Switching some boxes around and moving our swarm to a permanent home

07-28-13

I'm not gonna say a whole lot right now. I'm too tired. I just wanted to get these videos up. I'll let them speak for themselves

I'm hoping now that both hives will stay strong and use the next month or two to build up and fill out at least a second box. We'll just have to wait and see!

 

 

 

Removing a swarm from our bait hive.

07-26-13

Here's the videos we took when we moved the swarm from our bait hive into a standard Warre box. We'll join up that Warre box with the new hive we built at some point in this next week.

Please be aware that we're totally new to beekeeping. These videos are not intended to instruct you on the correct way to do things. We're totally learning as we go. We expect that you'll learn just as much from our mistakes as we do from our successes. Also know that not all the information given in the videos may be technically accurate. Please verify anything you hear on this blog with reputable sources before taking it for gospel truth. Finally, we are doing this as a project with my two boys (ages 8 and 6 when we started this spring), so I apologize for the shaky videos, etc, but it is what it is.

All that said, enjoy the videos!

More on making a bait hive from our extra Warre box

I've got some pictures of the construction of our bait hive a few posts back. Here's a video talking about preparing the hive to put out and using our beeswax "polish" to seal/waterproof the outside of the hive.

Lighting our smoker for the first time and our first beehive inspection 05-15-13

After soccer on last Wednesday, we stopped by Grandpa's to check on our bees for the first time. We passed our first test (lighting the smoker and getting it to stay lit) and were surprised by how active the bees have been. Whoever came up with the phrase "busy as a bee" wasn't joking! Look at how much they've accomplished in just four days!

In addition to what you can see in the video, check out the picture below. I wasn't sure how much foraging they'd be doing with Minnesota's late spring, but the bees have already found flowers and are bringing in pollen. We saw bees with yellow, orange, and white pollen.

Again, sorry about the picture quality, but in this picture you can see a little more of the comb coming down from the top bars. You can also see from the lines where the bees are, in other words, where there's more comb coming down that you can't see.

Pretty amazing work for only four days in a late spring!

Bee Day Videos 05-11-13

Well, I finally figured out how to use Windows Live Movie Maker to edit these clips together. Here's the video of our first ever experience with live honey bees. I'll pretty much let it speak for itself. Just be warned, however, the videographer was a eight year old boy. It is, at times, shaky. And, at others, not even pointing in the right direction. Still, I think it captured the day quite well, and I can watch it over and over again just as enthralled as when I was actually there with the bees.

More videos coming soon. Here's the first...

Our extra Warre box transformed into a bait hive

In preparation for beekeeping this spring, I read a number of books (you can read some of my reviews here) including McCartney Taylor's book Swarm Traps and Bait Hives. I thought it would be great fun to try and capture a swarm of feral bees. Ultimately, however, I decided to purchase package bees, at least this first year, to guarantee that we had bees instead of sitting around all summer twiddling our fingers. On of the upshots of deciding to build a Warre hive as opposed to a Kenyan Top Bar was that we have extra boxes sitting around and doing nothing right now. I decided to take an extra box (or two or three if I build more) and make them into bait hives.

According to McCartney Taylor, the ideal interior dimensions of a bait hive should equal 40 liters. I don't know about you, but I don't think in liters. Here's what it turns out to be in cubic inches:
- McCartney Taylor's interior dimensions are 19.25" x 13" x 10" = 2502.5 inches cubed.

Contrast that with the interior dimensions of one Warre hive box:
- Warre box interior dimensions are 11.8" x11.8" x 8" = 1113.92 inches cubed.

That ends up being about half of what Taylor recommended. What's the downside of a smaller box? Well, aside from the obvious (the bees might not like it as much and decide not to take up residence there), apparently smaller cavities are more easily accepted by Africanized honey bees (i.e. "killer" bees). Thankfully, we don't have Africanized honey bees in Minnesota, so, despite the smaller size I decided to go for it and build the bait trap. More likely I'll catch a swarm with a small box than if I don't put one out at all, right?

In the future, I may use two Warre boxes bungeed together to make a trap (that would be almost exactly the right size). Or if I decide to make specific bait traps, I could make one double long, but still fit my Warre top bars. Then, after the trapped bees have started building comb, I could move the correctly sized top bars to a waiting Warre hive. That's all in the future, however, so I'll just show you what I did for now.

First, I cut out a single piece of plywood and screwed it on as a cover. I chose a single piece here, to keep rain from dripping onto the bees.

Then I cut two pieces to use as the bottom of the trap. I didn't have a big enough piece of plywood left over to make a single pieced bottom. I figured it didn't matter as much on the bottom if there was a seam, no rain water would leak in there anyway. Then, near the edge of on of the bottom pieces I used a jig saw to cut a 2" hole, and I staples some straightened out paper clips across the hole to keep birds out.

And then I attached both these pieces to the bottom with screws. And that's really about it. Taylor adds a piece to the back that he uses to hang it from. I think I'm just going to set one out on a little deck we have that we never use, and if I make another, I'll bungee that to a tree (level of course) in my father-in-law's backyard.

It's nice that we made our boxes with windows. It will be easy to check on any swarms we happen to catch to see how their comb construction is coming a long.

Here's the last picture. You can see the 2" hole near the back of the box.