Hobby Beekeeper Walks Us Through His Sweet As Honey Beekeeping Process

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  "This year's season is starting with new bees. On Thursday, I got a text message from another beekeeper who had a couple of nucleus colonies ready for me to pickup - two weeks earlier than I expected. A nucleus or "nuc" is a mini colony with four or five frames of bees, larvae, and a laying queen. It's somewhere between 10,000 and 12,000 bees. I have to transfer the nuc into a standard Langstroth hive body, which holds 10 frames. That means I have to get my hives from last year ready for new bees and get other stuff organized for installs - like finding my veil, which has gone missing. That means a trip to my stuff."

  Via ByGonzah
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  "Luckily, my veil was over in the storage unit. This is where I keep my boxes. And frames and supplies and covers and bottles and extracting equipment and so on. I am hobbyist - that means I essentially keep very few hives "

  Via ByGonzah
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  "This is my bee yard. It's about 10 minutes from my house. It's usually a pretty good spot. Bees typically forage in a two mile radius around the hive. I only kept two hives last year. I usually have three to five. I've had as many as seven at one time, but that's frankly more work than I really want. This is a hobby, and there are many other things I'd like to get done during the summer in MN. Both of these hives froze out, so they're full of dead bees. I need to do a clean out to install the new bees. Despite good prep on my part and a lot of honey stores for winter feeding, they didn't make it. Getting bees through winter can be a challenge. I'm about 50/50 for overwintering over the last 10 years. I am sometimes a bad beekeeper. I wasn't last year, and I still lost two hives. It happens. You get frustrated. We move on."

  Via ByGonzah
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  "I love the smell of cleaning out in the morning. It smells like failure. Tear everything down. Sort out viable frames I can use this year. Shake out the dead bees. Scrape stuff out. I rotate out old stuff as needed. (TBH, it smells pretty great. Beeswax, honey, and propolis altogether smells like summer.) To start each new colony, I need to have one deep hive body with five frames ready for each nuc, which has five frames of bees in it and laying queen. 5 + 5 = 10 for 10 frames in a standard Langstroth hive body."

  Via ByGonzah
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  "And I'm back with the nucs. It's too early in the day to do the installs, so I'll just park them next to their respective new homes. I opened each one to let them calm down. Bees are always a little agitated by a car ride. Time for a nap and a couple errands."

  Via ByGonzah
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  "Back to the yard after supper. Evening is the best time to install because most of the bees will be back in the nuc and they are less likely to venture out as night time approaches. You can see here the five frames in the deep hive body, now sitting on the cleaned bottom board. I'll just take the five frames out of the nuc and drop them into the gap."

  Via ByGonzah
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  "Back to the yard after supper. Evening is the best time to install because most of the bees will be back in the nuc and they are less likely to venture out as night time approaches. You can see here the five frames in the deep hive body, now sitting on the cleaned bottom board. I'll just take the five frames out of the nuc and drop them into the gap."

  Via ByGonzah
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  "This is the five frame nuc. I'll move these frames one-by-one into the deep hive body, inspecting each one as I go - checking for fresh eggs and larvae. These are really nice nucs with a lot of bees. After the frames are all moved, I'll shake the remaining bees in the nuc onto the top of the deep. They crawl right down."

  Via ByGonzah
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  "And with a little adjusting and shuffling, everything fits together."

  Via ByGonzah
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  "I often find it helpful to share this illustration with people when explaining beekeeping. This is a Langstroth hive design - it's a vertically modular approach that allows you to manipulate behavior and harvest by moving the individual frames. Right now, I'm working with just one deep hive body. It's all I need at the moment. If I had too many boxes at once, they'll build it wrong. You want them to build out horizontally and then up vertically. Beekeeping is mostly moving the furniture around to manage their behavior. I'll show how all this works later this summer."

  Via Jason Neilson
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  "Each hive gets a fresh patty. This is pollen substitute. Pollen is protein, and essential for rearing brood. Over the next 10 weeks, this hive will grow to about 60,000 bees. That's a lot of eggs to lay and lot of larvae to feed, especially when you consider that most of the bees I just installed will be dead in six weeks. The average life cycle of a worker bee during summer is 42 days "

  Via ByGonzah
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  "The inner cover (the piece between the white and yellow boxes) goes over the deep box, and I invert a one gallon pail with syrup that sits on the cover. (The white box just covers the pail.) Spring syrup is just sugar and water in a 1:1 ratio. Syrup is carbohydrate. The bees will feed from the syrup until the colony gets strong enough to have a viable foraging force of bees and nectar is flowing. I'll start with weekly inspections next weekend, during which I'll see how the queen is laying, top off the syrup feeders, and add a fresh pollen patty."

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  Via ByGonzah

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