This past week beekeepers Jon and Fred were talked into
aiding an aging sideliner re-queen some of his hives. We thought we might learn a few useful
techniques that would help in our hobbyist beekeeping.
Location, location, location. The hives were all located southeast of
Montello. The area had large fields of alfalfa. All of this beekeeper’s hives were located on
the edge of the alfalfa fields; usually with a tree line close by to block any
winter winds.
All hives were mounted on old hay wagons; six (6) to ten
(10) hives per wagon. All wagons had an
electric fence barrier around the edge to counter transient bears that are in
this area.
Although the wagons allow for easy relocation of the hives,
in truth, working the hives on top of the wagons was not ideal. One, space is limited. There was little room for opening the hives
while doing regular inspections. There
is always the danger of falling off the wagon.
Two, with several workers on the wagon it was always rocking and
rolling.
DAY ONE:
Our method for finding the queens was to simply split the
hive and look through them frame by frame.
Each person took a hive and slowly worked through it.
The Good. With the exception of one queenless hive, all
hives were very strong. Brood patterns
were excellent. We used smoke on all hives
and only suffered 3 stings after disassembling 15 hives. On the way home we wondered why these hives
were being requeened. The stated reason
had been that they were overly aggressive.
The Bad. These strong
hives were overflowing with bees and this made locating the queen more a matter
of luck than skill. We only found five
queens in the first 15 hives we worked or roughly 33%.
Poor hive maintenance resulted in a lot of burr comb and
propolis. We didn’t think these hives
had ever been cleaned. Each frame was
glued in place. We frequently pulled the
top bar off a frame trying to remove it.
This beekeeper was running 9 frames in a ten frame
broodbox. Proper spacing was
accomplished using a metal frame spacer along one side. This spacer added to the difficulty in
getting the frames out.
He was also running 8 frames in the 10 frame honey
supers. These supers definitely
contained more honey than my 9 frame supers.
I would guess another 5 pounds. He
said honey extraction was also quicker.
After our poor success in finding the queens we decided on a
different approach for day two.
DAY TWO:
On day two we decided to use a queen excluder to try to
screen out the queen. Watch the
following YouTube video to understand what we were doing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbVbo21RMds
In this team approach one person was pulling frames from the
brood box, a second was shaking the bees from the frames and the third was
storing the shaken frames for later reassembly in the hive. On our first hive we shook the entire 18
frames and searched in the shaking box for 20 minutes before finding the
queen. We were a little dejected on how
long it took. But we still had 100%
success rate.
Then the person pulling frames realized he had a little time
to scan the frame before passing it on.
He could do a quick scan before the shaker was ready. Then the shaker would also do a quick
scan. The third person was also usually
helping scan in spare moments. After
that we were finding 90% of the queens prior to shaking all the frames. So instead of blindly shaking 18 frames from
the two deeps we were many times only having to shake only a third of the hive
and had the elusive queen in our hands.
On day two we shook 18 hives. One was queenless. Of the remaining 17 we
found 16 queens. That’s a 94% success
rate. Quite an improvement over day one. Only two queens made it into the
shaker box. We actually got to be pretty
good at finding queens whether they were yellow, black or striped. We think it was the fact that we had 3 pairs
of eyes watching for them helped tremendously.
OTHER OBSERVATIONS:
Despite the huge hive bee population and the excellent
location most hives only had a single super of honey. It was usually full. The upper brood chambers seemed to have
excessive honey. We suspect that the
beekeeper was not providing the bees with sufficient empty supers and, as a
consequence, had lost out on a lot of honey.
We were also introduced to a plastic propolis screen; which sort of looks like a queen excluder. The propolis screen is placed on the top of the hive above
the honey supers. The bees propolize
this screen. The screen is frozen and
then flexed will in a plastic bag to release the propolis. The beekeeper said he was getting $10 per
ounce of propolis!
Propolis screen trap
Despite 20 plus years as a beekeeper this beekeeper seemed
to be a novice in some aspects of beekeeping.
This is the end of July but he was planning on starting 3 frame nucs and
expected them to grow and overwinter if provided heavy fall feeding. We suggested 5-6 frames as a minimum of
which several should be frames fully filled with capped brood. I guess time will tell. We were under the impression that new hives need
to be started no later than the end of June to successfully build up for
winter.
This beekeeper fall feeds with fructose. The advantage is that its sugar content is
around 80% so that the bees can more quickly dry it to acceptable levels.
We also noticed he had tried using the oxalic acid on paper
shop towels. He said that many times the
bees did not remove the shop towel, which then blocked bee movement between the
two brood chambers. He was not planning
on using this method any more.
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