Speaker 1:          (silence)

Speaker 1:          Hi there. We're here today to talk about fumigating dead hives. Not so nice dealing with dead hives. They're kind of stinky and dirty, but what we've done is, we've scrapped them. We've cleaned off any dead bees. We brought them inside to be able to do the fumigation. We fumigate with acetic acid, and it will kill all the spores that may be present in any defecation that's within the colonies. When bees are cleaning that up, they get sick and then it affects them the following spring. So by decontaminating this equipment, we're protecting our bees for the following year.

Speaker 1:          We use a material called acetic acid. It's 85% acetic acid. It's basically really strong vinegar. That's the smell. And that will kill the disease spores. Here's our jug. That jug's kind of difficult to work with, so what we do is we pour the acetic acid into a bucket very carefully, and then we measure out 500 mills with this measuring cup here.

Speaker 1:          Of course, to handle this materials, we need proper safety gear. So we have a rubber apron to put on. We have long gloves. We fold the edges of the gloves up so nothing can run down the gloves onto our sleeves. And very important item is we use our safety goggles here, and we use a respirator that you'll see coming right up.

Speaker 1:          The acid goes into nine-inch aluminum pie plates. We don't wanna reuse them for anything else after this, so they're a disposable item. And that gives this acid a fair bit of surface for evaporative purposes. We heat the room to 30 degrees with a couple of these space heaters, so that the evaporation happens fairly rapidly. Takes about a week for this evaporation to occur and the combs to be decontaminated.

Speaker 1:          So we're gonna move inside now and show you how it's done inside the fumigation room.

Speaker 1:          Now we're in our fumigation room. Just a small room that we're able to seal up really well, so that the fumes don't get out of the room. We heat that room up to 30 degrees using these space heaters. It's really important that the heaters aren't pointing directly at a stack of the brood chambers, because that'll melt the comb and the honey'll run all over the floor. So point them into the spaces in between the brood chambers.

Speaker 1:          We've got the stacks set up here. There's five boxes piled up. Then on top of that is an empty box. You can see there. And then we have our tin pie plate in here, our nine-inch aluminum pie plate. So that's where we're gonna pour the acid. And it's sitting right on top of the brood frames here. So have that set up like so. As soon as that acid is in, we put an inner cover on here, one that's sealed up. There's no gaps around the edges there. And that'll retain the vapor, the acetic acid vapor, which is heavier than air so it'll drop down through and fumigate the comb.

Speaker 1:          It's really important that you read the material safety data sheets that come with the acetic acid. It'll give you an indication of what kind of respirator you need to wear. What kind of equipment you need to be wearing. And any kind of first aid response. It's dangerous material to handle so you need to be well prepared for that.

Speaker 1:          So we'll get our gear on. And then we'll pour the acid into the bucket. Getting our acid out here. Pouring it into the bucket. Setting it down carefully. Getting our measuring cup out and measuring out 500 mills. There, we've got 500 mills there. Pouring it in. And covering it up. Then so on through the rest of the stacks that we're dealing with. Once we're done, we come out of the room. And we close it up and post a warning sign.