Our Backyard Bee Journey!💗🐝

[drstratton]

We just had a bee club meeting. It's even worse than that: The president of the club said, "Ask 5 beekeepers, get 8 opinions."

It think that is true in anything...

Congratulations! How'd it go?

We were able to extract 13 frames, which gave us about 42lbs of honey. Only one of our hives (our strongest) has pure honey as we're still feeding the others to build out comb faster. So we did separate extractions. 8 frames of pure for 24lbs and 5 frames for 18lbs. We'll be extracting the other supers in a couple of weeks, not everything was capped. We're pretty happy as it's our first year.

Our bee meeting was about treating for varroa.
We'll be using Formic Pro in a few weeks, ASSUMING!!! the temps drop to more normal for the area. It has been a hot summer.
At the meeting, the presenter (who has 58 years experience with bees) said that winter starts in August. No, not the snow and the temps. The bees are "making the bees that will raise your winter bees. They need to be healthy."

The meeting we just had was on varroa mites too. Our presenter also talked about winter starting in August and that we need strong winter bees.... were we at the same meeting...lol
We also follow David Burns and he really stresses that.

Have you ever used drone frames to trap varroa? Did it work well for you?

Only one of our hives has drawn out their drone frame so far and we definitely saw mites in it. We added a frame without a foundation into the first super on our strongest hive, hoping to get a frame of honeycomb, they decided to build drone comb in it. We opted not to use a queen excluder and just have the first super as our excluder, as the queen shouldn't go up any higher. One of our reasons for doing so, is to make it easier for the workers to access the frames and build comb, especially since this is our first year. The point I'm getting at is, if they don't build on the drone frame, you could add an empty frame into the brood chamber and hope they build it out for drone brood. Which in our case I believe they would, since we use plastic foundations with the smaller comb pattern built into it. From everything I've read drone frames are a good and natural way to help keep the mite levels down.

The exchange of information we've just had and making new friend is why I love forums like this. So glad @cavemanrich tagged you.

I know you shared a couple of threads, do you have one of your own?

 

[cavemanrich]

All this info is interesting. I sometimes get ideas that may, or not work. So here is this one.
Would it make sense to try and vacuum out some of those MITES, to keep the numbers down??
My idea would be to have a small diameter hose at end to only suck up the tiny mites, and not large enough to get the bees???
My thinking,,,,,,,,,,,,,, the less of the enemy, the easier to win war.

We just had a bee club meeting. It's even worse than that: The president of the club said, "Ask 5 beekeepers, get 8 opinions."

This one got me rolling on the floor.
But I always look at the positive. That President still has a potential to get a gig at Comedy Central.

 

[drstratton]

All this info is interesting. I sometimes get ideas that may, or not work. So here is this one.
Would it make sense to try and vacuum out some of those MITES, to keep the numbers down??
My idea would be to have a small diameter hose at end to only suck up the tiny mites, and not large enough to get the bees???
My thinking,,,,,,,,,,,,,, the less of the enemy, the easier to win war.

I wish I could just vacuum them up. That would be amazing.

The problem is that the mites attach to the bees, like a tick. They hide in the cells with larvae in it before it's capped. Then they lay male and female eggs in there, they hatch, breed and live off of the bee larvae. By the time the bees emerge you can have a mite bomb go off and the cycle continues, the hive dies off if not controlled. They make the bees susceptible to viruses and disease.

Drones (male bees) take longer to emerge, 24 days and the mites need that time to reproduce. Drone cells are larger in diameter than worker bees (female, which emerge in 21 days)(queens emerge in 19 days) and somehow the mites can sense the size of cell. So, they tend to use the drones to multiply. That's why we can use drone frames to kill off mites naturally. The sad thing about that is, you also have to kill the drones, but a hive can have over 40-80 thousand bees in it and the summer bees only live around 45 days. So, it's a method that saves more bees.

This one got me rolling on the floor.
But I always look at the positive. That President still has a potential to get a gig at Comedy Central.

 

[drstratton]

We move on to May 7th and it's time to pick up our package of bees. This time they are only an hour away. I thought I had a picture of just the package, but I guess not. A package comes with 3lbs of bees and a queen in it, that equates to about 10,000 bees. They put together a package by shaking bees from many different hives into a box and add a queen inside of a small cage with a cork in one end to keep the bees from killing her. It takes a few days for the bees to accept her as their new Queen, by the pheromones she puts off. Before adding the queen to the new hive box we had to remove the cork and replace it with a small marshmallow. The bees will eat away the marshmallow to release the queen. You have to check in 3 days to make sure she has been released. A queen does not feed herself, she has attendants that see to her every need. They feed her and clean up after her. Her only job is to lay eggs. The queen also determines the attitude of her hive. A calm queen = a calm hive an angry queen = an angry hive. An angry queen can be removed and a new queen introduced, if you don't want to be attacked when you go near your hive or even hang out in your yard. Thankfully we have calm queens.

A nucleus hive comes with 5 frames and an already established colony, that's why they are so much better than a package of bees.

We have our 3rd hive set up and ready to go. Much less stressful than the nucleus install. This went of without a hitch (no running to the house with our heads covered).
I also failed to get a picture of the queen, but that's because we wanted to get them installed as quickly as possible and the gloves I was wearing at that time didn't work well with my phone camera.

We made the decision to add a frame of brood from our strongest hive and a frame of resources (honey and pollen on drawn comb. That increases the likelyhood of the package accepting their new home and not absconding. It slightly set back our first 2 hives, but didn't hurt them and it worked out well for us.

After adding the borrowed frames, the queen cage and shaking the bees into the hive, we placed the box at the hive entrance and the remaining bees crawled in to be with their queen.

 

[drstratton]

I brightened up the fence that we built as wind protection for our bees. My husband laughed at me a little, but he liked the end result.

We also planted a bunch of flowers near the hives.

 

[drstratton]

May 19th
Dale had asked me if there was anything special I wanted for Mother's Day. I told him I didn't really need anything, but we needed a riding mower for the treeline. So that's what I got. Then I told him the other part of the deal was I never had to use it, he was like, that wasn't what you said, I said, my gift my stipulations...

Fast forward to yesterday, I told him I found a way I could enjoy the mower. I could move it near the bees, sit in the comfy seat with my feet up and enjoy them in the mornings while I drank my tea. The picture shows what I found this morning!

I spent the morning and many after just enjoying watching the bees fly in and out. Seeing the pollen they bring in is pretty cool.

 

[cavemanrich]

Then I told him the other part of the deal was I never had to use it, he was like, that wasn't what you said, I said, my gift my stipulations...

Dale could get out of that one,, if he trains the bees to drive that Cub Cadet..

 

[drstratton]

Dale could get out of that one,, if he trains the bees to drive that Cub Cadet..

I'll see if he's tried that...lol

 

[N F C]

I brightened up the fence that we built as wind protection for our bees. My husband laughed at me a little, but he liked the end result.
View attachment 4171865
The bee was funny, Dale had just asked me if the bees liked it. I told him I didn't think they'd notice and then one landed on a flower, bee approved...lol
View attachment 4171867
We also planted a bunch of flowers near the hives.
View attachment 4171866

Love what you did with the fence Rene!

 

[drstratton]

Love what you did with the fence Rene!

Thank you! It turned out just the way I imagined, plus some. I especially love the dragonflies, bees and ladybugs.