain your honey.

-How To Install A Package Of Bees. For new beekeepers you need to know the right way to install your new bees.

-How To Correctly Remove A Stinger. There is a right way and a wrong way to remove a stinger. The right way will greatly reduce your reaction. Do it right.

-How To Test For Varroa Mites. Many test for mites using what’s called an alcohol roll, but this kills over 300 bees. An alternative that doesn’t kill bees is a powdered sugar roll. David will show you how to roll your bees in a jar of powdered sugar to test for mites.

-What To Do When Your Hive Isn’t Doing Well. Learn how to handle a hive that just isn’t getting off to a good start.

-How to Use Mite-Away-Quick Strips (Formic Acid) To Control Mites. In this video David will demonstrate how to use MAQ strips to control mites.

-What To Do With Honey Supers After You Harvest The Honey. Wet supers can cause many problems if they are not handled correctly. Learn what to do with your “wet” supers.

-It Is So Critical To Feed Your Bees In The Fall Without Causing Robbing. Colonies rob other colonies in the fall when there is a lack of nectar. Learn how to feed your bees in the fall without causing robbing.

-How To Get Fall Bees Ready For Winter. Leave Screen Bottom Board Open? Wrap? Mouse Guards? Here’s how to close off your bottom board and how to add insulation to your hive as well as mouse guards.

-How to Guard Against Robbing. Let’s examine how to use a robber screen.

-How To Make A Large Communal Feeding Station In The Fall. David demonstrates several goodies to add to fall sugar water to strengthen Bees by feeding out in the opening. This can help prevent robbing in the fall.

-Different Nectar Makes Honey Look and Taste Differently. David’s wife, Sheri, will talk about different types of honey.

-How To Requeen A Colony Late In The Year. It’s important to go into the winter with a new queen. Requeening your hive is best accomplished between July-August.

-Learning How To Read Your Bees. Knowing how to read your bees and understand brood in the frame is so Important.

-Combining Technology With The Hive. Brood minder has several sensors to help you monitor your hive from your cell phone.

-How to Check On Hives In The Winter. Monitoring your hives in the winter is limited, but there are still several things that must be accomplished.

-Join David in The Hive To Learn How To Handle Bees During An Inspection. Join David in the hive and learn the handling techniques of inspecting a hive.

-All Hives Have Mites. Learn The Importance Of Understanding Mites. In this video, David motivates you to take mites seriously.

-How To Mark Your Queen. Learn how to mark your queens.

-Take the Next Step In Beekeeping. Stay Motivated & Don’t Give Up. We will all lose a hive eventually. It’s important to stay motivated and continue on.

-What to Do When A Colony Dies. How To Clean It Up. When a hive dies, it’s important to clean it all up.

-How To Change Feeders In Late Winter, Early Spring. How to change from a winter-bee-kind feeding system to a spring feeder.

-Learning To Evaluate Different Stages Of Bees Brood. Learn to read your brood, eggs, larvae and pupae to determine the health of your colony and your queen.

-What If You Need To Move Your Hive To A New Location? Sometimes you need to change the location of your hives. But you can lose your foragers because they will go back to their old location. Learn some ways to successfully move your hives.

-Learn How To Make Splits. Swarm prevention is best accomplished by making splits. Learn how to make spring splits.

-How To Feed Bees In The Spring. David will show you how to feed your bees in the spring.

-What Opening Should Be Used On Entrance Reducers Throughout The Year
There are several ways to use entrance reducers throughout the year. Learn several ways to take advantage of your reducers.

-Unwrapping An Overwintered Hive. Taking a look at an overwintered colony and what to do.

-Part 1: How To Make A Spring Split. David shows you how to make a split in the spring.

-Part 2: A Continuation of Making Spring Splits. David explains his teaching on spring splits.

-Inspecting And Evaluating a New Split. Learning How To Solve Issues. David will teach you what to do when you have a colony that is no longer building up well.

-How To Inspect Your Hive. You’ll see how to inspect your hive, how to pick up a queen and even observe a queen laying an egg. 


Here’s how it works. Once you purchase this resource, you will be sent an email which contains the titles and descriptions of each video and the links for you to watch in the comfort of your home. You will find the answers you are looking for faster. Remember, once you’ve made your purchase of this resource you can watch the videos as long and as often as you’d like.

BURNS BEES FEEDING SYSTEM

Our awesome feeding systems are already selling faster than we expected in preparation for spring. Last fall we could not keep up with orders and we expect the same to happen this spring. Order your feeder early. It is a great way to feed new packages or overwintered hives coming out of winter. Click here for more info: Burns Bees Feeding System. 

Our New 2020 New Beginners Feb 1 Class Is Full

Sign Up For Our Next One Saturday March 7th



Do You Have An Amazon Alexa or Echo Dot?
Every couple of days David places helpful beekeeping tips on the Amazon Alexa for you to listen to with your daily briefing.  The Amazon  Alexa/Echo was a phenomenal hit this past holiday season. If you were one of the millions of people that purchased one of these during the holiday season you can now listen to a daily  beekeeping tip from certified master  beekeeper David Burns . Just go to your Alexa skills and look for the Beekeeping skill image shown here and add it to your daily flash briefing


Here's our newest hive kit with package of bees! (BEES ARE PICK UP AT OUR CENTER IN FAIRMOUNT IL) One deep hive with 10 frames and foundation, 1 med super with 10 frames and foundations, premium inner cover, metal covered top cover, one entrance reducer, and FREE ENTRANCE FEEDER (although we think you'll want to switch to the 3 Season Burns Bees feeding system). Foundation colors vary.Great for the beginner to add more boxes to, or as a gift for the hobbyist in your life who wants to get started in beekeeping. Click Here To Order Now!

Tuesday, January 14, 2020

Hive Insight Is 2020 10 Tips For 2020

We are David and Sheri Burns from Long Lane Honey Bee
Farms and honeybeesonline.com

What will beekeeping be like in 2020? Many new approaches along with reiterating proven methods will help 2020 be one of the most successful years in beekeeping. 

Today I want to share my TOP 10 TIPS for beekeeping in 2020, what I call, "Hive Insight Is 2020".

1. Closely monitor your mite counts.
    - Test every 30 days.
    - Keep deligent test results and identify trends.
2. Feed your bees more aggressively and include protein.
3. Carefully monitor your queen to ensure an abundance of eggs.
4. Share resources between hives early in the year.
5. Gain additional education from a reliable source. 
6. Leave generous amounts of honey on the hive.
7. Demand excessive growth and build up in populations, especially in the fall to support bees of winter physiology. 
8. Keep diligent notes on each hive.
9. Feed heavily whenever there is not honey supers on.
10. Never throw in the towel.

Although bees can die in the winter from issues beyond our control and even after we did everything perfectly, most winter die offs can be traced back to preventable problems which reduced the overall health of the colony at some earlier point. 

Not everything is our fault. However, to move past a lack of success we do need to ask IF there is something we are doing wrong and IF something needs to be changed. 

Sometimes people bring me their dead hives and ask me to examine it and tell them why their bees died. But I don't need to look at the hive. I just need to ask them 5 basic questions:
1. Show me on paper how you charted your mite test counts through the year. 
2. What did you do to aggressively reduce mites and show me the data where this worked.
3. Did you inspect every two weeks for brood productivity and was it ever weak or failing? If so what did you do immediately to remedy the issue, such as replacing the queen?
4. Did you start feeding your bees 1:1 sugar water and protein immediately after the nectar flow slowed in late summer?
5. Did you provide continuous food via candy board with protein all winter?

No expert can look at a pile of dead bees and have any idea why they died. The underlying cause of a winter die off usually happened months ago and finally took its toll in the winter. By that time, unless exceptional notes were taken all year, the underlying cause is gone.

I'm going to step out on a limb and fall back on my decades of beekeeping experience and workings with thousands of beekeepers from across the country and give my top reason, in my opinion, why bees die in the winter.

Lack of education and skill sets to keep bees alive.

It doesn't matter if a beekeeper has 1,000 hives or has been doing it for 50 years. What matters is if a beekeeper really has the knowledge, education and skill sets needed to read a colony and to quickly identify issues as soon as they happen. As part of my Beekeeping Institute I would divide up the students in small groups and have 3 or 4 groups meticulously inspect the same colonies at different times and write up a full report. I would then have a spokesperson from each group give a report in front of the entire group on each hive. Never was a report the same. In fact, usually they were nowhere close. One would report no eggs spotted, while another group would say they spotted plenty of eggs from the same hive.

It is very difficult for a beekeeper to inspect their colony objectively with an open mind. New beekeepers, especially, will say things like, "I had lots of bees" or "I had lots of honey." Rarely will a beekeeper tell me that their fall larvae lacked adequate royal jelly in the base of cells, or that they had an abundance of nurse bees in the fall to support raising bees of winter physiology.  

We are inundated with beekeeping classes on every corner, but most are teaching basics, old paradigms expecting new results. This is 2020. It's time beekeepers enter into a new decade of beekeeping armed with an advance understanding of keeping bees alive by knowing how to read bees and how to immediately respond at the first sign of weakness or failure in a colony. 

Finally, so many people tell me that their mentor, who started them in beekeeping, really didn't know what they were doing. This is true of every hobby. There are people of various skill levels and sometimes the help and guidance is well intended, but lacking.

So consider by 10 Insights for 2020 above and step up your beekeeping game. 

Jon Zawislak and I will be speaking in St. Louis this Saturday, January 18th. Our presentations will be on: Nutrition through the Seasons, Controlling Pests and Diseases, Spring Management, Queen Rearing, Bee Genetics, and Swarm Biology. Sign up today as this conference is limited to 120 attendees. Click Here.

Gaining Hive Insight For 2020 Is A Must
Do Not Keep Settling For Less

BECOME A BETTER BEEKEEPER IN 2020

EAS Master Beekeepers David Burns & Jon Zawislak

(An Intermediate Course for Those With Experience in Beekeeping)

Three Rivers Beekeepers is offering an Intermediate Beekeeping Course on January 18th (8:30 am to 5:00 pm).  Come and advance your beekeeping skills learning tips and tricks from Master Beekeepers.
WHEN:   Saturday, January 18th (8:30 am to 5:00 pm)
WHERE:  University of Missouri Extension Center at 260 Brown Rd. in St. Peters, MO 63376
HOW:  Register Here
HOW MUCH: $50.00 per person (including Lunch)

Hive Sight Is 2020 Material - Starting February 1st
Via BeeTeam6

In the spring of 2016 I started a mentorship beekeeping coaching program, inviting 200 people. It filled up so quickly. Starting Feb. 1, 2020 I'll be presenting my material known as, "Hive Insight Is 2020", providing you with how to get past your beekeeping limitations and advance into truly understanding how to best manage and succeed in beekeeping in 2020.

For less than $5 a week, beekeeper receive information, videos and access to me personally at any time. 

We have several openings and now would be a great time to join heading into spring and going through my material, "Hive Insight Is 2020".

12 Spots Are Now Open. Click here to Sign Up Now.

Are You Sure You Know What You Are Getting Into?
Sign up today and join EAS Certified Master Beekeeper, David Burns for a top notch beginners class. Our first Beginners class still has openings for February 1st. Presented at our training center located approximately 40 miles east of Champaign, Illinois. Click here today
 
If you prefer online courses taught by David from the comfort of your home, Check out our Online Beekeeping Academy. 

Our 5 Frame Nucs and Packages Are Available Now. Click here...

Newbee Kit


Here's our newest hive kit complete with package of bees. Available Now!

One deep hive body and a honey super with 10 frames and foundation, premium inner cover, metal covered top cover, one entrance reducer, and FREE ENTRANCE FEEDER (although we think you'll want to switch to the 3 Season Burns Bees feeding system). Great for the beginner to add more boxes to, or as a gift for the hobbyist in your life who wants to get started in beekeeping.
 
We suggest you add either our Equipment Kit Pack or to consider a smoker, hive tool, and protective gear. 
 
This kit comes with a 3 lb package of bees.  We can either ship your hive (not the bees) to you now, or you can arrange to pick it up for a discount, then come back in late April to pick up your package of bees.  Many of our customers sign up for a class and pick up all their needed items at the same time.

I'm glad you are keeping bees or thinking about it. Thank you for supporting our family business for all your beekeeping needs.

Sincerely,
David and Sheri Burns
Long Lane Honey Bee Farms
217-427-2678






Wednesday, January 1, 2020

Happy New Years!

Happy New Year to you and your family! We hope that you enjoy a safe and relaxing holiday with friends and loved ones.

2019 was astoundingly awesome for Long Lane Honey Bee Farms. We experienced incredible growth and improvements. As always we are so grateful for the loyal support of our wonderful customers. You push us toward new ideals, improvements and providing the best beekeeping products possible. We can tell you like our packages of bees because we have already sold over 30% of our packages within the first 10 hours of the new year! Thank you. We wouldn't be here without you.

We strive to provide the friends of our business with sound beekeeping knowledge and training that results in stronger colonies and a more enjoyable hobby.

Cheers to another great year! If you have any questions into the New Year, don't hesitate to contact us. We're always happy to help.

Sincerely,

David and Sheri Burns
www.honeybeesonline.com