It is probably a good idea to note when particular flowers bloom in my area for future reference. Accordingly, I note that on April 1, 2015 I found peach, pear, and plums blooming in my orchard. Cherries and apples are in bud but not yet open. Cleveland pears and saucer magnolia are blooming but I don't see any bee activity around them. Crocus and daffodils bloomed a couple weeks earlier and there was some bee interest. Dandelions are just starting as is dead nettle. Dutch clover is sprouting but not in bloom yet.
Thursday, April 2, 2015
Sunday, February 8, 2015
Soft Maple Blossoms - February 8, 2015
Another warm (70 F) day in February. Found a big ol' soft maple in my yard in full bloom. Did not see any bees around them even though they were flying around the hives.
Saturday, February 7, 2015
Checking Hives - February 7, 2015
What is so rare as a 70 deg day in February! Especially in mid-Missouri. Actually, 50+, if not 70, deg days are not that unusual and such days give us a chance to check up on our hives. First I weighed the four hives at values ranging from 66.5 to 75.0 pounds. That's not much different from what I got three weeks ago so I guess the bees are still conserving energy for the spring push.
When I peeked in I found in two of the hives the cluster was at the top of the box under the inner cover with each one filling 5 or six gaps between frames. There was plenty of honey and the honey was in the classic arch above empty comb. In the other two hives the clusters were just below the third boxes which were full of honey - maybe some extracting this spring? I didn't bother to check for eggs or brood - that can wait until next month. All in all, I'm a happy camper.
It was also a very nice day to work in the shop. I added a new, longer table for my radial arm saw which will make it easier to rip the long pieces of plywood for my wide hives. I also started assembling deep frames which will soon be needed - 100 today.
When I peeked in I found in two of the hives the cluster was at the top of the box under the inner cover with each one filling 5 or six gaps between frames. There was plenty of honey and the honey was in the classic arch above empty comb. In the other two hives the clusters were just below the third boxes which were full of honey - maybe some extracting this spring? I didn't bother to check for eggs or brood - that can wait until next month. All in all, I'm a happy camper.
It was also a very nice day to work in the shop. I added a new, longer table for my radial arm saw which will make it easier to rip the long pieces of plywood for my wide hives. I also started assembling deep frames which will soon be needed - 100 today.
Friday, January 16, 2015
Jig to assemble wooden frames
Beautiful day today. Temperature in the low 50s, bright sunshine. Shirt sleeve weather. My bees from all four hives were flying merrily about their entrances so there shouldn't be any problems with constipation. As reported earlier, the weights of all four hives are in the comfortable levels.
It was warm enough in the shop to start on bee projects for the coming seasons. In particular, I wanted to make a jig to aid in the assembly of wooden frames. I have been assembling them one by one but I anticipate I will need 800 or more this year and some sort of aid would be helpful. The design is simple. It consists of a rectangular frame made from scrap 3/4 plywood whose length corresponds to the distance between the end bars (17 inches) and whose width is arbitrary depending upon how many frames are to be assembled at one time. There are a couple of swinging "doors" on each end that, when closed, hold the end bars in a vertical direction. When open, the "doors" allow the finished frames to be removed from the jig by sliding them sideways.
In use, the doors are closed and latched and end bars are placed in the space between the "door" and the end of the frame. The top (or bottom, if you wish) bars are placed in the notches in the end bars and nailed or stapled in place. The entire assembly is turned over to that the bottom bars (or top if you already did the bottoms) can be added similarly and nailed or stapled. Open the "doors" and remove the finished frames. The pictures below should explain all.
It was warm enough in the shop to start on bee projects for the coming seasons. In particular, I wanted to make a jig to aid in the assembly of wooden frames. I have been assembling them one by one but I anticipate I will need 800 or more this year and some sort of aid would be helpful. The design is simple. It consists of a rectangular frame made from scrap 3/4 plywood whose length corresponds to the distance between the end bars (17 inches) and whose width is arbitrary depending upon how many frames are to be assembled at one time. There are a couple of swinging "doors" on each end that, when closed, hold the end bars in a vertical direction. When open, the "doors" allow the finished frames to be removed from the jig by sliding them sideways.
In use, the doors are closed and latched and end bars are placed in the space between the "door" and the end of the frame. The top (or bottom, if you wish) bars are placed in the notches in the end bars and nailed or stapled in place. The entire assembly is turned over to that the bottom bars (or top if you already did the bottoms) can be added similarly and nailed or stapled. Open the "doors" and remove the finished frames. The pictures below should explain all.
Tuesday, January 13, 2015
Checking on hives - January 13, 2015
We've had a couple of polar vortexes (vortices?) already this winter with temps falling into the low single digits. But there have been interludes of 40+ (F) as well which could have led to excessive honey consumption. I use a "luggage" scale I purchased on the Internet for about $11 with shipping to weigh my hives. The device is a plastic handle with some electronics inside and a hook which is intended to capture the handles of a piece of luggage. But for hive work, it slips under the bottom board and allows one to measure how many pounds (or kg, or g or oz) of force are bearing down on the hive supports when the hive is just lifted off the support. Do this on both ends, add together the two numbers and you have the weight of the hive.
My four hives (three medium boxes each) weighed on this day from 70.4 to 76 pounds. The empty (with frames) weight of this arrangement is just under 30 pounds. This indicates I have at least 40 pounds of wax, bees and honey at this stage of the winter. I figure there are no more than 4 pounds of wax and 3 or 4 pounds of bees (I could hear their slight buzzing when I put my ear to each hive) so that calculates to at least 30 pounds of honey which is a number I am comfortable with at this stage.
My four hives (three medium boxes each) weighed on this day from 70.4 to 76 pounds. The empty (with frames) weight of this arrangement is just under 30 pounds. This indicates I have at least 40 pounds of wax, bees and honey at this stage of the winter. I figure there are no more than 4 pounds of wax and 3 or 4 pounds of bees (I could hear their slight buzzing when I put my ear to each hive) so that calculates to at least 30 pounds of honey which is a number I am comfortable with at this stage.
Saturday, October 25, 2014
Fall 2014 meeting of the Missouri State Beekeepers Association
Yvonne and I attended the subject meeting that was held at the Truman Hotel in Jefferson City, Missouri on Friday-Saturday, 24-25 October 2014. Quick summary: we had a GREAT time. We met a lot of interesting people and came away with a lot of new ideas that I need/want to digest for possible incorporation into my bee operations. There are four topics I particularly want to comment on.
Horizontal Hives Before the formal program started we visited the vendor displays and saw a table with a huge, long box with frames in it. It was a display by Dr. Leo Sharashkin who is an avid proponent of horizontal hives as described by the Russian author/beekeeper Fedor Lazutin (Keeping Bees With A Smile). Fedor was fresh into the U.S. from Florida for this meeting (and a workshop in Columbia, Missouri) and led off the meeting with his presentation on "Natural Beekeeping in Russia & What We Can Learn" which is well covered in his book (which I purchased). His English is not strong so he delivered his talk in Russian which was translated by Leo. His apiaries are just a little south of Moscow which is very far north compared to us in Missouri (winter weather stopped both Napoleon and Hitler!) so his descriptions were very interesting.
I had heard of the horizontal hive and had visited Leo's website (www.horizontalhive.com) but I didn't really grasp its significance. A few minutes with Leo cleared up a lot of that. To summarize the horizontal hive is a modification of the more-or-less standard Langstroth hive (NOT to be confused with a top bar hive) which uses standard movable frames. The difference is the frames are on one level (no stacked supers) and, in Leo's model run to 31 standard deep frames. Seems strange to someone used to stacking supers to increase space for the bees but the advantages of the horizontal arrangement as explained by Leo make a LOT of sense (to me, anyway).
The brood nest tends to stay on one end of the hive and honey frames are added to the end of the stack as needed. When starting a new colony that needs only a little space, a division board is used to block off unused parts of the volume until needed by the expanding nest. Because the entrance (a long, narrow slot) is towards the end of the box, the queen tends to stay close to the fresh air when laying and there is no need for a queen excluded to keep her out of the honey regions. There is rarely any need to disturb the brood nest which can be covered with a cloth (or some-such) cover when the lid is lifted off the manipulate the honey frames. The heaviest thing ever needed to be lifted is a full frame of honey (assuming the lid is not too heavy and it can be hinged to open like a foot locker or cedar chest).
Leo reports excellent winter (and summer) performance. Leo recommends the walls be made of 2X lumber (1.5" thick) and to insulate the lid heavily. The hive is heavy and not conducive to moving to richer forage or pollination sites (minor factor for me). Preparing for winter is a matter of removing the surplus honey frames (which can also be done on a piecemeal basis throughout the season without disturbing the brood nest), installing the division board behind enough honey to get the bees through the winter and closing up. It is good to make sure the brood nest (cluster) starts out as close to the end as possible so the bees will move toward the division board (more or less in the center) as they consume the stores. Should the cluster be a bit away from the end it is easy to move the offending frames between the cluster and the end and to slide the cluster over, again without disturbing the cluster much at all.
Fedor showed that he uses an extra deep frame (like 18 inches deep!) in his hives in Russia. He had to make a custom extractor to accommodate them, but a picture of one showing a huge brood area with a six or eight inch wide band of honey at the top and wrapping around the top corners showed how well the bees/queen like it - convinced me.
I spoke with a couple guys from Iowa who built and stocked a horizontal hive this spring (with a package) and the bees have almost filled it by now (late October). However they made it deep enough to hold TWO deep frames (held together by clips so they can pull them out). Leo has plans for such an arrangement on his website (above). These monsters hold 52 deep frames (equivalent to 5.2 deep 10-frame boxes - seems like overkill to me.
I definitely want to build at least one of these to try next Spring but I think I will stick to the single frame layer.
Backyard Queen Rearing Cory Stevens presented a three part presentation on queen rearing which was so popular they had to change rooms with a competing presentation. Cory gave all the reasons beekeepers should work to produce local queens and more-or-less convinced us how easy it is although he concentrated on grafting while ignoring other means (he doesn't bad mouth the other ways, just is comfortable with grafting because he has ambitions to go commercial with it someday). He says his main interest is producing high quality, locally adapted queens but, with some 70 hives, some honey does come out of his operation. I accept his techniques without question or comment but was mostly interested in his strategies and applications. He sells only cells ($10-15 each?) but does maintain a reserve of laying queens in nucs throughout the summer for re-queening in his apiary as necessary. He just pinches bad queens and combines a handy nuc (which he has been able to evaluate for queen performance). He tries to maintain one nuc for each production hive (70 or so). He carries his nucs (5-frame deeps) through the winter with no supers or other preparation (checking for weight in the fall and feeding sugar if needed). He is always willing to sell a nuc to someone who needs it but says he stores no boxes. If he has a spare box, he puts bees into it. The other key is he only makes queens when the bees are wanting to do it anyway which means when there is a strong nectar flow on. He often is able to make queens and splits in August and if he has a laying queen by September 1, he says he can overwinter them with no problem.
Sustainable Beekeeping Grant Gillard (past president of MSBA) gave an excellent talk entitled "Sustainable Beekeeping: What It Is and Is It Important". He went through all the familiar arguments concerning chemical treatments of bees, etc but stated quite clearly that his interest is harvesting surplus honey for sale. But he reasons that developing local, resistant queens, etc is consistent with that goal and, in fact, gives a measure of how well one is doing. But he eschews the "James Bond" strategy of live and let die. If his bees are starving, he feeds them sugar. If they have a huge mite infestation, he tries to correct it,maybe with formic acid or thymol or introducing a new queen with better genetics.
He also espouses adopting a strategy of living with at least some losses. He gave a mathematical example of a goal of having 40 hives to produce honey in a season. If you start with 40 "good" hives in the fall and lose 25% you will have only 30 in the spring. Of these you can only expect 66% (or 20) to produce a good crop. So, using a bit of reverse reasoning, if you want to have the 40 good hives you need to have 52 survivors of the winter and about 78 hives going into winter the fall before. Sounds like a lot of work but compare that to the cost of treatments and/or new packages/queens and you can sustain your operation.
He says a weak hive will not get better. Best to re-queen or combine right away than wait for the inevitable. He also recommends splitting about June 1 (depending on the weather) more-or-less following Mel Disselkoen's theory but he suggests waiting a bit longer than Mel recommends to have a stronger foraging force. Move the queen out with a few frames and let the remaining bees make a new queen, freeing up the nurse bees to forage during the brood break.
Buckfast Bees? I had a fascinating discussion with a couple from South of St. Louis about their experience with some Buckfast bees ordered from Bee Weaver this spring. They started with a queen and a 3 pound package which they installed in a 10-frame deep with foundation only about May 1. They didn't pay a lot of attention early on and the bees swarmed by early June. When they looked they found the frames all drawn out and considerable honey stores. They added another 10-frame deep super and the bees swarmed again in July. Altogether they report the bees swarmed 5 times this summer. Even given that they were raw newbies and might have been able to do something to prevent the swarming, does this say something about how fast Buckfast bees can build up?
Horizontal Hives Before the formal program started we visited the vendor displays and saw a table with a huge, long box with frames in it. It was a display by Dr. Leo Sharashkin who is an avid proponent of horizontal hives as described by the Russian author/beekeeper Fedor Lazutin (Keeping Bees With A Smile). Fedor was fresh into the U.S. from Florida for this meeting (and a workshop in Columbia, Missouri) and led off the meeting with his presentation on "Natural Beekeeping in Russia & What We Can Learn" which is well covered in his book (which I purchased). His English is not strong so he delivered his talk in Russian which was translated by Leo. His apiaries are just a little south of Moscow which is very far north compared to us in Missouri (winter weather stopped both Napoleon and Hitler!) so his descriptions were very interesting.
I had heard of the horizontal hive and had visited Leo's website (www.horizontalhive.com) but I didn't really grasp its significance. A few minutes with Leo cleared up a lot of that. To summarize the horizontal hive is a modification of the more-or-less standard Langstroth hive (NOT to be confused with a top bar hive) which uses standard movable frames. The difference is the frames are on one level (no stacked supers) and, in Leo's model run to 31 standard deep frames. Seems strange to someone used to stacking supers to increase space for the bees but the advantages of the horizontal arrangement as explained by Leo make a LOT of sense (to me, anyway).
The brood nest tends to stay on one end of the hive and honey frames are added to the end of the stack as needed. When starting a new colony that needs only a little space, a division board is used to block off unused parts of the volume until needed by the expanding nest. Because the entrance (a long, narrow slot) is towards the end of the box, the queen tends to stay close to the fresh air when laying and there is no need for a queen excluded to keep her out of the honey regions. There is rarely any need to disturb the brood nest which can be covered with a cloth (or some-such) cover when the lid is lifted off the manipulate the honey frames. The heaviest thing ever needed to be lifted is a full frame of honey (assuming the lid is not too heavy and it can be hinged to open like a foot locker or cedar chest).
Leo reports excellent winter (and summer) performance. Leo recommends the walls be made of 2X lumber (1.5" thick) and to insulate the lid heavily. The hive is heavy and not conducive to moving to richer forage or pollination sites (minor factor for me). Preparing for winter is a matter of removing the surplus honey frames (which can also be done on a piecemeal basis throughout the season without disturbing the brood nest), installing the division board behind enough honey to get the bees through the winter and closing up. It is good to make sure the brood nest (cluster) starts out as close to the end as possible so the bees will move toward the division board (more or less in the center) as they consume the stores. Should the cluster be a bit away from the end it is easy to move the offending frames between the cluster and the end and to slide the cluster over, again without disturbing the cluster much at all.
Fedor showed that he uses an extra deep frame (like 18 inches deep!) in his hives in Russia. He had to make a custom extractor to accommodate them, but a picture of one showing a huge brood area with a six or eight inch wide band of honey at the top and wrapping around the top corners showed how well the bees/queen like it - convinced me.
I spoke with a couple guys from Iowa who built and stocked a horizontal hive this spring (with a package) and the bees have almost filled it by now (late October). However they made it deep enough to hold TWO deep frames (held together by clips so they can pull them out). Leo has plans for such an arrangement on his website (above). These monsters hold 52 deep frames (equivalent to 5.2 deep 10-frame boxes - seems like overkill to me.
I definitely want to build at least one of these to try next Spring but I think I will stick to the single frame layer.
Backyard Queen Rearing Cory Stevens presented a three part presentation on queen rearing which was so popular they had to change rooms with a competing presentation. Cory gave all the reasons beekeepers should work to produce local queens and more-or-less convinced us how easy it is although he concentrated on grafting while ignoring other means (he doesn't bad mouth the other ways, just is comfortable with grafting because he has ambitions to go commercial with it someday). He says his main interest is producing high quality, locally adapted queens but, with some 70 hives, some honey does come out of his operation. I accept his techniques without question or comment but was mostly interested in his strategies and applications. He sells only cells ($10-15 each?) but does maintain a reserve of laying queens in nucs throughout the summer for re-queening in his apiary as necessary. He just pinches bad queens and combines a handy nuc (which he has been able to evaluate for queen performance). He tries to maintain one nuc for each production hive (70 or so). He carries his nucs (5-frame deeps) through the winter with no supers or other preparation (checking for weight in the fall and feeding sugar if needed). He is always willing to sell a nuc to someone who needs it but says he stores no boxes. If he has a spare box, he puts bees into it. The other key is he only makes queens when the bees are wanting to do it anyway which means when there is a strong nectar flow on. He often is able to make queens and splits in August and if he has a laying queen by September 1, he says he can overwinter them with no problem.
Sustainable Beekeeping Grant Gillard (past president of MSBA) gave an excellent talk entitled "Sustainable Beekeeping: What It Is and Is It Important". He went through all the familiar arguments concerning chemical treatments of bees, etc but stated quite clearly that his interest is harvesting surplus honey for sale. But he reasons that developing local, resistant queens, etc is consistent with that goal and, in fact, gives a measure of how well one is doing. But he eschews the "James Bond" strategy of live and let die. If his bees are starving, he feeds them sugar. If they have a huge mite infestation, he tries to correct it,maybe with formic acid or thymol or introducing a new queen with better genetics.
He also espouses adopting a strategy of living with at least some losses. He gave a mathematical example of a goal of having 40 hives to produce honey in a season. If you start with 40 "good" hives in the fall and lose 25% you will have only 30 in the spring. Of these you can only expect 66% (or 20) to produce a good crop. So, using a bit of reverse reasoning, if you want to have the 40 good hives you need to have 52 survivors of the winter and about 78 hives going into winter the fall before. Sounds like a lot of work but compare that to the cost of treatments and/or new packages/queens and you can sustain your operation.
He says a weak hive will not get better. Best to re-queen or combine right away than wait for the inevitable. He also recommends splitting about June 1 (depending on the weather) more-or-less following Mel Disselkoen's theory but he suggests waiting a bit longer than Mel recommends to have a stronger foraging force. Move the queen out with a few frames and let the remaining bees make a new queen, freeing up the nurse bees to forage during the brood break.
Buckfast Bees? I had a fascinating discussion with a couple from South of St. Louis about their experience with some Buckfast bees ordered from Bee Weaver this spring. They started with a queen and a 3 pound package which they installed in a 10-frame deep with foundation only about May 1. They didn't pay a lot of attention early on and the bees swarmed by early June. When they looked they found the frames all drawn out and considerable honey stores. They added another 10-frame deep super and the bees swarmed again in July. Altogether they report the bees swarmed 5 times this summer. Even given that they were raw newbies and might have been able to do something to prevent the swarming, does this say something about how fast Buckfast bees can build up?
Wednesday, May 7, 2014
Thinking about a plan
I guess I'm the type who needs some amount of structure in my activities and my bee activities are no different. I read a lot and watch a lot of YouTube videos (thank you Al Gore for inventing the Internet) and talk bees with anyone who will reciprocate. I'm rapidly learning there are a lot of ways to do virtually everything with bees and different folks have different plans. I'm not ashamed to pick up ideas from wherever they can be found, nor to ignore well-meaning advice when it doesn't fit my personality.
Early on I saw two distinct paths (beyond just having bees) - producing honey and producing bees (with the full range of mixing the two). I also believe it is okay to "keep score," even to the practice of monetizing the counters. IE, producing a $100 worth of honey counts the same as producing $100 worth of bees. (I have also become acquainted with some folks who are happy with producing beekeeping equipment. I have enjoyed making my boxes, etc so far but don't see that as a separate path for me.) I guess the strongest attraction is realizing that I can work WITH the bees to maximize whatever result I go for. There is a lot of learning, trial and error, etc that I thrive on.
That being said, I've decided I want to do both - produce honey and bees. That means learning how to maximize honey production in my area while also growing more bees (to both produce more honey next year and, maybe, sell some bees). I don't know how it will evolve yet but here is the plan with which I will start:
I will start a "calendar of activities" beginning with a strong, over-wintered hive in the Spring. (How I get there will show up on my "calendar" in the Autumn.) Also, this is a modular approach, ie, if it works for one hive I expect to copy the method to as many hives as I might desire from time to time.
In late Winter, always keeping an eye on the weather and how Spring is likely to develop, I will try to stimulate brood rearing by feeding - sugar syrup and pollen patties. In our area (mid-Missouri, 38th parallel) I would hope to split the mother queen into a 5-frame box (with appropriate brood and stores, but feed if necessary/advantageous) about April 15 leaving the "main" hive to make a new queen. I first heard of this plan from Mel Disselkoen. The idea is to produce a brood break to discourage Varoa and that the brood-less hive will go to work storing honey instead of feeding it to brood. The new queen should start laying by mid-May. If something goes wrong with the new queen I will still have the old queen to fall back on.
By July 1 (10 weeks for the mother split and 6 weeks for the new queen) both hives should be strong again (3 boxes with 24 frames) and I can think about making a 4-way split of each hive. I will want to keep one of these to go through the Winter and start the cycle over again. That would leave 7 available for sale. If I can have a laying queen by August 1 (implying she started as an egg on July 1), the start I want to keep over Winter will have some 9 weeks to build up (for our typical fall weather). The for-sale nucs would have 5 frames each (seems to be a standard practice) but there would be 13 frames available for "my" nuc (2 24-frame hives = 48 frames with 7 5-frame nucs sold off leaves 13). The 5-frame nucs with a laying queen on August 1 have a good chance to be strong enough by Winter to make it through so a reasonably good "product" for the customer(s). (If I couldn't sell them at that time, I could try to bring them through the Winter and expect a good price in the Spring. I could also give each one a 6th frame to better grow each split.)
Mel Disselkoen's splitting technique would make the 4-way split with 3 queen-less nucs but with notched cells to make new queens and this would have to be done on July 1 to have laying queens by August 1. It seems to me there is a better way. I need at least 6 new queens (I would have two in the pre-split hives) but maybe 8 if I replace the old queens.
What I'm looking at is known as the Hopkins method wherein a piece of comb with eggs/newly hatched larvae are placed horizontally in a hive such that the downward facing cells will be turned into queen cells. This could easily produce the 6 (or 8 or more) queen cells with only a minimal sacrifice in brood-rearing in one hive (presumably with the best queen mother). These queen cells would be available about July 15 when the 4-way splits would be made from hives that have continued raising brood, collecting honey, etc for 15 more days than the "old" way of splitting earlier. The splits would only be brood-less for 15 days instead of 30 or so.
So, to summarize the plan: for each overwintered hive I would hope to get a good honey harvest from that hive by making it queen-less at the start of our Spring flow. I would hope to produce 7 strong 5-frame nucs for sale and a new hive to go through the Winter to continue the cycle the next Spring.
As always, comments are always welcome.
Early on I saw two distinct paths (beyond just having bees) - producing honey and producing bees (with the full range of mixing the two). I also believe it is okay to "keep score," even to the practice of monetizing the counters. IE, producing a $100 worth of honey counts the same as producing $100 worth of bees. (I have also become acquainted with some folks who are happy with producing beekeeping equipment. I have enjoyed making my boxes, etc so far but don't see that as a separate path for me.) I guess the strongest attraction is realizing that I can work WITH the bees to maximize whatever result I go for. There is a lot of learning, trial and error, etc that I thrive on.
That being said, I've decided I want to do both - produce honey and bees. That means learning how to maximize honey production in my area while also growing more bees (to both produce more honey next year and, maybe, sell some bees). I don't know how it will evolve yet but here is the plan with which I will start:
I will start a "calendar of activities" beginning with a strong, over-wintered hive in the Spring. (How I get there will show up on my "calendar" in the Autumn.) Also, this is a modular approach, ie, if it works for one hive I expect to copy the method to as many hives as I might desire from time to time.
In late Winter, always keeping an eye on the weather and how Spring is likely to develop, I will try to stimulate brood rearing by feeding - sugar syrup and pollen patties. In our area (mid-Missouri, 38th parallel) I would hope to split the mother queen into a 5-frame box (with appropriate brood and stores, but feed if necessary/advantageous) about April 15 leaving the "main" hive to make a new queen. I first heard of this plan from Mel Disselkoen. The idea is to produce a brood break to discourage Varoa and that the brood-less hive will go to work storing honey instead of feeding it to brood. The new queen should start laying by mid-May. If something goes wrong with the new queen I will still have the old queen to fall back on.
By July 1 (10 weeks for the mother split and 6 weeks for the new queen) both hives should be strong again (3 boxes with 24 frames) and I can think about making a 4-way split of each hive. I will want to keep one of these to go through the Winter and start the cycle over again. That would leave 7 available for sale. If I can have a laying queen by August 1 (implying she started as an egg on July 1), the start I want to keep over Winter will have some 9 weeks to build up (for our typical fall weather). The for-sale nucs would have 5 frames each (seems to be a standard practice) but there would be 13 frames available for "my" nuc (2 24-frame hives = 48 frames with 7 5-frame nucs sold off leaves 13). The 5-frame nucs with a laying queen on August 1 have a good chance to be strong enough by Winter to make it through so a reasonably good "product" for the customer(s). (If I couldn't sell them at that time, I could try to bring them through the Winter and expect a good price in the Spring. I could also give each one a 6th frame to better grow each split.)
Mel Disselkoen's splitting technique would make the 4-way split with 3 queen-less nucs but with notched cells to make new queens and this would have to be done on July 1 to have laying queens by August 1. It seems to me there is a better way. I need at least 6 new queens (I would have two in the pre-split hives) but maybe 8 if I replace the old queens.
What I'm looking at is known as the Hopkins method wherein a piece of comb with eggs/newly hatched larvae are placed horizontally in a hive such that the downward facing cells will be turned into queen cells. This could easily produce the 6 (or 8 or more) queen cells with only a minimal sacrifice in brood-rearing in one hive (presumably with the best queen mother). These queen cells would be available about July 15 when the 4-way splits would be made from hives that have continued raising brood, collecting honey, etc for 15 more days than the "old" way of splitting earlier. The splits would only be brood-less for 15 days instead of 30 or so.
So, to summarize the plan: for each overwintered hive I would hope to get a good honey harvest from that hive by making it queen-less at the start of our Spring flow. I would hope to produce 7 strong 5-frame nucs for sale and a new hive to go through the Winter to continue the cycle the next Spring.
As always, comments are always welcome.
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