Essential Equipment for Starting a Beehive Part Two

After the hive is set up a beekeeper will need a few tools and bits of clothing in order to manage the hive.

1. Hive Tool:
It would be impossible to inspect a beehive without a hive tool. That is the beekeeper name for a pry bar. It is used to open and inspect hives, and scrape wax and propolis out of the hive. It can be an emergency hammer, scrape bee stingers off skin and pull nails. You can’t keep bees without one.

2. Smoker:
It is a misnomer to say that using smoke “calms” the bees. That isn’t what happens. The smoke distracts the bees, allowing the beekeeper to make an inspection or harvest frames of honey. It is basically a metal can with a bellows and a spout attached to it. Beekeepers get to start a fire inside it, close the lid and then use the smoke to manage the bees.

Essential Equipment for Starting a Beehive Part One

This is the time of year when beekeepers order new equipment and supplies for the coming beekeeping season. If you are just starting beekeeping this year the numbers and variety of equipment available can get pretty confusing. So here is a list of basics and why you will need them.

1. Hive boxes (also called supers): 
These come in three sizes - deep, medium and shallow. Traditionally, 2 deep boxes have been used as brood chambers with 3 or 4 or more boxes (medium or shallow) on top as needed for honey storage. There is actually no hard and fast rule here. Many beekeepers use all medium boxes throughout the hive. This helps reduce the weight of each box for lifting. If you have back problems you could even use shallow boxes all throughout the hive. So, 6 boxes as a minimum for deep and medium. More if you wanted to use only shallow boxes. (Top bar hives are an alternative but they deserve a blog post on their own.) You will only need two boxes to start out, adding boxes (supers) as needed for extra room and honey storage.

The Queen is Dead, Long Live the Queen

Every beekeeper runs into a testy hive once in awhile. Bees can get defensive for a lot of reasons. Most often, it is the beekeepers fault, dropping something, bumping the hive, moving too quickly, disturbing a frame of bees.

The weather can make bees cranky too. If the weather is cool and cloudy, a lot more bees will be at home that day with nothing else to do but defend the hive. This is why it isn’t a good idea to open up a hive when rain is threatening. A poor nectar flow can can have the same effect.

Black Bees

Bees are some of the most commonly seen flying insects. As per entomology, they are closely related to other social insects, like the ants and wasps. Bees are not only important as sources for honey and beeswax, but they play a crucial role in the overall functioning of the ecosystem. Bees along with certain types of flying insects are primary pollinating agents for nearly all types of flowers. In fact, they account to about 80 percent of insect pollination.

Most of us are not bothered about the types of bees and their respective colors. As of date, about 12,000-20,000 species of bees are identified scientifically under 7-9 families. Of the identified species, approximately 600 types of bees are social in behavior and live in colonies. In a single bee hive, there may be 40-45,000 bees. More information on black bees and their types are discussed in the following paragraphs.

Honey In The Home

There are thousands of uses for honey in cooking and baking. The list of recipes issued by the American Honey Institute of Madison, Wisconsin, is almost endless. In practically every copy of apicultural magazines, domestic or foreign, there are new suggestions for the use of honey in preparing cakes, bread, biscuits, muffins, jelly-rolls, waffles, griddle-cakes, puddings, fritters, mouss�s, and all kinds of confectionery. Preserves, jams, jellies, candies, ice-cream, icings, hard sauce, meringue, salad dressings (plain or French), cinnamon or pecan toast, etc., are more delicious when made with honey. Apples baked with honey are very delectable.

Not all honey bees

Two things happened yesterday to prompt this post: first, the DC Public Parks hive at the Lederer Youth Garden was wrongfully accused of harboring terrorists, and second, misperceptions about honeybee ferocity are causing nearby jurisdictions to get antsy about bees.

The collage at left depicts three critters which are not honeybees, but are far more likely to sting people than honeybees are—even so, people usually start the fight. They are, from the top, a yellowjacket, a bald-faced hornet, and a European Giant Hornet (here depicted eating a honeybee). I'm picking on the vespids for a particular reason: their lifestyle choices are really close to most humans', and there lies some of the reason for all the conflict.

If You Want to Help the Honeybees.... Plant a Tree

There are so many articles and comments on the internet about beekeeping and efforts to "save the honeybees". Some of these involve buying a product with the assurance that a portion of the proceeds will go to honeybee research. That's a good enough thing but I tend to see it as more of a marketing tool for the businesses that do it rather than as a serious source of much needed funds.

Plum in Bloom

The plum is the first white-blooming tree seen in the woods early in the year. Plums blossoms have just started showing in the Mid-South. Plums can be seen in large thickets and scattered among the understory of forests. In the next few weeks some stands of plum in full bloom will give the woods the appearance of a late winter snowfall. Their locations often reveal pioneer homesteads long abandoned. When one encounters plums, pecans, mimosa, sassafras, yucca, forsythia, daffodil, catalpa, or wisteria in the woods, bricks and rubble of earlier dwellings are usually close by. We often find a number of varieties of plums in a woodlot, forest margin, or abandoned farmstead. Along with wild plums one may find Chickasaw plums, thought to have been cultivated by the Chickasaw Indians and early settlers. Many domestic plums require pollination by honey bees or bumblebees to produce fruit. Wild animals attracted to the fruit scatter plum seeds.

Wild honey bees

We can learn much about honey bees by observing bees in their natural habitat. Residents of my Arkansas Delta county called today and described a colony of honey bees living in a huge, hollow cottonwood tree at their home. Cottonwoods are among the tallest trees in the Delta, climbing to nearly 150 feet. This gnarled tree had weathered many a season and showed the damage of numerous wind storms and lightning strikes. Hollow cavities in storm-damaged trees provide excellent spaces for honey bees to build their nests.

Be Mindful of Bees

Do you know we rely on Honey Bees for a third of our food supply? Among that are some of the foods we love most: vegetables, fruit, nuts, juice, smoothies and... ice-cream! (One ice-Cream manufacturer is so concerned that they have launched a campaign)

Whenever we see a bee we should fall on our knees in deep gratitude and flow oceans of love. Most of us are unaware that our food supply depends on bees, and so we fail to acknowledge their importance in our lives, and we even mistreat them.

Bee Propolis Benefits

Bees make honey and wax, carry out pollination, so flowers can grow and have an organized work and social structure, something that has influenced human society since ages. Bees are one of nature's busiest workers. They work day and night and fly long distances, in the interest of their hive. A less known but useful bee product is propolis. Bee propolis benefits are largely medicinal in nature. Let's take a look at bee propolis and its benefits.

Maples and Elms

The beekeeper’s year is measured by a number of events of the calendar and nature. The calendar is divided into months and days and the solstices and equinoxes. Natural events are also significant to beekeepers. Among them are the bloom of the red maple, clover, blackberry, apple, tuliptree, and goldenrod. The bloom dates of major nectar producers, like soybeans and cotton in the Arkansas Delta, are also carefully followed. The red maple bloom is one of the first events observed by beekeepers. Maples are often the first major source of nectar and pollen. Red maple trees produce considerable nectar and large amounts of pollen in the late winter. As foraging workers bring the red pollen into the hive, it stimulates the queen’s egg production. The pollen also provides necessary protein for the developing brood. In the Arkansas Delta, the red nectar bloom occurs during the rapid expansion of the honey bees' brood nest. The red maple is followed in bloom by the silver maple, sugar maple, and the box elder, which is also a maple. Maple honey is described as having a fine flavor and a white or amber color with a tinge of pink. Rarely is a surplus stored; most is consumed feeding the brood.

Elms are wind-pollinated trees, but honey bees collect pollen from elms during times of pollen scarcity from other sources. The American elm was planted extensively in urban areas; but its numbers were reduced by a fungal condition, Dutch elm disease. Today, the most common elm is a small tree, the winged elm. While the maples and elms bloom at an important time in the early development of the honey bee colony’s spring-time expansion, their bounty is often missed. Cold and rainy days of the late winter and early spring often prevent bees from flying while the trees are in bloom. The weather was warm and pleasant today, and I saw foragers bringing in bright red maple pollen. Today’s photo: red maple in bloom.

Article Source: peacebeefarm.blogspot.com

Over-Winter Survival

In the temperate regions, the honey bee’s entire life cycle is geared around surviving the winter season when flowers are not producing food. Cold winter temperatures prevent the bees from flying and making cleansing flights. To raise brood, requires greatly warming the brood nest. Because the winter season makes for an interruption in the honey bee’s food supply, the bees must store adequate amounts of honey to feed the colony until flowers bloom again in the spring. While the amount of honey stored in the hive is largely dependent upon the available nectar in the fall and the amount of honey harvested by the beekeeper, it is also affected by the health of the colony. Colonies afflicted by the new strain of Nosema disease have a reduced population of foraging workers, because the disease shortens the bees’ lives. Colonies that survive the winter are likely to be the ones that are not excessively susceptible to pests and pathogens that affect the concentrated cluster of bees. Among these conditions are tracheal mites, Nosema disease, and chalkbrood. Merely surviving the winter is a great measure of the health of the honey bee colony. Harsh winters actually separate the honey bee colonies having beneficial traits and behaviors from those that do not. A late-winter hive inspection finds the brood nest expanding rapidly on strong colonies. Foragers carry pollen of several different colors. A few drones walk about the combs.

Pears, flowering trees of the rose family, are in full bloom in the Mid-South. The nectar of the pear contains a lower concentration of sugars than many of the other plants in bloom. Honey bees tend to forage from flowers that offer them the greatest abundance and concentration of sugars. To pollinate pears, beekeepers often move hives into the orchard as the trees start to bloom to encourage the bees to forage the thin sugars of pear nectar. Click on today’s photo of a honey bee collecting caramel-colored pollen from a pear blossom.

Article Source:  peacebeefarm.blogspot.com

Why I have held off feeding

The colonies I have checked that were alive looked pretty good. A couple were low on food stores. I bolstered the light ones with frames of honey from a nearby dead out. This time of year feeding with syrup isn't recommended. Obviously, if a hive needs food and there is no other option then the syrup pail goes on. When a colony has very little food this time of year feed syrup.

A Brief Encounter With Africanized Honey Bees

In 1985 the media publicize that that the "Killer Bees" were on their way to America. This imminent arrival resulted in our countries extension offices receiving many inquiries pertaining to the nature of bees. Should we as survivalists be overly alarmed about these "Killer Bees?"

Africanized honey bees have generally been over dramatized to sensationalize the evening newscasts. This term "killer bees" is frequently used by the various types of media to refer to the Africanized honey bee. Although the usual domain for these bees is from the northern portions of Europe to the very southern tip of Africa and on into western Asia they have made their home in the new world as well. There are several types of species that are referred to as the African Honey Bees and each one has a slightly different attitude. Granted some may be meaner then dirt while others present a more moderate manner.

Why Do Honey Bees Swarm?

A swarm of honey bees is very capable of reducing the most fearless man to a quaking bowl of jelly with eyes exhibiting sheer terror. Yet they are normally of no danger to man in this swarming state.

Watching honey bees pour forth from a bee hive by the thousands and then swirling in the air above like a tornado while sounding like a runaway express train is indeed one of natures most awesome scenes to witness.

So, what is this swarming all about? Are these thousands of bees preparing to attack one of us helpless humans at any minute?

Solving The Mystery Of The Disappearing Honey Bee

Research continues on the agricultural and environmental mystery known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). However, finding a cause and a subsequent cure for the problem is fast becoming a race against time for scientists.

The number of disappearing honey bees in recent years is indeed staggering. Many beekeepers estimate that, at the current rate of bee loss, there now may be only a ten year window to find a cure. Colony Collapse Disorder is unique since it leaves bee hives with a queen bee, a few newly-hatched adults, and plenty of food, while all of the worker bees responsible for pollination just disappear.

How to maintain hive in the winter

The survival of a honey bee colony over the winter depends largely upon the way the beekeeper sets up the hive in the fall. The first requirement for winter-time survival is that the bee hive must have adequate ventilation. Honey bees maintain a warm hive throughout the winter. Whenever the bees have brood present, they maintain a temperature in the brood nest of 95 degrees Fahrenheit.

The definition of Bees

Classification of the bees in the animal kingdom

Bees belong to the animal kingdom:
Division: Arthropods
Category: Insects
Under Category: winged insects
Category: Insect wings internal
Rank: Hymenoptera
Under rank: bumblebees
Subfamily: bees Stingrays
Subfamily: honey bees
Includes nine species, including honey bees, which is spread in most parts of the world