BeeKeeping

Comment

Comment by MotherLodeBeth on January 21, 2010 at 12:30am

Donald how are your hives doing in this wind and rain? Am up in the Sierras where the hives are covered in snow. But secure since we get 40+mph winds. ~Beth~

Comment by Joel LeGrand on December 17, 2009 at 8:46pm

Hi everyone,
Anyone know about a natural insecticide called BioNeem. It is not harmful to honeybees,earthworms or pets. Do you know anything about this product? Is it safe for bees, & pets? I found this on www.vermontbean.com

Comment by Donald on November 26, 2009 at 12:59pm

Hi Strumelia: I am totally spoiled living in the SF Bay Area where you can pretty much garden year round including start a new bee hive. You still must feed the new hive sugar syrup and maybe protein patties until mid February or early March, but the bees love the warm weather and the honey production is usually prolific. Here is a couple of picture of my current hive.

Comment by Strumelia on November 23, 2009 at 11:54am

Donald you lucky to live in an area where you can start a new hive at any time during the year! In New York one could never start a new package in December! =8-o
We'd love to see pix of your current hive. :)

Comment by Donald on November 23, 2009 at 11:26am

Hi Everyone: I am new to kitchen gardeners and I currently have one bee hive and I am planning on buying one four pound package of bees and a queen in December. If my luck is strong I will also capture a swarm and end up with three total hives going into Spring. I live out on the west coast in the San Francisco Bay Area where the winters are mild. I recently completed my first year of beekeeping and harvested a little over 3/4 of a gallon of honey or about 110 oz. I was really happy with the hive's production.

Comment by Strumelia on November 9, 2009 at 11:41am

Adrian, the old frames are totally beyond reusing- not worth trying to scrap and clean....I have all new frames waiting to be nailed together and new wax&wire foundation too.
When I do the split i will be putting one old deep on each stand- with brood, workers, and food (the queen in one and queen/swarm cells in the other) and will then place a brand new deep with new frames on top of each hive's old box in the Spring- so yes that will encourage the bees of both hives to start working upward into the new 2nd brood boxes.
As they progress and start raising brood in the new top deep and filling it up with honey and pollen, I will add yet another new deep on top of each hive and when they start using that 2nd new deep I will look for the right time to entirely phase out the bottom old funky deeps with their old frames. I may be able to scrape and reuse those old deep boxes, but the frames are pretty awful and not worth the work to try to save.

I don't really plan on harvesting honey this coming year, but rather my efforts will be aimed towards splitting this hive into two and building them up into two strong colonies, and shifting everyone slowly into all new hive components.

Thanks for your input and helpful info!

Comment by Adrian Fox on November 9, 2009 at 2:59am

Definitely aim to progressively replace those black frames with new foundation as soon as there is a reasonably strong honey flow next spring. Don't force the pace, let the bees work at their own rate, and don't split the brood nest by plonking foundation in the middle. New comb is always better and less disease prone, and even hatches larger bees which are healthier. Here in France, some of the professionals aim to replace all the brood nest comb every year if they can.
The other tip is that foundation is drawn out far better in a box abovethe brood nest.
Build a simple solar wax extractor if you can (sheet of glass over a wooden box painted black inside, with a sheet of tin for the wax to drip down into a container) and you can use the wax from the old combs to make candles or beeswax polish. Then you can fix new foundation in the old combs easily.

Comment by Strumelia on November 8, 2009 at 8:34pm

Well I did wind up getting that gift hive a couple of weeks ago.
A beekeeper helped me go through it beforehand and consolidate it down to two deeps. We found the queen and the bees looked healthy. The deeps and the frames are quite old and blackish, but I will start changing them out in the Spring- best to leave them in their familiar home for now. We did put new top lids and bottom board combo on it though, from my new hive components I had at the ready.
The bees seem quite happy for now, as you can see:

Hopefully they will make it through the winter ok. Next year I won't be worrying about harvesting any honey, but instead will be concentrating on creating a second strong hive from this one and getting everyone moved gradually into new hive components. Those old frames are pretty hopeless at this point...the bk and I already discarded 9 of them from the third deep (that we eliminated) before moving the hive to my house.
I'm very thrilled with my bees, and have gone into the hive a couple times already on my own. :D
Soon it will be too cold to open the hive at all anymore until Spring...but today was almost 60F! Weird, considering it was 28F last night. =8-o

Comment by Srijan on September 30, 2009 at 6:56pm

I did this in May 08. It worked great. You want to take brood frames that have open cells with visible eggs. The workers can develop a queen from an unhatched egg. Like Adrian said, it is probably better if the frame has a swarm cell on it. Bees in swarm mode are able to build out comb much faster because they all revive the ability to make wax. The important part is to do this early in the season so the colony can get strong enough to survive the winter esp in northern NY. Marla Spivak from the University of Minnesota wrote a great little book called Beekeeping in Northern Climates. It is a bit dated since it was written before IPM techniques were very popular.

Comment by Adrian Fox on September 30, 2009 at 4:05pm

Srijan is right that his method is the simplest... colony division. But I'd be a little worried that raising an emergency queen with relatively few bees might result in a very poor queen. At least by either buying in a queen or using swarm cells, when the bees themselves raise good queens at the best possible time, you are more likely to get good results.
In the end though, I agree that you have to choose a method which will work for you, and introducing queens and carrying out swarm control etc is not easy for a beginner.

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• …
• 19
• Next ›
• Page