What're your bee related winter plans?

[Rosie]

I will soon be working on preparations for our next local queen rearing groups meeting. At the meeeting we will review the progress made last season, discuss the genetics that each of our groups hold and set out our plans for next year.

On the equipment front: I hope to build a queen rearing arrangement based on the Van De Kerkhof Ventilated Hive.

On the education front: prepare for modules 3 and 7. Continue to put together a facility for teaching beginners at my home apiary.

Find a new apiary to replace the one I have just abandoned at 1200ft that produced no honey and was too hard on my poor old knees.

Rosie

[Jon]

Hi Steve.

Don't give up on queenright queenraising.
It worked really well for me this year.
My colony 31 from the drawWing thread was may cell raiser colony and I got over 100 queens hatched from it by shifting about frames from top to bottom brood box during June and July. Sometimes the take was 2/20 but a day or two later maybe 15/20.

[Rosie]

Hi Jon, it's true that I haven't had much luck with queenright queenrearing but the Van de Kerkhof system has TWO queens in so I've hardly given up on it!

Rosie

[Jon]

You caught me there with your fancy dan talk! I'll have to read up on that.
One queen in the bottom box of a 2 box colony does the job for me.

[Neils]

I have another couple of talks planned, but disagree about sharing. I believe beekeeping is much richer for the personalities that are in it, and whether it is classroom or apiary teaching I think the character of the person giving it is much more important. There are the standard titles "Queen Rearing", "Swarm Control", "Wintering" etc, and each speaker has a different story to tell and information to give. Let it stay that way please. There is a growing view in beekeeping that all you have to do is produce the material and anybody can teach, which I disagree with.

It's a truicky balance to reach. I don't want to be handing out a slideshow and a line for line script and that's not what I'm trying to do. The Course in a case principle is closer to what we're trying to achieve. As I suspect with a lot of associations we've a few people doing a lot of work at the moment and the hope is that by providing some standard materials that we can take some of the "fear factor" out of getting involved and spread some of that workload around.

Nellie, I think you will need to be careful as you will always get the clown who will try to rip you to bits. A good Chairman should deal with this swiftly, but so many are soft. If you have a load of experience you can deal with it yourself. I would stick to what you know, and be prepared to say what you don't know. On several occasions I have been asked questions that may appear innocent, but are often asked to embarrass someone or to make a point for political reasons.

Roger Patterson.

I'm certainly not putting myself forward to talk to other beekeepers as an authority on beekeeping. For a good few years yet at least. I do however feel comfortable that I can talk to non beekeepers about bees and beekeeping and after the lack of tea breaks in this year's beginner's course I'd be quite happy to talk as the "New Beekeeper" during that too. When it got round that I was in the same position as them the year before lots of people wanted to talk to me about it and that's where I'm quite happy to position myself for a while yet. I'm definitely not afraid to say "I don't know (but I'll find out)" it's part and parcel of my job for a start and I'm certainly not presumptuous enough to assume that I'd have much of interest to talk to the great and the good of beekeeping about when it came to the bees themselves.

suprised that more kit is not on your lists

Having priced up what I want to buy (rather than what I will end up buying) I quickly closed down the web browser and had a lie down. I think I need to get better at woodwork

But if we're going down that route my minimum requirement is: 4 14x12 hives (floors, brood boxes etc), 10-20 supers, enough frames (I like a few spares),a few other associated nick-knacks, a solar extractor would be nice, I've been meaning to build one for two years so maybe I just fork out the cash and be done with it. A couple of Nucs would probably come in handy but it might be time to go find some correx.

So do I take the plunge before the VAT goes up on the basis that if disaster strikes over winter I'll at least be able to shift the supers for what I paid for them come May-July or sit tight for a bit and see how the bees come through winter first.

Choices choices. That should however sort out my immediate kit requirements. 10 hives is the absolute maximum I want to go to and I'm an apiary site short of being able to hit that number so 6-7 for the next couple of years looks a decent number to settle on.

[edit] I don't normally remove something I've posted after the event, but what I wrote wasn't actually the point I was trying to make which got lost in translation somewhere and might have been taken as a dig at people, which wasn't my intention. As it's not been replied to I've removed it.

[nemphlar]

I have a mixture of second hand cedar wood and the home made marine ply smith hives, I thought I would try to make my own smiths from cedar wood but have been struggling to find a supplier, can anyone help?

[Roger Patterson]

Nellie,

It seems to me you have got things planned about right, but I would question your purchase of 14 x 12s. If you had proper bees you can get away with proper brood chambers!! Perhaps you should add queen rearing and selecting to your list!! Or get someone to talk to your BKA about the Local Queen Programme!!

Don't pile into him too quick chaps, nice and gently will do!

Now Rosie has mentioned a queen rearing method I will as well. When I visited his group earlier in the season someone mentioned the Morris Board, so I will make one of those.

Roger Patterson.

[Neils]

Nellie,

It seems to me you have got things planned about right, but I would question your purchase of 14 x 12s. If you had proper bees you can get away with proper brood chambers!! Perhaps you should add queen rearing and selecting to your list!! Or get someone to talk to your BKA about the Local Queen Programme!!

Don't pile into him too quick chaps, nice and gently will do!

That's fightin' talk that is
Sorry Roger I know you like your Nationals but I'm sticking to my guns with my choice to go with 14x12 Brood boxes. I do happen to think that 14x12s are a little on the large size for my bees, I also think that a National is just that little bit too small. By going with 14x12s I give my bees the space they need to do their own thing and I can view the supers as "mine" and I don't end up with the first super full of pollen.

As for the bees themselves there's three other hive sites/apiaries within 400 meters of my own that I know of so I'm open to suggestion as to how I even consider a controlled queen raising excercise. My three colonies were raised off the one that survived winter and unless the worst happens and I lose all three over winter, any increase I make will come off the survivors again. The hive in my new apiary which is perhaps the best located for queen raising is also, currently, the colony I'm least inclined to propagate from. While they're far from fiesty in comparison to some I've inspected this year, they are by far the most "twitchy" of all my colonies and the queen there was mated on that apiary.

I have to be honest and say that for the next couple of seasons, assuming my colonies continue as they have done, any form of "controlled" queen raising exercise is not high on my list of priorities. that's not to say that I don't take an active interest in how my colonies fare when it comes to queen replacement but that I am very much hands off unless there is an obvious problem right now. I started with bees of an "unknown heritage" and I've no illusion that they're anything but local mongrels. Survivors that show any inclination to cope with varroa will suit me very nicely thank you very much.

[Jon]

Hi Roger and Nellie:
I think the jury is still out re. ideal brood box size.

My colony 31 which is 85% amm according to drawWing was a double brood box colony in May - 18 frames of brood to be precise.
This queen is the mother of those colonies whose scattergrams I posted last week which are showing as near 100% amm.
The thing is - it only needed the double brood box for two months out of 12.

Personally, I don't mind a bigger colony. I just set on a second national brood chamber if they need it.
Most of mine fit happily into one national though.

[Neils]

That's the clincher for me at the moment, I really don't like double brood personally and I don't think that splitting the brood is that great an idea either. I can't really elucidate that any more than as a "hunch" that they're better off having "too big" an area to raise their brood in than being cramped and then split vertically across multiple frames.

Ask me again what I think in about 5 years time.