Natural Bee Farm

My footer solution, simple as can be.

When I migrated from Top Bar Hives to Langstroth hives, I was faced with a conundrum. What the hives sit on. Most Langstroth hives sit on a foundation or footer of sorts. It keeps the bottom-board itself off the ground to reduce rotting issues. A lot of people seem to use bricks or build fancy stands to put their hives on. But, if you have a bunch of hives, either option is expensive. Not to mention that bricks are heavy to lug around and stands can have a tendency to tip over, especially as the colony matures and the hive gets very heavy. Additionally, the taller a hive gets, the harder it is to work. My concern is not with a short two-box baby hive, but a full grown hive that’s five deep-boxes tall or six even. Put that on top of eight inches of brick and it’s just that much taller to have to deal with.

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Swarm Bucket

One of the most useful tools in collecting bees is the humble swarm bucket. Trying to lug a heavy brood-box around to gather a swarm can get very cumbersome sometimes. The very first swarm I was exposed to as a six-year old – one that I aided the beekeeper when he wanted to snap a picture and had me hold a branch out of the way, inches from this mass of bees – the beekeeper used a brood-box to shake the swarm into. My first swarms I did likewise. But, it was heavy and hard to place when out in the brush. Some people swear by specially made bee-vacuums but I had a bad experience with a bee-vacuum killing bees, and it’s also inconvenient if you’re out in the brush too. Me, I like the simple 5-gallon bee bucket. The bucket is light and easy to lug and can be kept in the truck for those chance encounters that we all hope we come across as we’re driving around doing our errands. However, there is a caveat. Making sure I get all the flying bees but keep the queen in the bucket.

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The pallet just fit in the back of my Ranger.

Up until last year, I had no need for an extractor. Top-bar hives only require a knife, a bucket and a strainer. I still have tubs of honey-comb in the freezer that I take out once and a while to chew on some for a snack. I could probably leave the comb out now – I put it in the freezer to ensure that any wax-moth eggs are killed. However, for serious honey production, especially for a side-line honey business, an extractor is an essential tool for the job.

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Bees forming colony behind a picture.

Not long ago I was presented with an opportunity to gather some bees. As usual, until you go look at it, you have to form a picture in your head with the questions you ask and the answers you get. My wife’s friends mother called about bees in her roof – way up at the apex. Based on what she described – and what I saw subsequently of where they were – I was not looking forward to cutting those out. Very high up, very difficult location. But, inexplicably, something happened to change all that.

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Bees top to bottom in wall of shed.

I had a bee cutout this Saturday to do. Last week I built a bee vacuum, sure it was going to cut my cutouts from four hours to two hours. Yep. Just suck all them bees up then cut and mount the comb at my leisure then pour the bees in when done. That was the idea.

But ideas and reality rarely mesh… Read the rest of this entry »

Swarm with half of the bees out foraging.

My first swarm of the year hasn’t done a whole lot just yet. But then, the nectar hasn’t really kicked in yet. My other hives are also pretty dry too – they’re certainly ready for the flowers to kick in. Currently we have bluebonnets in bloom and have had a few trees in bloom this season so far so the bees are not starving, but the main flow from the mesquite and wildflowers just hasn’t happened yet.

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Five-Day Old Swarm

I have always pictured a swarm as a bunch of bees and the old queen leaving the old hive, hanging out on a tree and then deciding on a new home – in just a few hours, if that. I’ve never heard of a swarm that would hang out overnight. But today’s swarm changed all that.

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Swarm on Crepe Myrtle

Saturday began like any other day – getting up and realizing that I’m running late.  I rushed to my job to set up some equipment at a convention and while there conducting the work I was to do, I bumped into a fellow beekeeper. In these parts that’s a pretty good thing – there are precious few of us around here. It was really refreshing to actually sit down and talk bees to someone who was as interested in bees as myself. Talking bees to my wife elicits little more than a glazed over, blank stare. Little did I know, that meeting would be an odd coincidence, or a herald to yet another hive to enter my apiary.

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Cutout JHH-style Hive with swarm bearding on it.

There’s always an occasion where you take a hive and split it. You take half of the hive and put it in another box, and the one without the queen will make a new queen from the open-brood left over. This mimics the natural way of hive multiplication, that colonies do in nature – swarming. Well, one of my hives swarmed. I think it was today, tho it could have happened yesterday. It was fairly anticlimactic tho – as I had an empty cutout hive out there – a short version of my long-hive design.

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Wood JHH Style Cutout Hive

A while back a co-worker notified me of a lightning damaged tree that had bees in it. The city had tried to remove the tree by pulling it over, and the top split off down the side, exposing the hive. Needless to say, they scooted out of there pronto. I’m sure they were planning on coming back with some poison later, so this became a rescue operation, as are most cutouts.

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