Old new equipment

This is an old bear damaged hive body.  It took a hit from a bear long ago in Amherst. It hung around the apirary mostly as a place to store old frames and whatnot. After all my bees came through winter looking strong it became apparent I would need a lot of equipment come split season.  

People have many strategies for preventing swarms and mine is to split the bees in a way that replicates a natural swarm but on my terms.  It happens where and when I want and the bees wind up where I choose. It's a great technique but it also means that I need a lot of equipment, albeit temporarily, to house those bees. To that end I repaired this old hive body. 

There's a lot of skills in beekeeping but a really basic one is planning.  That's all this is, just planning. Have equipment before you need it.  You can order a ready hive body to be at your apiary in a hour. You can read all the theory in the world, and even be a dab hand in the yard but without the resources you need in place when you need them it doesn't do any good.

Counting bees at the hive entrance.

I made a few quick videos to show how I count bees to gauge hive strength, the time or the total number of the count doesn't matter but the cadence does. Sometimes, I do not even count out loud.  When you start to trip over your own tongue that means you have a very strong hive and should worry about splitting. When you absolutely cannot keep count with landing bees you hive will almost surely swarm. 

This hive is moderately strong and will likely need swarm prevention, splitting in my case, sometime in late April or May.  

Here's a video of a double nuc that came from a late September swarm.  I housed it and didn't think much of it.  The hive even full over in the winter but still survived. This hive is less strong than the other one but still OK.  Counting landings means that you can gauge strength that might otherwise be masked by different entrances or landing boards.  It's a simple quantitative measure. 

All my hives use these same red hive entrance reducers which are supposed to reduce small hive beetle, and they may or may not, but it does take the bees around an hour to learn them and I think this also helps stop robbing. When these entrances clog up with returning bees on a honey flow the hive must absolutely be split. 

In this last video you can see bees entering a moderately strong hive but they're all going in on the left side. They're brining in a lot of pollen and the pollen sources look fairly diverse. What stands out to me is that almost all the activity is on the right side of the hive.  To me, that means I will find the brood nest there so I probably want to pull frames from the left side of the hive to open that up so that I am not pulling frames of eggs, brood, or the queen up and possibly rolling the queen. Seeing this imbalance influences where I will stand and start an inspection. 

Overall, I am trying to do less invasive inspections where the hive is opened up and bees are smoked. I am trying to learn more from external observation.  Take time out before you open a hive for observation, just look at the hive and don't be in a run.  Imagine what you'll see inside.  In time you will be able to look at a hive and have a pretty good idea what' going on inside without opening it up. My goal is to stop needlessly opening hives and disrupting their lives. Stop breaking their propolis seal and let them be bees.  I also don't have endless time.  So, a less intervention approach can benefit both me and the bees. 

100% winter survival.

 

100% of our bees made it through winter.  Commercial operations nationally lost over 50% nationally.  In my mind, anyways, this is a bigger deal than 'colony collapse' from 20 years ago.  Now, nobody cares. There's such a shit show in Washington right now that nobody can pay attention.  The government will not respond. 

You can see our bees here photographed on March 4th.  We're using a clear plastic cover now so we can observe them without disturbance.