todays news

[Calluna4u]

Any box that is designed to house bees you would imagine might be reasonably proof against being chewed by them or their close cousins
Obviously painting is the answer but perhaps it's better to just buy something more solid or make your own since some DIY is going to be called for in any case
Plenty time for most folk to do it now Winter is looming

Some poly boxes are hopelessly inadequate for purpose and are made with material that is too soft just to get on the bandwagon and extract some cash from the unsuspecting or inexperienced, or even just from sheer ignorance on the manufacturers behalf.

If the material is at all soft don't buy it. Rodents love to chew it up and wasps can just drill through it in no time.

Also responding to prakel.....its precisely in winter that we get a major benefit, with our losses in poly being negligible. Also they outperform the wooden hives at the heather as they carry on breeding full pelt for a little longer than the wooden hives do and we have more bee power in the latter part of a normal heather season. In any given year about 7 of our top 10 places will be poly, and the average at the heather will run at about 8lb per colony higher (Its not that simple either as there will be more colonies in poly above the spring count than in wood, so the truth will be more like 10 or 12 lb more per spring colony than in wood). Even at 8lb in bulk that's an uplift of over £26 per hive, per season, on average........so not long to pay for any perceived failings or lack of durability of poly (not the case anyway). My worst ever rodent damage was a rat attack and they went in through the floors and fronts of wooden hives and ate the whole contents out of over 20 hives, boxes etc all destroyed.

Over the 16 years now of our poly unit I doubt the attrition rate will exceed 3% of all the gear we ever bought. Say 15 years at 25 pounds cash extra per year per colony.....£375.......against about 3% attrition on gear in total.....hive carcase of 4 boxes, roof floor and feeder costs me about 64 pounds......so about £2............its a no brainer. You could lose the lot every 4 years on average and still be ahead, yet they are every bit as durable as the wood.

A bit of rodent damage is a pest for sure, and causes frustration, but it works economically.

and to Philip....sorry...I said GOOD grade...not FOOD grade gloss. Also..if you put too much thinners into the paint and/or use very light and soft poly (like most soft packaging grades) then yes, it can do some poly melting. However, on the correct grade of both poly and paint this is actually the very property that makes the bond. A tiny...microscopic.... amount of the poly does dissolve and mix with the paint and pretty well welds the paint to the material. Done correctly this is not even visible to the naked eye.

[prakel]

...responding to prakel.....its precisely in winter that we get a major benefit, with our losses in poly being negligible.

This doesn't surprise me in the least, even in your Glos and Hereford apiaries (where i grew up and our family has kept bees consistantly since the early 1940s) but this odd little corner where I am at present is a world apart and we're even able to winter some surprisingly small wooden boxes without any special attention at all (other than the extra weight to stop them blowing away which I mentioned previously). Winter losses due to anything other than obvious queen issues from the previous summer/autumn are very rare for us. I do watch what our bees are doing very carefully, year round although that's all I can base my thoughts on until I do invest in some new gear (which may be quite soon*).

edit:* The only thing really stopping me at present is an as yet unresolved decision whether to go with swienty nationals (and make full use of the bs combs we've got already) or do the sensible thing and move over to langstroth (and cut down our dadant frames to fit) and convert the bs into stand alone mating nucs. It's not my decision alone...

[Calluna4u]

edit:* The only thing really stopping me at present is an as yet unresolved decision whether to go with swienty nationals (and make full use of the bs combs we've got already) or do the sensible thing and move over to langstroth (and cut down our dadant frames to fit) and convert the bs into stand alone mating nucs. It's not my decision alone...

LOL...I know exactly where you are coming from on that, and in part its why I never gave up the Smith unit, and probably never will. Remember we run about equal number of poly and wood, and the Smiths represent my roots, and boxes made by my father from wartime tractor packing cases from the USA are still in service today. I came to poly from the position of a sceptic, as I do with almost all new ideas in beekeeping, partly due to 95% of new products or designs of products not actually being an advance or benefit at all.

However....for new gear I would now not go past Langstroth, and standard Langstroth in particular. You can buy fully made up and prewired frames for under a pound apiece if you shop around, even at smallish scales, rendering all kinds of faffing about, which UK beeks seem to love, quite unnecessary and certainly not economic...even if you get the materials free.

As regards wintering small units...against my better judgement, and under pressure from Jolanta, we are trying to overwinter some Keilers this year with some very late mated queens in them. Just an experiment but will see how it goes. I would have had the lot shaken out and stored away in late September myself as we have no real use for very late queens, especially as they have mated at a time when the good colonies had all long since bumped off the drones. Of greater interest are the batch of nucs I made up myself about 7/8 Sept with a bar of brood and bees from each of 3 different hives in each one (so 3 bars of brood and bees) and added queens from the mating unit on 10th Sept.....yet all took and went into winter on 6 frames of bees. Might sharpen my mind about the usefulness of lateish queens if it proves as much of a success as it looks it might be. Ditto some early Oct requeening experiments.

I had a large number of wooden nucs here up until a few years back, and their wintering was very mixed. Yes in some winters we got a lot of them through, in others only a few survived. Deemed it not a viable use of resources and gave the lot away. Poly nucs seem to have been a game changer in that. Now we have 400 of those into winter.....a great safety net in the event of big losses.

Even here the bees in coastal locations do seem to winter better than those inland, though there could be a lot of different reasons for this. I generally think wintering bees up out of valley bottoms and with good air drainage is as important as anything else, but with our number we often end up just having to take what we can get so have a lot of less than optimal spots. I would quite happily try wintering nice strong wooden nucs by the side of the Tay estuary, but know it would be a dubious process 10 miles inland behind the coastal hills that keep the sea air away. In spring however the cold wind off the sea can cause different issues, and our bees there fly less in April and early May than those sheltered. A lot of swings and roundabouts. Wintering small units down where you are, and almost the more south and west you go the better it gets until extremes of wind negate it, should be very possible and to be honest we were at one point thinking of wintering bees in the deep SW to get an early start to spring. Long time ago when fuel and labour were far cheaper.

[prakel]

In spring however the cold wind off the sea can cause different issues, and our bees there fly less in April and early May than those sheltered. A lot of swings and roundabouts.

No different here; I've mentioned the difference which we see between the sites we have which are perched on clifftops and those a few miles inland before. One of the issues here is that most springs we see the early flowers held back on the coast while their cousins are doing well inland. At the far extreme there's the example of Gavin's sycamores which seem to flower a couple of weeks before ours on a regular basis.

[Calluna4u]

No different here; I've mentioned the difference which we see between the sites we have which are perched on clifftops and those a few miles inland before. One of the issues here is that most springs we see the early flowers held back on the coast while their cousins are doing well inland. At the far extreme there's the example of Gavin's sycamores which seem to flower a couple of weeks before ours on a regular basis.

LOl....I don't know where he sees them!

Actually there are always a few of the sycamores that flower way earlier than others, ditto with late ones, the spread of flowering times is wide with some all set and showing keys, other still coming out, well into June. We have a double grove of them on either side of a road a couple of miles out of town, and its always the same tree that comes first, even in leaf and flowering before most of the rest are even breaking bud. However such single tree sporadics are of no real importance unless you have only a couple of Apideas within flying range. Its the main flowering that counts, and the Hereford area is 2 weeks at least ahead of up here, but in Gavins home patch and mines a good bit inland from him. Each year varies however. E or NE winds really slow our area down, yet are good for Hereford.

I am not surprised we see much that is the same.....the more you look at differences the more you see similarities.

[Jon]

As regards wintering small units...against my better judgement, and under pressure from Jolanta, we are trying to overwinter some Keilers this year with some very late mated queens in them.

Keilers should overwinter ok, assuming enough bees in them and a winter which is not exceptionally cold for weeks at a time.
Queens were mating well into October this year. Whether they mated well remains to be seen but I have a few double apideas with late mated queens which seem to be doing ok and still have brood.

[The Drone Ranger]

It won't help now but in another thread I mentioned this already
If you are using Kielers for mating and they get too big you can add an extension box with another set of frames
But
If you are overwintering them it means you don't need to split the boxes looking for queens
So
The best plan overwintering is not to use a second set of frames just let them build long combs down through both boxes
You can lift the top box with combs up to inspect bees with care
You are best not to try and lift the frames out individually unless you are moving them on to a nuc or something in Spring

[Calluna4u]

Not even gone down the route of what we will do with them next if they survive. Its just an experiment at this stage and have no plan about what to do with them in spring. I really don't have a role for any ultra early overwintered queens apart from perhaps adding them to a queenless package of bees. I have a few of our best home bred queens in nucs with a breeder 'in a warmer place' who can supply me back fresh mated queens from early April, all bred from our own best stock, and would prefer those to the ones in the Kielers as I am very dubious about drone quality involved as our own drone mothers here had slaughtered their drones by the time the mating took place so it can only have been with the rag tag and bobtail drones of the local area.....which are generally more narky and swarmy (and less productive) than the stock we are selecting. However there is no saying they WILL be poor.

If they cannot winter in a single Kieler then I would say it would be a fail, as we cannot be messing about with things too much. For now they look surprisingly good with a sound but very compact cluster.

[prakel]

If they cannot winter in a single Kieler then I would say it would be a fail, as we cannot be messing about with things too much. For now they look surprisingly good with a sound but very compact cluster.

Out of interest, if you don't mind, do you have a preference for the size of nuc your queens mate from? Maybe to be clearer, I should say size of comb. If your breeder is who I think he might be I understand that he's now of the oppinion that larger nucs (standard frames) are better. This is something I'm fast coming to agree with myself for quite a few practical reasons as well as a few observational comparrisons which I've made -but don't have any firm data for... yet. Just a 'gut feeling' at present. Of course a trade off may be the numbers which can be kept, healthily, in one location.

[The Drone Ranger]

If they cannot winter in a single Kieler then I would say it would be a fail, as we cannot be messing about with things too much. For now they look surprisingly good with a sound but very compact cluster.

They will probably get through if their stores hold out