This thread is a repository for bee keepers or those interested.
A couple of years ago, a couple of friends an my brother started puttering with honey bees. I didn't buy off because, well, I've never been a big fan of bees or getting stung by them. Last summer I tagged along a couple of times to check their hives and to remove honey bees from a house, public building and an old garage.
I realized at the end of the summer when I was helping them process some, that it's actually pretty interesting, and fits into my expanding "grow my own" logic. I'm not full blown hippy but I see a lot of logic in the self sustaining food thing and I'm doing some of that too.
That said, this thread is about bees, honey bees, bee keeping and bee fighting war stories.
I'm taking the leap and plan to get 2-3 hives this spring and maybe build some bee swarm traps to make it cheaper or to make a few bucks.
Join me and I'll share the real life lessons of an ameture bee keeper. I'm sure I'm going to learn some things the hard way.
I did verroa treatments in October, and had lost 2 hives. I've processed and bottled and now am in the selling/cost recovery phase of the operation.
Yesterday it was warm, so I went down to put the winter patties on the hives. For those that don't know, winter patties are a playdough texture mixture of sugar, some bee health supplements and essential oils. It provides carobydrates and some antibiotic health for the colony during the winter. They don't contain protein/pollen because that will stimulate egg laying and you don't want that due to the impact on food resources. If the bee ball works eats its way to the top of the hive, the winter patty sitting on top gives them some food to get them by for a while.
So, during this process yesterday I found 2 more dead outs and one more that doesn't look good. That's a total of 4 dead, one that probably will be going INTO winter....not good.
I did rob the comb from the dead outs and used them to backfill some of the hives that had less resources.
I'm a little baffled by what happened, but I know several other bee keepers who are losing bees this fall. One lost 17 of his 45 already. He's blaming verroa on his.
i did notice a design flaw in my horizontal hive...There just isn't enough room between the frames and the lid. I'll be building a spacer of maybe 3-4" to raise that so I have room for insulation next year.
Anway, I'm about done for the winter, with maybe a little wrapping but I haven't decided on what I'm doing about that this year. I'm now selling honey in 3 stores so that helps moving it easier. If I can keep these(most of them) alive, it shouldn't be hard to backfill my losses as I've learned alot about trapping bees this year and am confident I'll be able to catch what I need in the spring.
Hope you all had a good year.
You can lay a lot if layers of newspaper in not much space in your horizontal. It’s also a good idea to crumple up newspaper and pack the empty scape in your horizontal in the winter. Works great and still allows a little ventilation. I lost a hive that went queenless and then they started laying drones. Weird looking inspection. [Reply]
That's good advice. I've got newspaper and also some .25" foam board that would also word well. I usually use that for hive wraps but I'm leaning towards not wrapping the, this year. Have a good wind block or north and west which should stop most of the wind. [Reply]
Today is finally warm after a brutal stretch of winter. I just got back from a long lunch where I opened, counted the living and fed bees to get them through the rest of the winter. The majority of bees will die in March of starvation.....which is great news considering.....
I'm now down 11 hives since November. I have Six(6) living hives out of 17.
I can't really say what got them. I guess I'll assume it was mites(which I tried to treat in the fall) or I should have wrapped them and maybe condensation got them during the cold snap.
I can't tell you how frustrating it is to spend all that time doing cutouts, trapping, and tending to have so many just die. The most frustrating loss is the hive that my son got stung so many times during the cutout.
I'll have a lot of cleanup to do in a few weeks to save the honey and frames from bugs, and then I guess I'll regroup, build some more traps and go get busy in early spring.
THAT is why you should pay more for local honey..... [Reply]
My buddy lost 7 out of his 8 hives this winter, all 4 on my land. He is just devastated. I know he said he was going to bomb all the hives and frames. That is a bunch of money he lost this winter. [Reply]
I'll go pull them all in early spring before bugs are out(the dead hives) and clean them up, get rid of crappy frames, try to save frames of good comb and honey and then get busy trapping. I feel more confident that I know how to catch swarms now.
Cutouts are too much work, I'm not sure how many of them I'll do this year....and I'm pondering buying a couple of packages from a lady that is known for having strong, hearty bees. I just hate buying them.
I know a lot of people who have quit bee keeping losing less hives than your buddy. It's very discouraging.
I'm not done. I'll just try some different things this year.
On the upside, my horizontal hive had me nervous in the fall but it's roaring right now. [Reply]
I'm not sure, but each bee is just a part of that organism that is the hive.
Other than food supply, robbing competing hives, insecticides, weather extremes, mites, parasites, moisture, animals....They don't really have much working against them.
I wish I knew more. I will know more at the end of this year than I do now. [Reply]
Did your horizontal hive make it. I have been converting Langstroth boxes into traps works pretty good. I have started bee hunting before setting traps. It’s not hard if you do it the easy way. The only drawback is landowner permission. [Reply]
My horizontal hive had me nervous going into winter, but it looked good yesterday. I'll add another winter patty to it this weekend but overall it seems good so far.
My design has an issue that I'll try to resolve this spring. The lid sits down too tight/close to the layer of boards I put on top of the frames. There isn't really room to feed or insulate.
My thought is to add a 2-3" spacer on top this spring. If I build another one, I'll make the hinged lid this time just to make it easier. [Reply]
This was a rough year starting with the loss of all but 4 of my hives this spring.
I regrouped, hustled and worked to rebuild my yard. I set out swarm traps, I did 2 trap-outs of trees and did a couple of cut-outs from houses. I also had an opportunity to help out an esteemed planet member with a removal in a house.
At harvest time, I was back to 16 hives, i've lost a couple and added a couple back. Right now I've got 16 going into winter.
This year I started sending more stories of bee adventures with snap and made a business page where i"m doing live streams and sharing some stories.
A lot of hours. A lot of sweat. A lot of stings.....but I didn't end up with a lot of honey as a reward for the work that I did. The weather just wasn't good for honey production this year. All of the guys I used to do bees with are out or getting out, so I'm the last one standing.
I had 2 events where I took significant numbers of stings, the last being during a fall mite treatment a month or so ago. They were so damn angry that day, they were getting me through my pants, were getting up my jacket and into my veil. Probably 25 hits that day and I was pretty annoyed by the time I was done.
because of the losses, I've spent more time and effort on mite treatment. I did 2 oxalic acid vapor treatments, and then put apaviar strips in last week. I made new tops for inner feeders and all of my weaker hives(not having enough honey to get through winter) are getting 2:1 sugar water about once per week. I'll add some sugar to the top of all of the hives as we get close to winter.
In other developments, I purchased a 12x24' building that I"m using for a honey house/man cave. It's not done yet, but half is being used for processing honey...the other half will soon have internet, a tv, a desk, donkey kong and other essentials.
I was approached by a grocery store about selling my honey and I've had it in one store for a week and it's going very well.
This coming year I pretty much have to decide what I'm going to be. I'm either going to have to spend more money on equipment and grow some, because the people who have been helping me are selling their stuff.....or downsize a little ,and spend those hours of summer honey bee catching at the lake with my kids or something.
My other recent record is also in tact. For the 3rd year in a row, I mowed into ground bees within a couple hundred yards of my honey bees. This time with a brush chopper and I got beat up on the hands by yellow jackets. I hate those damn things. I'd like to kill all of them on the planet. [Reply]
Being a bee keeper is a lot like being a Chiefs fan...
Today was unseasonably warm, so I snuck off to do quick winter hive checks. I've got 5 dead so far and it's not even really the killing season for another month.
That said, changes are coming. Because I'm a glutton for punishment, I put in a new building for processing honey and bottling and have been working on that at night. I also am finalizing a deal to buy out another producer who has 4x my total sales. Might as well dig until I get to china at this point.
I am going to have some new products though. This year I'm going to start making creamed honey(3-4 flavors) and I'm going to have wax equipment for candle making and chap stick and stuff like that from bees wax.
Hope the rest of you have decent winter survival and mine doesn't get too much worse. I'm going to need to make a lot more honey. This season I think I'll need to be closer to 30 hives, which is a lot of damn work if I'm going to try to keep wild catching them instead of buying. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Buehler445:
Dig until China. :-)
Good luck my man if you put some of the hives in a lean to or something to keep the wind off would that help?
Wind isn’t my issue as I’ve got a tree line north and west sides of the hives. I did extra varroa treatment, fed sugar water and put winter Pattie’s and dry sugar on. I think it’s coming down to swarms I caught late not having enough time to build up honey or they were weakened by disease or mites…..or I’m as good at bee keeping as the chiefs are at closing out games to go to the big one.
It’s something everyone fights. I talked to a big producer that had 1750 dead this fall out of 4000…before winter. They’re able to recover easier with more to split in spring.
I’ll keep working on it and someday I’ll know what I’m doing. [Reply]
I did end up buying out another producer that I'd been doing some bee stuff with since the beginning. The downside is I had/have a bunch of equipment to move, and a week after i did the deal something happened and I had an unexpected operation and was in sweat pants for a month. Couldn't do anything. I hired some HS guys to help pick things up and put things down and they've done a great job helping me.
In the meantime, in addition to their equipment, I got their client list and the 2nd week in, I had some big orders come in and I wasn't prepared. I had to rely on the other people in my house to bottle a bunch of honey and they knocked it out of the park. I also was in the middle of rebranding, and have new logo, labels, cards and am working on some swag(hats and shirts). The hobby is turning into a job pretty quickly. The good news is, I've been hustling this month on the phone and I've added several stores, some pretty decent sized orders.
I've had good survival this spring and have been feeding some sugar, and lately some old honey and pollen. I want the bees to fire up a little early so I can do some splits of hives. My goal this year will be to more than double my hives and have a second bee yard. I need to make a lot more honey now, and there is only 1 way to do that.
I'll try to share more pics of swarm catches, and if I can figure out how to share videos I'll do some more of that too.
If you're someone I trust and are interested, message me and I'll share a fb link you can follow to watch me get stung. [Reply]
