I think Mjuric has a lot of experience, but he doesn't logon as much as he used to do.

My advice? Only ask one beekeeper... ask two and you'll get conflicting opinions ;)

Work the bees on warm, sunny, calm days. They're grouchy when it's cold, wet, and windy, as well as at dusk.

Gentle on the smoke and not too hot, the cooler the smoke the better. You want to smoke them, not roast them.

Place the hive where it gets as much sunlight as possible and have it elevated above the ground a foot or so. It will keep critters from crawling in.

I haven't used any Apistan in decades. I'm sure if I used more chemicals I'd get a higher honey yield but would rather forgo that stuff and have it uncontaminated by pesticides.

First year you won't get much if any honey, let the colony build up and get strong before you harvest.

You'll get used to getting stung unless your allergic and then you'll just get stung, go into anaphylactic shock and die.

Call Lesser Farms in Dexter Michigan

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sometimes

I had a guy who had an anaphylactic type reaction and I had to argue with him to get rid of the bees. Bee careful. Where do bees go to the bathroom. The BP station!

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They constantly try to escape from the darkness outside and within
Dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good T.S. Eliot

For some reason I kept seeing the OP and thought pro bookkeepers and was wondering if you were starting a cult. You know, with your first colony and all. :)

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TEAM HD
Each day is what you make of it so make it the best day possible.

I've been keeping Bee's for about 9 years now. i'm certainly no expert but can give some insights i hope you might find helpful

1. Join your local beekeeper society. i am a member of two. Usually they will run a basic bee keeping course once a year. I've been thru a couple and gone to some bigger seminars over at Auburn Univ. You will learn a lot and more importantly you'll make contacts with more experienced bee keepers you can call on to help you with issues. LIke swarming

2. Are you getting a small package of bee's or a full nuke? If you're getting a small package of bees it will be a challenge to get the hive well enough established (brood, and stored honey) to make it thru the coming winter. If it's a nuke you've got a good chance. Me personally i always try to have the main hive ball down in the main (full chamber) and i leave one full medium sized super of honey on each hive to help them make it thru the winter.

3. Use screened bottom boards--this will help greatly with veroa mites

4. Have a full hive body (with full frames) and one super (with full frames) ready to go in case you get a swarm and you capture it--the time to be building and painting a hive and putting together frames with foundation is NOT after you've captured a swarm

5. If your hive(s) make it thru this coming winter then you will want two or three supers for each of them for next year once the honey flow starts. You will need to find a spinner (one with heat tape on the outside really helps). If you're a member of a bee keeping club they will usually have one or two available for club members to borrow--although they will be in high demand right after the honey flow ends and everyone is busy robbing honey.

6. When you attend a bee keepers meeting--lets say there are ten bee keeps in attendance--be ready for about 15 differing opinions. Some very opinionated people on the subject but great folks to reach out to for help.

7. i buy all my wood stuff (hive main bodies, supers, frames) and foundation from Dadant--they're good folks

8. Don't use chemicals. Don't.

9. Google your state, country and bee keeping to a find local club. If that doesn't work contact your county ag rep and he/she should know the nearest bee keeping society contact info.

10. Pick a good location (as had been said) with as much full sun as you can find. Once they are settled in it's a pretty complex process to move them. The basic bee keeping mantra on this is "3 feet or 3 miles" If you move them pretty much any distance greater than 3 feet--but less than 3 miles---they will be all discombobulated and you will lose all the current batch of scout bee's

11. It's fun to do but you needn't plant any special plants for your bee's. They will fly up to three miles to find what they need to do what bee's do--they will soon know every black berry patch, privet patch, flower garden, blue berry orchard, etc within three miles..

Good Luck

/r

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Steve

Thanks for the advice, Steve, and everyone. Looks like I need to find a local chapter

So the wife and i came out of one of our barns just a couple of hours ago and she immediately noticed we had a medium sized swarm in one of our pear trees.



Here is where i pays to have equipment on stand-by ready to go. I had a full hive body, base, inner cover, top and one medium super all ready to go. So we went into our swarm recovery battle drill. She went into the house to "Bee UP" and i went back into another barn to gather all the bee swarm capturing gear and get it laid out.



First we put a light colored sheet in the ground. This will help bee's that fall into the grass find their way into the hive. Then i put the open main body as close under the tree as i could get it. I run nine frames in my hive main bodies and supers--cause that is what i was taught to do nine or ten years ago when i first started this. I've got spacers to make sure the nine frames have the right 'bee space.'

By now Mrs H is all "Bee'd Up" and ready to do the bee whisperer thing. These particular bee's swarmed from a very gentle hive of Italian bee's that we really like. I've a couple of hives of "russian bee's" and they are of a much meaner disposition. Instead of landing on a branch where they were easy to get at these knuckleheads had landed along the main trunk of the young pear tree. So Mrs H is gonna brush em into a small card board box and them dump them down into the open and waiting hive main body.





The trick is to get as many of the bee's as possible into the hive main body down on the ground. And MOST IMPORTANTLY--you've got to get the queen in there too. You will know if you've got the queen in their if the bee's on the outside of the box and down on the sheet all start lining up like good little imperial storm troopers and march into the box!



well they are all out of the tree and going into the main body--so we think we've got the queen in there. Carefully slide on the inner cover and pop the outer cover on and viola! A free batch of bee's courtesy of mother nature :-)

We will keep an eye on em the rest of the afternoon. Sometimes this works and you get a free new hive of bees--sometimes they decide they don't like the new hacienda and they fly away again.

If they are still in the hive in the morning i will put the blue hive up on a hive stand and focus on getting them up and running to make it thru their first winter.

Just thought it was somewhat timely and ironic that this would happen on a day you'd posted a ? about bee's so thought i'd post this

take good care

/r

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Steve

Stuff like this is why the LR is such an interesting place

I had a swarm in my backyard a couple weeks ago and they formed into a ball just like that.

My wife knew someone who wanted the bees, so he came over the next day and vacuumed them into a hive.

Very interesting post. Thanks for documenting it with photos and narrative.

So, the Russians are bigger bastards than the Italians, eh? Who would have guessed that...

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Take a short break from ST and read my blog:
http://tri-banter.blogspot.com/

i'm not trying at all to politicize the thread. Perhaps your comment was tongue in cheek? /s ??

"Russian" bees--from their pacific coast originally i believe--were brought here to the US as they exhibited some resistance to varroa mites which is a big problem.

All i know is that our hives of the Russian strain are very aggressive. Not making any particular political comment.

At all.

thanks

/r

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Steve

Definitely find a local chapter. A large portion of keeping is location based. What you do in Minnesota is not what you do in Florida. the issues you have to deal with, how to keep, over winter etc etc are all different.

To add to Steve's list.

1) The first year or two avoid the desire to be getting into the hive every other day to "See what's going on". The first couple years you will inspect more often then you would normally but getting in too often is one of the big mistakes made by starters. Every time you get in and mess around it puts the bees back a few to several days. Get in 2-3 times a week and you can really mess with their progress. This is saying nothing of the fact that every time you get in you risk crushing the queen or dropping her in the grass :-)

2) Don't panic. Well in most cases there isn't much you can do anyway. The first couple years you really don't have any idea what is right or wrong and most of the time don't know when to do "X" or "Y". The bees have been doing this for years and are pretty adapt at fixing their own house. When they can't odds are you can't either.

3) If you can find a mentor. Things go WAY faster when you have someone standing there going "Uhhh...no that's not the queen" :-) I'd still love to find an old time keep that would hang around with me for a couple days.

4) http://www.bushfarms.com/bees.htm One of the most informative and free bee sites I've come across. Check out things like the "Bee math". Having knowledge like that gives you a lot more confidence in what you're seeing in your hive.

Again, FAR from an expert and I still struggle with simple things like getting the damn things to live thru the winter :-)

~Matt

All i know is that our hives of the Russian strain are very aggressive. Not making any particular political comment.

The best hives I've had were aggressive. I'm actually beginning to think this is a necessary trait to defending the hives against mites. I've also never found it to be a matter of bee "Race" as much as individual hive character. I've had hives of Italian, Carnie, Russian and Buckfast. I've had aggressive and passive of pretty much all these. I've only had one hive which I thought about re-queening and it was an Italian hive. Those bastards would try to rip my head off as soon as I popped the top even on a nice calm sunny day.

I had a friend that said his most aggressive hive was Russian. It was so aggressive that they would start bumping the window of his truck when he pulled up near the hive. That queen lost her life in a pinching accident :-)

~Matt

Timely thread.. I'm working at our Boston office this week and one of my peers told me he just started beekeeping based on discussions with one of his team, who's been keeping bees for years. It turns out he had picked up a colony of bees yesterday morning and they were in the back of his car.

I guess my expression was one of disbelief because he offered to show me when he was leaving for the day. So we go out to the parking lot and sure enough, there's his car with a small hive sitting in the back, full of bees... with a bunch of bees flying around free in the car too, and yellow beeshit streaks on the windows and various parts of the interior. Best part was when he drove off (approx 45-60 minute commute) with a beekeeper's net on.

I've thought about getting them for a while but my daughter has bad allergic reactions in general. She's 11 and not been stung yet so not sure how she will respond. Not a big enough property to take the chance on her getting stung.

I've also been contemplating this for a few years, and have local bees available. We have ample property, but only 1/2-acre is cleared; the rest is wooded. I've talked to some semi-knowledgeable folks and they claim that locating a hive in the woods is fine. Other advice seems to disagree.

I'm wondering if anyone has experience or can comment on locating a hive in relatively sparse woods. I'd prefer to have them in the back yard, but never would out of consideration for our kids/neighbors/etc.

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"The right to party is a battle we have fought, but we'll surrender and go Amish... NOT!" -Wayne Campbell

I live in town, which allows bees but I really couldn't get them in a sunny place without it being relatively in the middle of the yard, where the kids play. If I ever get my druthers and we move out into the country I plan on getting them.

Sparse woods would definitely be fine. If you could get them in an opening that gets some sun would be bonus points.

I have an ideal place out in the country where I could set up countless colonies. The only problem is that it's 45 minutes away. My parents live adjacent to it, so maybe I just need to convince them that bee keeping is a great retirement activity.

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"The right to party is a battle we have fought, but we'll surrender and go Amish... NOT!" -Wayne Campbell

My impression and some of those with experience should chime in is that it's not really all that time intensive unless you want it to be.

Correct. I've got some hives that I have just left alone for a couple of year. Every few months I kick them to see is any bees come out.... they have, and in great quantity so I know they're vigorous.

This year my schedule is such that I'll actually manage them and get some honey.

Dad was a commercial bee keeper with 1,000+ hives (not all that huge in the world of commercial beekeepers). He previously was a dairy farmer and beekeeping felt like retirement to him.

The most I ever had was 20 hives and that was too many. I think for me the ideal number is 6

This thread was cool. Thanks to Steve for the pictures too. I was told my maternal grandfather was good with bees. Never wore a net or any equipment. Never met him though as he died when I was one month old.

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They constantly try to escape from the darkness outside and within
Dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good T.S. Eliot

Do you really get used to it? I've frequently wondered about that aspect of beekeeping.

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War is god

I watched a fascinating program the other day about algorithms, and an unsolvable one (at least thus far) is the Traveling Salesman Problem, in which you try to find the shortest route between multiple points without visiting the same point twice. This is applicable to bees because, as you wrote, they'll find all those spots and then begin visiting them and they have to do so in a highly efficient manner.

The program's host visited a bee researcher who attached a tiny pole that stuck up vertically from a bee's thorax, and then the bee was released into a field that contained multiple food sources for it. There was a radar set up at the field that tracked the bee's movements (via the signature of a tiny bead atop the tiny vertical pole), and it was fascinating to watch the bee experiment with different routes before it settled on the one it considered most efficient. It took a few tries, but the bee got it done.

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War is god

It varies

Some people do get use to it--some don't

i feel a responsibility as a bee keep so i keep epi pens about in case someone has a adverse reaction while they are here around my bee's. There's adverse reactions and there's adverse reactions. One time when i was a company commander in the 10th Mountain Division my company was sitting on their asses at McDill AFB outside a hanger waiting on a troop hauler to go somewhere and do something. One of my guys got stung by a bee and the reaction was immediate and dramatic. If our medics had not had epi pens in their kit he would have died before AF ambulance could have responded.

One old guy in one of my bee keeping clubs has pretty severe arthritis in his hands. He uses bee's to sting his hands and swears it helps ease his arthritis.

A single bee sting and i personally am fine. BUT--one time i decided after doing some bee keeping and while i still had my suit on--that i would do some weed eating around my hives. Bad move. Never seen bee's that angry. Got bee's inside my bee hat and got stung multiple times in head and neck; stung in crotch; ankles. Had to get my wife to drive me to the hospital. Things started going black as we were enroute so shot myself in the thigh with a epi pen. Everything turned out fine and i've been stung in single stings or even a few at a time since then with no adverse result.

Pro Tip. Bee's do NOT like weed eaters, or lawnmowers, or zero turn mowers outside their hives! ;-)

/r

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Steve

The beekeeper who vacuumed up our bee ball wasn't wearing gloves and got stung once on the wrist while at our house. He flinched and pulled the stinger out and was back working in about 10 seconds.

When I was at Purdue, one of the electives I took was Honeybee Biology in the entomology dept. Dr. Fischang was one of the best professors I had. In one class he took a bee out of the observation hive and had it sting his finger while we watched it through the microscope that was hooked up to the projector. Pretty cool to watch the venom sac pumping venom. For the last question on our final exam, he brought about 10 different varieties of honey (orange blossom, almond, buckwheat, clover, sourwood, etc.) and a big basket of biscuits his wife made, and we had to taste and critique the flavor of each honey.

It still smarts a little but the terror of getting stung left decades ago and you just accept it as part of the price of a hobby, not unlike knowing if you mountain bike you'll wreck and lose some skin and bleed a little.