Ducks and Bees

[katharinad]

Bee houses are quite common in Germany or Europe. The hives are in the wall with access to the outside. They are served from outside, but provide the sugar water access from the inside. The inside is also being used to the equipment etc. Here is a picture I found in google:

I searched for Bienenhaus, and it is amazing how many nice photos come up.

 

[NeilV]

I have bees and chickens. I don't think bees and ducks will be a problem. The bees will definitely ignore the ducks. I don't think the ducks will bother the bees (chickens don't, anyway). If they do, you could simply put a barrier up in front of the hive to keep the ducks away. The bees will forage out for at least a mile, maybe two. They get airborne and out of duck range quickly.

You DO NOT keep beehives indoors during winter. They overwinter outside just fine. Mainly, you need to make sure they have plenty of stores, and you may want to put a couple of straw or hay bales on the north side during winter. In extremely cold places, they wrap hives in tar paper for winter. However, I doubt that's needed in Oregon. The picture of the bee house is just a fancy way of keeping bees year round. The exits are always to the outside. Here in the U.S., people just set their hives outside all year. The bees are fine with that setup. (You do need a place to store empty equipment, and someplace indoors usually is best for that.)

They need to get out and fly on warm days in winter to poop, since they don't poop inside and they keep eating during the winter. If you have a warm day, they may even go get some pollen and water during the warm days in winter. Keeping them inside is not really an option.

Keeping bees does not take a tremendous amount of time, since you do not need to feed and water them like you do with poultry. However, beekeeping is not easy. You really never stop learning to keep bees. Chickens take more time, but are much easier to keep successfully than bees. However, beekeeping is very rewarding and keeps you in tune with the natural world in ways that chickens/ducks do not. It is interesting that once you keep bees, you start to be in tune with what flowers are in bloom and the changes in the weather and the seasons. Honey bee biology is very interesting also.

I would encourage your husband to keep bees, but there is much more to it than setting out boxes of bees and ignoring them.

Your husband should at least read a couple of books to start out. The Backyard Beekeeper by Kim Flottum is a good beginning book. The Beekeeping for Dummies book is also supposed to be good, but I have not read it myself.

What your husband really needs is to find a local beekeeping club that offers classes and get a mentor to teach you. Beekeepers generally like to teach others, so that may not be too hard. Have him look on Beesource.com, which has an excellent beekeeping forum. It is sort of the backyardchickens for beekeeping. I'm actually a moderator there.

Good luck, and definitely have a go with bees.

Neil

 

[NeilV]

P.S. You will have issues with varroa mites in your beehives. That is an issue everywhere, including Oregon. The best line of defense is to get bees that are resistant to the mites, but that is not always a cure either.

 

[katharinad]

Thanks Neil. There is a small bee club in Klamath Falls. We are in the high alpine region with fierce winters and extremely dry summers. This dryness seems to kill mites, but I will ask the local guys again to make sure. We don't even have fleas or ticks. To dry in summer and to cold in winter. 2 more car hours east and we have sand dunes, no water in summer at all. Everything turns into dry grass in early summer, even the wild flowers dry up fast. So we will have about 2 acres with clover, which we will irrigate. I know they will cover an area of 4 miles, which will include the local reservoir and their are plenty of flowers blooming in the swam areas. We only have ponderosa pine trees around us, but they have lots of sap. I'm still not to sure about winter. I know they produce a lot of heat in the hives and go and sleep somewhat when cold. We get quite often down into the 10's at night. I've read some books last year, because I just like to know things. I just love to learn more, even if I don't get into it. I wasn't really thinking about getting bees when I read the two books. Now my husband wants some just to preserve bees and as a hobby. I've been to beesource.com and find it quite interesting. I will reread the books this winter and give them to my husband to read. Then we will discuss it and see if we are going to do it. My feeling is we will. Keeps us busy. You are right about getting a mentor. Perhaps I pay them back with some fresh eggs.

 

[sourland]

Katharinad, thanks for the picture of the German bee house. Actually, there is no need to place the hives throughout your 22 acres. You could set them in the "bee house" on a permanent basis. They will range out and pollinate your 22 acres and far more. Study about them through the internet and books. Beekeeping is absolutely intriguing. I haven't kept bees in more than 50 years but am still interested. New problems like mite infestation and colony collapse disorder make bee keeping somewhat more difficult. All I had to deal with was foulbrood, waxmoths, mice and skunks.

At that time there were no bears in N.J. Flash forward to now, our first bear season in several years resulted in 600+ killed.

 

[katharinad]

I've read an interesting article in the Oregonian University Magazine for Agriculture and other Studies about 4 years ago.
http://oregonprogress.oregonstate.edu/
This is kind of what I remember: They were testing bees and wild bees for illnesses etc. The wild been of course did better. They were trying to figure out things about the bee collapse and they think it is the pesticides. They said there are healthy bee colony keepers in central Oregon where the weather is ideal but pesticides are not in use due to the lack of water and less farming. Those bee keepers endured collapse when they trucked them down to California for the orchards with pesticide use. They even narrowed it down to the kind of pesticide. It causes disorientation and death in bees. Yet it does not do the same to wild bees. The wild bees are the kind that lives underground. Kind of hard to deal with, and their honey production is not either. The conclusion was to have a little bit of wild land forest to invite these bees and have natural pollination take place.

We have all kind of critters around. Skunks and raccoon come around and we trap and shout when we see them. Had a raccoon invasion in spring and shot them all down from the trees over 3 nights. Totaled 6 coons. Then we have foxes and coyotes. Had a mink a couple of years ago. Mice galore, just go out with a flash light at night and shine into the fields. Eyes galore! A persistent Norwegian rat that seems to survive anything. Lost its tale to one of my dogs. Have seen bears and mountain lions just down the road. The list goes on. It's just another one of those risks we take on. Good news is that we do not have any population here. Surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of forest land. The nearest tiny town of 200 people is over 10 miles away. So there is no use of pesticides here, nor is in the next town. The Klamath Basin uses some pesticides, but they are mainly alfalfa growers.

 

[katharinad]

Quote:
I've just ordered the ABC and XYZ of Beekeeping on Amazon. Over 900 pages and 3 pounds. Wow, I have something to read over the winter.

Here are 3 books I've read a while ago and I will go over them again this winter.

"Keeping Bees and Making Honey" by Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum
"The Backyard Beekeeper" by Kim Flottum Liked this book so much, that I bought the second book:
"The Backyard Beekeeper Honey Handbook" by Kim Flottum

All 3 books are very nice.

 

[Denninmi]

I'm just skimming this thread, don't have time now to read it all, so if someone has already said the same, my apologies.

You should probably plan on putting some kind of physical barrier around the beehives to keep the ducks away to prevent a major sting incident, in the odd chance that a duck gets too curious. It's probably pretty unlikely, but in theory could happen. But, you really should do this ANYWAY to keep skunks and racoons (mostly skunks) from disturbing the hives at night to eat the bees. It doesn't have to be fancy, just some 3 foot chicken wire on small posts, that sort of thing.

My 6 beehives are about 25-30 feet from the duck pen, but the ducks aren't allowed to roam for their own safety, so can't get there. The occasional bee will try to get water from the plastic duck pool in the warm weather months -- doesn't usually end well for the bee, as the ducks find them a most tasty snack.

 

[NeilV]

I would add that you should not ever pen up ANY animal with the bees in close quarters. There probably would not be a problem, but you don't want anything to be trapped in close quarters with bees. So long as a critter can get away from the hive, there should be no problems.

I don't think you will have any problems with ducks, chickens or other critters eating your bees. Also, bees pretty much ignore anything that is not disturbing the hive itself.

Skunks are a problem. They go to the front of the hive at night, scratch, wait for bees to come out to see what's up, grab the bees and eat them. Other than bears, skunks are the only mammal I know of in N. America that bothers bees.

Here is a trick to deal with skunks: get carpet anchor strips (which have nails pointing up) and hammer them down across the entrance. When skunks go to scratch at the entrance, they rake their little skunk hands across the nails, get poked and decide to go find something else to eat.

 

[FenDruadin]

I keep ducks and bees no problem. They ignore each other. You might end up with a duck that especially likes to eat bees, and might stand in front of the hive and snack, but it's unlikely to be a big deal--ducks rarely forage in the same spot more than a few minutes per day anyway.

As for moving them inside, you've already received lots of great info. Just wanted to clarify something: bees can be moved readily from one location to another, as long as it is LESS than three feet OR MORE than two miles. Don't try moving them a distance in between that.

Sounds weird, but here's why: Bees will regularly forage up to two miles away from their home. They learn the landmarks and can easily return home at any time. If you move them up to three feet from their normal location, assuming you *don't* put another hive there or nearby, they will see their hive when they return and go to it. However, if you move their hive to a nearby location more than a few feet away, they will fly off and then follow their familiar landmarks back to their old homesite. Very confusing for them, and potentially deadly. If, on the other hand, you're hauling them cross-country and then letting them out again, they won't recognize ANYTHING. Their response is to orient themselves to the new landmarks before flying off. Assuming they don't encounter any familiar landmarks in the area, they'll remember to return to their new site. But if they fly off and come across familiar landmarks, they'll follow them "home" to their old site.

Bees are well equipped for winter as long as they have sufficient stores. They must be either left with enough honey for the winter (a full super for a small hive, two supers for a large colony), or well fed with sugar water WELL before winter. They have a process they go through to make the sugar water suitable for storage, and they won't be able to access the sugar water in the feeders once the weather gets cold, so you have to do this in summer and early fall. Once it gets cold, they will cluster inside the hive and keep each other warm, and will NOT leave the brood in the combs, not even if they are starving to death and there is sugar water six inches away.

Anyway--bees are really easy to keep, but you do have to follow some basic protocol. However, once they're established you can ignore them for a year or more if you have to (if you're not harvesting the honey, they don't need much attention), so if you get busy or whatever, it's not like ducks where they have to be tended. They're a wonderful investment, and I highly recommend them. Just make sure you grab a book or take a class (some beekeeper associations have classes for VERY low cost--our local association has a nine-week class for $25).

Good luck!