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.
