The bee keeper diaries

[redfan]

I caught a little break in the rain before the wind picked up and checked my hives this afternoon. All 3 seem to be doing fine. Hopefully I get a chance to go in a little deeper later on this week, so I can get a better picture of what's going on in there.

Check out Don "The Fat Bee Man" Kuchenmeister on youtube. Lots of good info from him, he is very experienced.

[displacedinMN]

How has this winter/snow affected things?

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[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.

[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!

[Iowanian]

Originally Posted by Mr. Wizard

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!

Interesting. I have no interest in messing with those after watching some youtube videos of removals. Their honey does have a market and they're rabid producers but the squeeze isn't worth the juice to me.