Today was a reasonably warm day and very sunny. I used the opportunity to split one of my beehives into two.
Here’s how that works.
I have a beehive that’s doing pretty well. To split a hive, you take a bunch of frames from inside the hive that have eggs and open celled larva and move it (and the bees on the frame) to the new hive. In a few days, week, the bees will realize there’s no queen and feed one of the larva royal jelly which will turn that bee into a queen.
I currently have 4 hives, the goal this year is to get that number to 6. As of today, I have 5. If I get another nice day, I hope to split another.
Draginol,
Are bee populations still crashing or has that problem been solved? In the news I hear conflicting reports. And what do you think the real cause was?
I got a hive last month with most of the needed gear . . I need some bees now.
There was an article on yahoo news a few weeks ago about a possible cause. Pesticides, though nothing real definitive.
That sounds far more logical and a lot less messy than the political system in America.
On a separate note: I had no idea you could get honey from a frog.
My dad, uncles, and both grandfathers kept bee hives. What kind of bees are they? I think my dad raised Italian (I think that's the kind, ain't it?). It was fun watching him get the honey out of the wooden stacks and now that I think about it, I wish I'd have kept his bee keeping stuff. Would have come in handy when I had to kill off a yellow jacket nest last year.
So, we should start calling you ZubuzZ?
I'm interested in bee keeping. As hobby and harvest. But a family member is mortally allergic to their sting.
What are you guys raising them for? Hobby or harvest, or pollination of your fields or a clients? Or?
"Our result replicates colony collapse disorder as a result of pesticide exposures,” said Lu, who specializes in environmental exposures to pesticides (Harvard University).
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/04/neonicotinoids-colony-collapse/
Expect this study and topic to be trolled by those with something to lose. Bees are big business. What happens when the cause of colony collapses are unequivocally tied to commercial pesticides? Millions of dollars in lawsuits I'm sure. Loss of billions if neonicotinoids are taken off the market. And this, coming at a time when the public is clearly moving towards healthy, sustainably grown food stuffs. Monsanto and Dow and DuPont et all are taking heat.
The people speak up, the narrative changes, the market reacts.
Case in point from earlier today...
"Burger King vows cage-free chicken and pork"
The decision by Burger King, which uses hundreds of millions of eggs and tens of millions of pounds of pork annually, could represent a game-change in the egg and pork supply business as a huge new market has opened up for humanely raised food animals. While some companies have been responding to consumer demand by incorporating some percentages of cage-free eggs into their purchase orders, the landslide passage by voters in 2008 of California's Proposition 2, which will ban chicken cages and gestation crates by 2015, caused buyers and suppliers nationwide to take notice. Since then studies have shown that shoppers are willing to pay more for products they believe are produced to higher animal protection standards.
The decision by Burger King, which uses hundreds of millions of eggs and tens of millions of pounds of pork annually, could represent a game-change in the egg and pork supply business as a huge new market has opened up for humanely raised food animals.
While some companies have been responding to consumer demand by incorporating some percentages of cage-free eggs into their purchase orders, the landslide passage by voters in 2008 of California's Proposition 2, which will ban chicken cages and gestation crates by 2015, caused buyers and suppliers nationwide to take notice. Since then studies have shown that shoppers are willing to pay more for products they believe are produced to higher animal protection standards.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/47172360/ns/business-us_business/t/burger-king-vows-cage-free-chicken-pork/?fb_ref=.T5iNavdW3x0.like&fb_source=timeline#.T5igRLPDfRB
I dig honey. I dig frogs. Just don't smack the frog, honey.
From last week: http://naturalsociety.com/monsanto-bee-collapse-buys-bee-research-firm/
Hobby/honey. My mother got a few hives last year and my sister bought a hive and then decided she didn't want it. The back of my yard needs a purpose . . so things happened.
The hive will be set up behind that screen, next to the creek:
(Ignore teh dirt . . I had to replace some sump pup drainage (by hand).
A few years ago I remember seeing a report on the Teev that Oz was sending a whole bunch of queens over to the US to help restore the US population [bee, that is]....
I assume that's been and done....
I miss my bees. I only had two hives that were right next to a peach orchard. I've never had better honey before or since. My bees were some type of naturalized Italians. If I remember right I captured them with the help of a beekeeping friend. I remember one time I was smoking them to do some hive checking and discovered I had used one of my grandfather's helmets (he was a logger) that had a hole in the top. I ended up with over thirty stings on my head. Ouch. I was a bad beekeeper, I never wanted to steal their honey. I was saving up to buy a small frame extractor when I had to give them up. Someday I'll have some again.
Here, we had a fungus that infected the bees. Since it was carried from hive to hive the only way to get rid of it was to kill the hive. Quite a concern for someone with only two hives. Even more so for someone with 500. It seems that anything that gets into the hive means you have to kill them.
Does beekeeping cost a lot of time? I'm interested in keeping bees myself when I'm graduated. Another question, how close can one get before the bees start to become protective of there hive and go stinging you?
Any Stardockians reading this who are at the office, I will be splitting the office hives and I have two nucs.
They have pretty definitively (now) identified a particular ingredient in a pesticide that replaced other pesticides in the 90's as the most likely primary cause of colony collapse disorder. It messes with the bees neural systems really badly.
Here's an article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120405224653.htm
When I was a kid we had a hive swarm and end up coating the walls of our laundry room. We called a bee keeper and he found the original colony in our carport attic. He got over 90 US Lbs of honey from it and said the hive was so heavy it almost collapsed the ceiling.
Well, that's not something you hear every day.....
Yeah...usually my boss would just release an angry swarm into the office when he was mad.
What the _uck is a nuc?
If I remember correctly, it's a smaller living area for the bees to take care of while establishing the hive.
http://beekeeping.wikia.com/wiki/Nuc
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/The-Secret-Life-of-Bees.html .... I just read this Smithsonian article tonight, while mom was having an MRI. It is really interesting how bees communicate. It seems they dance. Well that is one way!
It's lazy-speak for nucleus.....
What's the bet it was coined in Oz......we invented lazy-speak....
lol...I'll buy that.
Bee keeping can be as little as one weekend a month to once a week when they honey is there to be harvested. Hives need to be checked for rogue bees, make sure the queen is doing well, no drones are being hatched, no new queens (that means the hive will swarm)
Nice, gentle domestic bees will pretty much let you approach quite close (NO perfume please) Quietly step, no stomping the ground, etc. They do like sweets and I wouldn't have them in town where there is a lot of activity and vibrations. I have known grade schools that kept bees, and gentleman/woman farmers in the suburbs. The Africanized bees are more sensitive to vibrations and more likely to aggressively go after things they like or dislike. Italians are probably the most popular bees for small home honey production because they are so docile.
I you are starting to keep bees, you want a bee suit, gloves, veil, suitable hat and shoes. That said, every experienced beekeeper I know rarely suit up unless it is a wild hive (swarm) they are capturing. Your bees know you, they know your odor and your way of moving. If you are afraid, sweating from nervousness, jumpy, wear scents of any type, then you are likely to be stung. Thus the bee suit. After you have been keeping a while using the suit, then you no longer are afraid so you can wean out of it. An experienced beekeeper I knew carried his "just in case". We were preparing to move hives (duct tape and foam) and one hive got cranky. Once one hive gets cranky they all those around do too. He used I word I'd not heard him say before (I was 16), put down his tools, and tromped off to the bee truck and got his suit. He was well stung that day. I never saw that again.
A special word of caution:
MAKE SURE YOU ARE NOT ALLERGIC TO BEE STING AND CARRY A KIT WITH YOU ALWAYS
Remember, you have to be stung twice to develop an allergy. Just being stung once and not having a reaction doesn't count. Everyone doesn't have a reaction the first time they are stung/bitten/exposed. It is the second time that the antigens have been formed and you will have a reaction or not. This applies for anything, poison oak/sumac, shell food, chicken eggs. At any time you can develop a life-threatening allergy to bees, even if you have been stung a hundred times before. Especially as you age, us old cronies are not as tough as we thought we once were. Get and carry a bee kit (anaphylaxis kit) if you are keeping (hiking, wilderness outback, search and rescue - anyplace you might be more than 5 minutes from medical care)
((ed. I keep thinking of more to say. A combination of many years as a medic and a few years working with a commercial keeper))
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