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?
