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The inner cover is not even, so there is one side that has more space. to keep the "bee space" I think the side with less room should be down. Is that correct?Eaglehound posted:Remember: 'Ask 3 beekeeps - get 4 answers'. Its refreshing to see that this group of people at least recognizes that and there is more than one way to do it. In Search and Rescue I have to constantly watch instructors because they will have their way, and no other way could be right, which confuses the hell out of students. Crazy Armed Pilot
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Mar 16, 2009 16:42
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Crazy Armed Pilot posted:Its refreshing to see that this group of people at least recognizes that and there is more than one way to do it. Oh don't worry. I've read some pretty intense arguments between beekeepers who know the "correct" way to do something and short of a correction by god, they'll never change their mind. That said, I painted anything exposed to weather and the top and bottom edges of the supers. I figure the paint is just to protect the wood and you don't want the bees having to deal with it. Quick question - I've seen discussion that nitrile gloves are awesome for beekeeping because they're thin but rip/pierce proof. Does anyone know if it's a specific type of nitrile glove that is resistant to piercing or is it all nitrile gloves that have that ability? The specific gloves mentioned are these but would something like this work just as well? TouchyMcFeely fucked around with this message at 19:45 on Mar 16, 2009 |
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Mar 16, 2009 19:30
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I've used some like the cheap ones when I was working on my truck with a neighbour, I found they ripped quite easily. If you're worried about getting stung, I would spend the extra cash on the thicker/stronger ones.
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Mar 16, 2009 19:55
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Slung Blade posted:I've used some like the cheap ones when I was working on my truck with a neighbour, I found they ripped quite easily. I've got these gloves but the problem is you can't feel what you're doing. I've read a few opinions saying that the lack of feeling can result in accidentally squishing bees which can cause the hive to get aggressive. I'm not really that worried about getting stung but it would be nice to have a little extra protection without those large, bulky leather gloves.
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Mar 16, 2009 20:47
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Touchy, there is a broad range of nitrile gloves. My lab has three or four different kinds because students are whiny bitches and have to have the thick/thin/purple/textured/special gloves or the world will end since someone complained about our latex gloves and OMG death. Anyway, there is a very broad range in the gloves, and I would say that any lab/exam glove will allow you to feel better than the leather ones. At that buy expensive ones, they will be thicker and better. The thin ones are a barrier and not much more, they rip, crack, and are lovely. Also keep them in a cool dark place and they will last much longer. They do go bad so buy some fresh ones. I will take a look when I go back to the floor to see what we have for a recommendation. My two deeps are done, and I am going to paint the westerns and other misc. components later this week so more pictures to come. Crazy Armed Pilot
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Mar 16, 2009 22:25
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Wandering Knitter posted:I've always wanted to take a class on beekeeping, but there's none in my area. Doesn't anyone in NJ love bees? These folks do!: http://www.njbeekeepers.org http://www.njbeekeepers.org/LocalBranches.htm -- Lists eight separate branches - one of them has got to near you!
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Mar 17, 2009 04:06
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Crazy Armed Pilot posted:The inner cover is not even, so there is one side that has more space. to keep the "bee space" I think the side with less room should be down. Is that correct? Yes, the small side should be down. I have to credit my beekeeping mentor for the "ask 3 beekeeps - get 4 answers" line. Another favorite line of his comes out when a couple of people start arguing about how to do something or how one way is better than another. He interrupts whichever person is being the most self-righteous and says in a kindly voice - "Well, maybe his bees didn't read the manual?" Stops the foolishness every time. 55 years of keeping bees, he's seen it all and knows better. I can only hope to live long enough to be as awesome as he is.
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Mar 17, 2009 04:22
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Here is some more motivation for you all. Here are my two completed deeps:  Both full of frames:  The rest of the stuff I need to paint with one coat of primer: (I had forgot that the bottom board and telescoping cover needed some paint too)  I just need to give a special shout out to melodywise for her thread that sparked my interest in this. Crazy Armed Pilot
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Mar 17, 2009 05:33
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Those look poo poo-hot, son. I'll be down to Corvallis later this week to get my big bag o' parts.
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Mar 17, 2009 07:29
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Hey Crazy Armed Pilot, maybe I missed it in this thread - where did you get all of this stuff (including your bees), and how much did it all cost? Keep us updated, I'm very interested in bees!
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Mar 17, 2009 07:44
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moana posted:Hey Crazy Armed Pilot, maybe I missed it in this thread - where did you get all of this stuff (including your bees), and how much did it all cost? Keep us updated, I'm very interested in bees! Okay, so I am getting my bees from someone local. I am getting a nucleolus hive, so I take this guy a deep and 5 frames and he raises nuc's. When a hive is ready, he will remove all the frames (minus the feeder) from a six frame nuc (so 5 frames of bees) and put it in my box. It should already have a queen and all be good to go. He will keep it a few more days and then check on it to make sure every thing is good, then I go pick it up and bring it home. He was offering a good deal of "about $65 bucks" to the bee school people so that's where I am getting my bees. My stuff came from Ruhl bee in Portland, but there are other places around too. Ruhl bee seemed to be the cheapest place. Everything needed set me back about $200. That didn't include a smoker or net because theirs were really expensive, and I could make a net hat thing, and the smokers at a different place where half the price. I also went a little bigger on my setup than they recommended. I am essentially ripping off how melodywise did hers. They recommended one deep and one western, but I am getting early bees and I want honey dammit. So my set up: 2 Deeps - 13.25/ea <- This is where the bees live 2 Western Supers - 10.25/ea <- This is where the bees put honey 2 Deep frame packs - 11.35/ea <- These are what the comb goes in 2 Super frame packs - 11.35/ea 2 Deep foundation - 12.00/10 <- This is what the bees build comb on 2 Super foundation - 9.35/10 1 Inner cover - 9.75/ea <- This is a cover on top with a small home 1 Telescoping cover - 22.00/ea <- This goes over the inner cover 1 Bottom board - 9.00/ea <- This is what it all sits on 1 Queen Excluder - 7.25/ea <- This keeps the queen in the deeps 1 Maxant hive tool - 11.95/ea <- This is the magic wand that makes bees make honey Once I get the rest of this stuff painted, I can get some pictures to show you all what this stuff is. In fact I think I will go put on a coat of primer now instead of studying for finals  Edited to try and fix formatting, but I am giving up. Crazy Armed Pilot Crazy Armed Pilot fucked around with this message at 17:37 on Mar 17, 2009 |
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Mar 17, 2009 17:33
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Eaglehound posted:-- Lists eight separate branches - one of them has got to near you! You'd think that, but the closest one near me hasn't updated their site in a month. Maybe I'll send a few emails around. I really want to try some hands-on stuff, which is why a class would be great. 
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Mar 17, 2009 21:35
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Well we spent the evening building all of Walrusmans kit, but I forgot the cable to upload the pictures. I will have to do that tomorrow when I get back out to work. Is anyone else here working getting hives ready? Crazy Armed Pilot
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Mar 20, 2009 08:57
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Crazy Armed Pilot posted:
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Mar 21, 2009 07:08
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I'm going to start working on my hive this weekend, today possibly. The weather has finally gotten nice and hopefully will stay that way.
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Mar 21, 2009 13:49
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I act as some sort of apprentice for my grandfathers bees, were down to 30 this year  . we have 20 boxes coming at the end of the month, and we would like to get back up to around 100 hives by the end of the year, but im concerned that it's going to be an awful dry year. I can offer my 2c if anyone has a question. More just interested in watching everyone else get into bees while i try and get out of the bussiness.
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Mar 22, 2009 01:52
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Wish my county was doing the free bee thing. Last year I had the money to get several hives, but not the time or permanent space. Now I don't have the money but have all the time in the world and my backyard is loving green acres.
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Mar 22, 2009 03:45
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nomad2020 posted:I act as some sort of apprentice for my grandfathers bees, were down to 30 this year I can think of tons of questions to ask you. How much land does he have? Where? What's on it (I assume plants and flowers for the bees..)? With this many hives, I assume he sells the honey. Does he make a living this way? Is it hard to maintain a living with beekeeping? What are his working hours like? Basically, anything you can offer up about having/maintaining a number of hives would be great.
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Mar 22, 2009 20:07
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Most of the time the bees spend around the farms and orchards in the area. During the late summer and over the winter they occupy not even a quarter acre. They're in Rural PA so they're surrounded by farms and gardens wherever they sit. A lot of the plants that they get their nectar from are the weed plants and trees. We do sell the honey at a few markets and festivals. We actually sell more honey than we produce at the moment so we buy from a few of the larger beekeepers in the area who ship their bees to Florida and California to pollinate the oranges and nuts respectively. It's not so much that it's a hard thing to sell (its sugar, who doesn't like sugar, but the markets that we've been using the past while are highly dependent on travelers. I'm not optimistic about people traveling this year. The more successful beekeepers I've known generally make their living off of leasing out their bees to pollinate crops. When you can get anywhere between 50-100+ for setting them in an orchard somewhere it turns into a business of scale. The difficult part of having so many hives is having to quickly take care of the individual hives. These beekeepers also generally have a few thousand hives, and maybe hire 2-3 others/involve family. Maintenance is fairly easy, we buy our hives un-assembled (guess who gets to do that bit) and we generally get everything put together this time of the year or earlier. Last week we went down through the supers and frames and pulled out the obvious bad ones so we can order what we need. My only real advice would be to see if there is a local bee club, and maybe even look into some of the larger groups. For example http://www.abfnet.org/ The American Beekeepers Federation. All i can think of off the top of my head.
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Mar 22, 2009 23:02
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I love bees. Today we've been busy straining honey, it's been messy but fun. Since we hadn't done it before we tried a few methods and stumbled onto this site with a pretty simple way to collect honey http://www.backyardhive.com/Caring_For_Bees_in_a_Top_Bar_Hive/Hive_Management/A_Simple_Harvest/
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Mar 23, 2009 02:05
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KillerChicken posted:I love bees. Today we've been busy straining honey, it's been messy but fun. Since we hadn't done it before we tried a few methods and stumbled onto this site with a pretty simple way to collect honey That's pretty neat, thanks for the link. I'll add it to the OP. But where the devil do you live that you're harvesting honey already? I'm damned jealous.
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Mar 23, 2009 02:26
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Hey you crazy bee people! Any chance I could buy your wax for encaustic painting? Looks like it goes for about 7.50 - 8.50 a lb online. I'd have my own hives cause I love honey so much but i wouldn't want to attract a lot of bees around my house due to the fact that my guy is super duper allergic yet too retarded to keep an epipen around. anyway if anyone is willing to sell me some wax shoot me an email at mar . bailey @ arts . cornish . edu
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Mar 23, 2009 21:46
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I'm in NY, it sucks we're harvesting, really. Our oldest hive swarmed very late in August, we caught the swarm but it wasn't able to store enough honey up and died over the winter. Cold weather set in earlier than usual, but it was too late even for a warm fall. We think the queen died in the original hive, shortly after the swarm left all the bees started acting weird that were left, and we weren't able to find any evidence of the queen. With no more broods the number of bees wasn't enough to keep warm for winter. Maybe we should have tried to re-merge the swarm with the original, since they didn't have a queen. We tried swapping frames into the swarm hive but ended up losing both Now the plan is to get more bees this spring. The honey is from the group that froze, we just hated to see it go to waste.
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Mar 24, 2009 01:36
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Okay, I was intending to add these to my prior post the next morning. Since I screwed around so long I will just make a new one. In review Walrusman came down Thursday night and we had a blitz build of his hive. We built everything starting around 7pm in about 4 hours. The only thing left was paint. Building boxes:  Working on frames:  poo poo there are a lot of frames, call for backup:  Last frames:  Now for a little tutorial, this is the base or bottom board:  Next you put on the first deep:  Then another deep (when the bees have seven-eight of the 10 frames full:  Once you have two full deeps and want to add a super, you first put on a queen excluder:  Then your super (in this case a western):  And another super:  The top goes on top of whatever the last box you added, the first step is the inner cover:  Then the telescoping cover:  And that's Walrusmans beehive (minus paint):  Edited because spell check wants a queen exploder and not excluder. Crazy Armed Pilot Crazy Armed Pilot fucked around with this message at 18:10 on Mar 24, 2009 |
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Mar 24, 2009 18:08
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nomad2020 posted:All i can think of off the top of my head. Thanks a lot, you've helped a ton.
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Mar 24, 2009 20:58
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Why does everyone paint the hives white? If you used decent wood, would it be acceptable to stain them instead?
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Mar 24, 2009 23:47
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Unless someone has a better reason I was always under the impression that white paint = cheap. Queen exploder sounds so much more entertaining. Nice hive!
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Mar 25, 2009 04:06
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We have a pretty tiny backyard, with a lot of neighbors (townhome community) How feasible would this be for me
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Mar 25, 2009 04:08
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nomad2020 posted:Unless someone has a better reason I was always under the impression that white paint = cheap. Maybe better light reflection=less scorching heat in the hive in the summer. My guess.
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Mar 25, 2009 04:31
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Armacham posted:We have a pretty tiny backyard, with a lot of neighbors (townhome community) How feasible would this be for me Do people in your neighbourhood have gardens or flower planters?
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Mar 25, 2009 05:45
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Armacham posted:We have a pretty tiny backyard, with a lot of neighbors (townhome community) How feasible would this be for me
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Mar 25, 2009 05:52
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I live in Austin, Texas. Would it be a horrible idea for me to try something like this? I've got a harebrained scheme to have a garden with a nice pond and a beehive but I'm concerned that despite my best efforts I will end up with a hive of murderous bastards due to living so far south. Is this a valid concern? Or am I just overreacting to the Africanized honeybee hype?
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Mar 25, 2009 08:02
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unprofessional posted:They won't even know it's there, unless you tell them. Shouldn't you tell your neighbors anyways, so they know if they see some bees swarming one day, they should come to you rather than catch it on fire with paint thinner or something?
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Mar 25, 2009 09:00
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Armacham posted:We have a pretty tiny backyard, with a lot of neighbors (townhome community) How feasible would this be for me Perfectly feasible as long as there are no restrictions on owning a hive and you register your hive with the local governing body. There was a great discussion over on the BetterBee forums about a guy who had a crazy neighbor spraying his hive with insecticide from over a wall common to their backyards. The lady called the cops to report the beekeeper and the hive and when the cops showed up, they fined the lady and told the beekeeper that he could sue her for destruction of property. Turns out in a lot of places you can't knowingly spray certain pesticides within a certain radius of a beehive and there are laws in place to protect beekeepers and their hives.
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Mar 25, 2009 17:30
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TouchyMcFeely posted:Perfectly feasible as long as there are no restrictions on owning a hive and you register your hive with the local governing body. It gets really hot in Tucson (100+ F) does the hive need a shaded place or will it be okay just painted white? Where do we go to register? I found out there's a bee research center near my home :3 So I think I will go down and talk to them about beekeeping. I think I might like to volunteer for a local beekeeper first before I dive right in to this...though I am really excited at the thought of having bees of my own. edit: Bee Research Center: http://www.ars.usda.gov/main/site_main.htm?modecode=53420300 Becktastic fucked around with this message at 17:56 on Mar 25, 2009 |
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Mar 25, 2009 17:54
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bawbzilla posted:Shouldn't you tell your neighbors anyways, so they know if they see some bees swarming one day, they should come to you rather than catch it on fire with paint thinner or something?
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Mar 25, 2009 17:55
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Tips for covert hives: Make sure they have water on YOUR property. In our class most of the bee related complainants that beekeepers received were related to bees getting water from elsewhere. If you don't put out water your neighbor will have thousands of bees around his leaky faucet, pool, hot tub, etc. Make sure that within a couple of feet of the entrance to the hive there is an obstacle 6-8 feet high. Bees will leave the hive and tend not to climb until they have to. If you have an obstacle they will climb up above peoples heads and wont drop back down until they are home. This will move your superhighway of bees up higher where they wont bother neighbors. Make sure your hives are not in view from the street or others. People could be 10 feet from a hive and usually the first sign of it is that they see it. If they don't see it, they wont know about it. Paint it to match your house, camouflage it with plants that also act as your 6-8 foot wall. Crazy Armed Pilot
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Mar 25, 2009 19:04
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If your willing to spare the window you could also bastardize a nook (4 frame hive for starting new colonies) to hang out of a window much like an air conditioner, though it will be a pain to work on. There's a guy that has a small hive like this that we supply bees to for bee sting therapy. I'm sure his nurses love him for that.
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Mar 26, 2009 05:14
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Becktastic posted:I probably have to tell my landlord though right? I wonder if I will need to pay a pet deposit... Hope it's not per pet. 
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Mar 26, 2009 20:57
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topenga posted:Hope it's not per pet. 
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Mar 26, 2009 23:15
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