Beekeeping?

I have each in a 10 frame deep box with 8 frames and a 1 or 1.5 gallon pro feeder that sits where one of the frames would. I will see how they have been drawing out comb this weekend. Any untouched frames I will replace with waxed frames. I think I will wait for the 8 frames in there to be nearly completely drawn out then I will take the feeder out and put a frame of two in its spot then add another box with the feeder in it.

I was a little worried about the queens getting out quick but I'm sure the queens were in their packages since before they got shipped out of CA where they came from. They haven't left my box yet so as long as nether queen is dead I should be in good shape.

The pollen substitute is something I figured I should have just to start and maybe for the winters, I told them over the phone I wanted some when I came to pick up my bees so they had a whole 10lbs box of the stuff ready for me when I got there. I've got enough for a couple years. They have been eating it, the entrance to the hive has some of the paper from the patty chewed up and kicked out. The hive that has been collecting less pollen may be using more of the substitute because I've seen cleaner bees carrying off more of the paper left over than the other hive.
 
If the queens were in the package, they'll be fine. You could have opened the cage and released her and they would accept her. The marshmallow just gives them all time to settle down before she gets released. When excited they will sometimes ball the queen up trying to protect her, and in the course of protecting her, kill her. Never have figured that one out! It's really odd. But you did good on the marshmallow. Not a problem at all there.

Put your pollen substitute in a plastic bag or a 5 gallon bucket or something and seal it up. They tend to dry out over time if you don't, the bees don't like them as much when they do, and the bugs will get in them and make a mess out of them, if they're left sitting out.

As stated earlier they do have their place, and starting a hive like you are, is definitely one of those places. Wintering a hive in Minnesota, is definitely one of those places as well. Where we throw them on in the fall, they still have a lot of natural pollen stored and we have trouble getting them to eat it. When we haul the bees back down here to Florida, they have a natural pollen flow going on, and they still won't eat. By that time however, it has become beetle feed, and you just raise a few hundred hive beetles in it, then have to scrape it out of your hive and dispose of it. By which time it resembles baby sh!t. As long as they eat it, by all means, feed it to them. It only becomes a problem when they don't eat it.

On a commercial scale you leave your feeders in all the time. In fact most commercial operations run one in all of their hivebodies, your double stories have two in them, that way if you split your doubles, each half has one. Too much trouble to keep up with them otherwise. However... they tend to fill them with burrcomb during the honey flow if you do that. On a small scale, I'd pull them out once the hive is established and put them back in, in the fall. If you didn't order the caps and ladders for them and can; by all means get them. They stay a whole lot cleaner if you run those.
 
I've already got the box of pollen gorilla taped shut and siting in my cool basement. I like my location, it's on the edge of a big enough city to have plenty of lawns, parks and a few gardens but it's not a ritzy enough city that people are spraying chemicals all over their yards so there's plenty of dandelion and other weeds. Then on the other side is mostly farm and grassland with some swamps and woods.

I've got the tops and ladders with the feeders. After I get my second boxes up I will take the feeders and any remaining pollen cake out. I just wanted to make sure they got a strong start in my fresh boxes.

Is there a good way of finding out where they are getting all this pollen from? Some of its dark, some orange, some yellow and some nearly white.
 
I just opened up each hive to feed and remove the queen cages. All is well and I found each queen right away doing fine. Unfortunately each hive spent a good amount of the week building bur comb off of the queen cages which I had to remove but it seems like they are doing alright with the plastic foundations, even the outer most frames had a light layer of comb getting drawn out evenly.

I didn't take enough frames out to see if ether queen was laying yet.

Amazingly, no stings...
 
Some days are better than others, they'll make up for it sooner or later! Take my word for it!!
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After spending the weekend doing some research I figured I am just going to jump off the deep end and convert the rest to foundationless frames. As long as they figure out these first plastic frames it sounds like I can put a foundationless frame between two drawn frames and they should make a nice straight comb on it. It may get tricky when it comes time to adding my second brood chamber but hopefully I can rotate enough frames through my first deeps so I can add a couple fully drawn out frames up top.

If I want to add my second brood box but only allow them access to part of it to start out with is there a good way to keep them out of one side of a box?

I also would like to replace my queens with some local queens sometime in the middle of the summer. I just need to find some local queens.
 
Originally Posted By: Rock Knocker but it seems like they are doing alright with the plastic foundations, even the outer most frames had a light layer of comb getting drawn out evenly.

did you paint the plastic with wax? i painted all but 1, and put that 1 close to the middle of the hive. guess what? no comb yet. the ones that i did paint with wax are already well built up.
 
Originally Posted By: sweatybettyOriginally Posted By: Rock Knocker but it seems like they are doing alright with the plastic foundations, even the outer most frames had a light layer of comb getting drawn out evenly.

did you paint the plastic with wax? i painted all but 1, and put that 1 close to the middle of the hive. guess what? no comb yet. the ones that i did paint with wax are already well built up.


Imagine that!!
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The wax they use to coat the foundation often has some parafin in it to make it flow easier, as the foundation is sprayed with wax. The bees don't necessarily like parafin, although if there is enough beeswax in it, they will draw it.

The second count against plastic foundation is there simply isn't enough wax on the foundation. More wax means less profit, they've researched it to see how little wax they can get away with, and they've got it down to the bare minimum. Because they too know, that if you put more wax on it, they draw it better.

We've also found that they draw dark foundation faster than they will the lighter colored stuff, from the factory. Thought at first it was because the light stuff came from Dadant and the dark stuff from Mann Lake. Wasn't sure if it was the blend of wax they used or the color. Then Mann Lake messed up an order and sent some of both, we put it side by side in the box. Several hundred boxes of it! They drew the dark stuff faster in virtually all of them.

However... if you paint it all fairly heavy with wax, there's typically no difference in the way they draw the two.
 
Originally Posted By: Rock KnockerAfter spending the weekend doing some research I figured I am just going to jump off the deep end and convert the rest to foundationless frames. As long as they figure out these first plastic frames it sounds like I can put a foundationless frame between two drawn frames and they should make a nice straight comb on it. It may get tricky when it comes time to adding my second brood chamber but hopefully I can rotate enough frames through my first deeps so I can add a couple fully drawn out frames up top.

Not a good plan bud... You been listening to too many hobbyist beekeepers over on the Bee Source Forum!!
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If you research drawing foundation, you'll find that they recommend you not space your frames in the box when drawing it, because it allows too much space between the foundation and some bees tend to really make a mess of things when you do. Typically what they'll do is draw burr comb side to side across the shortest distance, (i.e. from existing frame to existing frame) to fill the gap, therein making a mess of the empty frame, along with Fn up the existing drawn combs. Bees aren't stupid, bridging the shortest gap is structurally stronger. We force them to do things against their will for our convenience.

That method makes a very weak comb, especially in a deep comb, where a lot of space is spanned, and when you turn it on it's side to look at it, for the first year or two, and even if you bump it a little on it's side, if there is any weight to it, (i.e. honey or sealed brood), for several years thereafter, it'll break the cell walls and your comb simply falls out. Bad deal when it's honey, really sucks when it's a nice big frame of sealed brood, and it falls all apart.

There is also nothing there to regulate how much drone comb they will draw in that process, and you wind up with more drones than necessary in your hive taking up space and eating up honey. This is not to mention if they do draw drone comb there, they will work around it as it develops and gnaw the wax down on adjacent brood combs, so you'll lose worker bee producing potential on 2 additional frames when they do that.

While there are those that do things that way, they typically have too much time on their hands, vote Democrat, eat Tofu and drink lattes, while trying to tell the rest of us how to save the world, between bunny hugging conventions. Their methods aren't proven sane or sound in the real world.
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Originally Posted By: Rock KnockerIf I want to add my second brood box but only allow them access to part of it to start out with is there a good way to keep them out of one side of a box?

High density styrofoam cut to fit tight in the box, a piece of formica or masonite beneath it, laying on top of the existing brood nest. Make sure at least one side of the masonite is tempered, it's better if both are. They won't burr the tempered side up as bad since it's smooth, and if they do, you can scrape it clean with your hive tool. The untempered stuff is tougher to clean, doesn't resist moisture as well, and it's softer and breaks easier. You could cut foam to lay down in the hole you don't want them in, but they will stick it down, and it can be a pain in the keester to remove if they do.

If all else fails, duct tape, plastic feed sack, plastic garbage bag, piece of visqueen, slide the foam down in on top of it.



Originally Posted By: Rock KnockerI also would like to replace my queens with some local queens sometime in the middle of the summer. I just need to find some local queens.

http://beelab.umn.edu/Education/Public_Courses/index.htm

Drop Marla Stivik an e-mail and inquire who might be raising the best bee stock in the neighborhood for over-wintering in the cold country. Marla has been working with the bee program for a long time, and is directly responsible for development of the Minnesota Hygenic bee stock. To my knowledge, their only weakness is they didn't fair well in extremely warm climates, but last I heard on the program, she was working with someone in Texas trying to resolve that problem.

 
Didn't think about it earlier, but you guys might want to check with Mike Block at Permadent Foundation in Webster, SD. He's usually several weeks out on big orders, but small orders he might be able to knock out easy, don't know for sure.

Contact info found here - http://www.manta.com/c/mmj9qm1/permadent-foundation

Or, here - https://www.facebook.com/pages/Perma-Dent-Foundations/169343629748290

As best I recall Mike can custom cut stuff also. And, he runs a little more wax on his stuff than most available commercially. We bought a bunch from him one time, had a batch the wax was a little cool on, and he wasn't happy with it. This was shortly after our painting the foundation with wax experiment, and it was all honey supers so we weren't worried about drone comb even if they did build it. He gave us a heckuva deal on it, and the bees loved it!! Drew that stuff better than any plastic foundation we've ever used.
 
If you ever get a chance to attend anything Marla puts on, make an effort to do so. I've listened to a lot of people speak about beekeeping over the years, and for the most part they all tend to get scientific and start talking over your head. Marla's delivery is pretty down to earth, she's really easy to listen to and follow, and much of what she's doing in the Minnesota Hygenic strain makes a whole lot more sense to me, than all the crap everyone is doing combined.

She essentially exposed all of her test hives to the various diseases to determine which ones were resistant to what, and bred the strain from those that resisted the dieases and pest we're all battling in today's beekeeping world.
 
Call it beginners luck but my newbie eyes can't tell how these bees could be doing much better. I removed what little was left of the pollen cakes and checked the combs in each hive more thoroughly to see how things were going.

This it the second most outside frame, the end frame had a light coating and on the other side the frame nearest the feeder was built up a little more than this picture.


I dug several more frames in and things looked good.




That's from one hive with the light colored foundations, I don't have pictures of the dark foundations but they have very similar progress.

This is some cool stuff. So far today is the best look I've ever gotten into a bee hive.

How do these frames look to you guys that know what you're seeing?
 
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Everything looks great, they're doing what they're supposed to do, except the brood pattern is a little spotty. Could be signs of a young queen on foundation, as they are known to bounce around errattically when they first start laying, especially on freshly drawn light colored comb. Or, it could be signs of Nosema in the Queen, as they'll lay an erratic pattern like that when infected.

If you haven't already, treat them with a little fumagilin or Nosa-Vet. They should be treated spring and fall regardless; either treatment method will recommend 2-3 treatments back to back 4-5 days apart. Drench method works best, mix up some thin syrup, add medication, and treat by Drench method... Simply pour 8 ounces of the syrup/treatment over the top of the hive. If your syrup is too thick,(more than 50% sugar), they'll store it rather than eat it, which is not your intent.

Not sure about Nosa-Vet (yet, just finished second round on ours yesterday), but Fumagilin typically spurs the queen into laying, and she'll lay 2 - 4 frames of brood if there is anything open and available to lay, and she has bees to cover it. Definitely won't hurt them, and it may help close up those holes in the brood pattern.


And, the combs will not stay that pretty yellow color for eternity either. Each time a brood cycle is reared they leave a browish cocoon in the cell, and the comb will eventually turn black as those cocoons are repeatedly deposited over time.
 
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