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I've been paying attention to the SA bee threads for the last two years, and at some point showed them to my wife. She loves bees and has been super-enthusiastic. At our last place, we lived in a city with a law saying you had to have a hive at least 25' from the property line; such a spot was nonexistent on our rented lot. However, I just bought a house in December in Concord, CA and we moved in and are pretty much unpacked. So... Tomorrow we're going to a bee class ("Free Introduction to Beekeeping", held by a bee supply placed called 'Beekind') in Sebastopol. So it looks like the year for us to start doing the bee thing. On a related note, I planted a dwarf apple tree in the back, and put a super-dwarf cherry tree into a planter pot on the front porch, last weekend. A couple weeks ago I also planted a blackberry in the back. I hate grass, so I'm going for clover ground-cover in the front and back yards as much as I can, too. So I think we'll be in shape for happy bees. Anyone have an opinion on Beekind? Beekeeping in Contra Costa County, CA? Advice/starting dates/etc for beekeeping in sunny, no-snow-having CA where it's likely to be regular 70-degree temps well into November, and we've already had some days well into the 60s in February (although we're having a lot of rain this season (which is good))? (here is a photo I took of a bee) 
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Feb 27, 2010 04:33
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Ghostnuke posted:I hate to rain on your bee parade, but unless you've already ordered your bees it's probably going to be too late to start this year. You've got to get things ordered months before you actually want them. Beekind has plenty of spots left on their list for bee ordering. They make two batches available, April 17th and April 24th, and the folks at the shop yesterday said they take delivery of 170 3lb packs each, of Italians and Carniolans, for which they take reservations until they're all taken. The class was great. One thing that was a surprise was the advice to start with two hives, rather than one; two gives a beginner the ability to compare, so they'll be much more likely to recognize a problem in the hive early enough to do something about it; and, secondly, having two hives gives you a resource to draw from to help a struggling hive. I'll buy that as a reasonable suggestion, but my wife and I haven't decided yet whether to go that far (it's more expensive and will take more room in the yard). Once we decide, we'll place our order; probably this week.
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Feb 28, 2010 21:11
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OK, is it fairly common for municipalities to have a law restricting hives from within 25 feet of a property line? What is this law supposed to accomplish? We are now looking at a situation where if we want bees we have to break the law, even though our back yard has fencing all the way around, so bees will rise to go over fences and won't be a nuisance. My wife is gung-ho and so we're probably just going to pick a spot that's fairly far from the fence, as well as talk to our neighbor to make sure they're ok with it. But it does mean we won't be able to get inspected by the county or whatever. Argh.
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Mar 1, 2010 22:25
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That is great to hear. None of our close neighbors have swimming pools, and we keep a little lily-pond in a half-barrel that will be perfect for bees. One of our neighbors does have kids and dogs, so I was thinking they'd be the ones to notify. We're in a very Hispanic, working-class neighborhood, though, lots of practical-minded people who aren't squeamish and understand the value of producing for yourself; there's a guy two houses down who has his vegetable garden in the front yard, and I am certain I can hear a rooster and chickens a few houses away on the street behind our house, that kind of thing. I think it'll be fine. I just don't understand the ordnance itself. What does 25' do? Either bees are near your house and you don't like that, or it's fine. 25' strikes me as a meaningless restriction.
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Mar 2, 2010 07:15
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Apiphobia (is that right?) is understandable, but also irrational. Honestly, a neighbor's dog is much more likely to be dangerous than their beehive. Of course I guess I know the answer; bees are restricted because lawmakers didn't understand or didn't care about bees and how they actually behave when they wrote the ordnance. I suspect that cities often just copy laws from each other, as well, without bothering to discover if they make any drat sense at all first.
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Mar 3, 2010 01:53
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I ordered my bees today from HMS Beekeeper in San Francisco. The woman said they would be taking orders through Saturday, for delivery in April. You can order online: http://www.hmsbeekeeper.com/HMSB/Blog/Blog.html (Yes, order from the Blog page. Don't ask me!) 3 lbs of bees and a mated Italian queen for $85, which was the best deal going in the area.
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Mar 5, 2010 07:23
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Are you going to build supers that stack on top, or is that the whole hive?
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Mar 8, 2010 22:02
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Wife and I took the free Package Bee Installation class at Beekind in Sebastapol yesterday. Then we picked up all our equipment: two built deeps and a built super, each with eight frames and two followers, plus two more unbuilt mediums and a box of 20 more medium frames. Plus lid, some kind of special bottom, hive tool, smoker with fuel, two hats/veils and two pairs of gloves. Almost $500, even with the 10% discount they give (I think for people who attend their classes? Or maybe just because it was sunday, or who knows). This hobby can get expensive! (But I think this should do it for expenses for the whole year, unless we somehow need a fourth medium super). My wife is so excited to get our bees, she's going nuts. Melodywise, I'm curious; did you find that the hive still had honey left? And if so... what was the coldest day you had this past winter? If you don't mind talking about it, I hope it's OK.
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Mar 29, 2010 18:39
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A queen mates once, and that's it. So keeping the africanzed genes out would only matter if the hive requeens itself, right? As long as you start with a mated queen that wasn't wild-mated with the local bees, you should be fine, I think.
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Mar 31, 2010 22:19
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Yeah, that's odd. If they still had honey, they should have been able to cluster together and keep themselves warm. Finding them spread out around the hive and frozen doesn't sound right. But that's all just based on what limited reading I've done, plus a class. There's probably some good reason I'm just not aware of.
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Apr 1, 2010 05:08
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Got word from Her Majesty's Royal Beekeeper in San Francisco: bees arrive on the 11th! I have two deeps and a medium ready, with two more mediums in parts for me to build at my leisure. Bees next weekend!!!
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Apr 2, 2010 16:19
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By hive body, you mean the box that the bees are raising brood in, right? Is your body made of deeps, or mediums? I believe the rule of thumb is, two deeps, or a deep and two mediums, or three mediums. Everything else goes on top for honey, and it's for you. When you say it's really crowded, do you mean they've filled all the frames with brood? Or just, they're socking away tons of pollen and honey and stuff. If it's the former, well, that's expected right after winter, but maybe they'll swarm if there's too many bees next month. In which case, you could consider splitting the hive I guess? I'm not too sure what you're supposed to do at that point actually, someone more experienced can say.
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Apr 4, 2010 03:07
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In class last week, our instructor said that's what bees do in the early spring: as soon as it's warm enough, the queen lays like crazy and starts ramping up the hive population as fast as possible. I'm guessing yours have hatched out and you're at peak population right now. I'm not sure there's what should be done about that, if anything.
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Apr 4, 2010 18:24
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If they swarmed, then every bee is full of honey and you shouldn't need to feed them much. Right? Have you looked to see how many bees are left in your original hive?
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Apr 8, 2010 07:06
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If you have a deep for your first box, you don't actually have to dump the bees at all. This video from Beekind shows the package installation technique we were taught at our installation class. It's less disturbing to the bees, and less likely to get you stung too. Of course, I'm not saying you should do it this way, just, I think it's pretty cool and it certainly seems to be effective. Oh! I don't think the follow boards are supposed to be tight, actually - the ones that came with our deep have plenty of room around them for the bees to be able to get into the spaces on the ends. If the space is bigger than 'bee space' then the bees usually won't build comb there (although they can build crazy comb). Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 19:03 on Apr 10, 2010 |
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Apr 10, 2010 19:00
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/\/\/\ You don't have to force all the bees out of the package. Just put it down near the entrance and the bees will find their way in. It helps if it's still daytime of course - the recommendation is to install in early evening, so the bees are getting ready to settle down but there's still warmth and light. We just picked up our package from Her Majesty's Secret Beekeeper in San Francisco. Their bees were due at 6:30, but didn't arrive till about 11pm... and the 75 packages of bees were covered with loose bees on the outside. We felt really bad, she was setting up to have to sit outside on the street (this is in a busy nightlife neighborhood of the city) all night long, because she couldn't bring all those loose bees into the store without risking a lot of them getting into the ventilation. She's got a twitter up... latest post: "Initiate shop vac". Jesus. Anyway bees are safe at home. They just got packaged today, so, we were planning on hiving them tomorrow evening but we might wait an extra day, especially if it's raining.   
Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 08:27 on Apr 11, 2010 |
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Apr 11, 2010 08:03
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It's raining. Is it OK to hive bees like, during a pause between rain showers? They say to do it in the evening, but I expect doing it between showers would have the same effect (bees stay home), yeah? Last night my wife put the package in the kitchen. I told her they'd be fine outside but she was  .There were four on the outside of the package last night. This morning we can only see two. So... two bees loose somewhere in the house, fantastic.
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Apr 11, 2010 19:53
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The bottom of our hive has a screen, and then a board underneath (which you can slide out to inspect for mites, etc.). I wonder if since your hive only has mesh, do the bees just regard it as "the ground" instead of "the bottom of our hive"? I haven't really looked in to top bar hives at all, so I was surprised to see yours doesn't have a bottom, but I figured that must just be how they are done...
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Apr 11, 2010 22:37
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Installed Beees!!!! We got a window in the rain right around sunset, so we decided to go for it. That sure was a thing. I don't think we killed too many... we had to brush off quite a lot of bees off the queen's cage, and they mostly landed on the ground and stayed there. I'm hoping those bees are OK. They were just packaged yesterday, possibly quite late. So I hope they've accepted the queen... how long does that take normally? How long does it take for them to remove a marshmallow? Our friends came over and took pictures so I'll have photos later, once I recharge some batteries.
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Apr 12, 2010 04:23
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Aw  What time of day did you go look? Could be there's a lot of foragers out... If they can start feeding immediately, there might still be a chance. And odds are they've been doing everything possible to keep the queen alive, too. I went out this morning to peek. It's still rainy and wet. A clump of bees we brushed off the queen box is still on the ground, dead... the grass was wet and I think they couldn't find their way back inside. One or two bees peeking out the door, though, and I can see them through the glass jar on the entrance feeder, so there's still some activity at least. I didn't want to get too close today though, they need to feel secure right now.
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Apr 12, 2010 19:19
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Raccoons are very definitely problems. They will raid a beehive if they can. They were mentioned in our beekeeping class, but I don't recall if there was a set solution really. Ishmael, I'm really sorry to hear of your hive's problems. I'd guess that since they don't have much/any comb yet, a lack of food would be a very big problem. Bigger if it's also cold, since they burn through a lot of sugar to keep warm. Then again, it could also be disease, or if the queen is gone. The fact they're not cleaning out the dead bees is another sign they're struggling. I don't know what to tell you though; your hive seems really nicely made, so I doubt that's really the issue.
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Apr 15, 2010 20:23
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Cracked the hive this evening; took out the little queen cage, which was empty, and inspected that frame a little. It has some comb, the bees were totally chill, and there were plenty of them. So things seem to be going well! We didn't spot the queen, but there were tons of bees on the center frame, and she might have been on a different frame anyway. I watched them for 15 minutes this afternoon, too. Lots of bees coming and going. It looked like about one in ten arriving bees were loaded up with pollen... dunno what the other 9 were doing, maybe just scouts or something? How long will sugar syrup last unrefrigerated, and, should I stick the stuff I haven't put in the feeder yet into the fridge to preserve it or will it still go bad just as fast?
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Apr 16, 2010 09:52
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I can answer a few of your questions, Troublemaker: -You can certainly leave the bees to their own devices for an extended period of time. They will use up the space you provide, and then, when they feel cramped, they'll swarm. The swarm may split the hive leaving plenty of bees behind to continue the original colony... or, most or all of the bees may leave with the swarm, leaving you with an unviable colony or an empty hive. -Your bees will free-range far and wide to feed themselves. Even heavily planted, your three acres won't be enough for a single hive to be totally self-sustained. But that's OK, because the bees will find food elsewhere. Syrup is useful for helping a new hive get started or survive through a winter without enough honey, but the bees also need pollen... again, though, it's OK. Unless you live in Antarctica, odds are very good the bees will find enough food themselves. -If you don't take care of the hives, in the long run, you'll wind up with empty hives. It might take a few years but eventually, all the hives will have either swarmed, or succumbed to some disease or another. Beekeeping can be fairly hands-off, but some amount of maintenance is required to keep hives going indefinitely. -It is not too early to set up a hive. Your flowering plants will attract the local bees regardless... and the bees will range to wherever things are flowering regardless. Beekeepers benefit the whole community, and gardeners benefit the whole ecosystem. You could set up a hive today, or next year, or whenever you like. Having a hive on-site will increase fruit/seed production, of course, so I'm not saying it's pointless, just that you can't really expect the bees to notice or care about your property line. -Honey. If you don't want your honey, I'd suggest contacting your local beekeepers group and see if any of them would like to harvest your honey. A common agreement is that someone willing to come harvest gets to keep half the honey they extract from your hive. If someone is interested in doing that, it might be a good arrangement for you. If you don't harvest honey, the bees will probably swarm more frequently/rapidly, but it won't hurt them in any way of course. My suggestion is that if you don't want the honey and don't want to spend much effort maintaining hives, contact your local beekeepers and see if any of them need a spot to put their hives! Lots of folks would like to keep bees but don't have an appropriate property to put them on... you can probably make a mutually beneficial arrangement. You'll of course need to grant access to your property; a beekeeper would want to come several times a month at first, and at least once or twice a month on an ongoing basis, to maintain their hives. This idea is probably viable if you live near a city or town where lots of people might not have space for bees, or where local laws restrict people with smaller properties from having them.
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Apr 22, 2010 19:37
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Cracked open the hive today after a full week since removing the empty queen cage...    We've had a mite board in the base since we installed the hive. Pulled it out today: you can see there's a lot of moisture and debris. We're going to leave it off for a bit to let the hive get better circulation and dry out a bit, but we do want to be able to check periodically for mites.  We have 8 frames and 2 follower boards in this deep.  This is the second frame in from the end. It has about half the cells on the inside side built up, with a lot of the cells half-full of syrup.   Third frame in from the edge has more comb and a ton of bees on it. Still mostly just syrup, but there were also some cells of pollen.  One of the two center frames.  The other center frame. My wife found brood on this frame near the center.  And then she found the queen!  We put everything back together and we'll leave it for the next week. Looks like still plenty of room for syrup; we've been through most of the first batch we made (4lbs of sugar + 4 lbs of water) and will make another batch when they finish this off, probably some time next week.
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Apr 22, 2010 22:26
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Funnily enough, it's not really that many bees. Just one medium looks like. A package of bees is 3 lbs of bees which is around 14k bees. By the fall, my hive should have more like 30k to 50k bees, and even larger hives are possible. But I know what you mean. When we had our hive open and maybe a couple hundred bees got airborne, you can't help but really start to feel at the gut level "gently caress me this is a lot of bees".
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Apr 28, 2010 00:27
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They store a lot of it in that new comb they create. In fact if you keep feeding them for too long, they'll use all the space in the hive for storing it and you'll see just a tiny spot of brood in the very center.
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Apr 28, 2010 01:25
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Yup that's exactly what to expect. Once you stop feeding them they'll eat a bunch of the syrup and start making honey. Our teacher in the starting bees class said you go through one 7-lb bag of sugar (makes 14lbs of syrup) and then stop. He had people who didn't stop come in and ask why the bees kept eating more and more syrup and that's when inspection revealed they'd filled the hive with syrup and only had a tiny area left in the center for brood. Of course this is here in California, I dunno if they recommend more or less syrup in other climates.
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Apr 28, 2010 01:57
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Wow, so you just happened to be there when you got a virgin queen flight? Crazy! Do you know if its succession in your hive, or not?
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May 3, 2010 01:32
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Inspection today! Gonna give waffle another shot because rightload has it and not tinypic and I'm lazy. We opened it up and there were a bunch of earwigs under the lid, yuck. Didn't see any inside the inner lid though, and we brushed off what we found there. First job was to scrape off burr comb. The bees seem to like to build up to the hole in the inner lid.       The two center frames. The center of these frames is all hatched bees, with unhatched capped brood around the edges. You can see fresh larvae in many of the center cells, so they're well into second-use there.         This freaked us out for a while - thought it might be a queen cell. But the blurry pictures in the book indicate maybe it's just a drone cell. (click for big)   This frame is next to the center frames. Looks like more hatched brood cells on one side, and mostly capped brood on the other. By the way, we didn't spot the queen (didn't pull every brood frame though) but if you see her in one of these shots let me know!  Second-to-outermost frame on one side. The outermost frame on this side had no comb yet, but the outermost on the other side of the hive was fully drawn on one side and half-drawn on the side facing the follower board. The mostly-built side  Half-drawn side:  Put on the second deep. I'm not sure if it was definitely time yet, but I don't think it will hurt. This hive will be two deeps, with mediums as supers above once they're full. We don't have a queen excluder but we'll probably go get one before we add the medium supers. 
Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 20:52 on May 7, 2010 |
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May 7, 2010 20:31
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Are they sticking their butts up in the air while fanning their wings? That's a scenting behavior that helps bees find their way back to the hive. I've seen it right after hiving our bees, and also after opening up the hive - a lot of 'house bees' wind up in the air and the fanning/scenting bees on the front porch help them to find their way back inside. I've also read about a couple of other 'porch' behaviors. There are guard-bees that check every incoming bee to make sure it smells right and belongs to the hive (because bees will raid each other's hives if they can get away with it). Sometimes you'll see them doing this just outside the front door. There is also the ventilation thing. Even with an open bottom, they can do this to get airflow if it's too warm, or too humid, inside the brood nest.
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May 13, 2010 22:12
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I'm seeing the youtube thing but it still says the video I requested is not available... I've not seen or heard anything exactly like what you're describing, but I'm pretty inexperienced. If you're concerned maybe a local beekeeper could be tempted (by beer?) to come and check it out.
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May 14, 2010 05:15
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It occurred to me that maybe that blue paint had some sort of scent to it that the bees were investigating, or the color was throwing them off somehow. But if they don't seem distressed and they're still doing all their chores, I wouldn't worry about it.
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May 15, 2010 19:03
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I'm using only 8 frames per deep, with follower boards on either end. That lets me use the hive tool to kind of space the frames out a little bit before I pull one. Then I just raise the frame very very slowly, so bees have a chance to get out of the way or move or whatever. I've definitely killed one or two; under the lip of a frame edge when replacing a heavy frame, or with the hive cover or something, but not that many really. I think it's just a matter of taking care and going very slowly and gently. Then again I don't have that many bees yet, so it might get worse once the hive is more populated.
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May 16, 2010 23:08
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Yeah I'm immediately turned off by it, because I assume it's not going to be very compatible with all the world's beekeepeing stuff. OK it appears to take standard-sized frames, but... what if you decide you want a queen excluder, or a different type of base, or maybe you want an entrance feeder or something. You're stuck with proprietary design. Also it appears to be very costly. Not sure what benefit you get for that.
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May 23, 2010 21:22
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There's really nothing wrong with a standard langstroth hive. You can paint it any color you want, and it's basically sold with tiny or nonexistent profit margins. Made of real wood and lasts for years. It'll fit on a balcony or roof or whatever just as easily as any colorful plastic thingy, too.
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May 25, 2010 22:18
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It's tremendous overkill. You don't need cuts anywhere near that accurate, and, the parts are very simple and straightforward. You could probably buy much cheaper equipment and churn out the parts anyway. But you wouldn't make money as a small-time producer because there are already several bigger companies making them as efficiently as possible.
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May 26, 2010 07:27
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I guess I still don't get it. You're suggesting that you could save money by spending at least $10k on a laser cutter, vs. spending $100 each for hive kits. I think you need to factor in the cost of raw materials though, and maybe added labor, scrap disposal, and energy costs. I mean maybe it'd work out but by how much? Would you save at least a thousand dollars?
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May 27, 2010 00:26
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It just seems like gigantic overkill to me. I mean, the bits of a hive are very simple. You should be able to do it all with a basic bandsaw, and maybe also a router, instead of like $10k of kit. It's a bunch of straight pieces of wood, some of which have notches cut into them, and some panels, which if you want you can cut dovetails into. The question isn't really "could I make beehives with a laser cutter"; it's "what's the cheapest effective way to make beehives". And then, "does doing this save enough money to be worth the efforts". Companies that make tens of thousands of beehives a year probably have better efficiencies than you doing it in your garage, even if you make a few hundred; yes, they also collect a profit, but my understanding is that that profit is pretty slim. But I don't really want to argue this much more. If you can do the math and you think you can make it work, please go ahead! Take pictures and let us know how it works out! I'm just a pessimist about these kinds of ideas in general.
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May 29, 2010 08:10
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Yeah, definitely keep feeding them syrup. It stimulates wax and helps to convince the bees to keep building up frames. I'd get rid of that black one. The cells darken each time a generation of brood is reared, because they leave behind their crysalis. After many generations the buildup gets darker and darker. Black wax indicates a LOT of generations of bees... and that buildup gradually reduces the interior size of the cells. Eventually it's no good any more. Fresh cells will give the bees a better start. Bees will only eat dry sugar if there is no other nectar or syrup available at all; because they have to mix it with water first, which is an extra chore. However, powdered sugar is a treatment for mites, which makes me wonder if the previous keeper was treating for mites for some reason? Anyway your bees are making more bees, so you're probably in good shape. Keep feeding syrup and they'll build up the hive.
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May 31, 2010 18:27
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Do you have enough frames in there for that many bees? If you do, but they're not built out yet, give them plenty of syrup. It stimulates comb-construction.
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Jun 3, 2010 21:37
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