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In case the forums disappear, I want you all to know that I appreciate you and your bees. I have never kept bees and never had anything to contribute to the thread, but I followed it with interest.
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Jun 25, 2020 10:37
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Platystemon posted:In case the forums disappear, I want you all to know that I appreciate you and your bees. 
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Jun 25, 2020 14:31
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You know what I get asked all the time? If bees sting me. Because I can only assume it's what people fear the most from bees, and that is totally okay and I understand it. I then tell them that I get stung regularly. Sometimes you have to tend a hive when the weather is absolutely not right, sometimes a bee gets caught in your hair and stings in panic, sometimes the princess meets the wrong drones, resulting in a pretty hostile hive. But I mostly get stings because I refuse to select my queens for beeing calm. I want their offspring to be able to defend themselves from bad creatures. I just can't get behind the concept of breeding bees to be calm because the beekeeper can't be arsed to wear protective clothing. There are methods and bee hive boxes that are "closer" to nature that make bees calmer, I witnessed this many times. But you still rip open a hive if you have to inspect them, and I want my bees to be angry at me when I do this. I also adapted a pretty new way of handling my hives this year which I thought would totally fail but at the moment seems okay, but I'll post about that somewhere after the winter. Whenever I get stung, the first thing I do is trying to get the bee out of my skin before it rips itself apart, because she'd be dying in the process (the bees don't know they'll die when they sting something with skin like humans, that's why they panic twice like "gently caress, gently caress, I can't get away, I'm stuck and it's tearing me apart when I try to fly off but my wings are so strong", like bees don't die of they sting other bees, wasps, snails etc. ,They are basically in for the same surprise as the people getting stung, only their chance of dying is pretty high. I sometimes (not often, tbh) managed to remove a stinging bee with her stinging aparatus still intact, and put her next to the hive I suppose she came from (I also bugger out then because bees basically mark you with scents and poo poo like "here, I started killing this big bad thing, help me and kill it with me") What I'm trying to say is: Lowtax, I hope you get never stung by a single bee that is under my care. Not a single one is worthy to die for you, you terrible rear end in a top hat. This forum had so many cool and good people, threads and whatever. Lowtax, if a single bee of mine would sting you, it would be a wasted life of an insect that forms a colony that creates and looses 2000 bees a day. This is my meltdown, and I stand by it. gently caress you, Lowtax.
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Jun 25, 2020 22:08
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tuo posted:You know what I get asked all the time? If bees sting me. Because I can only assume it's what people fear the most from bees, and that is totally okay and I understand it. 
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Jun 26, 2020 06:03
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Call for a DIY IK https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3930843
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Jun 30, 2020 15:55
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Jesus when are my bees going to learn to loving read. A couple of weeks ago they decided to swarm after I inspected them 4 days before hand and found no queen cells. Then today they threw out a cast but just to right in front of them, I regathered it but it is way too small, going to have to go through it and see if there's a queen in there and recombine them.
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Jun 30, 2020 16:04
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Okay fellow beeks, I've got a weird situation at one of my hives and would love some opinions. Thought I had prevented a swarm at my formerly largest hive, but then of course they went and did what they felt like and swarmed with a virgin queen about 5 weeks ago. I'm 99% certain the second virgin queen emerged on 6/4. Left the hive alone for a while, but started swapping in frames of brood from one of my other hives after a couple weeks of no eggs. As of yesterday (7/1) there STILL weren't any eggs, and I never spotted a new queen. The bees all still seemed calm and hadn't been attempting to make any queens from the eggs I had added in, though, which seemed strange but whatever. Drove out to the middle of nowhere to pick up a new mated queen. Went to install her today, the workers immediately started stinging and biting the queen cage. Still no eggs but OH HEY THERE'S THE drat QUEEN. So we're 4 weeks out from when the queen emerged, but she still isn't laying and the workers don't seem to think there's a problem with her. HOWEVER, most of the hive has been backfilled with tons of honey and pollen, so part of me wonders if she just doesn't think she has room. And 4 weeks out without terrible weather conditions, she should be mated by now, right?? I really hate the idea of killing a young queen from such a productive and hardy stock, so for the time being I removed the frame she was on and stuck it in a nuc alongside some frames of pollen and honey with a little bit of open comb (I don't have any drawn deeps that aren't chock full right now). I figure this way I can give her a couple more days to start laying if it's just timing, but can still clear the hive of her pheromone so that I can install the mated queen. The entrance to the nuc is sealed, though, so if she's just not mated yet, she isn't gonna. What do y'all think?
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Jul 3, 2020 00:45
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4 weeks is not unheard off. I had that once last year (at least close to four weeks). They exchanged that queen within the same year, though. Them bringing in pollen though sounds like something came back and seemed mated, I think? The procedure you do sounds solid, imo. Two days should be fine for the remaining bees to realize they don't have a queen, and should adapt the mated one. Some beekeepers say two to four hours are enough, though I'm always better save than sorry. AAAALSO....had one of my hives swarm this year (the hive that swarms every year, regardless of what I do...though I didn't do regular swarm prevention this year, because I try to adapt a different way I learned this year). They didn't manage to make a new one. I mean it hatched, but three weeks later, no eggs. Added a frame with capped and fresh brood, and they started making a new one right off the bat. Time's of course already running out. Two weeks after that one hatched, no eggs. Bee mass already getting low, so I ordered a mated queen from a fellow breeder to pick up today. Checked the hive again yesterday to make sure, and yeah....eggs. Bringing in pollen like crazy... Argh... Only good thing is that they now have a queen with different genetics (from the hive next to it, which hasn't swarmed ever), so maybe they won't swarm next year. Start of july is not completely impossible to make an artificial swarm with the surplus mated queen, of course, but still....argh... tuo fucked around with this message at 17:09 on Jul 4, 2020 |
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Jul 4, 2020 17:02
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tuo posted:4 weeks is not unheard off. I had that once last year (at least close to four weeks). They exchanged that queen within the same year, though. Them bringing in pollen though sounds like something came back and seemed mated, I think? Most of the pollen that’s in my swarmed hive predates the swarm. Haven’t seen them bringing in much more, but they’re making tons of honey and building lots of burr comb. Presumably because they’ve got nothing else to do! Gonna check on them again today, fingers crossed that there will be eggs in the nuc. If so, I’ll just put her back in the original hive because frankly, I don’t have room for another. If there’s still no eggs... I dunno. Maybe it’s squish time. But ugh I really don’t want to. The farm where I got the mated queen said they’ve had a lot of similar stories to yours this year- people waited for eggs after a swarm, no dice, bought a queen, went to install, and there’s a queen. They were like “maybe wait a few days before installing her, everyone seems to be finding queens late this year.”  Bees!
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Jul 4, 2020 18:44
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Welp checked the nuc with the non-laying queen and wouldn’t you know it, eggs. Sloppy, irregular eggs, though. Gonna give her a little more time to see if she evens out. If she doesn’t, I’ll install the new queen in the old hive. If she does, I’ll just pop her back in there and bring the other queen back to the breeder. Meanwhile, another one of my other hives is insanely huge now, to the point where it’s nearly impossible to even read the comb. They’ve been wanting to swarm but so far I’ve been able to stall them by removing the queen cells and giving them more space, but I’m starting to wonder wtf else I should do. The obvious answer is a split, but frankly I’m out of space in the yard. Any of you ever do the temporary split thing where you split the hives only to recombine a little later? I’m reluctant but man, there are SO MANY BEES just pouring out everywhere. Beautiful temperament, too. Definitely don’t want to lose this queen before it’s her time.
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Jul 5, 2020 01:34
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I've done an artificial swarm and then recombined them later, though that was not the intention when I split them I have to say.
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Jul 5, 2020 10:11
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I haven't been keeping up on updates, but I somehow ended up with 8 hives this year. It's a mix of cheap NUCS, swarms, and a literal "free box of bees" off Facebook. It's been a rough start. Due to the constant rain this spring/early summer the girls missed out on the linden bloom and a good part of the Blackberrys. I'm planning on leaving extra supplies on and only taking excess required to downsize the hives for winter. I learned my lesson about leaving extra honey supers on with a queen excluder. Don't do it. Now I've been particularly neglectful about treatment. I want to improve this- it would help to understand others regiments/schedules. I want to get as many of these as I can through winter.
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Jul 6, 2020 22:43
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Melicious posted:Welp checked the nuc with the non-laying queen and wouldn’t you know it, eggs. Sloppy, irregular eggs, though. Gonna give her a little more time to see if she evens out. If she doesn’t, I’ll install the new queen in the old hive. If she does, I’ll just pop her back in there and bring the other queen back to the breeder. So in case anyone was wondering, the nuc queen ended up not being viable. I somehow missed it upon first sight, but she was missing an entire wing- I had snapped a couple photos of her the first time I saw her and on review, yep, missing the wing back then, too. Anyway, no idea when it happened or if she had been able to get any good mating flights beforehand, but all the eggs she laid were drones, so I dispatched her as humanely as possible. The replacement queen I got from the breeder is laying well and looks great. She doesn’t have much room, though, since the bees spent their month without a laying queen filling the whole drat hive up with honey. I’ve been swapping out frames whenever possible, but had been pretty much out of supplies until I was able to extract this weekend. Just crazy amounts of honey this year, it’s awesome.
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Jul 14, 2020 19:50
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Same here. We'll do the last extraction this weekend, and nearly every single honey super is filled to the brim...on some hives, I have four honey supers this year...and I could have put on a fifth if I had any...it's crazy. My back is NOT looking forward to this weekend  There is still enough to collect and I could keep them on another two weeks easily, but I checked varroa count on couple of hives and it's really alarming. Super warm winter where they nearly never stopped breeding, plus an absolutely awesome year for bees in regard to climate over here (warm, but not too warm, two or three days of rain every other week). So I want to start the first treatment as soon as possible. Luckily made a deal with a local bakery chain that wants to sell my honey, else I really wouldn't know how to sell all that myself, because due to Corona people hesitate to come over to buy some (allthough I offer to drop it off at their door, but no one used that option yet). Btw, there's a study currently going on over here about Corona and bee stings, inspired by a study from china. Apparently, nearly no chinese beekeeper (that tested positive) died or even showed symptoms from a Corona infection, even though many of them where within the risk group. And everyone always laughed at me when I went to my bees in shorts and got stung all the time...hah! *drycough tuo fucked around with this message at 06:55 on Jul 15, 2020 |
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Jul 15, 2020 06:50
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liiVX55tJ7E
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Jul 15, 2020 07:41
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Yeah my mite levels haven’t been great, either. I did an oxalic vapor in the spring and wanted to follow up with Formic Pro, but I was worried that would spark additional swarms since they were already so crowded. The brood break in my one requeened hive is definitely going to help, but I’m going to want to get going with formic as soon as the temps are low enough. I’ll probably keep harvesting supers till the end of the month, but we’ll see! Tuo, what do you treat with? That’s wild about COVID and beestings. Sure would be nice if it amounts to something! 
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Jul 15, 2020 16:12
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Melicious posted:Yeah my mite levels haven’t been great, either. I did an oxalic vapor in the spring and wanted to follow up with Formic Pro, but I was worried that would spark additional swarms since they were already so crowded. The brood break in my one requeened hive is definitely going to help, but I’m going to want to get going with formic as soon as the temps are low enough. I’ll probably keep harvesting supers till the end of the month, but we’ll see! Tuo, what do you treat with? I wish oxalic vapor was allowed over here, I'd switch to that in a heartbeat. It's allowed in many countries in europe, but not in Germany, sadly (simply because no company wants to pay for the procedure...similar to 85% formic acid, which ain't allowed here, only 65%). A lot of beekeepers use them anyway, but it's a hassle to get the stuff. In the last couple of years, I did the typical formic treatment with 65%. After the last harvest, I give every hive about 10kg of food, and then as soon as the weather is right, I do the first treatment (mostly 250ml / 8,5 oz, via a Liebig dispenser:  ). Then another round of food, and a second treatment. In december I dribble oxalic acid once the hives no longer breed. With a couple of hives I switched to total brood removal (in combination with oxalic acid) last year, as I want to get away from the formic acid if possible. That worked like a charm, and I'll do it with some of my hives again this year. If I'm getting more comfortable and experienced with it, I might fully switch to it. You need a lot of empty boxes for it, though, that's why I'll only do it with a couple hives this year...not in the mood to invest too much at the moment due to corona etc. Still hope this stuff gets approved within the next years (University of Hohenheim is currently running studies over here): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-19137-5 That would be a dream come true. No acid, and you can simply add it while feeding them for winter. tuo fucked around with this message at 09:12 on Jul 16, 2020 |
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Jul 16, 2020 07:11
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tuo posted:Btw, there's a study currently going on over here about Corona and bee stings, inspired by a study from china. Apparently, nearly no chinese beekeeper (that tested positive) died or even showed symptoms from a Corona infection, even though many of them where within the risk group. And everyone always laughed at me when I went to my bees in shorts and got stung all the time...hah! *drycough I actually joked about this early on before covid got big.
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Jul 17, 2020 16:46
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Guess who's getting honey this year. This guy! My super is like 90% full, just waiting on the last bits to fill up.
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Jul 23, 2020 14:28
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At what point of the warm weather months are folks ceasing the adding of frames/boxes? A couple weeks ago I took a peek and saw that some of the frames I have added (checkerboarded) in the brood section were only partially drawn out, and 2 of the honey end frames were not drawn at all. Comb manufacture seemed to have slowed down a great deal. Keep in mind, I am running horizontal hives. Brood framed are nearest the entrance end, and honey stores furthest away. I took the empty (honey end) frames and them from between the drawn frames, and moved them to the very end, so that the honey section would have no gaps (they would just need to build more comb down that end if they continue to add honey). I am HOPING that the partially drawn frames in the brood section will be completed, and brood will be laid there for the remainder of the season. TLDR: How soon to cease checkerboarding? fake edit: I mainly checkerboard so that the frames are built properly on my foundationless deeps. If I leave them to their own devices and allow them to build as they like along a slew of undrawn frames, uneven comb gets progressively worse down the line. Better to sandwich empty frames between proper ones until drawn out. Hasselblad fucked around with this message at 21:47 on Jul 23, 2020 |
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Jul 23, 2020 21:43
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Question about the money side of beekeeping: How do you turn harvested honey (and wax, etc.) into money as you grow your operation? I get that if you have 1 hive you use the honey yourself and give it away to family; 4 hives you are selling it at farmers markets and have a sign in your yard; 10 hives you are sneaking jars of honey into unlocked cars at the mall.... In my area of the US, the USDA says a hive produces on average 55# of honey in a year. If you have 20 hives, what do you do with 1000# of honey?
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Aug 5, 2020 07:24
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You can wholesale it. Which of course grants the least profit, but is also the least work. You can sell it online, though my experience is that it doesn't sell well (I think for one glass of honey I sell online, I sell like twenty cosmetic thingies). It's also more work than fun (packaging etc.) You can have your own little market stand, which works quite well depending on the time of year. Lot of work though, on bad days you sell nearly nothing etc. You can find a reseller. Depends on the deal of it's fun or not. I currently have a local bakery chain as a reseller, and it looks like they sell more than I can produce (20 hives at the moment), so I'm already in talks with other local beekeepers if they have surplus honey they want to sell. Just don't expect to get rich It's more work than profit, but I do it mostly for fun. Most fun is someone telling you for twenty minutes who of their ancestors kept bees and where and what not, only to buy one single jar of honey
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Aug 5, 2020 07:58
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Also regarding wax: I trade it in for fresh, sterilized wax. I thought about running my own wax cycle, making my own foundations from it (actually did that for a year). The problem is that you can't sterilize the wax, so if you are somewhere near a farmer etc., over time pesticides will build up in the wax. The bees try to filter them out the best they can (by using their own body as the filter, this dying in the process or at least getting heavy brain damage), but all studies over here show that after time, you have traces of them in the wax if you run your own wax cycle. Sterilizing the wax is impossible for a small beekeeping operation. The machinery costs ten of thousands of dollars (the wax has to be put at something like 60 bars IIRC and has to be heated to <i-can't-remember-but-hot> for like six hours to ensure that the wax is perfectly clean. The amount of energy you have to put into this only makes sense at a larger scale, also. Making candles out of them is also pretty hard, because you'd have to get all of the pollen out of the wax, else the candle won't burn reliably (wick getting clogged by pollen, stopping the capillary action, or worse, pollen burning up and candle starts "spitting" hot wax). So I bring my wax to my local foundation maker, and get a discount for fresh wax for the amount of "uncleaned" wax I bring. Still quite a lot of work to melt all the old wax down (they of course won't accept frames or stuff, only solid blocks of wax), and to be honest, one of the less funny activites in beekeeping, but at least you have something to do during winter.
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Aug 5, 2020 12:11
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echo465 posted:
The part of the equation you are leaving out is that a certain amount of that honey is consumed (should be) by the bees themselves.
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Aug 5, 2020 15:28
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Hasselblad posted:The part of the equation you are leaving out is that a certain amount of that honey is consumed (should be) by the bees themselves. With 55 pounds I assume that's already in the equation. A total production (including their own need during summer) of 55 pounds would be pretty fatal for most beehives.
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Aug 5, 2020 15:39
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tuo posted:With 55 pounds I assume that's already in the equation. A total production (including their own need during summer) of 55 pounds would be pretty fatal for most beehives. My point is that 55 lbs total production does not equate to 55 lbs of harvestable honey. Unless you are pumping them sugar water all year. So his question of what to do with 1000lbs per 20 hives only factored in the bees eating 5 lbs per hive per year. As far as money is concerned, I have been hand making long langstroths for folks on a built to order basis.
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Aug 5, 2020 18:18
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Hasselblad posted:My point is that 55 lbs total production does not equate to 55 lbs of harvestable honey. Unless you are pumping them sugar water all year. So his question of what to do with 1000lbs per 20 hives only factored in the bees eating 5 lbs per hive per year. I understood that. My point was that a hive that only makes 55 lbs per year total (including what they consume themselves) might have a problem.
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Aug 5, 2020 21:31
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tuo posted:I understood that. My point was that a hive that only makes 55 lbs per year total (including what they consume themselves) might have a problem. Gotcha.
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Aug 5, 2020 22:00
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Hasselblad posted:The part of the equation you are leaving out is that a certain amount of that honey is consumed (should be) by the bees themselves. tuo posted:With 55 pounds I assume that's already in the equation. A total production (including their own need during summer) of 55 pounds would be pretty fatal for most beehives. Honey, March 2020 is where the data is coming from (page 3). To me, Yield per colony means the amount of honey taken out of a hive, not counting any honey you leave behind for the bees.
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Aug 6, 2020 02:33
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Yep, that sounds about right.
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Aug 6, 2020 16:31
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When I was keeping bees, we got our supplies from Beekind in Sebastopol, CA and they also happily bought honey from beekeepers. At that time (~2010-2012) IIRC they paid about four or five bucks a pound. Also our CA hive yielded a harvest of 75lbs the first year and over 120lbs the second (and then swarmed, lol). And that was leaving a full honey super on them plus everything in the three-mediums brood box for them to overwinter on. Mild winters plus local stuff that blooms year round leads to huge production.
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Aug 7, 2020 00:00
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Leperflesh posted:When I was keeping bees, we got our supplies from Beekind in Sebastopol, CA and they also happily bought honey from beekeepers. At that time (~2010-2012) IIRC they paid about four or five bucks a pound. Here we have brutal winters and they are looooong. Summer we get lovely droughts (we are high desert after all).
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Aug 7, 2020 15:18
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Man, I feel like a complete idiot today. Yesterday I pulled supers from 5 hives. I had ran out of deeps mid spring and used mediums in the brood chamber. I then ran out of mediums. Not ideal, I ended up with a single 8 frame brood box I never revisited. I did however put a queen excluder and 2 mediums on it. I do not know how, but the queen snuck upstairs. I only learned this AFTER pulling the supers and using my small 18v blower to dislodge the majority of the bees. I have no idea if I have a queen left. Completely my fault for not doing more thorough inspections. I reassembled the hive after a quick inspection. Downstairs is looking great, completely full of honey and nectar - but I was scooping up handfuls of clusters bees and putting them back in the box. At least they were calm. Definitely going to have some cleanup this spring when I can replace all these mediums with deeps.
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Aug 15, 2020 18:21
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I got to collect my honey for the first time since I started two years ago! I'm so happy!
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Aug 30, 2020 21:10
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Remember the taste. No honey tastes as good as your first own harvest!
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Aug 31, 2020 07:27
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Got some little honeybear for our customers this year (mainly as presents for children), and boy do they love them. I thought it might work around christmas, but I already have to order more of those bear-shaped glasses at the start of autumn. 
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Sep 1, 2020 14:37
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Pulled off 11 frames to harvest just the very end of the season here, gotten about 40 jars this year which is not bad considering the weather we've had. Also got 5 times as many colonies as the start of the year. Time to treat for varroa and see how many make it through winter.
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Sep 1, 2020 14:42
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Uuuuugh, great! You think you are done feeding the hives for the winter, and now 26 to 29 °C temps kick in, and all the little fuckers collect pollen like crazy and are breeding like crazy. Trying to get inverted bee food at the moment? It's basically battle royale at the local sellers. They can't get enough from the supplier, and when something comes in, there are like three dozen beekeepers standing around the lorry while the stuff is unloaded, everyone eyeing each other about who they think they can manage to take down to get some inverted food. Guess I'll have to feed another hundred kilograms of non-inverted. They also suck that stuff up like nothing at the moment. Eight litres of 2/3 sirup in a day, some even have the feeder dry after couple of hours. ...and yeah, too lazy at the moment to convert to imperial
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Sep 14, 2020 11:23
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Also weighed the hives yesterday which I didn't take honey from this year. They also need some feeding. What a year.
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Sep 14, 2020 11:25
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I finally pulled my super yesterday, got about 8.5 frames full probably.
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Sep 14, 2020 20:02
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