Beekeeping it’s the bee’s knees

Was this hive queen less ,10 extra, are you splitting the Africanized with European genetics To see the Acceptance Percentage? What tip of queens

 

Sometimes yo can store extra Caged queens in a hive and the nurse bees will tend to the caged queens till you can use them. And some times the bees want nothing to go with them

 

So we imported about 40 queens from a queen producer from another state to try them out. Had about 8 extra queens so we decided to "bank" the extra in a queenless Africanized colony. Sometimes it can be hard to bank this many with a standard size colony (two deeps). The breeder suggested we do it in a nuc size colony, but if we order more I wanna be able to bank at least 50-100 in a single large colony. We had to keep the colony queenless for at least 5 days, ripping out any queen cells, but ensuring lots of capped brood for nurse bees to tend to the queens. Seemed to work well.

 

Yeah we had to split about 30 colonies, but wanted to use incorporate some European genetics from a breeder in New Mexico. They dont normally sell queens now, but my co-worker knows them well and we asked for a favor. We liked their stock since they use open mating including stock from wild colonies. We wanna try to keep as many different types of genetic stock in our apiaries, then decide which we think works best. Now we need to call in a favor from one of the breeders in Hawaii

 

That is very cool,

 

What causes the color difference? Is it good or bad?

 

Different nectar sources, it is a good thing just different types of flowers in bloom during different seasons

 

gonna start a hive next spring in my urban backyard. neighbours are good with it. will start with one and go from there. i have a friend who's gonna help. bought my hive and will paint over the winter. order my NUC (Italian honeybees) in Feb and go from there.

 

Best to have at least 2 or make friends with another beek in case you need to pool resources like an extra frame of honey or brood. Regardless, still doable with 1 and i hope it goes good and you enjoy it!!

 

I second this, best to start with 2, it is a great hobby.

 

Getting a honor box set up for extra honey

 

Couple pics of my fall brood pattern not bad


Queen shot

 

Brood looking good!

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8TYrIA-hHY

We shot a short documentary on our project in AZ. Here is a behind the scenes footage from the filmmaker.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_v9oEcq7uOM

The actual short documentary. Its for a competition.

 

Let’s get some bee roll nice

 

Very interesting,

 

We extracted yesterday. Letting it settle out before bottling it.

 

Nice how much did you get

 

About 50 pounds. We had to restart our apiary this year - combination of a cold winter and a bear that destroyed our hives after the electric fence failed. We got a late start, though - put in three colonies that have grown to 6. We want to make sure they have enough stores to survive the winter - next year should be much better. So, we only pulled 14 frames.