Honey Bees and Hives

[kassy68]

Miss Prissy, What does the inside look like? little short dividers? where did you find these at... Ive wanted bees for as long as I wanted chickens.. finally got the chickens last year.. maybe soon I'll get the ok for hives.. Of course the bees in Michigan have been dieing off the last 5 years.. alot of beekeepers have given up on them for awhile.

 

[MissPrissy]

Look for your state beekeeping association and start there.

I order my woodenware from Walter Kelley. I order my bees from south Georgia.

There may be places closer to you that you could order from.

 

[Reinbeau]

Angie, I don't know how I missed your thread, I usually catch all the honeybee posts here! Awesome looking hives, I can't wait til you have your bees - although I'll be losing my best Maine honey customer

For those who are interested, as Angie mentioned, getting in touch with your local bee association is a great way to get started. You can find your local association by clicking here.

 

[MissPrissy]

Fingers crossed that I get a harvest, Ann.

 

[djmb74]

There is a big push to save bee's by switching to top bar hives and raising the hives to be less stressed and worked and some interesting theories about CCD worth looking into.

I am going to work in my area at raising up queens to release here to help boost local colonies in Central Florida.

getting my 2 hives from Sam Comfort from this site... http://anarchyapiaries.org/hivetools/node/32

You should look into people in your area that are raising generations of bee's from a similar program.

Martin

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[MissPrissy]

My top bar hives were always weak. This is why we are changing over to the conventional hives. I won't ever recommend a new beekeeper to try the top bars. I think those are a side line for a more experienced beekeeper.

No more top bar hives for me.

 

[djmb74]

I guess that depends on what your goals are. I am not looking at selling honey, I am just really looking at getting better pollination on my crops and help raise new colonies by letting them do their thing without pushing them to being a honey factory.


Quote:

 

[djmb74]

"We are not alone. We need only look to the precedents of symbiosis already in our world and release them from exploitative control. Bees and flowering plants have been dancing together for 100 million years. The bees can guide us to a new paradigm. To be a natural bee-steward in this way is truly carrying a torch.

After years spent in honey bee “death camps,” I have seen bees thrive again by abandoning the mechanizations thought to make beekeeping more “profitable” at the cost of the bees’ long term health. Gurus in natural beekeeping have laid the groundwork to reverse these trends.

SMALL CELL BEEKEEPING (hey, do these come in my size?)
Dee and Ed Lusby in Arizona were the first to promote a smaller, closer-to-natural cell size comb.
Dee started the yahoo organic beekeepers newsgroup and hosts the National Organic Beekeeping Conference in February in Arizona. Her writing can be found in the POV section of beesource.com. For over 100 years the beekeeping industry has been oversizing bees, typical capital-driven thinking “bigger is better,” bigger bees make more honey. It was only a matter of time before an opportunist arrived that really took advantage of an oversized bee. That pest is the varroa mite.

I discovered that bees, when shook from “standard” beehive comb into an empty box with no hexagon-ridged foundations, will build a slightly smaller size wax cell than they had been forced to previously. Once a generation of bees hatches from that smaller sized comb and is shook again into an empty box, they construct an even smaller cell for their broodnest core. By allowing each generation of bees to draw its own comb, the width of the cells in the core brood area shrinks and seems to stabilize after 6 to 7 generations at a much smaller size than the ubiquitous industry standard. Once this cell size is reached, the bees are able to keep varroa mites below life-threatening levels and secondary diseases do not show up. More so, the hive’s morale and vigor is off the charts, incomparable to large cell hives. Today, smaller sized (4.9 mm) foundation is available from bee supply companies, as well as intermediary steps (5.1 mm), so often the regression can be completed in two actions of having the bees draw all new combs. This is still difficult to complete in a single year, especially up north. An all-plastic fully drawn smaller cell comb, with plastic cell walls, called Honey Super Cell can “instantly” downsize the bees. Then once a generation of smaller bees hatches, this plastic can be removed and the bees allowed to draw wax again. (They hate plastic.) I’ve heard many have had success with this product. Caught swarms are already on their way and are not at an advantage being shaken onto established comb. The small cell camp figures, at the time of varroa mite introduction, most wild hives were first generation swarms from domestic hives and not fully regressed to a natural cell size. Thus we saw most feral hives disappear when varroa came. They are slowly coming back. "

From the site....

 

[djmb74]

"This past summer when the oldest intact beehives (3000 years old) ever discovered were exhumed in Israel and still had comb in them, what was the cell size? Did anyone look at the cell size in eastern Russia when the USDA discovered that the honey bees there were thriving in the presence of varroa? Of course the imported Russian queens were introduced right onto 5.4 mm comb.

Small cell beekeeping is not a silver bullet. I do not believe that any hive can go through an entire season of uninterrupted brood rearing and be healthy going into winter. Studies have argued that smaller comb does not reduce mite counts, but this kind of beekeeping is not about getting lower mite counts or eradicating the “enemy” but a means of alleviating stress on bees to let them find their own balance after a period of healing. This is a more holistic beekeeping. As my bees became stable on smaller size comb, my life changed. Suddenly one frame of brood hatched out twice as many bees as I expected. Queens laid better patterns and faster. The hives seemed inspired in a way I had never seen in my six years of commercial beekeeping. After years of seeing struggle, death, and darkness in the bee industry, now I don’t worry about anything anymore.

TOP BAR HIVES

Once my hives were established on small cell comb, I stopped using foundation. Less mechanization, labor, and energy while stepping aside to let the bees do what only they know best. After all, they’ve been using the social system for 80 million years. I use 3-frame nucs (baby hives) and have the bees draw new comb from scratch in between two drawn frames. These small hives want to draw mostly worker comb to establish a field force, and they do so perfectly often having cell sizes down to 4.7 mm here in New York state. I will never buy foundation again.

I looked for a more efficient bee house – one that takes less energy and materials to build but can still allow for inspections. The history of top bar hives predates the modern commercial model by untold thousands of years. The Langstroth hive we use today was popularized during the Industrial Revolution, when beekeeping was becoming a profitable business and needed to be standardized for suppliers to create monopoly. Suddenly, the box hive was in every corner of the world. Also as suddenly, new diseases appeared like foul brood, sac brood, nosema, chalk brood... Combs were being spun and saved every year and harboring pathogens. Bees were being shared and shuffled around the country and spreading disease. The swarming instinct was and still is suppressed. Major die-offs began to occur immediately, and have continued in about every decade since, the latest being called CCD. Even though the manipulation of movable combs brought about these new diseases, the industry declared war on feral bees and the old-school, “unscientific” beekeeping as dark pools of disease. Every state passed laws banning fixed comb hives that don’t allow easy inspection – the homemade skeps and gums – further locking beekeepers into the new industrial model. With the passing of a generation, all other types of bee houses and methods were forgotten."

 

[JP33]

Miss Prissy, I hope you don't mind me mentioning that you will most likely find those top covers to be a royal pain in the you know what if your bees make a lot of propolis.

If you find they are tough to remove, I would recommend going with a migratory cover, much, much easier to remove.

I highly recommend anyone getting into beekeeping to use cypress for their woodenware. Cypress will outlast pine by many, many years even if the pine is painted with several coats.

This is who I recommend for cypress woodenware: http://www.gabees.com/

They are out of Georgia.


...JP