Honey Bees in house... THEY'RE BACK!! See #61

[MichiganWoods]

Holy cow.

Well, I absolutely love honey! If you end up getting some strained and bottled up, and are willing to sell/ship, lemme know! My supply is running low.

I see that you're in Michigan too... ever been to the Michigan Renaissance Festival in Holly? Jodi Bee Honey Farm always has a booth and I always stop by to purchase a big jar of my favorite variety: Wildflower.

 

[HeartLunger]

If anyone is interested in keeping bees, you should check out Top Bar Hives. They are great, easy to build, and fairly cheap. The last one I just built I made for under $10.00 using the "Value Wood"(Warped, twisted, bowed) section at Menards.

 

[Guitartists]

Well, I'll see how this honey extracting goes first... LOL If all goes well I may have plenty more than I will know what to do with

 

[Ellie_NY_chick]

OMG Angie - we had the same thing last summer, but ours were all still alive. We had over 60,000 bees living in our bedroom wall. We did find a guy to takes them. Here's a couple of pics:

Seems harmless enough...

but the next thing we knew the whole wall had to be cut open...

No honey for us, but being allergic I was glad to be rid of them!

 

[Guitartists]

Wow.... that's what we thought we were dealing with too.

 

[MichiganWoods]

Ellie_NY_chick -

 

[Guitartists]

What's the most minimal bee keeping set-up you can work with? Do you really need all of that other stuff???

 

[deerman]

Quote:
Bees only need a draft free hive. They do a fine job of regulating their core and hive temperature at a constant 95 degrees year round. This is how bees survive in trunks of tree etc. I doubt those bees died, but rather left the hive either due to running out of ample room, the queen may have been replaced by a new queen who was either killed on a breeding flight or the queen was just too week, and then there is always colony collapse disorder(which no one understands.)

The best way to get that honey out of the comb is to crush and strain. You can either put it all in a big bucket and crush it and then strain it, or you can build a press: http://www2.gsu.edu/~biojdsx/press.htm and then strain it.

Have fun!

The bees die as the pic show, the old queen may have swarmed,and the new hive die. That alot of dead bees. Not sure they froze , but sure that hive is dead, if not bee would have been flying around when open.

Most honey bees the old queen leave every spring with some bees. What is know as a swarm

 

[HeartLunger]

Quote:
If you do Top Bar Hives all you really need is a veil and a smoker. Of course, you may or may not want gloves, and you really should have some white coveralls that you don't mind getting ruined with propolis. A hive tool is a good idea also. You can build your own comb crusher easily. Not much investment unless you go with Langstroth hives.

 

[Guitartists]

I'm going to have to do some research...... hopefully I will be able to set up a hive next year

I have so many plants to transplant to the new house.... I really would like to have the bees around