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jal_ut
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Location: Northern Utah Zone 5

Beekeeping

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Last edited by jal_ut on Wed Aug 22, 2018 11:14 am, edited 2 times in total.

imafan26
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Location: Hawaii, zone 12a 587 ft elev.

We just harvested our first honey this year on August 11,2018. It was a small harvest only 108 jars. Most of it has already been distributed and sold. I have some wax outside left for the bees to rob. My friend wants it to make some hand cream.

We almost lost two hives over last winter. We grafted a queen to one hive and it took her a long time to start laying. Other hives started to have problems and most of them requeened. Forage is not the problem, but our hives seem to like to requeen in January when there aren't are lot of drones around to mate with.

We have to MAQ again. We don't want to do it when it is 90 degrees, but we want to try to requeen the hives before going into winter. Our bee clusters are bigger than other beekeepers because we do have forage all year, but we also have problem with hive beetles and varoa mites.

Two hives we lost, came back to life. It seems we have a new way to collect swarms. Just leave the old boxes out and they will come. 2 swarms found two of the hives we thought had died out. One moved in less than a month ago. The other has beetle problems so we narrowed the entrance and the bees have doubled in size. We hope they will be big enough so they can survive the winter.

We are changing out some of the older equipment. We are cycling out he short supers and putting in mediums. A couple of the hives had bad termite damage and we are awaiting the arrival of new hive parts since we have to totally replace one hive and we need to replace some of the mediums, get a couple of inner and outer covers, queen excluder and beetle blasters. We will also get frame lifters. We still have to get enough people to put down some weed block under the hives to keep the weeds from coming up and hopefully keep the hive beetles down as well. We have 8 hives now with the 2 swarms that moved in. Hopefully they all make it through winter. We average losing one hive a year.

Most of the hives have already started filling the supers again and we did take honey frames out of some of the brood boxes and move them to the supers since they were getting honey bound. We might get another small harvest before the end of the year. We usually only leave the bees a couple of frames of honey for winter.

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jal_ut
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Location: Northern Utah Zone 5

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Last edited by jal_ut on Wed Aug 22, 2018 11:09 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Gary350
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Joined: Mon Mar 23, 2009 1:59 pm
Location: TN. 50 years of gardening experience.

jal_ut wrote:With all the readers on these forums, I would suspect there are some beekeepers along? How about a forum on beekeeping?

Today I melted down the cappings . I poured the wax into cupcake papers so now I have little wax ingots.
James, If your on Facebook there is an option to make your own forum it is on your Facebook page. Click it, give it a name, answer a few questions, type in lots of key search words so people can find your forum. You can make a forum for anything you want. I know there are beekeepers all over the USA my cousin is one, friend from high school is one, friend in town is one. YOU get to be the moderator and forum police.

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Gary350
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Joined: Mon Mar 23, 2009 1:59 pm
Location: TN. 50 years of gardening experience.

I got interested in Honey Bees in High School. I built a bee hive from Plans. My father would never let me have bees he did not what them anywhere near the house, we lived in town. My Father made me give my bee hive to a man that has bees. The man said, it is a very nice hive you built I will put it to good use.

My uncle had bees for many years, he lived 10 miles from town in the middle of a 20 acre forest. He was not a bee keeper he had bees only because he wanted to help bees so there was about 10 bee hives scattered all over his property that no one every got honey from. After about 15 years his hives started to fall apart he was in his 80s and too old to do anything about it. He died, property was sold, don't know what every happened to the bees.

The guy I know in TN has 30 bee hives but about 20 bee hives died this year. He said, something is killing the bees, hives die every year we use to not have this problem. He gets new queens and gets all 30 hives going again. He puts out all the bees wax for bees to reclaim and use in their hives. I bought a quart mason jar of honey from him for $12 it sure is good. He has solar stainless steel boxes that he puts the honey comb in to warm up so honey drains out and fills up the jars. I don't know much about it only what I see and what I am told.

Someone advertised on CL looking for places to put bee hives. I told the guy he could put some in my yard but he never did. I am in the country I thought bees might be good for my garden. My yard has about 40 trees with lots of shade maybe that is not good for bees.



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