This is from the notes I took at an excellent session at the Heartland Apiary Society gathering in Cookeville, TN July 8-10, 2010.  I’ve tried to accurately record the instructions that were given, but it is quite possible that I’ve gotten something wrong.  Caveat Emptor and all that.

Everyone won’t agree with all of this – that is a given among bee keepers – but I’ve tried not to interject my opinion at all.

To make a good honey crop requires:

1) A large population of foraging bees during the honey flow.

2) That they not swarm.

It is assumed that the bees are healthy and disease free, and have a manageable load of mites or other parasites.

Requeen within the next 6 weeks (EI between July 10 and August 21 more or less) if your existing queen has already performed through one or more intensive brood production periods.   It is important that your queen is performing at her peak potential during the fall build up.  Without a strong hive population going into winter it will be impossible to build up sufficiently to exploit the short nectar flow that is available in the south.

Never let any hives fall below less than 15 pounds of honey available in the hive – ever.

Note: Dates given are rules of thumb based on mid-south weather, but even in the mid south they are only guidelines and judgment should be exercised by the bee keeper – that’s really the trick isn’t it?

To prevent swarming

Feb 15 – Inspect hives.

March 10 – Population build up should be apparent. At this time (before bees have worked all the way to the top of the hive) reverse hive bodies – but only if at least 4-5 days of decent weather is predicted.

April 1 – Arrange hives so that all brood is in the top brood box except for one frame of capped brood plus one frame of mixed brood in the bottom brood box – remainder of frames in the bottom box to be empty drawn comb.  This manipulation is to make room for queen to lay.

Reverse hive bodies about every ten days – three times by April 25.

April 11 – if weather permits do a thorough inspection and remove any queen cells – As long as fresh eggs are found indicating a queen which is laying. Continue to inspect and remove swarm cells every 10 days for the duration of swarm season.

April 20 – add honey super whether they need it or not.

April 25 –main brood chamber should be on the bottom.

Don’t use a queen excluder until June 15.

June 15 – add a queen excluder wherever you want it regardless of presence of brood above the excluder – make sure that the queen is below the excluder.

July 6 – any brood above excluder will have emerged and cells will be filled with honey – honey may be harvested at this time.

Requeen  within the next 6 weeks.

Queen Bees – The heart and soul of a honey bee colony is the Queen.  Every hive has just one (with few exceptions) and if she is healthy, good natured, and productive she will pass those traits on to all of her daughters – the worker bees – and all will be good.

A bee keeper needs new queens to replace failing older queens, and to establish new hives and grow their operations.  If a hive becomes queenless for very long it’s production and health will suffer, and eventually the colony will die.  Hives with old queens are more likely to “swarm” – an event where the hive splits itself and half of the bees flying off to make honey for their selves instead of for the bee keeper. So replacing old queens with new ones every year is also a way of preventing swarms.

Queen Rearing – Most bee keepers order new queens by mail (when they are available) for about $20 each plus shipping.  Others raise (or allow the bees to raise) their own queens one at a time like nature does.  These videos are of what is called queen “rearing” – producing viable queens in batches.

At a value of $20.00 each the ability to rear even small batches of queens could make a big difference in the economics of a small apiary. Being able to have queens when you need them instead of having to wait for one to come through the mail, and having some control over genetics are also factors in favor of learning this craft.

Wax cell cups for raising queens

In the first video very young (probably one day old or less) worker larva are being removed from a frame of brood comb and placed into wax cups using a wire grafting tool.  BTW, all workers are female.  The larva are very small – about the size of a comma.  Wax cups roughly the size of a small thimble  are either manufactured or are home made by dipping a wet wooden peg into liquid wax.

1) Grafting larva into cups

In the next video, the grafted queen cups which have been mounted with hot wax onto cork shaped pegs that fit into a special frame are being placed into a “cell starter” hive.  A cell starter is a regular hive with the queen removed that has a very high population density of bees – especially young “nurse” bees – and plenty of food stores – honey, and pollen.  Probably the bee keeper removed hive body boxes from the  starter hive to crowd the bees together.  The high density of nurse bees and food will assure that the grafted larva will be fed plenty of “royal jelly” which is produced by the nurse bees.  The queenless state of the hive will motivate the workers to raise new queens just like they would in nature if something happened to the old queen.

Worker bees are raised in comb cells just like honey comb which are horizontally oriented while queens are raised in cells that hang down vertically.  Apiarists have learned that some of the  worker larva that are the right age placed into a queenless hive  in cells that are vertically oriented like queen cells, will be raised as queens – which is what all of this manipulation is about.  The only differences that make a worker larva become a queen is the diet of royal jelly that they are fed as larva and the shape of the cell that they grow in.  In a few days the cells can be removed from the cell starter hive, and either another batch started, or the queen can be replaced, and the starter hive can be returned to work making honey.

2)Installing grafted queen cups into a cell starter hive

In the next video the bee keeper is collecting nurse bees that he will use to make up “mating nucs”  for the newly hatched queens.  Nurse bees have never been out of their home hive, and won’t try to fly back to it once the Nucleus hives are set up.  Also the nurse bees – after being without a queen and her pheromones for a few hours – will be very accepting of a new queen.   If a queen is introduced into a hive that already has a queen she will usually be killed.  The young nurse bees will also be the right age to produce wax comb in the empty mating nuc.

If you carry a box full of bees away from it’s colony all of the mature field bees will quickly return to the home hive, but the nurse bees will not readily abandon brood comb which contains baby bees.  So the bee keeper has  separated brood comb covered with nurse bees a short distance from their hive(s) and allowed the field bees to leave.  Once he is finished with this operation I imagine the brood will be returned to it’s home.  I think he is spraying them with sugar or honey water to keep them calm.

3) Collecting Nurse Bees for Mating Nucs

In the next video the nurse bees are being measured into the empty mating nucleus hives.  It looks to me like he is measuring about a cup of bees into each one – 1700 bees more or less.

4) Ladling nurse bees into mating nucs

In the next video the newly hatched virgin queens are being marked for identification to prepare them for going into the mating nucleus hives. Queens can be labeled with tiny numbered stickers – or simply with a dot of color which indicates the year of her birth.  Either way she will be marked for life, and a marked queen is a lot easier to find in a hive full of bees.

Notice at the beginning of the video the queen cells have been placed into small cages.  This was done off video after the queen cells were capped (sealed) by the nurse bees, and before the adult queens emerged from the capped cells.  If they weren’t confined in cages the first queen to emerge would kill all of her sisters before they came out of their cells.

After the queen cells were caged they might have been put into an artificial incubator, or most likely into a “cell finisher” hive which is just a strong normal “queenright” (with queen) hive that keeps the capped cells at the correct temperature and humidity until they hatch.

You will notice that queen bees are not inclined to sting or fly.

5) Marking Virgin Queens

In the next video the marked queens are being dipped into honey water to mask their scent and help the nurse bees to accept her before being  inserted into the prepared mating nucleus hives.

After installing the queen the beekeeper is closing the entrance, and making an entry in his voice memo recorder which I’m sure will be later transcribed into a written record.  Record keeping is an important part of this kind of operation.

The small size of the mating nucs make it possible for such a small number of bees to control the temperature, protect it from invaders, and become a full fledged although small colony.  The sides of these particular nucs are glass which will make it very easy to monitor the progress of the queens.  The top section of the nuc has a space for food (probably sugar candy) so that the little family of bees can get its house in order without worrying about gathering food for a few days.

Any small hive can be used as a mating nucleus, or even a full sized hive, but the nucs in these videos look like they would be perfect for this kind of operation – and would be especially handy if they were to be taken to a remote location for mating.

6) Installing Queens into Mating Nucs

Once the queenright nucs are placed into the apiary and the entrances opened the workers will get busy setting up house, and within a few days the queen will fly out for her mating flight.

On her mating flight the new queen may fly several miles away and hopefully will mate with several strong healthy male “drone” bees, and then return to her little colony.  She will only do this one time in her life, and her body will retain the sperm to fertilize all of the female eggs that she ever lays. Drone eggs are not fertilized oddly enough.

If the queen doesn’t return – she could be eaten by a bird, hornet or other predator, or she could be killed by sudden bad weather – the hive is basically doomed.

The queens that do return will soon start laying eggs, and soon the little colony will outgrow the mating nucs.  The successful queens can easily be evaluated by comparing how much brood they produce, and the best ones will be either sold (for about $20 each in the United States) or used within the apiary for replacing old queens or establishing new hives.

In the next video the worker bees from the nucleus hives seem to be being combined along with one queen to form an artificial swarm for the establishment of a new hive.  A package of honey bees that you can mail order is exactly like this artificial swarm.

7) Reuniting bees from used mating nucs into an artificial swarm

The bee keeper in these videos is obviously extremely experienced and competent, and is demonstrating his own tried and true method for queen rearing. The fact that he is speaking German (I think) really doesn’t matter, because as they say – a picture is worth a thousand words.  If anyone who understands would like to translate a bit in the comments I would very much appreciate it.

BTW, I certainly do not intend to imply that I’m an expert on queen rearing – I’ve never done it yet.  However I intend to give it a try once I build my apiary to the point where I have enough resources – probably next year which will be my third keeping bees.  I am posting this because;  Reader response to the other articles that I’ve done on beekeeping has been quite positive so I think quite a few people find it interesting.   And, producing an article like this  helps me to learn.

I know that it’s long, but I hope you liked it.

I’ve really enjoyed my first summer keeping bees – Working with, observing, and learning about the bees has been very interesting and enjoyable.  Before I started I read a lot about the subject, but inevitably experience teaches things that I didn’t pick up on during months of study.

You have to feed bees -  And it is more expensive than you would think – ideally bees feed their selves, but if you are trying to increase the population of your apiary you will probably have to feed sometimes – BTW most hobby bee keepers feed their bees syrup made out of plain old granulated sugar.  I haven’t kept up with it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve bought $50 (or more) worth of sugar to feed my 1 1/2 hives of bees this year.

When I feed my bees syrup I use a quart jar with a few small holes in the lid.

Bees make honey of course, but they also eat honey. So if you harvest too much, or if it just isn’t a good year for honey production you might have to feed your bees – even after they are well established.  But when you are first starting out and concentrating on growing more bees rather than producing honey it’s almost a sure thing that you will have to feed.  Bee keepers have a saying – You can grow bees or you can grow honey, but not both.  Don’t plan on producing a lot of honey for a year or two.

My mail order "package" of bees.

I started bee keeping by ordering a “package” of bees by U.S. Mail.  Despite placing my order in January I didn’t get my bees until May 10 – a whole month into the TN honey gathering season.  Also being my first year I didn’t have any drawn comb so my bees had only an empty box for a home and had to start out building wax comb instead of raising baby bees and gathering honey.  If one could start with a “nuc” – a small, but complete hive – earlier in the season the hive would get a much better start, and you might not have to feed them much – if at all.

Getting stung is pretty rare – I’ve only been stung 2-3 times, and once was because I put my hand down on a bee.  I know that it varies, but my Italian bees are very mild mannered so far.  Something that I didn’t really know before is that even when you open a hive and take it apart to inspect – almost all of the bees just keep on going about their business.  Unless you really get them upset they don’t all fly out and mob you – that never happened to me.  Very few of them ever try to sting you, and they don’t search for a gap to crawl into your clothes to get at you.  I did several full inspections while wearing regular clothes along with a veil and gloves – without getting stung.  Some bees aren’t so mild mannered, but my commercially raised Italians are.

You don’t really need a lot of equipment – Like any hobby you could spend a lot of money on a bunch of paraphernalia that you don’t need, but there is really no need for most of it.

What you do need:

Veil – A veil keeps bees away from your head and neck, but a mosquito head net from a hunting supply store will work for less than $5.

Gloves – many experienced bee keepers don’t wear gloves, but your hands are the most likely place to get stung and you will be more confident if you wear gloves at first.

Bee hive – A home for your bees.  But this does not have to be expensive.  A simple top bar hive can be built very cheaply, and will work just fine.

Bees

A plan – there was a time when honey bees could be kept successfully with very little human intervention, but because of the globalization of parasites and diseases that is no longer the case.  You need a plan for how you are going to deal with those issues – especially varroa mites.  You don’t have to know before you start, but by the end of your first summer you will, or it is likely that you will  lose your bees within a year or so.  Read all you can.

What you don’t need:

Honey extraction equipment – processing a lot of honey probably won’t be a problem for at least a year or two, and lots of bee keepers do what is called “crush and strain” which doesn’t require anything that you don’t already probably have.

Bee suit – Long pants and long sleeves to tuck everything into will work fine – along with some gloves and some kind of veil.  A roll of tape to secure cuffs and sleeves with will make you more confident, but won’t really be needed most of the time.

Hive tool – a putty knife,  screwdriver or pocket knife will work.  I still don’t have a hive tool.

Feeder – a quart jar works fine.

Frames and foundation – top bars with popsickle sticks will work great for your bees to build comb from.

Chemicals, supplements, medications – You might  have to treat for varroa mites, but I personally don’t buy the philosophy that you should arbitrarily dose your bees with antibiotics and other chemicals whether they need it or not.

If you are starting out with a package of gentle commercially produced bees like I did you could totally do without almost all of the protective garb.  A “real” bee suit will boost your confidence, but a $2.00 pair of work gloves, a $2.00 mosquito head net from any hunting supply store, a standard “hoodie” – sweat shirt, and long pants will work fine.  You don’t have to have a smoker – It is nice for getting the bees to move out of the way, and you will want one sooner or later, but in my opinion you don’t really need it until long after you have installed your package.  New packages are especially docile.

One hive isn’t enough – Starting with one hive is fine – two is probably better, but if you plan to keep bees from now on you will need more than one hive.  Fortunately, your colonies can reproduce and  turn one hive into many if you want to.  The problem with keeping only one or two hives is that if you lose one or two hives (not unusual) you are out of bees, but as long as you have one healthy colony left you can use it’s offspring to repopulate a failed hive.  So, multiple hives allow your operation to be more sustainable.

It is difficult to be “chemical free” your first year -  Most commercially produced bees don’t have very much resistance to parasites and diseases, and it is likely that you will choose to treat them, however there are effective alternatives to expensive synthetic chemical treatments.  There is also a lot of bad information about alternative treatments – so choose your plan of action carefully.

Bee hives come in all shapes and configurations and can be an attractive addition to a garden.

Honey bees don’t really care what kind of “house” they live in.  If you are building your own hive – woodenware as bee keepers call it – there are good reasons to use a standard configuration, but the bees won’t care if you don’t.  For centuries mud covered wicker skep hives like the ones in the top picture were used all over Europe.   Skeps are against the law in most parts of the U.S. however, because they are difficult to inspect.

Online forums are a great source of information – However, anyone can contribute to the conversation even if they don’t know what they are talking about.  I highly recommend that you check some of them out, but take everything with a grain of salt.  BeeMaster.com is one of my favorites, but as with any forum be prepared to filter.

This spring after I wrote “Anyone Can Raise Rabbits” my wife and I decided to get back into rabbit raising – something that we did for a while almost 20 years ago.  I haven’t mentioned this up until now because I wanted to have something more informative than just cute pictures of our rabbits.

We started out with 4 young “New Zealand” rabbits – 3 does and a buck.  The reason that I put New Zealand in quotes is because we did not buy pedigreed stock from a breeder.  We bought Easter bunnies which we found in online classifieds.  However our rabbits conform pretty well to the New Zealand standard.  New Zealands are especially good for meat production, and make good mothers  – not very nervous or prone to lose, abandon, or kill their litters like some other breeds might often do.  New Zealands are the stereotypical “white Rabbits”.

A 2 day old baby New Zealand Rabbit

We’ve just completed one “cycle” of backyard rabbit raising and I thought that some of you might be interested in how it comes out in the real world.

One week old baby New Zealand Rabbit - Grow fast don't they?

We raised a total of 10 baby rabbits from two litters.  In the 10 weeks beginning with when the two mothers were first bred we fed 3 – 50 lb bags of commercial rabbit feed at $15 per bag – for a total of $49.00 more or less including tax.

As soon as the bunnies were old enough to ween (7-8 weeks)  we advertised them for sale on Internet classifieds and eventually sold 4 for a total of $38.00.  When the babies were 10 weeks old they were almost as big as their mothers, and the time had come when they could no longer remain in the same cages with them any longer.   We would have been happy to have sold all of them if possible, but the plan had always been to use any that we couldn’t sell by 10 weeks for food.   So that is what we did.

The remaining 6 rabbits yielded about 18 pounds dressed weight of meat at a total cost of 61 cents per pound based upon the cost of rabbit food minus the proceeds from the sale of live rabbits.

In addition we also got quite a lot of weed free high quality organic fertilizer for our garden.  According to the university of Maine ag department fresh rabbit manure has an analysis of 2.4-1.4-0.6 NPK ratio which is about 1/2 that of store bought “organic” fertilizer from the home improvement store – which is actually pasteurized, processed chicken feathers, manure, and by products from a commercial factory farm.  If you compare it to that stuff we got an easy $25 worth of fertilizer out of the deal.

So to sum up:

• We bought $50 worth of feed
• We sold $38 worth of live rabbits
• We got to use $25 worth of organic fertilizer
• We harvested 18 pounds of dressed rabbit meat

In addition to the breeding does and their litters we were also maintaining the buck / sire, and one idle (unbred) doe during the same time period – both of which were also fed out of the same allotment of rabbit feed as the working does and bunnies.  So the total  feed conversion rate of our little rabbitry was about 5 pounds of feed consumed per each pound of dressed meat produced – including what would have been yielded by the 4 that we sold.  Really not too bad for a very small first effort.

I might point out that even though this isn’t all that bad (nor all that great) That we can conceivably improve our efficiency in the future.  For one thing we won’t usually have an unbred doe just taking up space and consuming food.  Also, 5 offspring per litter is low, and I believe that will improve  – these are first litters for these does, and subsequent litters are likely to be larger.  Also there is a breeding technique that I wasn’t previously aware of that is supposed to increase the litter size.

Obviously I’m not including the cost of the initial investment in cages and other equipment or breeding stock.   Even so this is certainly not a get rich quick scheme, and if you value your time at all then it’s an exercise in futility.   You would certainly be better off financially to work an hour or two of over time and just buy your food at Wal-Mart.  Of course from that point of view it’s probably also cheaper to just feed your kids happy meals than to fix them a home cooked supper.  Though if that’s how you looked at it you wouldn’t be reading this blog would you.

This is a brand new (and nearly perfect) frame of honey bee brood. Click on the picture for a closer look.

Not brood as in introspective and depressed – brood is the term for pre-adult honey bees.  The queen lays an egg in a cell  (up to 2000 a day) and 3 days later it hatches out into a larva – on day 8 the workers put a wax cap on it – where it meta morphs like a caterpillar into a butterfly.  A few days later (depending on what caste the bee is destined for) an adult bee emerges.

I promise that this isn’t going to turn into a blog just about honey bees, but I think this is pretty cool and I thought some of you might be interested.  Click on either picture in this article and you’ll get a high resolution version that you can zoom in on – hold the ctrl button and hit the + key to zoom in.

Look closely now - in the uncapped cells you can see white larva curled up in all stages of development. The white capped cells at the top of the frame contain honey - I think. The tan cappings lower down contain baby bees. The cells that look empty actually have either eggs or larvae that are too small to see. Right in the center of the picture you can see a bee with her head stuck down into a cell - she's feeding a baby. Click on the picture for a much higher definition view.

Is that cool or what?

If you’ve been following my progress as a bee keeper you can see from these pictures that the bees have stopped building crooked comb and are now building 2 frames of comb like this about every 3 days.