What's new
The Shaving Cadre

Welcome to The Shaving Cadre, a forum dedicated to gentlemanly discourse about wet shaving and other topics of common interests. Membership is always free so register today and join in the fun

Beekeeping

EMG06 said:
What’s the process of doing this? Build a hive and see if a new colony moves in? Go to a bee breeder? Pick some up at the local animal shelter?
Click to expand...
Bee breeder (kind of) is the main way. Local keepers can split their colonies and sell off the splits. A split colony is called a Nuc (short for nucleus). It is 5 frames that already has bees including brood, pollen, and honey stores.

Or big beekeeping supply stores will get truckloads of bees (Nucs or Packages) in the spring that you can purchase. Packages or Nucs can cost anywhere from $125 to $250 depending on the source. Packages are cheaper, but Nucs give you a better start.

This is a package of bees:
1686067088953-png.112493


It's packaged by weight, usually 3 lbs of bees and there's appx. 10,000 bees in there.

Bees will also swarm, usually in spring to early summer. That is them naturally splitting into 2 separate colonies. You can set up swarm traps, and try to catch them naturally. Or when swarms are in transition they will cluster in a tree, or someplace like a fence, pole, or sign. You can collect the swarm, and move them into a hive. Free bees!
 
@Spider Thanks for the info!

Also perhaps a silly question, but do you choose a specific species that you want to keep and is there regional variation in the species you want to keep?
 
EMG06 said:
@Spider Thanks for the info!

Also perhaps a silly question, but do you choose a specific species that you want to keep and is there regional variation in the species you want to keep?
Click to expand...
There are about 20,000 species of bees in the world, but only a eight of them are honey producers, and most of those only make a small amount of honey for the queen and do not make enormous stores of honey like the western honeybee. There is only one main species of honeybee that is kept worldwide, Apis mellifera. There is one other species that is kept in its native southeast Asia.

There are about 20 recognized breeds or subspecies of Apis mellifera. Of those, about 6 are commonly kept by beekeepers. None of these are native to the US. Honeybees were brought into the US from Europe in the 1600s.

woodpusher said:
I think Journey had a hit song about this: Don't Stop Beekeeping!
Click to expand...
LOL, I'm always going to think this now when I hear that song.
 
Spider said:
Hey @NurseDave here's one style of observation hive. I can see these fitting in your other bathroom among the shelves you used to have up.

BEEcosystem-indoor-hives-2-889x474.jpg
Click to expand...
Ok, so how do you harvest the honey without opening the hives inside? Or is it 100% observation and you just watch what they do naturally?
 
NurseDave said:
Or is it 100% observation and you just watch what they do naturally?
Click to expand...
Yes, their design is for observation, education, and to a lesser extent, health benefits. I believe most observation hives do not have a way of harvesting honey. Some may have a way to do it, based on the design, but it's usually tricky. This particular design is modular, and you can hook more of them together as the colony grows, so if you get one that is full of honey, you could disconnect it, cap off the opening, and take it outside to get the bees to leave the comb..... but I'm not sure if they are meant to be opened like that. I'd have to read up on that particular design. It's pretty expensive, but there are a lot of plans online for DIY observation hives.


This particular DIY has a pretty smart way of collecting honey. The bees build their honeycomb directly in the to-go containers. When it's full of honey, you just remove the container and replace it with a new one. Once you get all the bees out of the container, you just put a lid on it and sell it as-is.

1686164888103.png
 
One thing that takes some skill and practice is to be able to identify the one queen among thousands of bees and tell the difference between drones and workers.

In this pic, the queen is circled in pink. Note her abdomen is longer than the other worker bees and her thorax (middle body section) is smooth and shiny rather than fuzzy. The drones (males) are circled in blue. Note their bodies are bigger and somewhat blocky, and their eyes are bigger, taking up the scace of most of their head. The rest of the bees are workers (female).

Note the four bees circled in orange have different patterns and colors. This goes back to the fact that there are different breeds of bees and a colony will actually be made of of a mix of different breeds, and each individual bee, can also be a cross breed.
The queen will mate with 15-20 different drones, and each drone has his own genetics and can be a different breed. She only mates at one time in her life (over the course of about a week). She stores the sperm from all of them in one storage pouch. When she lays an egg that is destined to be a Drone, it is unfertilized, so his genetics (and breed) will be identical to the queen. But if she lays an egg that is destined to be a worker, she will fertilize it as it is laid and it will be fertilized by a random selection of sperm from all the males she was with. Their breed will be a mix of the two. Bee farms can specialize in breeding certain breeds and when you buy them, they will likely be a pure breed throughout the hive. But the next time the queen gets replaced, and she goes off to mate, she will bring other genetics back into the hive and it will start having crosses.
1686315854019.png

Now the difference between the queen, workers, and drones seems obvious when pointed out in the above pic, but imagine looking at a frame full of thousands of bees and trying to identify them. And a hive will have 10-20 frames in it, and there's only one queen. So it can be a challenge to locate her if you need to.

1686314963280.png

One thing beekeepers can do to help identify their queen quicker is to mark them. They do this with a little dab of paint (usually from a paint marker), or sometimes with a numbered sticker. Queens can live up to 5 years, so knowing how old your queen is, is very helpful. Also, if you've marked your queen, and then you go to check your hive and find that your queen is unmarked, then you know your queen has been replaced with a new one. (there's a few different ways and reasons this happens). Marking queens, without hurting them, is a skill and artform all to itself.
1686317876854.png1686315960362.png

There's actually a standardized color code for marking your queens based on the year they were born.
1686316050607.png
 
Yesterday, I first learned about stingless bees. They build very odd looking hives.
af256069307276d36cc70cc07a782767.jpg


Sent from my Pixel 4 XL using Tapatalk
 
fhalden said:
Yesterday, I first learned about stingless bees. They build very odd looking hives.
1686409858681.png

Sent from my Pixel 4 XL using Tapatalk
Click to expand...
Stingless bees are a weird group. The name is misleading as some of them can and do sting. The honey that they make is different from the Western Honeybee as well. They don't make as much and it's not dried out as much either. Stingless bee honey is 70-80% water, where honeybee honey is more like 16-18% water.
Bumblebees also make honey in hives underground. One of my local beekeepers said that when they were a kid they dig up a hive because they wanted to try bumblebee honey, and they said it was disgusting.
 
Our family will be at the Honey Festival in St. Genevieve, MO this weekend. @Spider , you game? You can stay at our place if you want.
1687269489588.png
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top