I think my bees are coming this weekend. I ordered a NUC from a local guy who advertised on Craig's list. I'm putting them in a Peronne hive with a window and I've built a Warre hive which I will try to use as a bait hive. As recommended in the podcast (a 4 parter - 6 hours total!) I got my husband to build me a bee hut. It helped that he scored a ton of free roofing that was being replace on a job site. Here's a pic of the unfinished hut:
Here's me being brave, installing my NUC: The space was a little too small so I sent my husband back to the house to get a hammer & chisel. Here's the finishd bee hut with the Perone and a baited Warre hive: And here the bees progress after 3 weeks of excellent weather:
[QUOTE="cjsloane, Here's the finishd bee hut with the Perone and a baited Warre hive: And here the bees progress after 3 weeks of excellent weather: [/QUOTE] OK> OK> OK, Now I get it. You see in my area a bee house is a bee tight place where you can process your honey and repair hives etc. You will need such a place, in time, so plane ahead. It can be and usually is a framed place with window wire on it and a double entry way. [URL='https://flic.kr/p/nNANif'][URL='https://flic.kr/p/nNANif'] [URL='https://flic.kr/p/nNANif'][URL='https://flic.kr/p/nNANif'][URL='https://flic.kr/p/nNANif']When you do your first hive rob you will understand better than I can spell!!!![/URL][/URL][/URL][/URL][/URL]
Currently I have zero hives. I have had as many as 10 hives. Location is central Texas. I still have hive bodies and a number of other things I consider is needed once you start selling Honey. BTW, I am not trying to sell any of my gear, just spread the word on what little I learned after ten years with bees and how I lost the fight with fire ants. If I sell off some cattle I may start with bees agian but the African Bees area great concern here. Bees, if cared for in a business manner, meaning to increase the number of hives and make a little cash, are more intensive than many think. To prove this statement you need to read one prime book, which of course slips my mind right now. Just letting them go on their own is a poor practice since they can throw off 3 or 4 swarms a year. If there are any problems in your area of this then someone may come a'lookin for you. Throwing off swarms also weakens your hive and cause it to collapes aka die out. In the two main seasons, necter and pollen you need to check each hive once a week and replace filled hive frame bodies with stamped wax sheets. Reason for this is that any wax made by the bees is lost honey production. This is also how you monitor the food the bees store and the general number of males in the summer. NO MALES are allowed to winter over, if in the hive then something is wrong. I'd write a book but others have done that job!
Well, the one hive that's occupied is a Perone. It's about the size of 4 langstroths and the only thing the beekeeper is supposed to do is harvest honey. There are no queen excluders, no frame manipulations, no treatments, no stamped wax sheets. I do want to harvest honey but I think the stamped wax sheets are a bad idea because the bees use different size cells for various reasons. A little lost honey production is OK with me if it keeps the hive healthy. The other hive is a Warre which is baited or perhaps I'll catch a swarm. No one will come looking for me if my hives swarm, I have lots of land. The "natural beekeepers" consider swarming a sign of hive strength (it's strong enough to reproduce). This hive is unlikely to swarm till next year, but first it has to make it through the winter in Vermont.
FWIW, As the story/history of bee keeping goes when European understanding of the colonies and biology of bees allowed the construction of the moveable comb hive so that honey could be harvested without destroying the entire colony we learned how to keep hives alive and used for good food production. Now if the the New Wave groups want to drop back 10,00 years then that is fine with me. Lots of anologies I could use but to keep bees is to be as one with the hive. A nasty little critter known as the wax worm moth will kill a hive in a few months, you only know about it when the hive dies or if you check the hive on a weekly basis. YMMV
You don't have to destroy the hive to get the honey so I don't think it's reverting 10,000 years or even 200. As for bee diseases, the theory is that by frequently opening up the hive and changing the humidity and temperature you are stressing them out, leaving them more susceptible to disease. Feral colonies don't have anyone checking on them and many do better than managed ones.
I did a little research on the wax worm moth, and several sites say that they are not a problem in healthy hives and it's best to let the bees take care of them. They also seem to be more troublesome in the south where you are, HK.
Not sure where that comes from "bees take care of them" , I will have to guess it was not from a hive owner who actually works their own bees. As I have experienced first hand, the wax worms travel in the active brood area that is sealed. In this they move in a random manner eating brood and leaving their own feces and the dead brood to rot. The bees can only attack the moth at the "Front Door" as the worms are encased in the middle of the wax comb. You have to pull the frames, inspect them for the tell tale trails and spider like threads they leave.
I'm sorry but the conflict is evident to me "Feral colonies don't have anyone checking on them and many do better than managed ones." If no one is observing the "Feral colonies" then how do you know what is actually happening? Bees travel in and out of the hive all day. They return with all types of mites, and microscopic vermin. The hive air is changed at an unusual rate by the HVAC Bees and a continued circulation within the hive, all as required by their DNA inprint. Hives that are checked can become very gentle or you can replace queens in "disturbed" hives with known queens from your gentle hives. This is part of where the African Bees have developed in the aggresive manner for survival and is fine in the wild. Removing excess Queen brood and adding another body at a lower level increases your bees' space and prevents swarms. I do not use queen excluders as this slows down the workers. Anyway a Queen who wanders from the brood chamber hive body is usually old and needs to be replaced. Yet another reason to work your bees.
Remove the infected frames, check for webbed out worms in the corners of the hive and pray. I strip each hive body and torch the hive joints to insure death to the worms and would be new moths. Remember, everything in this world has an enemy and if wax worms failed and were just a myth and easy for the bees to kill then they would be long dead as a species.
Not always what happens in the wild or in uninspected hives. Two examples that I have seen. 1. Wild hive that died out for some reason, not observable due to being in a wall of a home. Bees gone, hive totally infested with wax worms and cock roaches. Planty of empty brood chmbers, pollen storage and lots of honey. What Happened? No clue but that old hive spun off, I would guess, many thousands of Moths. 2. Old stand of hives, all fine but one hive was dead, Wax worms all in working order, hive full of webbing. Hives fail for many reasons but the most common is too many swarms in the late part of the season and then not enough bees to keep the hive and queen warm or the death of the only queen left from late in the season.
So, cutting a tree open is non invasive? Seeley is correct in most of his statements and it seems all of his work is a repeat of others. You see when he started his PHD trail I had been keeping bees for years. Someplace in all my stash I have some excellent photos that I took around 1975 that are like his but taken with a Pentax Spotmatic and a macro setup with the great bellows unit. Of course I did not have a fellowship nor did I receive a stipend to aid me. Thomas D. Seeley Biologist Books Professor W301 Seeley G. Mudd Hall Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 Phone: (607) 254-4301 Fax: (607) 254-1303 Email: tds5@cornell.edu My scientific work has primarily focused on understanding the phenomenon of swarm intelligence (SI): the solving of cognitive problems by a group of individuals who pool their knowledge and process it through social interactions. It has long been recognized that a group of animals, relative to a solitary individual, can do such things as capture large prey more easily and counter predators more effectively. More recently it has been realized that a group of animals, with the right organization, can also solve cognitive problems with an ability that far exceeds the cognitive ability of any single animal. Thus SI is a means whereby a group can overcome some of the cognitive limitations of its members. SI is a rapidly developing topic that has been investigated mainly in social insects (ants, termites, social wasps, and social bees) but has relevance to other animals, including humans. Wherever there is collective decision-making—for example, in democratic elections, committee meetings, and prediction markets—there is a potential for SI. To better understand how a group is optimally structured to possess swarm intelligence, we can examine natural systems that have evolved sophisticated mechanisms for achieving SI. For the past 30 years, I have done so by investigating the mechanisms of SI in honey bee colonies. A colony of honey bees is a model system for studying SI because it solves collectively a variety cognitive problems with impressive skill and because its mechanisms of SI are accessible to detailed observation and experimental analysis. Specifically, one can describe the problem-solving abilities of the whole system (colony), characterize the behavioral properties of the system’s components (bees), trace the routes of information flow between the components (signaling and cuing pathways), and manipulate the components’ behavioral properties and communication processes to test their roles in building swarm intelligence. From 1980 to 1995, I directed most of my efforts at understanding how a honey bee colony solves the problem of allocating its foragers across an ever-changing landscape of flower patches so that it gathers its food efficiently, in sufficient quantity, and with the correct nutritional mix. This work is reviewed in detail in my book The Wisdom of the Hive (1995, Harvard University Press). Since 1995, I have concentrated on figuring out how a swarm of honey bees chooses a new home. This problem arises when a colony reproduces and the old queen bee and some ten thousand worker bees leave the parental hive to produce a daughter colony. The emigrating bees settle on a tree branch in a beard-like cluster and then hang out there together for several days. During this time, these homeless insects do something truly amazing: they hold a democratic debate to choose their new living quarters. Exactly how they do so is reviewed in my book Honeybee Democracy (2010, Princeton University Press). Remarkably, there are intriguing similarities between how the bees in a swarm and the neurons in a brain are organized so that even though each unit (bee or neuron) has limited information and limited intelligence, the group as a whole makes first-rate collective decisions. For examples, in both systems the process of making a choice consists basically of a competition between the options to accumulate support (bee visits or neuron firings). And in both systems the winner of the competition is determined by which option first accumulates a critical level, or quorum, of support. Consistencies like these indicate that there are general principles of organization for building groups with SI, that is, groups that are far smarter than the smartest individuals in them. The analyses of collective decision-making by honey bee colonies indicate that a group will possess a high level of SI if among the group’s members there is: 1) diversity of knowledge about the available options, 2) open and honest sharing of information about the options, 3) independence in the members’ evaluations of the options, 4) unbiased aggregation of the members’ opinions on the options, and 5) leadership that fosters but does not dominate the discussion. At present, my main research interest is in the area of conservation biology: determining how honey bee colonies living in the wild are able to survive without being treated with pesticides for controlling a deadly ectoparasitic mite, Varroa destructor. Understanding how feral honey bee accomplish this will help beekeepers develop sustainable, pesticide-free approaches to beekeeping. Preliminary work has shown that there remains a feral population of European honey bees living in the Arnot Forest, Cornell University’s 4200-acre research forest located 15 miles from Ithaca, NY. My work has also revealed that these bees have survived infestations of Varroa mites since at least 2002, that the mite populations in these colonies do not surge to high levels, and that this population of bees is not maintained by immigration of bees from managed (pesticide-treated) colonies living outside the forest. I am currently investigating three possible mechanisms that can explain how the honey bees of the Arnot Forest are able to survive on their own: 1) these bees have evolved means of resistance to the mites, 2) the mites on these bees have evolved low intrinsic rate of reproduction (avirulence), and 3) these bees possess colony-level traits (such as small colony size and frequent swarming) that reduce mite populations. CAREER Dr. Seeley received his undergraduate degree in chemistry from Dartmouth College. He received his PhD in 1978 from Harvard University, where he studied with Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson. He held a postdoctoral fellowship in the Society of Fellows at Harvard until 1980, when he accepted a faculty position at Yale University. He remained there until 1986, when he joined the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University. In recognition of his scientific work, he has received the Alexander von Humboldt Distinguished U.S. Scientist Prize, been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, received a Gold Medal Book Award from Apimondia for The Wisdom of the Hive, and been elected a Fellow of both the Animal Behavior Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His most enduring honor, though, is to have had a species of bee named after him: Neocorynurella seeleyi Short CV Publication List Courses Taught Introduction to Behavior; Animal Communication; Mechanisms of Insect Behavior; Biology of Social Insects; Major Transitions in Evolution
