Beekeeping Part II

The previous blog had a lot of information and pictures from the classroom and practical exercise weekend.  And while we did have more practical exercise than normal due to the rapid expansion of one of the hives we were examining, there was still a lot more practical exercise to go.  The instructor wanted the weather to be a bit warmer before opening the hives significantly, so the pictures following are about three weeks after the previous pictures.

Activities we conducted during the past weekend were:

1.  On the regular hives we had examined in the previous class exercise, we  examined the hives, made sure everything is healthy, properly structured the hives and took any remedial action necessary.  We also made sure there was a functional queen (either spot the queen or insure that there is good, recent egg formation).
2.  We built hives for two of the students who are ready to go on their own with home bee keeping.  We built these new hive boxes from two groups of bees that had been gathered by the instructor.  One was from bees gathered from a "possum box" and placed into a single hive box and the other was from bees retrieved from a barn and put into a single hive box.
3.  We examine a hive where the instructor had killed the queen (bees too aggressive) and attempted to insert a new queen.  We wanted to see if the new queen has survived and examine the hive for other "queen making" activities.

Here I am in a borrowed half suit (jeans on the bottom, bee suit at the top).  Also I have borrowed gloves.  The big problem with this outfit is that it is a bit small.  The sleeves are too short, leaving room at the top of the gloves for bees to get in.  The suit is also a bit short in the torso, meaning that when I bend over to work on the hives, I'll risk exposing some skin around the waist.  Still, I'm ready to go and start smoking the first hive we'll be working on.

And here's our team for the day.  The instructor, me and two other students.  The other two are building their first hives from some of the "captured" bees that the instructor has had on site for a couple of weeks now.  These bees have been organising their own hives, getting settled and now should be ready to be examined, organised and moved to a bee box where they'll be ready to transport after the sun goes down and the hive "goes to sleep" for the evening.

The area where the hives are located is just part of a normal suburban back yard.  The tall fence to the left and rear of the picture meets the Australian Department of Primary Industries (DPI) rules of being at least 2 meters tall (else the hive boxes must be at least 3 meters from the fence).  Given the size of the backyard, the property can only support two hives and by taking the reclaimed bees and putting them into hives that will be transported later this evening, the remaining two hives meet the requirements.

Here's one of the students, Tajn, finishing up her hive box with the last frame.  The bees have been carefully taken from the open box to the right.  This hive built from bees taken from a "possum box" that had been inhabited by a swarm of bees.  The instructor was called to help remove the bees and they were placed in a hive box and brought back to his back yard.  During the past few weeks, the bees have built up their hive nicely within the new frame boxes and are now being relocated to another box for transport to their new home.

Here I am working with a group of bees that are much more aggressive than the two groups we had just transplanted into new hive boxes for transport to their new homes.  This hive is going to remain in this location but we were working to locate the queen.  The instructor had killed the previous queen as the hive was too aggressive.  His hope was that the bees would take to a new, more docile queen and that once we found her, we would mark her to make it easier to find her in the future.  This activity with two hive boxes and 16 frames, took awhile.   Since the bees were already aggressive and it took us 15-20 minutes to find the queen and mark her, the bees found the obvious flaws in my half suit and I wound up with a couple of bee stings.  One on the wrist between the suit and glove and the other right at the waist band where a been had gotten in.  It was good to discover that I still don't have much effect from bee stings.  The sting on the wrist was hardly noticed and removing the stinger quickly meant almost no sense of having been stung.  The one on the waist band was a bit more noticeable as I had to walk across the yard and get someone to remove the stinger and pull the top part of the suit down better.  Still, that took a minute and then back to work.  We did find and mark the queen and you can see in the following picture that a marked queen is really easy to find.

I really enjoyed this "bee keeping" day.  We spent about 2 hours working with the bees in a real world situation.  It is early Spring here in Australia.  The bees are very busy and there is much work to do with the hives.  We sorted out two hives, requeened one, and took two "rescued" hives, sorted them out and reboxed them for transport to their new homes.

Lesson learned:  get a very good, full length bee suit.  And one that fits properly.  A poorly fitting half suit is an invitation for bee stings.

I'll now try to get involved with one of the local bee keeping clubs and see if we can get some practical experience (yesterday was just an introduction) prior to going it alone at our homestead in Texas.  From my research on the web, the closest bee keeping club to our homestead is 35 miles or more away.  Not too far, but far enough to make sure there's probably no one around the corner who can help me out.

Beekeeping Part I

I've always been curious about bees.  And I especially enjoy honey.  Combine those facts with our five acres in a rural area along with our desire to build up a high degree of self-sufficiency and keeping bees seems like a very good idea.  Still, it does create a lot of questions:

1.  Will I like it?
2.  Could I be any good at it?
3.  Will it annoy our family/neighbors?
4.  Does it add value?

And of course, if I put it to the test of the book, Beautiful and Abundant, Creating the World we Want, I can safely say that:

1.  Is it beautiful?  Absolutely - bees are incredibly beautiful animals/insects, well organised and industrious
2.  Is it abundant?  Sure is.  You can create 150-200 pounds of honey per hive per year.
3.  Is it fair?  I believe so as long as one takes good care of the hives
4.  Is it contagious?  I hope so with respect to our family and friends in the area.  They'll certainly get a chance to share in the bounty.

Given all the background, I found a local class here in Melbourne from an organisation called Lifecycle Learning.  They teach in an urban area in a community center and have their hives right in the neighborhood.  I enrolled in this class well prior to our last trip to the US and it coincides with the end of Winter and beginning of Spring.

We spent a fair amount of time in the classroom, working with the basic elements of a hive, studying the behavior of bees and how to handle them plus the cycle of bees, the seasons, hives and other useful information.  Still, I was most looking forward to the practical elements of the class - seeing the hives, seeing how the bees build the brood, process nectar and pollen into honey and do the other "busy bee" activities they do to maintain the hive.  The following few slide show the first examination of a hive.  Recognise that this is the end of winter here and the hive should be relatively quiet and inactive.  In was even marginal as to whether one should open the hive and work with it since the temperature hasn't been too warm.  Still, it was relatively warm and certainly, there's a lot of trees and plant in bloom so it looks like Spring is starting.

The following three pictures show the instructor opening the hive and examing the frames.

What we saw was that the bees are really building brood and making honey.  All signs that it is Spring.  Also, they were making lots of cells for drone eggs - something they typically do in the early Spring as that's when the males are needed to mate with queens.

The following picture is what we saw when we opened the second hive:

Lots and lots of bees in the lid of the box.  This means the bees have run out of room, are expanding wherever they can and if this problem isn't resolved quickly, the bees will organize a swarm to get out of the current enclosure and find something larger.  Thus, even though it wasn't planned, we set about expanding the hive to insure the bees have plenty of room to expand.  This expansion is seen in the next few pictures.

Smoking the hive. This causes the bees to eat a bunch of honey quickly. They don't know if there's a fire that will make them flee but if so, they need to store as much honey as they can to survive the flight. Still, the rapid eating of a bunch of honey causes them to go into a "food coma" resulting in some slow, gentle bees.

Adding the additional box and frames so the bees have plenty of room to expand for the next few weeks.

The final result - building the hive from 2 to 3 boxes only took about 20 minutes and will give the bees adquate expansion room for at least the next few weeks.

So - did I answer my questions from the first part of this blog - definitely yes.  I enjoyed this class a great deal and now look forward to the practice of these lessons in an actual "hive day" to be held in a couple of weeks so I get a chance to suit up and work through several different things like finding and marking a queen, merging hives, dealing with bees from a "rescue operation" like getting bees from a possum box, tree or building.