Starting a Beekeeping Project

[ElizabethB]

Ozark - thanks for sharing your story. I had a mental image of your trepidation and the goat getting in the way.

[GardenRN]

Ozark, that's what I see my experience being like lol. Thanks for that experience! I'll keep it in mind as I venture into this bee bit.

[Ozark Lady]

I have three Langstroth hives.

I had hive beetles the first time that I opened the hives.

They were the missing bugs that was my clue that the hive starved to death.

Hubby and I like to go watch the bees coming and going, and interact with them, without getting into the hive. I do open it from time to time just to look around and see if I see food, pollen, brood and/or the hive building up queen and drone cells preparing to swarm.

I plan to order a product called Beatle Jail, it goes across the front of the hive and traps the beetles before they get in there to mess up your honey.

On You Tube there were several videos of dealing with pests in hives. One used tea tree oil, another used powdered sugar... both of those are less toxic than most chemicals.

Lesson #2. Don't bring old frames inside your home, with pollen etc. on them.
When the hive died, I rescued the frames so wax moths wouldn't eat all the wax up. I brought them inside, cut the wax off the frames and bagged it all up, to be able to give them back to the bees later. They were so nicely put away in little zip lock bags, and arranged in larger zip lock bags!

I didn't look into the box again for awhile. Suddenly, I had moths all over my house, they were all over my windows... inside!

I finally tracked them to the box of... what had been bags of wax.
Apparently there were eggs in there, and they hatched, ate the pollen and wax, and grew up... I had cocoons of moths in corners here and there and moths flying all around! What a mess! There were even maggot looking things all inside the box, baby moths I guess?

If you bring used wax inside, either melt it immediately, or freeze it immediately, unless you like a house full of moths and cocoons!

I like my bees, but it has been an interesting learning curve for me.

I still have to double check anything, not used daily, I will find cocoons in some of the oddest places!

[MObeek]

To Ozark Lady,

You might try looking into regressing your bees if you haven't already. You can do that by eliminating the use of foundation or using smaller size foundation. Here's a link that talks about regression. http://www.bushfarms.com/beesnaturalcell.htm

I started raising bees last Spring and used the Warre hive with top bars instead of frames and foundation. Plus I bought a package of bees that were already regressed and raised organically. I know I should have bought 2 packages but they are expensive. So I figured if my bees die, I'll just have to resort to catching swarms to repopulate my hive. So far, they are still alive and well. But winter is not over yet either.

[Ozark Lady]

Thanks for the link, I scanned over it, I will have to look closer and study it.

Bees are doing well, on warm days I see them returning with pollen in their leg sacks. They are pretty friendly ladies.

I, now have a mentor. A lady in Canada who plans to call me weekly to teach me about bees and their care. We will run into her being zone 3 and me being zone 7 though, that just makes a big difference. Also, she lives in farmland and I live in the Ozark forests. That too will make a difference, but I will love learning anyhow.

I joined a bee forum it was for the Warre hives, so I learned about them first, but decided to go with the Langstrom hive.

I do not use full sheets of foundation, I use half or less sheets and allow the bees to build their own foundation for the lower half. Best of both worlds was my idea, quick storage for them, and then room to build their own.

Those foundation sheets are a real pain in the neck to put into frames!

[MObeek]

And aren't foundations a little bit costly also?

You can actually use your Langstroth like a Warre hive. Some Warreors use top bars, some full frames without foundations and some half-frames. Here's a beek who uses half frames to encourage his bees to build straight combs and also be able to inspect the combs easily. http://milkwood.net/2011/05/04/urban-be ... arre-hive/

I don't intend to do a lot of manipulation so I opted for the top bars. And since I have some view windows in 3 of the hive boxes, I get to peek in more often without bothering them too much.

[MObeek]

One more suggestion. You might want to try joining www.beesource.com/forums and learn from other beeks. I'm actually a member of 3 beekeeping forums and I have learned a lot from interacting with other beeks and reading past posts. There are a lot of very experienced and smart beeks out there, both national and international.

[imafan26]

There are ways to manage varoa mites and hive beetles organically. Some methods do spoil the honey, but it will save the bees. The hive beetles spoil the honey no matter what you do.

If nothing is done, the hive is usually doomed anyway. When the bees stress they will swarm.

http://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/sustainag/n ... os-bee.pdf

http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/entomology/api ... 20copy.pdf

[Ozark Lady]

Here is the bee forum that I am a member of... I haven't been there in a very long time, but I signed in just fine.

http://www.biobees.com/forum/index.php

I still like the idea of the beetle jail.

I haven't seen any varroa mites. The man I got my bees from said they are not an issue here.

[applestar]

I don't have bees but I remember last year, there was a huge number of lost colonies in NJ because it was such an anomalously warm winter that the bees stayed too active in their boxes and used up their reserves of honey/winter food.

An online news article said that the bee keepers that realized this and fed their bees didn't sustain the warm winter temperature related losses.

It was rather warm through January this winter too, though maybe not as much overall as last year when we hardy had freezing temps.

[MObeek]

To Imafan26: very good links. Thanks.

To Ozark Lady: I am also a member of Biobees but they mostly deal with TBH's. There are a few beeks using Langstroth hives in there but using Warre hive method. Beesource.com and Beemaster.com have a lot more beeks using Langstroth hives the traditional way.

I have not done any kind of treatment on my bees so far. I know SHB's are in there but, one day, I also noticed my bees getting rid of larva so I know they know how to handle those bad boys. I did cover the ground with cedar shavings and sprayed garlic/onion tea all over the ground to break the life cycle of SHB larva. The only treatment I have been doing is adding some HoneyBee Healthy supplement to their sugar syrup when I feed them. Plus, since they are regressed, Varoa mites are cut down to a bare minimum. Although I haven't actually seen one on the bees nor noticed any deformed wing syndrome.

I bought my bees from this company and am very pleased with how their bees thrive. http://www.wolfcreekbees.com/philosophy.htm

[ElizabethB]

A little off the subject - Ozark - I love your use of language and your ability to tell a tale I often become frustrated at the lack of language skills found on the internet. Thank you. I always enjoy reading your post for the excellent use of language even if the topic does not apply to me. Were you an English/language teacher in another life?

[Ozark Lady]

Well, thanks, Elizabeth,

I actually hate English and writing compositions. And don't get me started on trying to interpret what Shakespeare meant! But, I do like to talk!

I have to write a testimony for church, I am on the 4th rewrite and I have already heard that it still has issues, I just haven't picked it up to try again! So, thanks very much for the compliment. Let's see: I was disorganized, not explicit and left folks wondering what I meant... and the list goes on.
I did fine on spelling, and not so fine at verb/subject agreement...

It is 57F so I am going to go check on the bees, I believe it is even warm enough to open the lid and sneak a peek.

Besides, I want to be outside! So nice out!

[Lucius_Junius]

But Shakespeare understood bees so well!

"For so work the honey-bees, creatures that by a rule in nature teach the act of order to a peopled kingdom."

I'm happy to see this post, because I just registered yesterday as a beekeeper with my Department of Agriculture. After researching various hives and methods and having come across the Abbé Émile Warré's book on bee-keeping, L'apiculture pour tous, I've decided on going with a Warré-style hive that I can build by myself. The only modifications I'm making is adding windows to the boxes so that I can observe what's happening inside without having to take the hive apart.

I'm going to start with two hives, and can't wait for the bees to arrive in May.

On other note, as to bees flying around over two miles and gathering their goodies from non-organic yards. If you're worried about honey quality, you may consider the case of the plethora of rooftop beekeepers in London, England, including the young man featured in this article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2 ... 19/food.g2

While they're not operating "organically," reviewers are often surprised by the high-quality honey produced by urban bee-keepers. If quality is your concern, I wouldn't worry too much about bees dipping nectar from non-organically grown flowers. But then again, who knows? Has there been some science done on nectar produced from organically vs. non-organically grown flowers?

If anyone is interested in plans for building a Warré hive, please don't hesitate to ask here or message me! There are links available to Warré's book in English online, and plenty of instructions on building his hive and pursuing his methods.

[Ozark Lady]

I did sneak a peek at the bees, but I didn't suit up therefore I didn't get into the bottom box.

I was advised to put a second box on the hive, without frames, and use this box to feed the bees in, so that ants were not a problem for the bees and there would be no robbing and I wouldn't be feeding wasps.

Don't laugh, I got a chicken waterer, that goes on a jar. I then got a pint canning jar, filled it with sugar water, added marbles to the base and had a diy bee feeder with marbles to prevent drowning. Those marbles are tricky to get in there before the base fills with sugar water. I think I will silicone them on the base permanently...

As the hive started building, I did add 4 frames to this box, it is a 10 frame box, the spare room is becoming bee comb, and the frames are not drawn.

Boy, I might as well have a Warre hive! They have built their own comb up into my food box. I guess they didn't understand this was a cafeteria, and lounging room!

When I am properly suited up and hooded, I will have my work cut out for me in getting frames apart and the new bee made comb fastened into a frame. It is lovely, but it is also unreinforced and could break easily, when I have to remove the top box to get to the lower box.

There was nothing stored in the new comb, but it is full sized, almost large enough to completely fill a frame.

I could see the bees below, and they are working on a solid 8 frames and were very busy and lots of them. Many more than the last time I looked.

My hubby tends the bees more often than I do.

[MObeek]

To Lucius,

Good to hear of your plan to raise bees in Warre hives. I started raising bees last April on a Warre hive also. But, later on, I have done some modifications to my hive to suit the weather condition out here. After much research, I've decided to remove the quilt and roof and replace them with a top feeder/condensation trap (with an entrance hole) and a flat roof with deep sides to provide protection for the top entrance hole on the feeder. If you go to this link and look at feeder no. 8, you will see one made by a beek from Alberta, Canada http://warre.biobees.com/feeders.htm I did a similar design but with the entrance for the bees situated on the side. If you'd like to check out my feeder, just go to this link. http://www.keepandshare.com/photo/45509 ... ?fv=y&ifr=

Good luck with your beekeeping venture.

[Lucius_Junius]

MOBeek,

Now that's a nice-looking hive. Can you explain a little more about what specifically motivated you to alter the hive? I'm starting out with a hive as described by Warré, but I'm certainly open to modifications in the future. Was the quilt too much insulation? And why the flat, as opposed to chalet-style, roof? This is interesting, because I've seen a lot of Warré hives from France built with the flat roof - and often using tin or some other metal.

[MObeek]

Well, you could actually use the gabled roof even if you want to put a top entrance to your hive. Just make sure the hole is situated higher than the lower rim of the roof so it's protected from the wind, rain and snow. I just first got interested in flat roofs when I saw John M's set-up. Then, I found a wasp building a nest inside my gabled roof and that really put me off.

The main reason I changed my set-up was I figured that if John M's bees could survive Canada's winter with his set-up, then my bees should be able to do the same. Plus, you might want to go to this link to read the thread about Condensation and Varroa! The missing link to survivalists http://www.biobees.com/forum/viewtopic. ... 3989#83989 It's a very good topic started by Bernhard Zaunreiter. He's a very smart beekeeper from Germany.

[Ohio Tiller]

I added 3 new hives this year 2 new starts and one I inherited from my old friend who passed this month.



This is the hive we started with a swarm we caught a couple springs ago.

[rainbowgardener]

So glad people are keeping bees. Have you had any trouble with the hive beetles or mites?

[Ohio Tiller]

So glad people are keeping bees. Have you had any trouble with the hive beetles or mites?

I have not had trouble in the past but I am going to have to go work on a hive tomorrow that has got wax moth worms real bad! The stinking worms eat all the honey and end up starving the bees. I am going to swap out all the frames tomorrow with freshly extracted ones.

[imafan26]

I'm glad to hear people are making habitat and room for bees. We have made artificial hives for carpenter and leaf cutter bees out of wood and bamboo. But many people still consider bees to be pests if they are near their house.

Carpenter bees will make holes in your house but they prefer unpainted wood, so keeping your house painted and caulking holes and crevices and providing them an alternative habitat should be a sensible solution. Providing nectar plants and a pesticide free environment helps many beneficial insects to survive and with them around we end up with healthier gardens.

Leaf cutter bees like carpenter bees are solitary bees and don't make honey. They are still important pollinators. People don't always appreciate that. People are so removed from how their food is made that they do not realize that most of the fruits and many vegetables require pollination or that many of the animals are also dependent on plants that require pollinators to reproduce.

It is just not the bees in danger of extinction, it is also many plant species, animals who depend on plants to live and other animals who depend on other plants and animals to exist. Ultimately our own existence may one day be altered by the complex and often misunderstood interconnections of life on planet earth.

[Ohio Tiller]

I know a lot of folks that think global warming is a real problem but it is nothing compared to a total bee extinction life as we know it will never be the same!! The biggest threat to this planet right now is Monsanto!

[Sage Hermit]

Keep up the good work.

[Ohio Tiller]

Well took some honey off this last month and wow is it sweet this year!

[rainbowgardener]

Beautiful. My Quaker Meeting (church) kept a bee hive for a couple years until it got wiped out by the hive beetles. But the honey we got from it was amazing. I didn't realize until then that honey was one of those things like tomatoes that is so much better from the garden.

[imafan26]

I see a few more of the bees coming around my garden everyday, so at least they seem to be making a comeback, at least in my yard.

[rainbowgardener]

The cover article of Time magazine this week is about the bee crisis. Overall they are NOT making a come back, the crisis continues to get worse.

But the article mentions the zillions of hives being trucked all over the country to pollinate various crops, from one to the next like migrant workers. The article just mentions that in passing doesn't even discuss it as part of the problem.

We are clearly injuring the bee population in a ton of different ways, exposure to fifty different herbicides and pesticides (and who knows about their interaction effects), increased pressure from parasites, climate change, etc, etc. But has it not occurred to people that you can't take an organism like a honeybee/ bee hive that is so intimately connected to its local environment and rip it out and move it from one environment to the next repeatedly:

Honey bees use the sun as a reference point in navigation and communication. Experiments have shown that bees have internal representation of the sun's movement through the sky and suggest that this representation is innate, but is tailored by experience. Attempts to model this representation have not been entirely successful.
http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~wilk ... skemedium/

Honey bees actually have many navigation tools that they can use: the sun, visual landmarks, and the earth’s electromagnetic field.
If bees cannot “see” the sun, how do they locate it and use it for navigation? One important clue they use is ultraviolet light. Especially on clear days, the bees identify the location of the sun as the area of the sky with the least ultraviolet light. In fact, experiments have shown that a bee may identify any object in the sky as the sun, as long as it is less than 20 degrees across the horizon, and less than 15% of the light associated with it is ultraviolet; the amount of polarization is unimportant. In comparison, a human would identify a 0.4°, completely unpolarized, white circle as the sun, while a bee might identify a 9°, 75% polarized, blue square as the sun. It seems like this would be a problem, but not for a bee.
Relying on the sun for navigation also presents a problem because, not only does the sun move, but its rate of movement changes throughout the day. After foraging for two hours, a bee needs to find her home relative to the sun, but the sun has moved. How does she find her way home? Actually, she relies on experience. Each day the bee memorizes how the sun moves through the sky, and this memory becomes the solution not only to the problem of sun movement, but the problem of cloudy days.

Another clue from the sun that helps bees navigate on cloudy days is polarized light. The light coming from the sun is actually not polarized, but when it bounces off particles in the atmosphere, it becomes polarized. A bee actually sees concentric circles of polarized light throughout the sky. The bee knows that the strongest polarization lies in a circle that is 90° from the sun, and uses this information to estimate the sun’s location. Patterns of polarized light are so useful that a bee only needs to see one patch of sky that is 10° wide to determine where the sun is.
Although bees have the ability to use UV and polarized light for navigation, they actually rely most heavily on physical landmarks. As long as the landmarks are prominent, nearby (within 2 meters), and unambiguous, a bee will use them as the main source of navigational information. However, they must remain consistent. If the landmarks are moved, the bees will become confused and unable to find the hive.
It is believed that bees have one more navigation tool that is rather remarkable. Even during long stretches of darkness, such as confinement within the hive during winter, the earth’s magnetic field is a reliable means of navigation. The bees are able to detect electromagnetic fields because bees are actually magnetic. They contain a region of magnetite in the front of their abdomens. They also use their ability to detect magnetic fields to regulate their internal clocks and to guide them as they build combs within the hive. If a strong magnet is placed on a hive, with a magnetic field radiating in all directions, the bees will build strange and contorted honey combs.
http://utahpests.usu.edu/htm/utah-pests ... avigation/

Note the bold type [my addition]. One of the things that sometimes happens in colony collapse disorder is that the bees just disappear. Maybe they just got lost.

Bees are dependent on their connection to the sun, the earth's magnetic field, their knowledge of landmarks,
the polarization of light in their vicinity ETC in complex interactive ways that we are barely beginning to understand. What happens to all that, when the hive is repeatedly moved by truck (vibrations, fumes, etc) in a way that does not allow them to create any new maps, to new locations???

Not to mention all the symbiotic connections between bees and the flowers and organisms around them.

This is my own theory that I have not seen discussed, but it seems pretty obvious to me.

We need to think in systems!!

[rainbowgardener]

I of course meant obvious as one piece of a multi-factored interactive causal picture. Clearly there have been hives that died that were never trucked anywhere, like ours died of the hive beetles. That is not colony collapse disorder, which is abandoned hives with disappeared bees. But stationary hives have collapsed also.

Here's someone who says inbreeding is part of it, we created huge commercial operations from too few genetic lines, http://starvingofftheland.com/2012/04/c ... se-and-me/ , thus creating less robust bees that are more vulnerable to all the other stuff going on.

And of course, I continue to think that insecticides are part of the problem: (this is a comment I posted on the above starving off the land blog)

I agree that CCD has to be multi-factorial not single caused. But I think you rule out neonicotinoids too easily. 1) there are many of them, quite similar in actions not just imidaclopid and they are among agriculture's most popular insecticides, used on many crops, not just corn. Here http://www.beecharmers.org/Pollination2.html is an article listing a bunch of the imidaclopid products and citing examples when CCD has clearly resulted from spraying crops other than corn with it. 2) neonicotinoids are not only used in commercial agriculture, but by home gardeners, who are more likely to use it outside of the directions, in high quantities and concentrations. For example Bayer Systemic Rose and Flower Care sold in big box stores to home gardeners, has only one active ingredient imidaclopid http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott ... orn-fields 3) neonicotinoids spread in the environment and have been detected in ground water, soils, soil biota, field margin plants, etc 4) agriculturally, seeds are coated with imidaclopid in a huge planting machine that uses air pressure to blow out seeds and the insecticide powder. "Krupke explained how he tested that planter exhaust and found amazing levels of neonic pesticides: 700,000 times more than what it takes to kill a honeybee. That toxic dust lands on nearby flowers, such as dandelions. If bees feed on pollen from those flowers, that dust easily can kill them." http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/0 ... g-our-bees

Given how far bees travel, can you guarantee that your bees have not contacted any neonicotinoid treated crops, home gardens, contaminated ground water, field margin plants, etc etc? I think that would be very difficult.

[rainbowgardener]

In reading all this stuff, I discovered that they don't just truck hives around. They stack them on pallets and load them on jet planes and fly them around the country !! I know what I feel like after taking a jet across the country and i don't have to find food and water by navigating by the sun and magnetic fields as well as landmarks...

No wonder the poor bees are screwed up. Worker bees of the world unite! You are not migrant workers! I think they are going on strike against low pay and poor work conditions.

[DoubleDogFarm]

No wonder the poor bees are screwed up. Worker bees of the world unite! You are not migrant workers! I think they are going on strike against low pay and poor work conditions

Yeah! and now they need a photo ID.

Eric

[jal_ut]

However, our hive is now infested with some kind of little mites? tiny beetles? We are considering what to do about it, since the treatment is harsh chemicals and we do all organic gardening. We may end up letting the hive die and starting over next spring. Even in a very diverse organic garden, it seems that it is harder to keep bee hives going these days.

Those little mites are pretty much a given these days. May as well treat for them or get out of the bee biz.

Powdered sugar puts them on the run. You have to get a shaker and go powder all parts of the hive. If you use a screened bottom board, the mites drop down through the screen with the powdered sugar treatment, and will not return. The alternative is the chemical mite strips.

[jal_ut]

Look at this!

It would be well to get two colonies of bees or more. Problem with one is that if there is a problem, no way to make manipulations. You are sunk.

Also, may I highly recommend making your frames with reinforced foundation. IOW the foundation has vertical wires embedded in it. I use the ones with wires with hooks, plus put in two horizontal wires too. I get the frames with split bottom board and foundation make for it, then the foundation goes down between the bottom boards and is held centered. Made like this frames will last many years.

[GardenRN]

If it's beetles, you can buy a trap for them that you just put a little oil in and they go into it and get stuck and drown. No chemicals. I used it on mine and it worked fine...

My first hive was a failure this year. The hive died due to wax moths. But I have since realized what I did wrong and I think I will have better luck next year. Another $125 for a nuk though....ouch!

[rainbowgardener]

I can't answer most of your questions. Hopefully jal_ut will come back and do that. But I can say definitely you can keep bees in the city. I have a friend who has several hives. She lives definitely in the city. She has a extra large double lot with lots of gardens, but bees can travel 2 miles or more, so it isn't that the bees are staying in her yard. My church had a bee hive for awhile and we are almost inner city, 4 miles from down town.

[imafan26]

You have to look at your city ordinances where beehives can be kept. If you live in a rural area it might not be a problem but in an urban environment with a lot of other people around there might be some restrictions.