The Beekeeping Thread (Pic heavy)

[ineffableone]

I like this concept but it's really only for small scale single hive operations. For me I have 11 hives, they hold 12 frames, for me to fit my entire operation with then it would cost me $9,240. To break even I'd have to sell 96 1/4 gallons of honey. I got about 40 gallons of honey last year.

Not trying to debate you, just figured it worth mentioning.

Are you taking into account the Flow Frames are bigger than standard frames (7 Flow Frames fit a 10 frame Langstroth hive)?

Are you taking into account the cost of separating the wax and honey? With that many hives I imagine you have spinners to separate the wax and honey, with the Flow frames you could sell off your spinner to help recoup the costs.

Also you would not necessarily have to switch them all over at the same time. You could get a few Flow frames see if you like them. If you do like them start adding them as you can afford them.

[Halfapint]

hmmmmm I didn't read that they were larger I figured they were the same. but that'd be interesting. It would be nice to have a couple of them with the flow frames though.... I have a crappy spinner not worth much only holds 2 frames. It's a loooooooong process to spin the honey. Good points, I'll have to take a closer look, I was turned off by the cost so I really didn't look into them all that well.

[Halfapint]

Got the first swarm of the season tonight! We lost one this last winter, so this is the replacement.

[ZMace]

I have been out of beekeeping since the 90s, but am thinking of getting back in. I see there a couple of PNW guys here in this thread, any suggestions on where to get bees?

It looks like there are some places in Spokane, which is not too far from me. I would probably be looking for nucs for a faster build-up.

Congrats on the swarm, Halfapint. I was always happy to get those.

[Halfapint]

I have been out of beekeeping since the 90s, but am thinking of getting back in. I see there a couple of PNW guys here in this thread, any suggestions on where to get bees?

It looks like there are some places in Spokane, which is not too far from me. I would probably be looking for nucs for a faster build-up.

Congrats on the swarm, Halfapint. I was always happy to get those.

Thanks, and honestly I'm not sure. All of ours have come from swarms, dad bought a couple queens and had them shipped via mail. But we had hives all set up. Good luck getting back into it. They are quite fun to watch and take care of.

[Anianna]

We can never find swarms. We have lots of wasps, but it's hard to find wild swarms of bees out here.

[Halfapint]

We can never find swarms. We have lots of wasps, but it's hard to find wild swarms of bees out here.

I don't think this one was wild, I could smell the scent from one of my hives. Pretty sure it was one of mine. It landed in my moms back yard and mom actually found them they had been sitting there for a while, perfect little ball of bees. Knocked them into the box and keft them.

I raided some of the other hives for honey and brood to put into it. Checked them this morning and they were seeming to take to the hive.... We'll see how they do.

[Halfapint]

Welp! it was a good day, called out of work to help mom (health issues). Driving back from urgent care we got a call from a neighbor he had a swarm! Sweet as! Loaded up some equipment in the back of the truck suited up, and drove down. The swarm was in a low hanging branch so that made it SUPER easy. Let the swarm sit there buzzing around getting used to their new home.

Got to moms house, and..... ANOTHER! woo! 2 swarms in 1 day, 3 in 2 days.... awesome, this one was up in a kiwi vine, made it easy to get the swarm down. Did the same thing as yesterday, tall ladder next to smaller ladder, and hive on the smaller. shook the branch and got the majority of them in the hive. I let them settle down a little, a few hours later grabbed the box, put the lid on, and then cut down the couple of bundles that I had.

The only problem I have is that most of my used boxes (that I spun the honey out of), got infested by some sort of worm or something... Not sure, made a type of spider web, and looks like it burrowed through most of it. So I'm going to have to figure out what it is. I've got to damn man hives to put them in the freezer. But I am making a new bee shed this year so hopefully if I seal it well enough it'll help for most of it

[ZMace]

Wax moths maybe?

[Halfapint]

Wax moths maybe?

From my research that's what I'm guessing, I'll have to think of a better way to seal them up. Damn....

[Anianna]

Wax moths maybe?

From my research that's what I'm guessing, I'll have to think of a better way to seal them up. Damn....

Like these? That's one of the problems we have and why hubby prefers to keep his frames in my freezer. My freezer is full, though, and we have lots of frames to protect until we get more bees. I tried contractor bags and duct tape for the ones that won't fit in the freezer. We'll see how that works.

[Halfapint]

[quote="Anianna"]Like these? quote]

Precisely those.... eesh! They totally infested one stack of my boxes. I opened them up and let the chickens eat all the bugs, I know healthy hives can clear out mold and other stuff not sure if I want to put them back in a hive.

Now I need to figure out a way to store them... I counted I have over 50 box's that 500 frames at a minimum. Most of the wax is still intact I hate to waste it it all by burning them. That's a lot of honey that could be saved by not having to rebuild all the wax.

[Halfapint]

Well.... Got home from work and..... TWO MORE SWARMS! I only captured one the other was in a neighbors yard and he's not happy that we have bees so I left him a little surprise

I'm having to order MORE bases, boxes, frames, and tops... geez... another $400. Sheesh! To many bees!

[ZMace]

So jealous of all your (practically) free bees.

I think this thread is going to be responsible for getting me back into bees, and I am looking at 125 dollars per nuc, plus the pain of all the starting equipment.

At least I shouldn't need an extractor this year.

[NamelessStain]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... -90lb.html

Now that's a hive!

[Halfapint]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... -90lb.html

Now that's a hive!

I feel bad I had a swarm get away from me and go up into a tree nearby but there's just no way I can get to it. Looks like the swarm is dying but they have built quite a bite of comb. I'm pretty sure the queen died and they just keep going there's only maybe a couple hundred of the thousands that it was when they first swarmed. Hate seeing a good swarm die.

In other news I have had to order another half dozen tops and bottoms, I'm also looking at getting another 10 supers... This should be a good year. I've been so busy at my moms house prepping it for paint I haven't been able to look in my hives. That's top priority over my next weekend is get some supers on my hives.

Those damn wax moths ruined probably 3 dozen frames! I cleaned out the moths and got as much of the webs out I'll probably just reuse them but put them in with the really strong hives. I know they'll clean them out just fine. I had a couple that had some water and got a little moldy and I reused them and they are completely clean and capped with brood. Bees are meticulous cleaners, if I could only get them to live in my house and clean up for me!

[ZMace]

I've got a 40ft extension ladder you could borrow, I hate using the thing, but that would be entertaining to see.

Probably too late though.

In other news, my bees will be here in May(damn you all).

[Halfapint]

I've got a 40ft extension ladder you could borrow, I hate using the thing, but that would be entertaining to see.

Probably too late though.

In other news, my bees will be here in May(damn you all).

Hahahahahaha!!! First you SHOULD be thanking us! !!! Second I have a nice 40' ladder, but it's not that its high up, I just can't get to it because my kiwi/grape arbor is in the way. It's right on the fence and the neighbor on the other side built another fence in about 2 feet from the other, and the tree is in a massive loral(sp). I tried everything to reach it but just couldn't get to it. it's just out of my reach when I stand on the fence. I don't want a Darwin Award for taking myself out of the gene pool by trying to stand on a ladder, balanced on top of a fence, while passing off my beer and saying "hey guys watch this!!!!"

Oh well, stupid bees should have picked a better spot to swarm!

Congrats on your new bees, to bad your in ID if you were closer I'd call you and get you soem free bees!

[ZMace]

Thanks, this will be the first time I have had them since the '90s. I'm really looking forward to it.

Where I'm at in ID, I can drive to Portland in less than 6 hours, but I'm not ready for bees from the woodenware stand-point, so I might take you up on that sometime, but not now.

I'm hoping to try the walkaway split technique in the later summer to increase my number of hives, but like I said, I need to hit the woodshop and get some equipment made first.

[Anianna]

So, that one hive we had left that hubby had left to die, but it didn't - well, when he had checked them, they had most of one deep filled out. Hubby put another deep and a medium on them to give them room, but lamented on and on that he shouldn't have put so many supers on at once instead of waiting to put the other on. He figured that would be the end of them. We pretty much left them alone until yesterday when hubby discovered they had one deep full of brood, one deep full of honey, as well as the medium full of honey! Hubby processed some of that today and gave them some more mediums to move into.

In our experience, the meanest bees are the best survivors and honey producers. These bees will chase our beekeepers clear past the house before returning home!! Hubby said they had to go all the way into the orchard which is a helluva distance to be chased by angry bees! He thinks it's funny, but our daughter was stung today and now she refuses to go outside so long as "Daddy is pissing off the bees"!

Also, he found a place selling some nucs a couple of hours from us and is just waiting for them to be ready in the next week or two. That'll get us up to three hives again and hubby hopes to split them until he eventually gets 15. We'll see how that goes this year! I'm pretty sure these ferocious bees are real survivors, so maybe it'll work out this time.

Hubby is on a new honey kick, now, too. He wants to make whipped honey. The stuff he bought at the store for "starter" is pretty daggum tasty.

[Halfapint]

GREAT NEWS!!!!!!!! That's awesome I'm glad to hear it. I'll second the "angry bees are the best" I lost a few hives because it wasn't warm enough for me to open them up (on my days off) and yet they kept splitting, and splitting. I went from I think 9 hives to 19, in one spring. Some of the older hives died off, but the newer ones are a lot more....... Angry. I opened up my hives a few weeks ago, and I thought I was going to lose a majority of what I had. I found ZERO signs of queens, hell.... a majority of the cells were honey. I found little or no brood. But I found a LOT of queen cells. I killed a lot of them, left a few....

I then left them alone, didn't even look at them.... I was scared. I Let them do what they know best. Well I'm down to I believe 14 active (very active) hives. Which is great, I was prepping myself to have 3 or 4 hives. But the queens I kept did what they do best, and started producing brood. There are groups of bees on the front of the hives most days now. I've settled down and realized, I'm not really trying to produce a lot of honey this year. I just want to get my bees to be healthy and to grow them, I want to go into winter with lots of food. I also ran out of supers drying to expand and grow, So I have double stacked medium hives, that's what most the new hives have for their brood/food chamber. Though I got a few supers from Mannlake, I might try to add the super below the 2 mediums, and put a queen excluder between the top medium and the other. I'll have to watch the top and make sure it doesn't have queen cells that way I can use it for honey.

We'll see what happens. I'm still learning, dad was not the greatest teacher, but he did do a great job at telling me..... Try shit out! If it fails then learn from that and go from there. I have "the bee guy" who dad learned from but, he's still a bit shaken up and standoffish with me since dad died. I'm slowly building a rapport with him and hope I can get more info from him as time goes on. He might be testing me and seeing how willing I am to learn.... So I dunno but It's not even June (still 2 hours to go ). This is expected to be a long, dry, hot summer. I will be working with my bees as much as I can and I want to see what they will do.

It also helps that I posted on facebook a picture with me in my bee suit with the hives and people went batty. I've sold more quarts of honey in the last 4 weeks than the last year or more. People want pure, raw, local honey. So I'm reinvesting that money back into hives, back into equipment and trying to get this into a mini business.

Sorry Ani, didn't mean to make this about "me", but I see a correlation between our situations, and wanted to voice support and ideas.

Fake Edit: Look on craigslist, in the paper, and ask around..... Beekeeping equipment is expeinve, but as I said I posted a pick on facebook and had a friend contact me. I paid her 2 quarts of honey; I got 3 tops, 3 bottoms and half a dozen supers (the supers were beyond repair so they went to hold targets at the range), but she was happy and I got about $200 worth of equipment for $30 of honey. I told her to keep me in mind when she talks to neighbors, and that if they don't want honey, I do have cash. She just contacted, me and an older neighbor is looking at getting rid of some of his equipment. He's willing to work out a deal with me driving up there (about an hour) and doing labor in exchanger for some, or all of his equipment.

[Anianna]

Don't worry! It's the beekeeping thread, not the Anianna thread!

We weren't expecting any honey this year from just the one hive we thought was struggling, but it has produced more than our original three hives combined. Those bees are welcome to stay angry jerkfaces if they keep that serious production up!

Awesome deal on the equipment! I've just been buying supers by the unpainted side and putting them together myself. I have some five gallon buckets of paint from the returns section that work well and I found another bucket under the house when I cleaned the previous owner's stuff out of the crawlspace. Hubby checks Craigslist for such things pretty regularly, but we haven't had much luck with it out our way yet.

[Anianna]

Picking up bees Saturday morning. Trying to decide if we want to include a trip to see my folks who live near the beekeeper, which would me the entire family in a van with three nucs full of bees for nearly two hours on the way home. They're usually pretty well sealed, but you never know. It's not like he's packaging them by post office rules, so who knows how well he'll seal them up.

Could be a fun ride...

[Halfapint]

Awesome, good to hear you have some good producers, even if they are angry jerkfaces!