Is that comb in the lid?
That's the exact plan I have printed to build, except I'm going to use some reclaimed 2x12 from a barn.

I'm planning to use regular deep brood box frames, but I'm kicking around the starter strips for the "bee's side" of the hive to save some money

Do you like this type of hive so far?

Yea, other hive has 2 brood boxes and a flow hive super on top that had an A frame top. I took it off today permanently and will have to crush and filter it all. Too much work! I am used to the flow hives which are honey on tap. :clap: We are surrounded by alfalfa fields as the flow is so fast I need to harvest once a month.

I love inspecting the horizontal hive, it's addictive. I cant say how much production though since its a new hive. I am getting read to take frames out of my overpopulated hive and add to it.

LOVE IT SO FAR!

I built my top bar hive this weekend. Not sure why but it took me quite a bit longer than I figured it would, but I know if I did another one it would go faster now that I've done one.

I had a swarm that had been in a trap for a couple of weeks that I relocated to it saturday night. I need to get some thin strips or burlap to put over top of the frames but so far I think it's going to be nice. At the rate these bees were building comb on day 1 I'm not sure how long it will be before I have to remove honey frames.


I did decide to put flashing on the top to keep water out. I like how it turned out, I'm interested to see how it compares for production.

Looks good! Yea your gonna wanna keep them in the frames or they will fill your lid with burr comb imho. Did you make a divider?

Do these horizontal hives make harvesting the honey easier or is it better for the bees? Wondering what the advantages are vs. standard hives.

That looks amazing!! How many frames will it hold?
All you guys with your top bar hives, those look easier to work than these giant stacks I've got going. I'm gonna have to rethink my strategy here in a little while.

I did make a divider to keep the hive area appropriate in size and so that I could split the box and use it for splitting hives or something.

I don't have an inner cover yet, but I will. Not sure if I'm going to run some strips through the table saw or just use burlap or something. I'm open to suggestions on that for sure.

I started with the 5 frames from the trap and added I think 10 more.


I did try something new...I've had trouble getting them to build on the black plastic frames....so I melted a couple of pounds of bees wax and had the kids paint that on them with a brush to see if it would help, and I'm predicting it will.

KS....
I'm doing it because it's a different way...just wanted to try it.
The advantage is there aren't boxes to lift or remove to be able to inspect the hive. You can pretty easily determine where the brood(babies) are located and just pull the frames you need to for inspection with less disturbance to the colony. If they fill it up, I'll pull the honey frames and place new ones in their place... Another benefit of this style is supposed to be the thickness of the wood used to build the box makes it easier to overwinter in colder climates.

I'm not positive, but just eyeballing it I'd guess it will hold 35 frames? 35 deeps.I was tinkering already with the idea of a smaller box to place on top of this one for honey supers....we'll see.

It's not that hard to make one but as usual I made it tougher than it needed to be. First tried to use reclaimed barn lumber but my 2x12ish boards kept splitting. Honestly I think as long as the inside dimension is right for your frames you could build these however you wanted to do them.

I bought a piano hinge for the lid but decided against that for now.

I can walk over to my horizontal hive with nothing but shorts on and inspect the whole hive in 10 minutes.... every frame... see every bee... no lifting and the bees could care less.

I reccomend getting "keeping bees with a smile" same website. I wish I only had horizontal hives now

According to the book you want one entrance open, closest to your brood frames, with the divider one one end and honey frames on the other end. Bees will brood closest to the opening and store honey farthest from the opening.

end entrance ( honey on one end)

end-honey frame-honey frame-honey frame-honey frame-brood frame-brood frame-brood frame-entrance-brood frame-divider as the hive expands you move the divider and add frames always keeping the opening on the brood end away from the honey.

OR middle entrance (honey on both ends_

end-honey frame-honey frame-honey frame-honey frame-brood frame-brood frame-brood frame-entrance-brood frame-brood frame-brood frame-honey frame-honey frame-honey frame- divider as the hive expands you move the divider and add frames always keeping the opening in the middle near the brood away from the honey on both ends.

I've been thinking I wanted to slow down, but every time I say it out loud I get a call.

Last night a friend called who is tearing down a house as a donation for a local community, and it's got a large hive. He's done favors for me any time I've needed it, and he's asking me to get the bees so they don't sting his crew....At least it's a second story window.

I've also still got a tree I agreed to trap out. I've been doing a little research of forced absconding with smoke and bee repellent, and then vacuum as they come out and try to get the queen? Advantage....get it over with in first trip. Disadvantage....hive has been in tree for 3 weeks, not sure they'll leave...not sure it will work....but I'm probably going to try that instead of a trap out. Thoughts? The tree has 1, fist sized entrance and the trap-out wouldn't be terrible to do.

That just gave me an idea for a tee shirt for bee nerds.....TrapOut.....

I also saw something else that intrigued me for a way to have bees build comb into mason jars(of which I have a ton of old ones)....

https://www.iseeidoimake.com/how-to-...n-jar-beehive/

That mason jar honeycomb is a great idea!

I've had to use my horizontal hive a couple of times to rob frames/brood for various reasons. That said, I've been in it twice and found supercedure and swarm cells(queen cells that look like peanuts that indicate queen is being replaced, or they're planning to swarm). There is plenty of room and I'm not sure why that's happening.

The first time I plucked out the queen cells, and the last time I had decided to use them as a backup plan. I had a tree trap out the past month and I decided it was time to bring them home. When I did, it hadn't completely worked, they hadn't made a queen and the queen wasn't in there. I went back into the horizontal hive to pull the frame with the queen cells, and 3 days later they were all gone/chewed away.....and the bees were mean as hell. It was hot and evening, but they were mean and I got chewed up pretty good again, through my gloves and suit and some got up my pants let and back of my jacket.

I'm going to pull another swarm trap that has bees in it, and will merge it with the trap-out hive I brought home, hoping that queen will take over the colony.

It's been too hot for the removal a couple of posts above, but I'm still going to do it and then I'm not planning to do much more than manage hives with added boxes until time for harvest.

I've worked my ass off this year. I hope it's worth it at harvest.

Hopefully the bees have been working as hard you have.

My buddy that has hives on my land lost a queen in one of the hives. He tried to combine bees with another hive. Said he is hoping to harvest 80 pounds of honey from that queenless hive. They were just making honey, no brood.

I still haven't managed to get the bees removed from the above house.....but if weather cooperates will probably try to do it this weekend. It's too late in the year, but I don't have a queen in my horizontal hive. We'll see.

I'm a couple of weeks from honey harvest. Overall I'm up to 16-17 hives this year, and they're all producing enough that they should be ok this winter, but I'm not sure what to expect on production. We'll know in a couple of weeks.

I've had a couple of new keepers I've been helping and I think one of them and a high school aged daughter of a friend who is interested are going to come down when I pull boxes for the harvest. If you want to know if it's for you....pulling honey supers in the late summer, or switching the deeps around in the spring will let you know if bee keeping is for you.

How did you all come out this year?

I pulled my honey supers last weekend. They were robbing a hive when I got down to the yard...and when I started pulling boxes it turned into a frenzy like which I've never seen. I could t keep them out of the boxes for anything. Honey bandit, and I'd blow them out with a leaf blower and for every bee I blew out, I swear 20 zipped in. It was a shit show. They weren't aggressive to me, but my God they were wild.

I processed today and as usual I'm not thrilled with the volume given the amount of work I put into it this year. I'm plus 12/13 new hives more than I had last year, but didn't make much honey off of them. I'll bottle tomorrow probably and start bringing in some money. I spent enou on equipment this year that it will probably be a loss or a wash on the year.

I worked my ass off, took a beating....hopefully they make it to spring.

I will be fogging for verroa mites soon now that temp is coming down, and I'll start feeding sugar water soon.

I did have a new bee keeper and a high school friend brother th his young son who is obsessed with honey bees down to watch, so that was fun. It's just a lot of work.

If you're buying local honey, which you should....be happy to pay more than you do at the store. They've earned it.

Ok.

I did verroa treatments in October, and had lost 2 hives. I've processed and bottled and now am in the selling/cost recovery phase of the operation.

Yesterday it was warm, so I went down to put the winter patties on the hives. For those that don't know, winter patties are a playdough texture mixture of sugar, some bee health supplements and essential oils. It provides carobydrates and some antibiotic health for the colony during the winter. They don't contain protein/pollen because that will stimulate egg laying and you don't want that due to the impact on food resources. If the bee ball works eats its way to the top of the hive, the winter patty sitting on top gives them some food to get them by for a while.

So, during this process yesterday I found 2 more dead outs and one more that doesn't look good. That's a total of 4 dead, one that probably will be going INTO winter....not good.

I did rob the comb from the dead outs and used them to backfill some of the hives that had less resources.

I'm a little baffled by what happened, but I know several other bee keepers who are losing bees this fall. One lost 17 of his 45 already. He's blaming verroa on his.

i did notice a design flaw in my horizontal hive...There just isn't enough room between the frames and the lid. I'll be building a spacer of maybe 3-4" to raise that so I have room for insulation next year.

Anway, I'm about done for the winter, with maybe a little wrapping but I haven't decided on what I'm doing about that this year. I'm now selling honey in 3 stores so that helps moving it easier. If I can keep these(most of them) alive, it shouldn't be hard to backfill my losses as I've learned alot about trapping bees this year and am confident I'll be able to catch what I need in the spring.

Hope you all had a good year.

Moths destroyed 2 of the 4 hives on my land. I haven't seen activity in the strongest hive from last season, so that could be 3/4 hives gone.

I hate to hear about the losses but its good you all keep plugging away. It's so interesting to read this stuff.

You can lay a lot if layers of newspaper in not much top space in your horizontal. You can always put a layer of cardboard or stryrofoam on the roof the wrap it. It’s also a good idea to crumple up newspaper and pack the empty scape in your horizontal in the winter. Works great and still allows a little ventilation. I lost a hive that went queenless and then they started laying drones. Weird looking inspection.

You can lay a lot if layers of newspaper in not much space in your horizontal. It’s also a good idea to crumple up newspaper and pack the empty scape in your horizontal in the winter. Works great and still allows a little ventilation. I lost a hive that went queenless and then they started laying drones. Weird looking inspection.

That's good advice. I've got newspaper and also some .25" foam board that would also word well. I usually use that for hive wraps but I'm leaning towards not wrapping the, this year. Have a good wind block or north and west which should stop most of the wind.

Today is finally warm after a brutal stretch of winter. I just got back from a long lunch where I opened, counted the living and fed bees to get them through the rest of the winter. The majority of bees will die in March of starvation.....which is great news considering.....

I'm now down 11 hives since November. I have Six(6) living hives out of 17.

I can't really say what got them. I guess I'll assume it was mites(which I tried to treat in the fall) or I should have wrapped them and maybe condensation got them during the cold snap.

I can't tell you how frustrating it is to spend all that time doing cutouts, trapping, and tending to have so many just die. The most frustrating loss is the hive that my son got stung so many times during the cutout.

I'll have a lot of cleanup to do in a few weeks to save the honey and frames from bugs, and then I guess I'll regroup, build some more traps and go get busy in early spring.

THAT is why you should pay more for local honey.....

My buddy lost 7 out of his 8 hives this winter, all 4 on my land. He is just devastated. I know he said he was going to bomb all the hives and frames. That is a bunch of money he lost this winter.

I'll go pull them all in early spring before bugs are out(the dead hives) and clean them up, get rid of crappy frames, try to save frames of good comb and honey and then get busy trapping. I feel more confident that I know how to catch swarms now.

Cutouts are too much work, I'm not sure how many of them I'll do this year....and I'm pondering buying a couple of packages from a lady that is known for having strong, hearty bees. I just hate buying them.


I know a lot of people who have quit bee keeping losing less hives than your buddy. It's very discouraging.

I'm not done. I'll just try some different things this year.

On the upside, my horizontal hive had me nervous in the fall but it's roaring right now.

Serious question - why are bees such pussies?

I'm not sure, but each bee is just a part of that organism that is the hive.

Other than food supply, robbing competing hives, insecticides, weather extremes, mites, parasites, moisture, animals....They don't really have much working against them.

I wish I knew more. I will know more at the end of this year than I do now.

Did your horizontal hive make it. I have been converting Langstroth boxes into traps works pretty good. I have started bee hunting before setting traps. It’s not hard if you do it the easy way. The only drawback is landowner permission.

My horizontal hive had me nervous going into winter, but it looked good yesterday. I'll add another winter patty to it this weekend but overall it seems good so far.

My design has an issue that I'll try to resolve this spring. The lid sits down too tight/close to the layer of boards I put on top of the frames. There isn't really room to feed or insulate.

My thought is to add a 2-3" spacer on top this spring. If I build another one, I'll make the hinged lid this time just to make it easier.

2021 update

This was a rough year starting with the loss of all but 4 of my hives this spring.

I regrouped, hustled and worked to rebuild my yard. I set out swarm traps, I did 2 trap-outs of trees and did a couple of cut-outs from houses. I also had an opportunity to help out an esteemed planet member with a removal in a house.

At harvest time, I was back to 16 hives, i've lost a couple and added a couple back. Right now I've got 16 going into winter.

This year I started sending more stories of bee adventures with snap and made a business page where i"m doing live streams and sharing some stories.

A lot of hours. A lot of sweat. A lot of stings.....but I didn't end up with a lot of honey as a reward for the work that I did. The weather just wasn't good for honey production this year. All of the guys I used to do bees with are out or getting out, so I'm the last one standing.

I had 2 events where I took significant numbers of stings, the last being during a fall mite treatment a month or so ago. They were so damn angry that day, they were getting me through my pants, were getting up my jacket and into my veil. Probably 25 hits that day and I was pretty annoyed by the time I was done.

because of the losses, I've spent more time and effort on mite treatment. I did 2 oxalic acid vapor treatments, and then put apaviar strips in last week. I made new tops for inner feeders and all of my weaker hives(not having enough honey to get through winter) are getting 2:1 sugar water about once per week. I'll add some sugar to the top of all of the hives as we get close to winter.

In other developments, I purchased a 12x24' building that I"m using for a honey house/man cave. It's not done yet, but half is being used for processing honey...the other half will soon have internet, a tv, a desk, donkey kong and other essentials.

I was approached by a grocery store about selling my honey and I've had it in one store for a week and it's going very well.

This coming year I pretty much have to decide what I'm going to be. I'm either going to have to spend more money on equipment and grow some, because the people who have been helping me are selling their stuff.....or downsize a little ,and spend those hours of summer honey bee catching at the lake with my kids or something.

My other recent record is also in tact. For the 3rd year in a row, I mowed into ground bees within a couple hundred yards of my honey bees. This time with a brush chopper and I got beat up on the hands by yellow jackets. I hate those damn things. I'd like to kill all of them on the planet.

Being a bee keeper is a lot like being a Chiefs fan...

Today was unseasonably warm, so I snuck off to do quick winter hive checks. I've got 5 dead so far and it's not even really the killing season for another month.

That said, changes are coming. Because I'm a glutton for punishment, I put in a new building for processing honey and bottling and have been working on that at night. I also am finalizing a deal to buy out another producer who has 4x my total sales. Might as well dig until I get to china at this point.

I am going to have some new products though. This year I'm going to start making creamed honey(3-4 flavors) and I'm going to have wax equipment for candle making and chap stick and stuff like that from bees wax.

Hope the rest of you have decent winter survival and mine doesn't get too much worse. I'm going to need to make a lot more honey. This season I think I'll need to be closer to 30 hives, which is a lot of damn work if I'm going to try to keep wild catching them instead of buying.

Dig until China. ROFL

Good luck my man if you put some of the hives in a lean to or something to keep the wind off would that help?

I just enjoy reading this thread wishing you good luck.

Wind isn’t my issue as I’ve got a tree line north and west sides of the hives. I did extra varroa treatment, fed sugar water and put winter Pattie’s and dry sugar on. I think it’s coming down to swarms I caught late not having enough time to build up honey or they were weakened by disease or mites…..or I’m as good at bee keeping as the chiefs are at closing out games to go to the big one.

It’s something everyone fights. I talked to a big producer that had 1750 dead this fall out of 4000…before winter. They’re able to recover easier with more to split in spring.

I’ll keep working on it and someday I’ll know what I’m doing.

It's about that time.

I did end up buying out another producer that I'd been doing some bee stuff with since the beginning. The downside is I had/have a bunch of equipment to move, and a week after i did the deal something happened and I had an unexpected operation and was in sweat pants for a month. Couldn't do anything. I hired some HS guys to help pick things up and put things down and they've done a great job helping me.

In the meantime, in addition to their equipment, I got their client list and the 2nd week in, I had some big orders come in and I wasn't prepared. I had to rely on the other people in my house to bottle a bunch of honey and they knocked it out of the park. I also was in the middle of rebranding, and have new logo, labels, cards and am working on some swag(hats and shirts). The hobby is turning into a job pretty quickly. The good news is, I've been hustling this month on the phone and I've added several stores, some pretty decent sized orders.

I've had good survival this spring and have been feeding some sugar, and lately some old honey and pollen. I want the bees to fire up a little early so I can do some splits of hives. My goal this year will be to more than double my hives and have a second bee yard. I need to make a lot more honey now, and there is only 1 way to do that.

I'll try to share more pics of swarm catches, and if I can figure out how to share videos I'll do some more of that too.

If you're someone I trust and are interested, message me and I'll share a fb link you can follow to watch me get stung.

Last week on my day off I killed 12 wasps with my blowtorch cane device while smoking cigars and drinking coffee on my front porch.

Little Bastards were everywhere ! :#

2022 is off to a booming start.

I'll start by saying there are a lot of moving pieces this year in honey. Canada suffered heavy honey bee losses, and Ukraine is one of the top honey exporters. I know a guy who keeps 4,000 hives and lost 1,700 of those last November alone. That's all leading to a pending honey shortage...and skyrocketing prices. That's good if you have honey on hand I suppose.

Sunday was finally nice enough weather(but windy) and I was home and healthy enough to get into my hives. I still have 14 alive, with 2 that area either weak in numbers or appear to have a queen issue. I inspected all of the hives, found quite a few of my queens and then reversed/flipped the boxes. Typically, the bottom box is where the bees live and queen lays eggs and the 2nd box is supposed to be full of honey to survive the winter. Well, in the spring, the top box should be cleared of honey for the most part and by switching it to the bottom, it gives the queen a lot more room to lay eggs, thereby growing the hive number quicker.

I made it through 12 and everything was fine. I did find one that had a large field mouse that had done some serious damage and I'll have to supplement that one with frames of babies from a strong hive to get it back, which I did. It was getting a little later and I opened the last 2 hives and encountered some unfriendlies. Something set them off and I got climbed on pretty good. I had let my smoker go out, which was a mistake but once they started stinging the mask, I could smell bananas and that's trouble. For some reason they got after my jeans. When the dust settled, I probably had 100 stingers in the back of my jeans, the ass of my pants and crotch. Some stingers do get through pants and I had a number of welts on my ass and hamstrings. It wasn't too bad, just itchy for the most part. Glad it was done.

Yesterday, I had a vist from a local middle school FFA chapter. I've acquired about a dozen bee suits. We had a nice tour and saw a lot of native pollinators in the same pear tree honey bees were working. I showed them equipment for raising, feeding, working and processing. Then I suited them up in groups and took them to the hives and dug into them and let the kids see bees, brood and the resources the bees collect. We did find some queen cells during the inspection....It must not have sucked too bad, because I had the attention of 25 middle school kids for 2hrs and they didn't want to leave.

After they left, I went back down, pulled some frames of bees from strong hives, took the frame with the queen cells and did 2 splits(creating new hives from existing) and moved them to my new(2nd) bee yard.

My goal this year is to have a min of 30 hives by the 4th of July. We'll see but that's my goal.

I'll keep this discussion going if there is still interest, or I'll be happy to just do my own thing.

I like to see updates Iowa. I don't have any interest in doing any of it myself, but like reading about it. :thumb:

So I'm officially a bee keeper. I have two hives and will be getting bees from a hive split this weekend. A beekeeper buddy brought the hives out to my place. He looked around and found a spot in the back pasture that he thought would be fantastic. Fingers are crossed. I'm totally new to this.

Went into winter with two. Came into Spring with two.

I do boring beekeeping. I take honey once a year, if I need it, and if they can spare it.

I’ll prolly catch a few swarms and get a few calls about swarms in “undesirable locations”


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I’m down. I don’t have much to contribute but I enjoy reading it.

Me three!

Do you still have your horizontal hive. Hopefully the wind will die enough that I can check bees, it's been awful this spring, even for western Kansas. I need to get some traps set out.

Me 4. I find it really interesting. I don't have the space or, to be honest, the patience to keep them, but my partner worked in horticulture and has fully convinced me of how amazing bees are. Please keep it coming

I'm interested in it as well. A buddy has talked about doing it a few times and has the place for it, but not sure if he ever will.

I do still have the horizontal. My bees have done very well in there, but i haven't really used it for honey production. There are a TON of bees in it, and while I saw the queen yesterday when I was robbing a couple of frames of bees for a split, there isn't a ton of brood. I saw quite a few queen cups, so I'm thinking that queen needs to go. This was the hive that was mean sunday, which goes against what they're supposed to be. I'm assuming it's a queen issue that has them grouchy.

I wish my design was a little different. I think I'd much prefer if I had the room to just use inside covers(normal Lang style) and had taken the time to hinge the lid.

Other than that, I like it and plan to use it for resources.

There is a lady that has bred a great line of local bee in the Des Moines area and she's selling queen cups. I'm thinking about picking up 3-4 of them to bring those genetics to my yard, and then splitting the bees in the horizontal into 2 splits and re-queening what's left.


I don't know if I'm going to do it this year, but I've been thinking about making a hive in one of those large, clear water cooler jugs, and putting that inside my honey shed with a PVC exit tube so I can have an observation hive. I think that would be fun.

Yes a hinge would def be needed to make it handy. I don’t use covers at all I use pieces of burlap about 6 frames wide. When I want to check them I just smoke a bit and peel back the burlap as I go. I leave burlap over the frames I am not checking right then. Love it. Super easy on me and the bees. Yes it makes sense a hive that is not queen right would be defensive. I don’t wear a suit anymore but have found I don’t really have to pull frames to check them in the horizontal just slide them over.

Bonus bees.

I dropped a kid off at practice and picked up another and had an hour and a half for the next shuffle. It’s supposed to rain for a couple of days so I decided to go grab some equipment.

The people I bought out had some hives in a field they presumed were all dead. When I got there, one was busting at the seems with bees. Change of plans. I threw a ratchet strap around it and duct taped the entrance shut. It was about all I could do being 3 boxes deep and full…but I got it loaded into the truck and moved it to the new apiary I started yesterday.

I’ll do mite treatment with oaxcillic acid vapor soon and plan to try to split this one into 2-3 depending what I find. A nice surprise. With splits and these, I’m up to 18 and we aren’t to swarm season for a couple of weeks.

very cool, love to hear the updates. Would like to mess with them but not sure I have the motivation. How much honey do you get from a hive? And how long does it take to harvest the process the honey? Just curious. Thanks for the share!!

"how much honey"

Well, if you've read this thread....more than once I've been singing the theme from Lowered Expectations.

I've ready a wide variety of numbers on the average, but "the average" hive should produce 30-60lbs of honey per year, and some COULD produce 100#. The issue is there are a ton of variables. Is it a first year package hive(you bought 2# or 3# of bees in a box with a queen and you put them into a hive with no or limited comb)...you're not likely getting much honey from that hive in year one. It's all about getting them into year 2. If it's a swarm, did you get them in May or early June? If so, and you've got some existing frames of comb, they'll go gangbusters building those first 2 boxes and maybe you'll get some honey. Do you have a strong, robust queen and hard working bees in a hive, or are they lazy? Did your queen die or get replaced during the season? Did you work your hives and keep them from swarming, or did half of the bees leave your most active hives? Is it a drought year? Is it a flood year? Do you have verroa mites?

There are just a ton of variables. I guess if I had a goal for my hives, I'd like to see 40-50#/hive average. that would be great for me.


Harvesting. I've posted a couple of times about that with pics. The time it takes I guess depends on how many hives you have, what equipment you have and how you're processing. Grove would have a different answer than I would, because from what I understand he takes full combs, crushes/smashes them and drains honey off into jars.

I've done extraction a couple of ways. I've used someone's 20 frame extractor(which I now own and is 12' from me in my office right now) and last year I used a hand crank 3 frame extractor which took a long time and a lot of small batches. I'm trying to extract the honey, and preserve the frames of comb so they'll be easy for the bees to clean up and repair and fill back with honey the next year. It takes about 8#/honey energy for a colony to produce 1# of wax to build come...so there is great value in honey production next year, by preserving this year's comb.

Basic process for me:
1. use fume board with honey bandit on hive
2. Remove honey supers, and blow as many bees as possible out with leaf blower
3. remove individual honey frames, decap(remove wax coating from honey frames)
4. Put frames of honey into extractor, spin until most honey is out, flip, repeat
5. pour raw honey through metal screen to remove bulk wax and bee legs etc
6. bucket honey
7. store and bottle

If I had to put a time on it, I'd say just processing honey(not bottling) would maybe take 45min-1hr per hive with my setup. So, If I end up with my target of 30 hives, I think it will take me 2 days to get the honey extracted. If I had to guess how much time I have in them in a year? With swarm catches, feeding, inspections, adding supers etc...I'd guess I would easily have 10hrs/hive in them.

I also do comb honey. That's a different process. For those frames, i pull the boxes the same way, remove invididual frames of capped honey, put them into a freezer for at least 48hrs. that makes sure any tiny creepy crawlees are dead. Then I remove those, thaw them, hand cut with a tool into 4"x4" squares and package.

In short, it's all time intensive. All of it. Even if there isn't "work" to do, you still need to check them.....and you're going to WANT to just got watch them do their thing. It's captivating and relaxing to just watch. Great stress reliever, when it's not stressful.


I wish I had taken a pic the other day when I visited a place with 4000 hives. They had them grouped in 4 per pallet in a parking lot with 4 guys going through and feeding them before they place them. They'd just gotten them back from pollenating almonds in california and were getting them ready for honey production. Ironically, the honey produces from almonds is gross. The big advantage for the bee keeper is they come back from a warm climate full of bees and brood and ready for splits when they need a lot of new hives to replace deadouts.

This will piss you off.

Divide $48,000 by about $170 and that will tell you how many hives of bees those idiots killed. I’m sure the responsible people didn’t understand, but damn.

I save EVERY honey bee that falls into our pool when I'm out there.

I can't imagine the loss of bee life in my pool though. :(

They just don't understand that they can't swim!!!

We leave a chunk of floating wood in all of our tanks. There are certain times of the year you'd find dozens of dead bees a day without them floating in there. They also keep you from finding the occasional dead bird and squirrel. They're dumber than bees when is comes to water.

I honestly don't know what you could put in your pool, but I bet there's a product available made to mimic the floating chunk of wood. If there isn't, some bee keeper needs to jump on that marketing campaign with some bleeding bee heart mantra for a low low price of $29.99.

Dumb ****s for sure.

Curiosity got me and google disappointed me. It appears bees are often a planned annual crop in Alaska. That's kind of ****ed up as well. I guess I assumed they collected hives and stored for winter.

Interesting thread! My grandfather was into beekeeping big time back when I was a kid. I’ve pretty much done it all with him. Even had a couple of my own hives. Between him and his partner they had right at 500 hives in around Columbia Missouri. Good times.

Out here in western Ok where it’s dry and plants to pollinate are spread out bee keepers have hives on trailers so they can be moved closer to plants periodically through the season. I found that interesting. Thought maybe some here would too.

Dead bees and geckos in the pool. First years in this house and never a dead gecko. Past few years I'm finding a handful of dead geckos each year too. Makes me sad.

I'd do anything to save the bees too.

Easy solution.

Fill your pool in with concrete. :D

But if you do, I'd remove the diving board just for safety purposes.

There are enough in a colony that you shouldn’t feel too bad about a few drowned bees. I have them drown in the buckets I leave out to clean up the honey after I bottle, and it buckets outside that have water in them.

The floating wood or 2x4 chunk in the tank or the pool is a good idea.

My neighbor owns a horse farm and is a beekeeper. Bees everywhere on my property. Very cool.

amazed that a bee would land on wood instead of water. Not doubting you, but amazed.

I'm going to try something new. My kid did some time-lapse videos of different processes over the weekend and I made a rumble to try to share some. It might take a bit to figure out how it works to embed, but if you want, I'll share some bee videos.

If someone knows how to embed from rumble I could use a pointer.

https://rumble.com/v144hlk-working-on-swarm-traps.html

https://rumble.com/v144ht5-hanging-a-swarm-trap.html

https://rumble.com/v144ig7-looking-t...ve-splits.html

BTW Iowa did check that out. Cool stuff! :thumb:

If you guys like it, I'll get some videos when I'm catching swarms and doing other things that might be of interest. I'd have done it before but I didn't want to do youtube to host the vids.

I like it, but it may need some Benny Hill music.

I have some videos my kid made that has them clipped together and music, but those clips have a tag on them that leads to my kid and I can't do that here.

I've got some other non-time-lapse videos of inspections where i explain things. I'll upload and share some of those sometime....but I'm hoping to get some swarms caught first!

I assume he means me.

I'll describe my process, but here's several videos, one of which is the harvesting process after I've taken a box from them.

https://www.icloud.com/sharedalbum/#B0U53qWtHWrV5T

He's correct, I take full boxes, because I don't run frames. There's a lot I don't do, but I don't begrudge anyone keeping bees however they want.

So for the Warré hive style that I run, you add a box to the BOTTOM of the stack in the spring, and you take a box off the TOP of the stack in the fall or whenever you decide to harvest. (Some guys harvest in mid summer or even spring.)

The theory is that in a natural cavity, the bees are observed to start at the top, and build comb downwards. This hive style mimics an "endless" tree cavity.

The downside is that you regularly get honeycomb that at one point contained brood. Every time a cell is used for rearing brood, the pupae leaves a papery husk when it hatches as an adult. Nobody likes the taste of husk, so having former brood comb holding honey is a negative for some people, and you certainly can't make cut comb out of it.

Another downside is that it takes a lot of bee energy (read: honey) to make wax, so forcing a colony to make their own honeycomb could be considered energy that is wasted instead of letting them not spend that energy (because you provide them with either already drawn comb or plastic comb)

The upside of this system is that I believe bees are made to make wax, and they're quite good at it. So letting them build their own comb in some ways lets them fully be themselves.

Another upside is that the comb gets renewed frequently. The queen is often laying in cells of freshly created comb, or just one year old. It's a known thing that toxins build up in the wax, and that wax which is re-used year after year contains more toxins than freshly built wax.

Another upside is that I don't generally do squat to my bees. The MO Conservation has guidelines as far as "every 10 days do X", and "every 30 days do Y", and for some folks that's part of the fun, but for me, NOT doing those things is definitely part of the fun.

I pay em a quick visit in the spring to add a box, and a quick visit in the Fall to take a box. The rest of the time I just enjoy em, look in the windows or sit and watch the entrance.

They work for me, so I get to treat em kindly...by leaving them alone. Other people get to treat theirs kindly....by treating them for pests or cutting out queen cells or whatever they want.

I don't use fume boards, but I've often used a thin box with a bee escape in it. This lets the bees which are in the honey box (that I'm about to take) make their way down to the rest of the bees, but doesn't let them come back up. A one way door so to speak.

So I leave this bee escape in-between the topmost box and the rest of the boxes for 24hours before I take the top box off.

If I don't use that method, I'll just take the top box off, put it on a solid surface (so no bees go out the bottom) and then place a bee escape on top. This escape uses some window screen rolled into a cone. The bees come out of the top of the honey box, crawl up the cone, then fly out and back to the hive.

There's a video of that at the same link.

Lots of ways to skin these cats, and I love it that so many of you are keeping or thinking about keeping bees.

Good stuff groves.

I worked through all of my hives today. Everything looked good other than I definitely need queens in 2 of my splits. I added honey supers to 4 hives, so I’m officially banking honey for 2022.

I stole the idea from a guy, but today I screwed cattle ear tags to each of my hives. Now they’ve got a number and a note of where each one came from….a split from hive 7, a swarm from 2021. It should be helpful in tracking what’s going on.

I did get a call for a swarm today. It was 20 miles away and 60’ up a maple tree. I was going to hang a swarm trap nearby but they bolted before I got there. I do have traps out and saw scout bees on 2 of those today. Won’t be long.

Going good for me so far. The best news is I ordered some bad ass ball caps with my logo on leather patches. They were delivered yesterday and they are cool.

Do you use any software? If I ever decide to have more hives than just a few I could see some of these apps being helpful. They let you record inspections results quick and easy and you can scan a QR code or whatever on each hive.

No swarms here yet or scout bees.

I’ve never done any cutouts. I stick to swarm captures and bait hives.


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I can’t say I’m really “using” it yet but I downloaded and started entering info in an app called Apiarist beekeeping assistant. I’ve had a mentor recommend one called hive bloom.

I probably won’t track everything but do want to track sources, mother colonies, hive health, temperament and ,Anne queen age when i know and then I’d like to track production….and then build in the future from the producers.

We will see.

I’m much more interested in swarm catches and traps than cutouts at this point. No more free cutouts.

I got my first swarm yesterday and took a video. It’s 10 min but I’ll link a shorter version also. I’m still trying to figure out how to embed video from an iPad…if you know how to do it help me do it.

This makes 19 hives if you’re tracking me.
Full version
https://rumble.com/v16e7dg-first-swa...e-of-2022.html

Shorter version
https://rumble.com/v16g2hk-honey-bee...ture-2022.html

3 minutes of bees for 7 minutes of sawing :)

Just kidding, thanks for posting that, we kept bees when I was younger but I don't have the space for them now.

The hard part is nicely sawing through that green limb without the saw catching and shaking them all onto the ground. I was annoyed by how long it took. I probably should have had a kid pull back the limbs under it and just shook them into the box….that’s more fun anyway.

The air bomber method. Nice. Like that old timey birthday game where you drop the clothes pin from your chin trying to land it in a bottle.


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Yesterday I did a little maintenance around my hive areas, weed eating etc.

I've got a swarm living in one of my traps and I'll plan to move them tomorrow and get a trap right back up in that spot. So far, using a hunting ladder stand has been my most effective location for swarm traps. 10-12' up seems to be the sweet spot for my success, though I have caught them in lower tree forks etc.

One of my splits is defnitely queenless and I think 2 are probably not going to make it without significant intervention. Not sure what I'm going to do, but I'll probably just let them go at this point and focus on replacing them with swarms.

I'm not sure if it's the weather or something else, but in general I've got more aggressive bees this year. 2 hives I'd call mean, but even on a nice day yesterday at my second yard I had bees bouncing off of my facemask the entire time I was there. I'm sure some would tell me to do a mite check and see if that's why they're grumpy, or if I need to kill and replace a couple of queens. Unfortunately, I haven't found many queen cells and there haven't been any available to buy in a reasonable drive.

That said, white clover is blooming and I've started adding the honey supers(boxes for collecting honey that I keep). I've got a couple of boxes put together with comb foundation and I'll add those this weekend.


I did make a new tool to help capture swarms that are clustered higher locations. I bought a 23' telescoping painters pole. I obtained a clear plastic water jug and mounted it on the pole. Now, If I get calls for those swarms higher than I can reach, I can extend this pole, and hopefully knock the cluster into the jug and bring them down to the hive box without dumping 20,000 bees on my head. I'll try to get a video to share when I get a chance to try this out.

We save SO many honey bees from the pool or at least they look like them but various kinds that aren't all the same. The wasps are definitely different and also seem better about getting water. The honey bees get in the pool and quickly drown while the wasps know how to sit on top with their long legs, get a drink and take off. So when we see a bee worth saving, we quickly swim over and use a sandal to lift it out of the pool and get it to dry land. When then watch it's minutes long routine of trying to dry itself off so it can fly away.

My son also asked me what bees make their houses out of. I said I didn't know. He said, "it's probably bricks and poop."

My wife turned really mean back in 2006. In hindsight I should have replaced her so I'm thinking that's the problem with your hives. The queens have turned into Royal bitches and all the worker bee's are taking it out on you.


Yeah, get rid of the bitches!

Mean bees have been on social media. They are turning into the rest of the world,

I got a swarm this weekend and captured it a little different way than normal.


https://rumble.com/embed/v16eb28/?pub=14uowq


I also went through my hives a little this weekend. I didn't do a deep dive, but found some of them aren't as strong as I'd like to see, and it looks like 2 of my splits are queenless and dying. I added the swarm above to one of those boxes, and I've got another swarm caught in a trap to replace the other.

As a rule of thumb, I really want to get the bees I'm going to get this year before July. The old timers say "A bee in July, ain't worth a fly". You're just not likely to get any honey out of bees you get this late and your goal is to build them up, keep them alive so they'll start strong next year. I've been adding honey supers(boxes of honey frames) and I'm hoping the dry weather will get them get out and pack in pounds and pounds of honey every day.