Starting a Beekeeping Project

[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.