Re: Keeping bees

plantoid 6/28/2013, 4:11 pm

Hope you don't take this as me being bossy etc. See if this makes sense and is of any use to you .

You could take two full combs of capped & open brood from one side of the brood nest ( centralize the remainder in the old brood box & slip in new undrawn brood comb frames either side to give the bees something to do ) with just one sealed queen cell carefully attached by a paper clip to the lower part of one of the mid position frames of brood you can easily make up new brood box up & prevent unplanned swarming .

Shove the new made brood box in place of the old one & put a drawn super on with one comb of capped honey for feed and it will soon get it's compliment of bees from the foragers & scouts out of the original hive . Then block the entrance for a day but make sure it can breathe so that the trapped bees can walk the frames and bring on the new hatches . Then open up the entrance to two or three bee spaces towards the end of the second day just before sundown or the temp dropping below 50 oF .( see below for how it's done )
Move the old hive back to it's original position .

Depending on the size of the sealed QC you should have a fully mated new queen egg laying in the new brood box within 14 days .

Once you have the artificially swarmed bees in the new brood hive on capped brood with a sealed QC in it you can play around . ( see below how this is done )

Do you recall the old adage of , " Move a hive three miles for three days so the bees don't end up flying back to the original site. then move it back to where you want it in the apiary .

Well I did some experimenting because I was too lazy to hump & bump my new made up brood hives that far & back in three days time in a bee suit in hot weather , just so I could integrate them into my local apiaries a few yards away .

I found that if the new brood hive made up as above is on a wheel barrow or a moveable platform like a small trailer etc. you can move it one to two feet every hour from when the bees start flying till they start going to bed . They will pick up the hive scent at that rate of moving around and go back to it . It only takes a couple of days to move the man made swarm brood box to where it is going to stay and you don't get a big drop in pollen collection or honey production .

I don't know your weather patterns and your normal end of season dates , but knowing that old the hive has tried to swarm because of a waning queen influence & it's been thwarted once I'd let it get two more sealed QC's before doing the above artificial swarm exercise then snuff out the old queen and leave one of the sealed QC's in place & use the other as above for the artificial swarm .
If the artificial swarm does not get going by the end of the season you can always integrate it ready for a strong nest for over wintering .

**camprn** 6/28/2013, 4:58 pm

Thanks for the tips David! This is not a swarm emergency situation as I believe this hive was not making any serious preparations to swarm, just a few normal shallow swarm cups in the event they need to do it. There were no eggs or royal jelly in the cups. There are no supersedure cells. I am not worried about this, at least not for the next several days to a week.

There are many frames of eggs, brood, capped brood in an unlimited broodnest. This is a second year queen. The plan is to split the hive, as it is very robust. There is a top entrance and the outer cover is propped for more ventilation. I also use screened bottom boards.

Have you ever managed a hive to make comb honey. It's darn tricky. This hive is like that, packed with bees with just enough room to keep them busy and enough room for the queen to keep laying eggs. I want the hive full so they can finish the honey and honeycomb for the table. I will probably do an equal split and let them raise their own queen. I have no utility truck so most likely there will be drift as the split will have to be in the same yard. I am also planning to make one more nuc, but I will probably do that from one of my weaker hives.

CindiLou 6/30/2013, 2:48 pm

This was from my hive today
Keeping bees - Page 15 Rssam_10

I did remove them..they were empty without anything in them...Burr comb or swarm?
I have a lot of bees, eggs, larvea, hatching brood, pollen, honey, nector ect..
I have three hive bodies. Switched the outside frames inside on each one.
Added another super.
No queen cells.

CindiLou 6/30/2013, 3:08 pm

Humm..sounds like camprn lol

plantoid 6/30/2013, 5:18 pm

Here's my tuppence worth about my cut comb .
I think it is in the right order and should make sense ( had a hard day today:lol: )
To get good comb honey you need a queen excluder and unwired foundation either for normal or drone foundation.

Drone comb cells fill slower than normal cells due to the bigger sized cell holes but overall it fills quicker as there is less wax to make the bees have nectar to spare so use it to fill the drawn comb instead .( sounds contradictive but I'm sure you understand how it's meant .)

Evidently feeding bees sugar syrup is the best way to get the bees to quickly draw out the foundation , It does not affect the quality of the honey stored . Check it every other day and turn /reposition the frames to get them drawn out as best as possible . Remove the frames and store in a wax moth free place ( the freezer ??? ) if they are not needed straight away .

Then as the weather starts to turns hot and humid put the frames in a super directly above the brood nest above a queen excluder . I used to take off all but two supers so that the bees would have to concentrate on filling just the two in three or four days rather than them messing about filling as they naturally do & leaving the outer edges unfilled / last capped ..
During the consequent nectar flow the bees will fill the super in about three days if it is a good flow and also cap the honey .
If you get it right there will be very little travel staining ( yellow from pollen on the bees feet ) on the capped honey remove when most of the super is capped and use a proper stainless steel punch down cutter to get your squares & rounds .

Use only the capped stuff as mould will grow on the uncapped honey due to the higher water content. Use your own properly extracted , cleaned and right moisture content honey to top up the comb honey if your having to sell it by weight

The best cut comb homey I used to get was when the peas in the fields came into flower ..it was a lovely white comb and very soft delicate taste

Just as the peas were starting to show signs of starting to produce the buds for the flowers I'd feed 4 gallons of my own sugar syrup to each hive by the pea field so they could draw the comb with the least amount of nectar consuming effort . At pea flowering time there is nearly always plenty of pollen around for feeding and making comb

Canola tends to be hard & white as well as white capping's if the nectar flow is present , Ragwort and ivy is quite yellow and gives you the runs occasionally.

Learning to recognise a nectar flow is happening is important not only so you can take advantage of it but so you can also keep out of the bee line to & from the nectar producing plants as the bees go crazy as your likely to get badly stung if you enter the danger zone unless your fully suited up .

Re the feeding of the bees with a 1:1 sugar syrup early on in the season ... most of the guys in our honey cooperative used to make 45 gallons of sugar syrup with some Thymol crystals in it and out the back of the truck or trailer pump set put 4 gallons of syrup into each hive top tray feeder so that if the weather turned evil the bees would not starve .

The Thymol was used rightly or wrongly as a help to keep down Varroa mites instead of using sheets of drone cells just to grow extra mite in your hive .
Our sugar was scrap white sugar out the sugar mills in one tonne bags .
So long as it went into boiling water , ( We used a 45 gallon barrel with the lid cut off , set on a gas fired tar boiling ring ) and it was stirred all the time , by the time it had dissolved it was also sterile .

plantoid 6/30/2013, 5:25 pm

CindiLou wrote:This was from my hive today

I did remove them..they were empty without anything in them...Burr comb or swarm?
I have a lot of bees, eggs, larvea, hatching brood, pollen, honey, nector ect..
I have three hive bodies. Switched the outside frames inside on each one.
Added another super.
No queen cells.

It looks normal , gently scrape the excess wax off and put it in the solar melter ..white wax makes good prices at bee equipment auctions/ shows where people buy the wax. as it is used by churchy folk etc for their pure virgin wax candles & also for medicinal purposes .

Sweeping statement ...... Wink

:-

The big secret of bee keeping is to understand & remember what is normal in a hive and what is not .. there is no need to spend hours looking for a queen and in most cases no need to mark or clip her wings either . If you have capped cells , eggs and royal jelly on eggs the hive is usually quite healthy . You just have to keep up with sensible anti Varroa precautions and feed them if required before things get too late for the hives survival

plantoid 6/30/2013, 5:30 pm

camprn wrote:Thanks for the tips David! This is not a swarm emergency situation as I believe this hive was not making any serious preparations to swarm, just a few normal shallow swarm cups in the event they need to do it. There were no eggs or royal jelly in the cups. There are no supersedure cells. I am not worried about this, at least not for the next several days to a week.

There are many frames of eggs, brood, capped brood in an unlimited broodnest. This is a second year queen. The plan is to split the hive, as it is very robust. There is a top entrance and the outer cover is propped for more ventilation. I also use screened bottom boards.

Have you ever managed a hive to make comb honey. It's darn tricky. This hive is like that, packed with bees with just enough room to keep them busy and enough room for the queen to keep laying eggs. I want the hive full so they can finish the honey and honeycomb for the table. I will probably do an equal split and let them raise their own queen. I have no utility truck so most likely there will be drift as the split will have to be in the same yard. I am also planning to make one more nuc, but I will probably do that from one of my weaker hives.

Make your neuc with a pair of frames of brood from each good hive & feed the neuc well . Not much point in using sick /poor bees to do a decent job of growing up into big strong girls & boys is there ??? .

**camprn** 6/30/2013, 5:33 pm

plantoid wrote:
camprn wrote:Thanks for the tips David! This is not a swarm emergency situation as I believe this hive was not making any serious preparations to swarm, just a few normal shallow swarm cups in the event they need to do it. There were no eggs or royal jelly in the cups. There are no supersedure cells. I am not worried about this, at least not for the next several days to a week.

There are many frames of eggs, brood, capped brood in an unlimited broodnest. This is a second year queen. The plan is to split the hive, as it is very robust. There is a top entrance and the outer cover is propped for more ventilation. I also use screened bottom boards.

Have you ever managed a hive to make comb honey. It's darn tricky. This hive is like that, packed with bees with just enough room to keep them busy and enough room for the queen to keep laying eggs. I want the hive full so they can finish the honey and honeycomb for the table. I will probably do an equal split and let them raise their own queen. I have no utility truck so most likely there will be drift as the split will have to be in the same yard. I am also planning to make one more nuc, but I will probably do that from one of my weaker hives.

Make your neuc with a pair of frames of brood from each good hive & feed the neuc well . Not much point in using sick /poor bees to do a decent job of growing up into big strong girls & boys is there ??? .

You would be surprised. It has worked quite well so far. If I use anything from my strong colonies it will be after this spring/early summer flow.

Pollinator 7/1/2013, 12:57 pm

camprn wrote:

Just a tip here: Many times hobbyists line up their hives in neat rows, all painted white. This is confusing to the bees. They seem to be able to distinguish between left and right, so it's not a problem with two hives, but with more than that, they tend to drift to one end or the other, or both ends. So the end hives get overly strong, and the middle hives get weak. I've even seen hives in the middle of a row die out.

The solution: Move the hives into a more random pattern, or drive stakes or posts in random pattern in front of some of the entrances, or (best of all) paint the hives different colors - at least the front above the entrance. I've even seen some beekeepers stencil different patterns on the front of each hive.

Note that commercial beekeepers usually keep their hives on pallets of 4, so they don't have to deal with this problem. On the pallets, two face one direction and the other two in the opposite direction. When the trucks are unloaded, usually the pallets are distributed somewhat randomly. Some beekeepers will leave a few small trees in a bee yard, even though it is a nuisance to work around, because it helps the bees orient.

CindiLou 7/1/2013, 3:42 pm

Pollinator wrote:
or (best of all) paint the hives different colors - at least the front above the entrance.

Told hubby I wanted to paint each super different color.. rofl

He had a fit! "Hives are white" he says..told him sure..IN A YARD! But I am only going to have 2-3..besides granddaughter wants pink/purple/orange..grandson says camo thinking

..I just think plain white is boring rofl

**camprn** 7/1/2013, 3:59 pm

Pollinator you are so right about this! I have been meaning to bust out the paint. It has been raining so much I have put this project on the back burner. Keeping bees - Page 15 1280598131

But I'm going to take care of it the afternoon. Now where did I put that paint brush.... thinking

Pollinator 7/1/2013, 4:07 pm

CindiLou wrote:

Told hubby I wanted to paint each super different color.. He had a fit! "Hives are white" he says..told him sure..IN A YARD! But I am only going to have 2-3..besides granddaughter wants pink/purple/orange..grandson says camo ..I just think plain white is boring

Only hobbyist bees are in white hives. Commercial beekeepers tend to use a variety of colors. There are two reasons: 1 Paint is expensive, so we tend to buy the cheap pain that the stores are trying to get rid of, because someone ordered a mix and didn't come back to get it. And 2. White hive stand out like a sore thumb. A commercial beekeeper may have 30 or 40 different bee yards (apiaries), and can't keep watch of them all the time. If they are noticed, they are more apt to be vandalized. I've had hives shot up, run over, and burned to ashes by vandals.

At one time I had bees in four states. One time I had a bee yard vandalized and smashed up by vandals, the police came to investigate. He said, "That was quite a bear!"

I replied, "Bears don't smash beer bottles on the hives."

Should have kept my mouth shut. At that time Pennsylvania was compensating beekeepers for bear damage.

**camprn** 7/1/2013, 5:12 pm

Oh dear! I have white hives because that was the cheapest paint in the store when I went to but some. I found the acrylic hobby paint... I'm making progress.... jocolor

now if it would just stop raining long enough for the paint to set and not run all down the hives... Rolling Eyes

plantoid 7/1/2013, 5:40 pm

Pollinators post reminded me that far too many years back I saw some German hives being used for the colour recognition experiments .

The brood boxes were in primary colours . It didn't seem to matter what colours of the supers were so long as there were no repetitive colour sequences in the stack or around the year.
I think the conclusion was that the bees could differentiate some thing like 23 different sequences
Other parts of the experiment were a closed solid wooden walled large towable trailer that a man could stand up in and work the 14 hives set up inside the trailer .
Each hive had around its own coloured entrance in various colours and coloured segments of geometric designs . It seem as though the bees worked that out effectively as well .

When I first saw the trailer it reminded me of a portable air traffic control trailer that you used to see on an airfield made up not of black & white chequered squares but multi colour and single colour squares instead .
There's bound to be something on Google about bees & colour recognition especially in the images sections.

**camprn** 7/1/2013, 6:16 pm

http://westmtnapiary.com/Bees_and_color.html <~~ check it out!

CindiLou 7/3/2013, 8:50 am

One of my ladies hard at work.

Pretty sure she is one of mine cause the bee balm is about 10' in front of the hive.

Keeping bees - Page 15 Img_2010

NHGardener 7/3/2013, 9:11 am

Those are beautiful photos, CindiLou. What kind of camera is that?

**camprn** 7/11/2013, 9:40 pm

There is a good reason bees buzz in the flowers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/11/science/unraveling-the-pollinating-secrets-of-a-bees-buzz.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0

LittleGardener 7/11/2013, 10:32 pm

camprn wrote:There is a good reason bees buzz in the flowers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/11/science/unraveling-the-pollinating-secrets-of-a-bees-buzz.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0

Thanks for this article. - asked last year here re best wildflowers for bee-appetite, & got this :)advice: They just might feed from those, while ignoring pollinating your plants. - So this year were I to transplant the red+white clovers which prolifically bloom on the opposite corner, into the cement blocks making+surrounding each bed, would the Veggie pollination-rate rise alot?

**camprn** 7/11/2013, 10:39 pm

Maybe, maybe not. They like to go after flowers when there a lot of them in one place. And they have sources they prefer over others. I have a yard full of luscious white clover and most of the time the honey bees fly away over yonder for something else. Most of the vegetable garden pollinating happens with the wild bees. At least thats the way it seems in my garden. Another way to attract them is to have a nice water source available and accessible.

LittleGardener 7/11/2013, 11:28 pm

Okay, unfortunately when I inquired about a Bee-hive with the city, they laughed & said: "Um, how many of your bees would be leash-Trained?" ( Rolling Eyes

) so tho you keep bees, we can't keep a hive. These bees r all wild, less than 10 I've noticed, but busy Smile

little friends. And yes, there's a (sterilized cat-litter box) between the 2 Veggie-beds filled with clean water for them to enjoy a sip whenever they want, that I use to water the plants with. - So I just thought that since they spend hours grazing the clover, maybe Pollination would rise, were I to transplant the luscious Smile

clover to surround the Veggie-beds. How easy does Clover transplant?

**camprn** 7/11/2013, 11:57 pm

LittleGardener wrote:How easy does Clover transplant?

I wouldn't know. Try it and get back to us.

LittleGardener 7/12/2013, 12:08 am

camprn wrote:
LittleGardener wrote:How easy does Clover transplant?
I wouldn't know. Try it and get back to us.

LOL leave it up to me to try... Laughing

Pollinator 7/12/2013, 8:50 am

LittleGardener wrote:So I just thought that since they spend hours grazing the clover, maybe Pollination would rise, were I to transplant the luscious clover to surround the Veggie-beds. How easy does Clover transplant?

For the short term - no, garden pollination won't rise.

Basic principle that's not understood by all those who try to "attract" bees: if pollinator populations are thin, you will attract the bees right past your garden veggies to the richer plants you provide to attract them.

The alternative principle: If pollinator populations are good (what used to be normal), then all available flowers will get worked, because the bees compete with each other and this guarantees visits for the less attractive flowers.

So feeding your pollinators will help - not to attract bees, but to build up pollinator populations. Watering is also a great help - be sure to have a float to keep them from drowning.

Mud is another good idea. Mason bees need mud for their nests, as well as other beneficials like potter wasps and mud daubers. We keep a lump of clay under the air conditioner drip in a pan.

Providing homes is extremely useful to build pollinator populations. An expanse of dirt that's permanently kept bare is a big help for digger bees. Bundles of small reeds or briar canes can also be hung in sheltered locations. Sometimes we are too neat: an old pine stump is home to several green halictid bees, who like to nest under the loose bark.

Most of all; protection from pesticides is essential, as one bad spray can set back pollinator populations for a couple years. Educate yard-fogging, and Sevin dusting neighbors about the damage they are doing. Show them on the label, where it is illegal to use Sevin on blooming plants.

And speak out on mosquito control. These sprays often make mosquitoes worse by killing the natural predators of mosquitos, such as dragonflies. Then they have to spray again, and again and again. Great treadmill, that the pesticide manufacturers love. They also can kill our pollinators, and you can document this by adding your observations of the number of pollinators you have before and after sprays.

**camprn** 7/15/2013, 7:39 am

Someone recently pointed out to me the Rose Hive Method of keeping honeybees. A gent, I think he lives in Wales, is using his National hive in a manner that is not traditional. I use this method with medium Langstroth boxes here in the US. Of course I did this before I knew there was a name for it. Most important is the unlimited brood nest and the lack of queen excluder, I think. As with all things honey bees, timing is so important. In my neck of the woods, the beekeeper would not want to add an empty to the middle in August and disrupt the decreasing brood nest.

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