The bee keeper diaries

[Iowanian]

It's a great time to buy stock in eppy pens.

This thread is a repository for bee keepers or those interested.

A couple of years ago, a couple of friends an my brother started puttering with honey bees. I didn't buy off because, well, I've never been a big fan of bees or getting stung by them. Last summer I tagged along a couple of times to check their hives and to remove honey bees from a house, public building and an old garage.

I realized at the end of the summer when I was helping them process some, that it's actually pretty interesting, and fits into my expanding "grow my own" logic. I'm not full blown hippy but I see a lot of logic in the self sustaining food thing and I'm doing some of that too.

That said, this thread is about bees, honey bees, bee keeping and bee fighting war stories.

I'm taking the leap and plan to get 2-3 hives this spring and maybe build some bee swarm traps to make it cheaper or to make a few bucks.

Join me and I'll share the real life lessons of an ameture bee keeper. I'm sure I'm going to learn some things the hard way.

[Iowanian]

I am hoping it warms up enough this week that I can check and put some sugar in for them. I'm sure the guys further south are ahead of me but I've still got snow on the ground....and flooding rains today. May hives had snow pile down up on them most of the winter. I dug out the entrances but assume the snow helped insulate the, if it didn't being , moisture into the hives.

If mine are still alive I'll get them fed and try to keep them going until dandelion bloom.

[ChiefGator]

Originally Posted by Iowanian

I've got some photos in the thread that will show what I'm talking about....

Thanks, Iowanian!

I'm taking a four day course (spread over several months) from my county ag office. Just last weekend girlfriend and I attended a class on swarm control and got to split some hives. Good stuff. ( http://blogs.ifas.ufl.edu/alachuaco/...lachua-county/)

We are blessed with warmer weather most the year down here, so I think wintering is less of a worry here in Florida. But, Varroa mites and small hive beetles love it down here too...

I did notice the kid who grew up around bees was wearing short sleeves and no gloves. I think I may step it back to gloves and hat (and long sleeve shirt of course) in the future. Well, for doing a cutout, I guess I would want a full spacesuit honestly, but just working with the bees in good weather, they were pretty agreeable really.

[redfan]

I'm liking the start of this season much more than last year!
I think the cold winter we had helped conserve their food stores and I didn't have to do any emergency feeding like I did last year.

I'm gonna go ahead and say at this stage, all 3 of my hives have overwintered successfully. 100% survival for the first time!! Maybe, just maybe, I finally did something right.

I've given all 3 some Super DFM to help give them a boost. They really seem to like it, they eat it right away after I sprinkle it on the tops of the frames.

I've made a 4 chamber queen castle (just a reg deep divided into 4 separate chambers), and I hope to be doing some splits with queen cells fairly soon. No queen cells yet, though.

I've got a package of Saskatraz bees coming, and it'll be interesting to compare the different behaviors between species. I've only worked Italians until now.

I hope everybody's hives survived, and may your nectar flow be long, sweet, and voluminous!

[stumppy]

This is great.

[Sweet Daddy Hate]

This thread is fantastic.

[Iowanian]

Glad to hear that red.

Mine lived also...but others I know and help all lost about half.

Last weekend I flipped my boxes(switch the top hive box with the bottom) and cleaned the bottom board. You do this because the top box is pretty much empty if honey and you put that box on the bottom so the Queen with lay in that box and leave room for honey making above.

My welfare apartment hive had a lot of dead bees in the bottom, already has hive beetle issues and some roaches. I'm going to pinch the queen soon and replace her and see if they can be turned into something useful.

The hive I got from the cemetery swarm a couple of years ago is roaring....enough bees I'm afraid they will swarm. I'm considering doing a split with that hive soon.

I hadn't fed but it was a rough winter so I took the easy route and on a warm day a month ago dumped some dry sugar on the top cover. Moisture seemed to harden the sugar and it worked fine. I saw tree blooms earlier in the week and flowers bloomed today. Should be good to go.

I hope to get some swarm traps out this weekend or soon after. I'm pretty excited to see if I can make that work.

[Groves]

We have only one warré style hive. Wintered great. Didn’t feed.

I’m of the mind that a healthy hive *will* swarm, so we gladly just collect it if possible and start a hive for a friend or another for ourselves.

None of the Springfield area beekeepers caught ANY swarms last year. Zero. It was strange.

If any planeteers in SGF want to keep bees and need a gentle push down the slope, I’m good at shoving.

I built a few more hives so I’m ready to trap a few swarms.


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[Iowanian]

This doesn't have anything to do with my bees but it's still interesting to me.

I didn't know it before but Notre-Dame Cathederal has a small Apiary. A guy in Paris as part of a bio-diversity program has been placing hives on roof tops in the city for several years and placed hives on top of a roof at Notre Dame in 2013.

The bees this guy keeps are "brother adam" which aren't very popular in the US but are known for being gentle. This line of bees was developed by a benedictine monk named Brother Adam who started bee keeping in 1915. He traveled Europe, the Near East and North Africa finding parasite resistant bees and developed the Buckfast strain in Buckfast Abby after losing more than half of his hives.

They keep the Brother Adam bees for their nature, because there is apparently some blowback due to honey bee swarms in the urban area. A lot of the urban beeks don't do splits and hive management and end up with alot of swarms.



I also learned reading about this that St. Ambrose is the Patron saint of bee keepers. The story has something to do with a swarm of honey bees landing on his face when he was a baby sleeping in a crib.


I just found it interesting that one of the issues with the fire yesterday was removal of the bee colonies.

[Mr. Wizard]

I have a new hive in which I just installed a package of bees. The western Kansas beekeepers association orders them by the crate and we go pick them up. I am using a flowhive;

https://www.honeyflow.com

which promises "honey on tap!"

After MUCH youtube study and being full of bee - e - ness I sat out to trap a hive in the wall of my father in laws old farm house. Guess what, they are africanized!

Also guess what, they side of my head is swollen like a pumpkin and my wife actually feels sorry for me! I should have known when they acted the opposite of any hive I've been around to kill them all first but the thought of saying "I trapped that hive"was too strong.

Tonight they die,,,,, every f'ing one of them! Then I will remove and dicard the chemical laden comb, rinse the inner wall with clorox and seal the hole.
Never again.

PS It's nice to have my wife feeling sorry for me though.

[Iowanian]

I'm curious how/why you think they are Africanized?

Depending on your experience they could have beaten you up due to weather conditions, time of day, banging around...or in my case just smelling way too much like a griz or something.

Take some pics.

[Holladay]

Going to my second Bee Keeping meeting. I will buy 2 hives. They intrigue me and have the land to go for it.

I read "The 101 Bee Keeping for Dummies" book and seems there are a lot of variables involved.

My wife hates bee's so this will be an adventure.

[Mr. Wizard]

Originally Posted by Iowanian

I'm curious how/why you think they are Africanized?

Depending on your experience they could have beaten you up due to weather conditions, time of day, banging around...or in my case just smelling way too much like a griz or something.

Take some pics.

1- they react differently than other bee hives. A puff of smoke they attack, a spritz of sugarwater they attack. They attack directly and in groups. They are direct in all patterns of come and go not lazy like a honey bee. Lastly I looked at two under a microscope.
2- This is the second hive I have dealt with. Once you handle them you will understand. I hope you never have to.

They are dead now if you want to verify I will send you some!

[Amnorix]

Originally Posted by Iowanian

It's been a little slow in bee world with this weather. I'm hoping we don't have another late start to spring, and I'm going to try to slip some sugar blocks into the hives if it ever warms up.

I bottled my last 5 gallons this weekend and have been peddling it to make some cash for supplies for this spring.

At what price do you sell the honey? To be honest, it sounds to me like given the amount of time, effort and costs, there can't be much profit margin, but obviously there are businesses around honey production so there must be some profit to be had..?

[Amnorix]

Originally Posted by Iowanian

My welfare apartment hive had a lot of dead bees in the bottom, already has hive beetle issues and some roaches. I'm going to pinch the queen soon and replace her and see if they can be turned into something useful.

So, again, THANKS so much for this awesome and interesting thread!! I've said it before but will keep saying it because I really do appreciate it. Very cool stuff!

Help the idiot time again though (sorry, but I'm confident I'm not the only one who doesn't know this stuff!):

1. "welfare apartment hive"?

2. "Pinch the queen and replace her". So pinch the queen sounds easy enough -- remove her -- but how do you just replace her? Are you able to identify a young queen in another hive and just move her to the other hive? Are queens available for sale? Do you trade queens with other beekeepers? Amazon literally has EVERYTHING from A to Z?!?

3. Separate question -- do you have to keep your hives reasonably far apart from each other? I have no idea if they are territorial, but in a prior post you were discussing a war between your strongest hive and a foreign invader. If you had hives close to each other, it would seem to me the risk of that would always be there.

The hive I got from the cemetery swarm a couple of years ago is roaring....enough bees I'm afraid they will swarm. I'm considering doing a split with that hive soon.

So I get that the swarm needs a queen. How do you split the hive? Can you just get some queen from somewhere and put it into a new hive complex and then physically move a bunch of bees from the existing hive to the new hive and then it's all good?

I hope to get some swarm traps out this weekend or soon after. I'm pretty excited to see if I can make that work.

Glad to hear all your hives survived, and good luck with the trapping!!

It sounds like you're at three hives right now. Is there a number you're aiming to get to?

Last, do you take your hives out to pollinate for farmers or anything? I remember learning about that a decade or so ago when we had the scare where alot of bees were dying. I never knew that was even a thing, but obviously that's another way to make money on the hive.

[Iowanian]

Am..

I name my hives based on where or how I get them or for some other reason to keep track of things.

I have one hive that I named after a local welfare apartment complex. The hive always has had hive beetle and roach issues, it smells weird, the bees are grouchier than my other bees, and there isn't anyone working in that sonnabitch during the day when the others are...low producer, grumpy, bug infested welfare trash....that queen is from a low rent trailer park for sure. This hive is named after a specific complex I don't want to name because of privacy reasons. I actually bought the hive as a nuc my first year.

"pinch the queen". A hive is what the queen is....If she's gentle, your bees will be. If she's a hard worker, the bees would likely be good producers. This hive has sucked for 3 years. I'm going to find the queen and squash her, and install a replacement queen either from a cell I find in another hive or a purchased queen. A new queen in that hive of workers will eventually lay eggs of better stock and in 6-8 weeks the hive will be completely different. Hopefully better.

My hives are close together. You pretty much just need enough room to work. The "big boys" will put 4 of them on a single wooden pallet. I think at some point having too many in the same area would be counter productive, but the large bee yards have enough bees in one area that I'm not worried I'll ever have more than I should in one spot. The truth is it's easier to have them in the same general area because you don't have to spend as much time running around to check on them. Right now there are essentially 3 guys on my bee team. One guy is tired of bees dying and probably getting out and another moved out of the area. Of those remaining we have bees on 4-5 farms.

The only reason I'll spread mine out would be if I do splits(taking frames of brood from a good hive and place those and bees from that hive into a new box where they'll hopefully make a new queen and become a separate hive). I'd move them so the bees don't get confused and go to their old home. I think they need to be a mile away or more. I do have a copule of friends who have asked me to place a hive near their garden or orchard I might do just to help them out, but I don't have the hives available right now. I'd do that, but I'll never send my bees on the big trips to California or anything. It's a good way to make some money in the winter but a great way for your bees to die.

My goal for this year would be to end the season with 7-10 hives but I'd be happy if I end up with 6-7 healthy ones. I'm not looking to get too big, this is just a hobby right now. I'll also probably help my pal get more hives filled because they have a lot more and more of the processing equipment etc. I'll spend as much time helping him get back up and going, because honestly just like deer hunting it's more fun with a battle buddy.

I only have 1 trap out right now, in my orchard. Time is the only thing holding me back. I'll try to take some pics of the trapping process and how it works...win or lose, success or fail.