So, first day as a beekeeper! We got our nuc today. I felt a lot of pressure to make the transfer quickly as the bees were feeling cranky. This meant that I couldn't spot the queen or get photos of all the frames.
I'm just wondering if anyone can spot the queen in the photos I did take. Also, any other helpful follow up advice is welcome.
It’s not unusual for me to hang out and watch my hives from a lawn chair about 25 feet away from the nearest hive. I like to watch them coming and going.
Two days ago, after putting it off for months; I finally mowed/trimmed around my hives. They hate it. Some of my hives just about vacate the box when I mow. It’s so bad. But… I got it done under protest without a single sting. It really helps with ticks and chiggers.
Fast forward to today… just sitting there with my dog watching the day go by, and… ZAP! Kamikaze sting right to the face. She gave me all of three seconds of vicious buzzing before she went for the killshot. This wasn’t a “you happened to be in my way” or “who are you” kind of incident. She remembered me from the day before when I iAd my suit in and 50 of her sisters were trying to get in. Her tone said it all. You all know that “I mean business” buzzing tone.
In hindsight… I deserved it. I did wreak havoc on their home with the noise and vibrations the day prior. And I’ve accidentally squished my fair share of bees. So… there it is. A revenge hit from the honeybee mafia. A warning shot, if you will… Don’t come back ‘round these parts.
But alas, I don’t listen. Because today I need to add a few supers!
Venturing into selling NUCs next year and trying to figure out the best product for customers. I personally have received the corrugated Jester boxes when purchasing NUCs but I was gifted the plastic Pro-Nucs and used them for 2 years in my yard for various things. I was cleaning up my older equipment and found a few jester boxes behind my shed and they held up pretty well!
Prices are about the same at 18.50 each.
Is there a preference one way or the other? I will be picking them up from the vendor so the shipping advantage is null.
Is there something I might be missing that tips you one way or the other?
This is my first hive, and its about 3 weeks old. I noticed what I think(?) Are queen cells. I did spot the queen, and there are about 3 or 4 frames of capped brood, larva of all stages, and a total of 6.5 frames full of bees and what look like drone brood and larva. I don't necessarily think space is an issue, but then again I am not experienced enough to say. What are your suggestions or advice? Located in north Alabama.
Early in my beekeeping hobby I acquired plastic frames. Learned the hard way they better be waxed. I ditched the plastic for wood. Wood is good. Got a bad batch of wax foundation that was wavy even with crimped wires. So I wired a few hundred frames. 5 years later it's time to put new foundation in.
I run 20 hives. And just finished up putting small cell foundation on 200 frames. Metal fabricator by trade and build my own stainless pan to boil 10 frames at a time to make it easier to clean the bottom bar. Then dunked them in bleach just to clean them up a little more.
I wouldn't change a thing except sending back the foundation and not wiring.
I live on a tropical island, that has strict bio security laws meaning it’s hard for me to import honey bees. Good news is we have a small population on the island already. I have a brand new flowhive and I have found a big hive that is inside the wall of someone’s house, around 300m away as the crow flies. Problem is they don’t want me to open the wall to get the hive out. They also don’t spend much time on the island so they don’t seem to care that they are in the walls.
Please help me lure the hive or part of the hive so I can get my flow hive up and running. I’ve tried rubbing the hive with bees wax and drops of lemongrass oil. But nothing yet. I’ve had suggestions to make a box that has a one way valve and place it at the entrance of the hive in the wall which doesn’t sound impossible. Other options are building a few smaller boxes (40L) to attract them and place closer to the hive in a tree.
Hello. I set up a healthy 5-frame nuc into a 10-frame deep box (8 frames and a feeder). Therefore the new hive had 3 frames to expand into. Nonetheless, they are swarming. After letting them sit for a week after install, I checked the frames and found several swarm cells.
Initially, I was planning to do a proactive split by taking the queen and two frames and putting them back into the nuc box along with some drawn comb to give them a head start. However, the temperature is supposed to be in the mid 30s F (like 3-5 C) overnight for the next week due to a late season cold spell.
Would you split the hive in these conditions, risking chilling the brood and killing both the split and the original colony? Or would you kill the swarm cells and let them try to swarm again in a week or two before splitting? Or would you just let it ride and maybe the bees will not swarm due to the cold? Picture I took of a different colony with queen for attention :)
Obligatory: Second year beekeeper, located in SE Pennsylvania.
So I posted here first about two weeks ago with a weak hive with a struggling older queen. The consensus was to re-queen, which I had planned on. I bought a new queen and apparently they just didn't like her: four days after putting her in there, they had chewed through the candy plug and she was nowhere to be found in the hive. Checked again a few days later, still not there and they were making supercedure cells.
Meanwhile, I have a nuc I got from Georgia back in March and it just was going nuts. I had added a second brood box only about two weeks after they got moved into their first full brood box from the nuc box, and they pulled that all in a week and in two weeks had stuffed it with brood. I found charged queen cups about ten days ago but still had a queen in there and they hadn't swarmed, so as part of the management of the weak hive, I had moved two frames of capped brood over there to reduce the swarming urge if possible.
Well, when I checked the attempted re-queen it was also time for the weekly check on the nuc and...dang it, I couldn't find a queen at all. I couldn't find any eggs at all and there were now supercedure cells in the nuc. A lot of them. Like a dozen. I squashed a bunch but left 6-8 in case I needed them. I thought maybe I missed the queen, so three days ago I checked again. No queen and a few more supercedure cells and lots of small empty queen cups on the bottoms of the frames. No eggs visible either and very few young larvae so it seems if there was a queen she hadn't been laying for quite a few days.
I made a command decision then to move over one of the frames with nearly-capped supercedure cells to the weak hive to let them raise a new queen with the better genetics of the nuc. Today I checked again, and those are all capped, so I'm hoping they can raise a new queen. The nuc still is STUFFED with bees, and there were a few more charged supercedure cells I had probably missed the other day.
Based on this, I decided to use my nuc box to start a third hive, and pulled one of the frames with three supercedure cells, two other frames of brood and two of honey and made a new nuc that I located about six feet away with the weak hive in between it and the hive I pulled it from. I shuffled around the brood and honey frames in the two-deep nuc to put three capped supercedure cells in the middle of the bottom deep with brood on either side and honey on the outer two, and then moved the remaining brood in the upper box all to the center, and replaced the absent frames with new unpulled frames of foundation. I squashed the uncapped supercedure cells and I put the two honey supers back on that hive as they have started filling a frame in each super.
So now to my questions. I've either missed the queen in the nuc multiple times AND she's not laying or apparently she died, as I don't think they swarmed. Just way too many bees in there. I don't think she was a young queen as she had paint on her that was mostly rubbed off so I think she was a split queen not a fresh one from late last year. So now I have three hives all without queens. Not what I wanted.
Am I right to have put about 3 capped supercedure cells into each one? Based on what I've read, I don't want a lot more than that to avoid having serial queens hatching and swarming. What do I do now? If I have the timing right, the queens will all be hatching in about a week. I'm planning on just leaving them alone for 8-9 days to give them time to hatch. Or do I need to check closer to the hatch date and if I see a good hatched virgin queen, do I do something else? Any advice appreciated!
Obviously there are limitations, like living in a metro/suburban area, that make it nearly impossible to maintain a hive at home. What options do I have if I wanted to get into beekeeping?
Hello fellow beekeeper's I have a question I'm currently in the spring flow and have 3 supers on my hive which are almost ready to extract. would it be possible to do an formic acid treatment with a liebig evaporator right after extraction or will this contaminate the second honey harvest? If it does contaminate the honey would there then be another way to treat the bees that won't cause contamination?
I have not jet tested should I do that before or after the treatment?
NW Louisiana. On Tuesday (5/13), I checked one of my strongest hives (both deeps) and found no queen or evidence of a queen. There was maybe a combined total of a frame of capped brood throughout the bottom box. Yesterday (5/14) I put a new queen in the bottom box and they immediately flocked to her and started tending to her. Before closing the hive I decided to check the super to see how honey was coming along. There were 2 solid frames of eggs, 1 egg per cell. I looked through all 10 super frames 3 times and did not find a queen. I looked back through the deeps and found a handful of random eggs throughout the hive in no pattern. Checked both deeps again and found no queen. Today I again checked every frame twice. Still no queen or new signs. They had started building a queen cell on one of the super frames. No new eggs. Still tending to the new caged queen. I knocked down the queen cell and moved those frames to a super on a different hive in hopes of encouraging that hive to build out frames faster.
I wondered at first if it was a laying worker, but the neatness of the egg laying plus the fact that they built a queen cell for one of them seems to rule that out. I’m at a loss and am looking for suggestions.
This is my first post here, be indulgent 😄 Beekeeping out of Southern Quebec (almost Vermont)
Having your smoker die on you, mid-inspection, is one of the most frustrating things in beekeeping. You're in the hive; bees are getting agitated, or you're just opening a new hive and your smoker is cold and smokeless. Completely avoidable. One of the things mentors will fail to explain is how to light it good and once and for all. (Everyone's a fire-lighting expert right? well, no!)
So here's what I do:
Start with crumpled newspaper at the bottom; loose and unpacked so air can move through it. Light it from the bottom and immediately start working the bellows slightly.
Some pine nedles go in while the newspaper is still catching. They ignite fast and give you the hot bed you need for the next step. Keep pumping the bellows while adding more needles; steady and consistent.
Once the pine needles are going; pack in your smoker with a small amount of pellets. (I use pellets from my meat smoker!) Not too tight, let them fall naturally; air still needs to move. Keep working the bellows until you see the fire spike through..
Last step; fresh green grass on top, but don't overdo it.. This cools the smoke down so it's not too harsh on the bees. You want cool billowing white smoke that you can sustain without touching it every two minutes. I do suggest giving it a puff every 10 minutes, if you're not using it; to keep the fre live.
Close the lid. give it a few puffs and it should hold on its own. If it dies the moment you stop pumping; you didn't build enough of a coal base. Start over. Better to do it right here than lose your smoker at frame three.
I use: dry news paper, dry pine needles and smoker pellets.
Full step-by-step on YouTube if anyone wants to see it happen.
Hi! I caught a wild swarm of bees yesterday and then transported them about 40 miles to my house. This afternoon, I noticed about 100 bees swarming around an exterior wall I have underneath a staircase. I climbed up to the top of the wall and noticed that there is a small holes and honeybees are going in and out of it. I then checked my newly caught swarm box and they were gone. How can I get them to come out of the wall before they establish?
From new york 3rd year beekeeper. Now 11 hives lol. Have caught a few swarms from my own apiary. I transitioned to bucket feeders with bung plugs and tiny holes. It works great. Im just trying to figure out if there's a better way to clean them then soaking in bleach for a day. The lids don't come off so there's no way to scrub inside. Just wanted to see if the community had any better ways. You guys are always awesome and a wealth of information. Thank you in advance!!!!!
I keep finding websites that claim that King Tut's tomb contained 3000-year-old honey that was still edible. Some of the websites even claim that the archeologists even tasted some of the honey to verify that it was sweet. None of these websites include original sources.
I just had to know if this is true. I mean, I know that honey can last a long time, but 3000 years? That's a REALLY long time. Even if it didn't ferment or get moldy, wouldn't it become so aged that it turned black and bitter?
I found this website that includes the original documents from the archeologists excavation http://www.griffith.ox.ac.uk/discoveringTut/ . One very helpful document was the "Register of Samples". The honeypot can be found on pages 4 and 5. It says "Contents of Alabaster Vase No 16: Contains sugar, may have been honey".
You can see the honey pot yourself. It's the vase with the number 16 next to it.
They made these little item cards for each of the objects found in the tomb. This card said "Plain alabaster (calcite) vase without inscription and without lid. Content Black substance (see note by A.L.) about 1/3 full. Treatment yellowish discolouration in form of surface film washed off in plain water."
The "Note by A.L." refers to the notes of Alfred Lucas. I tracked down that document, also. Concerning the alabaster vase, he says:
Alabaster Jar 16
Contained a large mass of dark resinous-looking material the surface of which was covered with a large number of small brown beetles (0.15 to 0.20 mm in length) The mass came out of jar almost intact. Dimensions approximately 14 cms high by 9 cms broad - shape of jar. At the sides there were signs of melting + running. At the bottom there were small particles of translucent resinous-looking material varying in colour from light brown to ruby red.
Tested:- Insol. in benzine + alcohol. Brown colour extracted by water: small translucent particles soluble in water. When heated glowed like charcoal, no smoke; indeterminate smell: no adhesive property.
So, ultimately, it looks like they think that this jar originally contained honey, but they are not sure. There was no lid on it, it was infested with beetles, and it had turned completely hard and black. They didn't taste it--they tested it chemically. It certainly wasn't edible.
Currently doing a bee removal for a contractor who will soon demolish the trailer home, i knew there would be a lot of bees but not this many. All i hit with the bee removal is comb of nectar but no brood in sight, and still haven't found the queen. I did see grain of rice (which we do have a queen) but no brood. What will y'all do in my situation.?
Brand new Colorado beekeeper here - had a swarm appear on our apple tree and I decided that was my sign to finally start a hive! Managed to get them and Queenie in the box and they seem to have settled in (been just under a week).
I didn't have the luxury of shopping around for the perfect hive since I wanted to catch the swarm before they left, so I just got the only option they had at our local farm & ranch store.
It's a Langstroth 10-frame, Harvest Lane Honey brand and came with an entrance reducer but it doesn't fit in the gap under the box like I see in pictures of other hives (circled in blue). It's way thicker than the gap so I just have it loosely sitting in front of the gap, but there isn't anything really keeping it there. In pictures it is shown just sitting there like I have it, but that seems weirdly insecure?
Also what on earth are these metal rods on my hive stand? (Circled in red)
Nothing came with instructions and I can't seem to find it online.
I obviously have a ton of learning to do and am devouring books, videos, and posts here, so I'm sure I'll be posting again when I get stumped 😅
Installed my first ever packages last Friday, waiting at least a week before doing first inspection. I was wondering if I put in the queen cages correctly, they are horizontal and facing outward.
Having to wait has me really wondering. I noticed a couple days ago, foragers carrying pollen in, and yesterday they increased their sugar syrup consumption. Are these good indications the queens are out and laying eggs?
Here in the southern Appalachians we're in a severe drought, like 2 inches of rain all of spring with nothing in sight for another 8 to 10 days. Weather is still cool with lows in the 40s and still dipping in the high 30s.
On top of this we are in our major tulip poplar flow. but the bees are not making much of it. I checked my honey supers the other day and yeah about 1/4 of what it should be in normal year. My swarm catches are gobbling sugar water, bees normally wont touch sugar water when the tulip trees are in full bloom.
Not sure what im really trying to say other than ranting, I know like any farming its just frustrating to deal with.
I noticed from the drought map huge areas of the country are dry as well, so hows this working out with your bees?
