Worldwide Beekeeping
Beekeeping => General Beekeeping => Topic started by: Zookeep on January 04, 2014, 05:33:22 pm
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I met with a honey producer today and we had a chat, he uses a single deep for brood chambers and just adds supers above for honey, I dont know how he can not have hives swarming all over the place with so little brood space any ideas?
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New queens usually. He may also be moving frames of brood out to keep them from overpopulating. Got a meeting coming up. Phil Ebert will be there, I'll ask him how they do their honey production hives.
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zoo, honey supers? or comb production?
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honey, thats whats got me baffled, I just dont see how 1 brood box can produce alot of honey.
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if you do the math using several assumptions on the maximum daily laying capacity of a queen then this would not be such a mystery to ya' at all. then remind yourself that this is THE MAXIMUM laying capacity... not the average or the mean and then I suspect it will all fall into place for you.
I regularly use queen excluders and no bottom entry repeating essentially Jerry Hayes method in 'Is a Queen Excluder a Honey Excluder' and in about 95% of the cases one deep box with 9 frames is all you need. You do need to make certain when you set the box up that you do not have any restriction to brood.... for example solid frames of pollen.
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Tec, did you have a link for Haye's article about that?
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blue,
Queen Excluder or Honey Excluder (http://www.beesource.com/point-of-view/jerry-hayes/queen-excluder-or-honey-excluder/)
ps if you go there.....better come back here or we send a posse after you! :D
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:o :o :o
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dang ya' tricked me there riverbee. kind of like Gandalf foolin' the Hobbits to wander into Mordor to seek out the owner of a ring??? ;D
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ps if you go there.....better come back here or we send a posse after you! :D
[/quote]
:laugh:
Thanks, I have bookmarked it! Just like the cookie man said, run, run fast as you can, you can't catch me, I'm the gingerbread man!
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well, the only place to find that article online is over there, it's a good article, and i really didn't want to go digging through my files to find the original abj article.....scary stuff, my files..... :D and i don't have permission to reprint it here anyway, otherwise i would have.
tec, you started it, you mentioned the hayes article......i knew where to find it online...... ;D
and blue......bookmark? just print it off!!!! :D
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well thanks for that riverbee ;D. much like yourself I could have found the article if someone had twisted my arm and then gone thru my 6 foot stack of old ABJ. this of course suggest I don't have the very best filling system or that I don't ever throw anything away either.
for those folks into their second or third year then Mr Hayes article is something they really should try. prior to this time I pretty much figure that a queen excluder is totally unnecessary anyway.
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I was back in Wisconsin last year and met up with a commercial Beek from ‘the other forum’ linked. They run all deeps (including supers) and a single brood box below an excluder. Every couple of weeks they go and put most of the capped brood above the excluder and feed more open foundation to the brood box with the queen. They also clip and mark their queens. Got me thinking about clipping my queens this year (one of my goals). I am going to try this (double deep though not all deeps ).
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Being commercial and if his is spiting and selling nucs and packages these activity's are his swarm control and the timing to the honey flow doesn't allow time for the bees to build back up to 2 brood boxes in time for the honey flow. Once the main honey flow hits the bees swarming instinct is suppressed as long as they have empty space to store and ripen the nectar.
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If they are constantly pulling brood up into the box above the excluder the bees should not be inclined to put honey down below that brood. That may keep the bottom box more accessible to to queen for laying. I think we covered that one deep is enough space to handle a queens laying potential if it is not filled up with nectar and pollen and especially if capped brood is removed.
Doesnt this scenario seem somewhat like what is accomplished by Demarreeing? This interests me for next season since I do not want to expand hive numbers but want honey without swarms (hopefully)
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Minz, what is 'clipping a queen' mean?
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Beekeepers will clip the wings on a queen so she cannot fly. I never have done it. It was at one time a theory for swarming control. Usually what will happen is she will try to take off with the swarm and end up on the ground in front of the hive. Then once a new queen emerges the new virgin queen will leave with the swarm
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Jen in MinniMo explanation of to stop swarms from leaving the hive the queen will leave the hive with a swarm a couple of days before the queen cells emerge if the bees stop her from taring the cells down. the theory was that when the swarm left and the queen could not fly that the bees would return back to the hive thus stopping the hive from swarming. the Problem is the bees still want to swarm and because there are multiple cells in the hive the bees will protect some of the remaining queen cells after the first queen emerges and so the bees will swarm with a virgin queen. You can have multiple swarms issued from the same hive. The first swarm with the old mated queen is called the prime swarm, secondary swarms with virgin queens are called cast swarms.
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This one is complicated for me, seems there is more than one issue going on here.
Minz! Don't take this personal.. okay! cause I'm not fully understood of this issue yet, just going on nature's instinct!
I think swarming is a natural process! If the bees have already gotten it in their heads that they are going to swarm... then that's exactly what they are going to do! If you catch the swarm - Hallelujah! if not, then they will set up housekeeping somewhere else.
Clipping a queens wings seems so unnatural and cruel!
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Let's confuse you a bit more. :D
If you don't want them to swarm, take 2 or 3 frames of brood and the queen and put them in another box. Shake the bees from another couple frames. Move them away. The queen and many bees are gone, so they think they have swarmed. They will go back to normal life, and you will have the "artificial swarm" safely secured in a new hive.
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Well That Sound Soo Much More Reasonable!
Ya sure don't want to get my duff up about being cruel to any females! :) 8)
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Let's confuse you a bit more. :D
If you don't want them to swarm, take 2 or 3 frames of brood and the queen and put them in another box. Shake the bees from another couple frames. Move them away. The queen and many bees are gone, so they think they have swarmed. They will go back to normal life, and you will have the "artificial swarm" safely secured in a new hive.
Iddee, when you say "move them away." How far do you need to move them? Can it be in the same apiary? It's a curious mind thing.
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They have two goals.
Move to their queen, and return to their original home.
If you move the box with the queen, you will get a balance of each, so yes, 5 feet is fine. If you move the queenless hive, I would say a couple miles for the best balance. If, after 3 weeks or so, when in the same apiary, they are not balanced, switch places in the middle of the day. They will then balance out the population, as the returning foragers will go to their known location.
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Iddee is correct (as usual). I might add that once you see swarm preparations of any kind (eggs in queen cups, start of actual swarm cell building), it's too late to stop it. Once they have made up their minds to go, they're going to. No amount of cell knicking will help, in fact it is highly likely you will only leave yourself with a queenless situation
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Perry ""I might add that once you see swarm preparations of any kind (eggs in queen cups, start of actual swarm cell building), it's too late to stop it. Once they have made up their minds to go, they're going to. No amount of cell knicking will help, in fact it is highly likely you will only leave yourself with a queenless situation""
This is exactly what happened to my only hive last spring. Three swarms. Alarming to say the least.
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Clipping the wings is not removing them; it is clipping the tip off of one wing. I have not dug into it too far but from what I recall you remove about a ¼” from which ever wing the year is (even or odd). She can still fly but not very good, and in a circle. The swarm should be within sight of the hive and not 100’ in the air. Clip too much and they will replace her. You put them in a hive and there you have new frames drawn out by the following Saturday. This is on my ‘to do list’ not my ‘done it’ list. I still get buck fever handling my queens. Perfectly steady hand for 30 drones and grab that queen and start shaking like a leaf!
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Just to put your mind at ease, clipping a queen's wing is not painful to her. It's comparable to clipping your finger nails. There are no nerves in the wing to produce pain.
However, when a queen is clipped, if you've taken off too much, the bees sometimes tend to think of her as maimed and they'll replace her.
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It isn’t so much about hurting the queens wing but about crushing her. I break more stuff without trying to be holding a little bug in my hand that is the future of my hive. It should come over time.
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in the past I have not regularly clipped queens. going forward this is something I hope to do a bit more.
as minz states you do not remove the entire wing < this taken a bit too far I SUSPECT can lead to superscedure since the workers may view the queen as being damaged or flawed... same goes for watching how a new queen moves over the face of a frame < if she even appears to be in anyway lame the worker can replace such a queen. when clipping queens I like to remove only the very back edge of one wing. learning to catch queens and having some experience in holding a queen is the hardest part of this process. much like grafting you do getter better with PRACTICE. a lot of queen rearing folks will mark and clip a queen at the same time typically adding a dollar for each part of this process.
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Jen: " Minz! Don't take this personal.. okay! cause I'm not fully understood of this issue yet, just going on nature's instinct!
I think swarming is a natural process! If the bees have already gotten it in their heads that they are going to swarm... then that's exactly what they are going to do! If you catch the swarm - Hallelujah! if not, then they will set up housekeeping somewhere else."
Petr: You're right that swarming is a natural process and not harmful (except to the people who end up having to pay an exterminator to get bees out of their walls). feral bees select tree cavities roughly the volume of a medium lang box. they get crowded quickly and swarm several times a year. This goes hand in hand with their prime directive: propagate the species. The aim of most bee keepers is to produce honey, so we re-direct the hive's energies from producing swarms to producing surplus stores. This is done by keeping young queens and preventing crowding in the hive. Preventing swarming is an important part of honey production. The swarm not only depletes the work force, but also leaves with a lot of the honey in the hive.
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...... learning to catch queens and having some experience in holding a queen is the hardest part of this process. much like grafting you do getter better with PRACTICE.
A very safe and secure way to get this practice is by honing your skills with drones. True, they are shorter of body and wings, but they give you the opportunity to get the feel of holding a bee in your hand, manipulating its positioning and doing the actual clipping----and just think, no risk of getting stung. 8)
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...... learning to catch queens and having some experience in holding a queen is the hardest part of this process. much like grafting you do getter better with PRACTICE.
A very safe and secure way to get this practice is by honing your skills with drones. True, they are shorter of body and wings, but they give you the opportunity to get the feel of holding a bee in your hand, manipulating its positioning and doing the actual clipping----and just think, no risk of getting stung. 8)
Yes!! THis is exactly what I did, was told to do to prepare for handling queens. I even MARKED drones to practice marking the queen.. I am not exactly sure about the testers paint but the drones seemed to deal with it...... at least the ones I didnt mangle with my beat up hands.
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Yup, that’s what I said on #25, perfectly steady on all the drones, buck fever as soon as I pick up the queen. If anything I drop them trying not to hold them so tight.
(https://worldwidebeekeeping.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fs27.postimg.cc%2Ffmktuiqe7%2FDSCF4465.jpg&hash=1e6f2b7ba3089d033c11166386faa354ff542f2f) (http://postimg.cc/image/fmktuiqe7/)
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minz, that's funny......oops a little red paint elsewhere?....... :D
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Nice :)
Hers the queen! oops, nope.. Oh, there she...., nope, AHA!... sigh......
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Nice :)
Hers the queen! oops, nope.. Oh, there she...., nope, AHA!... sigh......
For sure dont use the current years color! Even the wrong color popping up when concentrating on finding a queen, throws you off your game.
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"For sure dont use the current years color! Even the wrong color popping up when concentrating on finding a queen, throws you off your game."
and don't forget, then there are times when the bees have completely cleaned the paint off the queen....... :D
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And the original post was??
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It was about how a pro makes honey. I got off on the commercial guy I talked to and how they do it. Then down the old rabbit hole with ADD leading the way. Look! Something shinny!
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and don't forget, then there are times when the bees have completely cleaned the paint off the queen......
This is also why some large scale beekeepers and breeders nip one wing.
They can look at a Queen if she has her wing nipped she is the Queen that he put in the hive, if not they know that the hive has a new Queen of unknown gene pool.
mvh Edward :P