Goals for 2013

I have thought a lot about this and there are so many things I want to try, but so little time to do it.  After such a bad year for honey last year, I would like to really focus on honey production.  We had 15 hives going into winter and many of them were pretty light.  I would like to stay at about 15 hives, but really focus on building them up in the spring.  If I have any that don't make it through the winter, I will replace them with packages.  I will try not to split any hives in the spring unless they start to prepare to swarm.  I will try to feed them pollen substitute to get them to build.  I don't think I will feed them sugar water, even though most people recommend feeding the pollen with the sugar water. I am hoping they have enough honey and wont need the sugar water. I will pay close attention to the mite counts. Hopefully through these efforts I can have healthy bees going into the nectar flows. I am also hoping this year we wont have as dry of a year. I think that is what really killed me last year.

The second thing I would like to do is sell hives again this year.  We had a lot of fun doing it last year.  I found even better quality equipment and I think we can get people set up right.  I didn't have a very good experience buying our first hive, so my goal is to make sure people feel like they are ready for bees and have someone that they can trust gave them the best shot at being successful. Goal is to sell 25 hives this year.

The third thing I would like to try is to over winter nucleus hives.  It always seems like you have a couple of week hives in the bunch.  I am thinking of splitting them up the end of June or first of July and getting them built up enough to get through winter.  We will see how it goes. Winter is the most stressful time for me, because you cannot check you bees.  You just hope they will make it through, so if I had some nucs make it I can cover any of my hive losses. 

If I can do these things 2013 should be a great year.  Happy beekeeping!   

Cordovan Queen (one of my favorite breeds of queens)

    

2012 In Review

2012 was a great year for me, but not so much for the bees.  I first apologize for not keeping the blog up as well as I should.  My wife had our third child and that made life crazy for us.  I hope to do a lot better job this year. 

As I said it was a tough year for the bees.  It was so dry that we really didn’t see any nectar flows.  We started about 5 nucs (small 5 frame hives) this year and put New World Carnolian queens in them.  I was really excited to try these queens. One trait of this breed is that it will slow down the brood rearing when there isn’t nectar flows.  Well unfortunately they were all really slow to build up because we didn’t have any nectar flows.  This is supposed to be a good trait to help them get through the winter on less honey stores, but on such a dry summer I am hoping they will have enough to get through the winter.

Honey production overall was a dismal.  We got about 80 lbs off of 15 hives.  I probably was a little aggressive in taking the honey too, thinking they may have a fall flow.  They didn’t, so we went into winter pretty lean.

Firsts for 2012:

·         Built from scratch 30 hives (I am not sure it is worth doing from scratch)

·         Helped 10 people get started with beehives

·         Found 2 queens working in a hive

·         Saw a queen lay an egg while I was observing the hive

·         Had to deal with mold in a hive

·         Purchased an extractor

·         Used a heat gun to remove the cappings

It was a fun year, but tough one on the bees.  I am anxious to see if we can get all 15 hives through the winter.

Two More Weeks

The bees are about to arrive.  We will be picking up 20 packages of bees on April 14th.  It should be a lot of fun.  I have spent the last two months building hives and now I am ready to focus on the bees.  For those who are just getting started, now is the time you want to set up your hive.  Pick a good sunny location.  An ideal location would have the entrance facing South East so that the sun can wake the girls up early.  A little afternoon shade isn't bad and some kind of shelter to protect them from the North wind in the winter is good too.  If it were me I would lean towards too much sun vs. not enough.  Set your hive on something so that it gets it off the ground and high enough to avoid vegetation blocking the entrance.  You will want your site as level as you can get it.  I then put a shim or two on the back so that it tilts slightly forward.  This makes it so that if any water does get into the hive it will run out the entrance.  Once you have your site located and prepared.  I would put your hive in its place.  You will start with the bottom board and then one box on top of that.  You will want to put your feeder in, but I would not fill it up yet.  If it is a division feeder, I like to remove 2 frames.  I would wait to fill it on the day you get the bees, but good to have it all in place.  You then will put the inner cover on and the top cover.  Your hive is ready to go.  You can put your entrance reducer on if you would like, you will want it on when you put the bees in.

Over the next two weeks you will want to make sure there is a water source for the bees.  This can be a natural source or a man made one.  You will want to make sure you have all your safety gear (suit, gloves, hive tool and smoker if you want).  I would go to youtube and watch a few videos on how to install a package of bees.  This will get you even more excited and when I show you on the 14th, it will look really familiar.  The night before the bees arrive, it is a good idea to make up the sugar syrup.  For spring feeding it is 2 parts water to 1 part sugar and I do it based on weight.  In volume I think it is almost 1:1.  You will want it room temperature when you feed it to your bees.  On a new package of bees I like to feed them until they have the first two boxes filled up or until they don't take it any more.  A lot of times there will be a natural nectar flow and the bees will prefer it over the sugar syrup. You are ready to become a beekeeper.

It is extremely good to read up on how to keep bees and youtube is a great resource as well.  I will not be able to explain everything in the short time we will have on the 14th, but there are tons of resources and info that are available either in print or on the internet.

Beekeeping is a great hobby and you will love keeping bees!         

First Year vs. Second Year Beehives

Looking at the next seven day forecast, we should have some great spring weather for the bees.  I put a pollen patty on all of the hives last weekend and this should start the queen laying again or at least encourage her to increase her laying.  We have had a few good days of weather lately and the trees are really starting to bud.  You can see the aspens, some maples and willows starting to bud out.  With good weather for the next few days the bees should be able to get out and we should see some pollen coming into the hives.  This is always exciting because you know that they are replenishing some of the used stores they had from last year.  They use the pollen for the brood and if you see lots of pollen coming it is a good indication there is a lot available and more importantly you probably have a queen and she is laying eggs.

The first year of a hive, all the resources are going into building up a hive.  I heard yesterday that it takes 7 pounds of nectar to create one pound of wax (not sure how accurate that is) and when you start with new foundation the bees are going to be putting all the resources they can into building wax so the queen has a place to lay and the bees have a place to put nectar and pollen.  You are also starting with a smaller bee count so they are focused on building up the population which is taking a lot of resources.  Unfortunately the first year they typically build up slower and you don't get much honey if any.

The second year hive is really fun to see.  Assuming they are coming out of winter healthy, they are going to start building up population about 6 weeks before new hives are being delivered and started.  A second year hive will already have a place for the queen to lay so they don't have to focus on building wax.  These hives should really build fast.  The queen is still typically young enough that she is still close to her prime and boom the hive starts to explode in numbers.  They do this so that they will have strong populations when the nectar flows start in the spring and then in the summer.  You also have to be really careful that they don't get too big compared to their space.  If they start to feel too crowded about the first of April through June they will swarm on you.  It is a good thing to have a big healthy hive, but you don't want them swarming or else you loose that big population to gather nectar and pollen.  

Things I will be looking for this week will be the amount of activity and pollen that is coming in.  I would expect the pollen will be a white or gray color coming in and hopefully we will see quite a few of the bees coming in with it.  I may take a look at a couple of the hives that I am worried about to make sure they have a queen and big enough food stores to get them through bad weather days.  They also really don't have any nectar sources until trees start to flower.  If they don't have much honey it is a good idea to feed them sugar water or some type of feed since they need a carbohydrate source.  You also don't want to break up the cluster in a hive unless it is at least 60 degrees or so. We should hit that the next couple of days.  I will let you know what I see.

A Couple of Videos from Last Year.

I thought I would repost a couple of videos from last year.  These were a lot of fun.  It is fun to have the whole family involved.  My Dad and I do most of the beekeeping duties, but my wife and girls enjoy watching us start new hives and harvest time. We aren't the best at making videos, but hopefully you can see how much fun this hobby is.  The fist one is of us installing a package of bees.

This next video is of us installing a nucleus hive.  The weather was really cool this year, so we had to get the nuc and package right into the hive as quickly as we could.

The final video was of us capturing a swarm.  I didn't do a very good job of catching all the bees, but somehow I got lucky and got the queen.  I left the box there over night and probably 95% of the bees found their way into the hive.  This was a lot of fun.  Bees are typically very gentle in a swarm because they don't have a lot to protect.  They don't have brood or food storage to protect so they are really focused on finding a new home.  This was a blast!  Cannot wait for swarm season (as long as it isn't my hives). 

I Spoke Too Soon!

Yesterday I thought I had sold out of hives.  Well I had someone want to change his order and decrease it by one hive.  That means it isn't too late to start beekeeping.  The one that canceled was actually a nucleus hive.  I wasn't going to sell these until next year, but this individual wanted three of them instead of the packages of bees.  I can swap either one out of my hives so you can choose.  A hive with the package of bees will be $300 (all the wooden ware and a 3# package of Italian bees) or the nucleus hive will be $350 (all the wooden ware, 5 frame nuc of bees, wooden nuc box, and a division feeder). Both types will have a Cordovan Italian Queen.

The difference between a package and a nucleus:

Let's start with the package.  This is probably the most common way people get started.  It is less expensive, you can get the bees a littler earlier, and if people plan to have them shipped this is the way to do it.  I don't ship so the last point really isn't valid for people around here. Some disadvantages are sometimes they don't take to the new queen.  A package is 3 pounds of bees shaken from different hives and placed with a foreign queen.  Generally they do accept the queen as their own after a few days, but there is a risk.  Some times the queens are not as prolific as you would like and get superseded in the same year. This will slow down the progress of the hive.  A package of bees mimics a swarm, and the bees are generally in a hyper growth mode and will build out new foundations rather quickly.  The downside is the bees only live about 6 weeks this time of year and the population will start to decrease until the first brood emerge around day 24 after the queen has been laying.  At this point the population should start to really build. Here is a video of one way to install a package of bees.  This is done by Chad Ragland from Apis hive and he does a really good job demonstrating it.  Package Install

Nucleus hives, are in my opinion the safest way to start a hive.  I will start with the negatives first because there aren't many.  Nucleus hives cost a little more because you usually have more work invested in them from a suppliers standpoint.  Their is a slightly higher chance of passing disease if the supplier isn't careful.  Typically if the supplier uses newer foundation, pulls from a healthy hive, and breaks the brood cycle, you wont have to worry about most diseases and mites.  The advantages of a nucleus are great.  When you get a nucleus hive typically it is 4 to 5 frames and should be full of bees.  You often have the opportunity to to inspect the nuc before taking it and make sure you approve of the brood pattern.  When you get the bees they will be increasing rapidly because they will have all stages of brood.  This tends to result in more honey that can be harvested in the first year.  It is a little less intimidating for a new beekeeper because you don't have to pound and shake the bees out of the package, all you do is transfer the frames into your new hive.  I do highly recommend nucs, but they do cost a little more.  The success rate of a nuc is a lot higher because the supplier takes on the risk of making sure it is good and ready for sale. Here is a quick video of a common way to make nucs. Nuc video

A quick note on the Cordovan Italian queen.  These queens are beautiful. All queens are pretty amazing, but the Cordovan queens do stand out when you see them.  They are a very light golden color and often don't have any black strips.  Their offspring often do have a little dark on them so the queen really stands out among her offspring.  These queens are generally very prolific, gentle, good hygienic, and a good honey producers.  This breed does very well in our climate.

Hope that helps.  We are down to about 6 or 7 weeks until bees start coming.             

I am sold out!

This should be an exciting spring.  I have started making all the boxes.  I will be making about 105 boxes.  I am going to really need to speed up the process I can tell already.  I enjoy working with the wood though.  We have 1,050 frames and foundation coming to us any day, so I am going to see if my Dad can help me assemble all of those.  I have sold 10 hives and hopefully can increase my yards by 10 hives.  That means we purchased 15 packages of bees.  12 will go straight into hives and 3 of them I will make nucleus hives out of.  I will give them a couple of frames of built out foundation and maybe even a frame of bees to help boost their population.  This should get them really going.  It will be a busy Saturday, but should be a lot of fun. I am also scheduled to receive my queens on the 19 of April and so I will need to have made up my splits probably the Monday after I get all the packages.  I cannot wait for April.  We will need some good weather around the middle of April for me to be able to get it all done.  

I checked the bees again this last Saturday.  All the hives are still alive, but I am a little nervous for a couple of them.  They just have pretty small clusters and hope they can make it through.  I am hoping to make at least 6 splits and possibly 8 if I have strong enough hives.  I will start feed them pollen sub patties probably in the next week or so.  I already put one on my weakest hive and they have not even touched it.  My guess is it is too cold for them and they don't want anything to do with it.  I will keep you posted, but should be a busy, but fun next two months.