Do you keep livestock? Having any problems? Want to talk about it, whether it be sheep, goats, chickens, pigs, bees or llamas, here is your place to discuss.
Ellendra wrote:I'd recommend looking at topbar hives, they're much easier to maintain and easy to build. The downside is they're smaller, so you won't get as much honey per hive.
I can't see how these work without a queen excluder.
I've read the description of TBHs but are brood cells kept separate from honey cells (by the bees) on individual combs ?
In a TBH the queen hangs near the entrance, mine never had brood more than 3 frames away from the entrance. You can always trim an excluder to fit the hive.
For me, it was a choice between being able to keep bees or not being able to, I just don't have the muscle strength needed for a lang (bad shoulders). Even my TBH's had hinged roofs so I didn't have to lift anything heavier than a single frame at a time.
Horray. It is good to find so many people discussing top bar hives. They really are the best way to keep bees.
Someone mentioned 'dissappearing bees'. One reason this can happen is that the hive swarms, leaving behind a virgin queen. The fertile queen was the one that left with the swarm. Then if the weather is inclement, the poor virgin queen can't fly and get mated. No mated queen equals dead hive in pretty short order.
Someone else worried about the bees annoying the neighbours. The best way to avoid this is to position the hive so that the flightpath of the bees does not point directly at the neighbours kitchen door.
I would recommend joining your local beekeeping club. The fees for ours have just gone up to £20 for the year and the info and advice you get are so much better than books and 'going it alone'. When the course finishes in August you can then buy a nuc (a nucleus of about 5 frames of bees with a mated Queen) from the club and you know where they've come from. You could probably get secondhand stuff cheaply and have a look at the different types of hives before making a decision as it can be quite expensive to start up.
I've made some good friends at our club and during the summer we then buy and sell each other's excess bees and you may even get the chance to pick up a swarm for free.
It's also reassuring to be able to pick up the phone and ask advice when the bees do something quirky.
Joining a local bee keepers association is a good idea - if you bear in mind that they will almost certainly all be using conventional equipment and methods, which *some* people believe are part of the problem...
Low cost, low impact, natural beekeeping in top bar hives www.biobees.com
beesontoast wrote:Joining a local bee keepers association is a good idea - if you bear in mind that they will almost certainly all be using conventional equipment and methods, which *some* people believe are part of the problem...
Agreed, but its the same as most new things, you glean as much info as you can from every source and then make your own decisions. One of our trainers has 50 hives and is always splitting/merging/re-queening to take the maximum honey from his hives. He admits that this puts his bees under stress and as a result he then uses more chemicals to cure the ailments they get. Because I'd rather have 'happy' bees and take far less honey, he thinks I'm an inadequate beekeeper. So who cares. I'm happy, my bees are happy (I think), and my fruit trees get polinated and drip with fruit. ww.
witch way wrote: Because I'd rather have 'happy' bees and take far less honey, he thinks I'm an inadequate beekeeper. So who cares. I'm happy, my bees are happy (I think), and my fruit trees get polinated and drip with fruit. ww.
Yours is the kind of beekeeping I want to encourage, for sure. Unfortunately, the beekeeping 'establishment' seems addicted to chemicals and the Victorian 'dominance of nature' ethic! I think things are changing though - 30 people came to my local talk on top bar hives the other night.
Low cost, low impact, natural beekeeping in top bar hives www.biobees.com
Good for you BOT. I'm sure that with the pesticides that the bees already have to put up with and with the poor queen-mating weather we had last year, bees that are put under too much stress will not survive. Mine were out collecting pollen from the snowdrops yesterday. It's quite uplifting. ww
The weather has had a detrimental effect, for sure - and I think this habit many beekeepers have of suppressing or culling drones is also bad news for queen mating.
Let's hope this season works out better than the last two!
Low cost, low impact, natural beekeeping in top bar hives www.biobees.com
They really are the best way to keep bees.
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