The Door Garden

How to build strong bee hives for honey production – Ed Holcombe

2010-07-14T01:50:55Z

How to build strong bee hives for honey production – Ed Holcombe

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.

Starting Seeds Indoors Under Lights

2010-02-09T20:48:34Z

Seedlings growing under lights

I started some seeds today in my “plant work room” and I thought you might be interested. I start seeds in regular plastic nursery trays that I get from a local greenhouse – and that I save from store-bought plants. I do recycle my plant containers from year to year - If you reuse containers like this you really should wash them thoroughly in a weak bleach solution and dry them in the sun before storing them away for reuse. Or so I’ve heard – I might try that some day.

just planted flat

This year I’m planting in commercial soil mix, because I just don’t have any compost that is ready right now to make into home made potting soil. Anyway, fill your containers with soil and plant your seeds at the recommended depth. Most of what I planted today is in the cabbage family, and needs to be about 1/2 inch deep. I just use a finger to poke holes about that deep, drop 2-3 seeds into each one and then sprinkle with more soil to cover. I’m using pretty small divisions – 72 plants per tray – because I plan to plant out these cold season plants under row covers or in the greenhouse as soon as they are big enough to handle. If I thought that I would have to hold them for a while I would probably start them in larger divisions to begin with.

BTW, I am also test germinating some seeds that I saved last year – by planting 10 seeds per container to see how many come up. Assuming that some of them germinate I can just multiply the number of seedlings by 10 to get the success rate as a percentage. Other than using 10 seeds per container they are done exactly the same way as everything else.

Using a spray bottle to water the planted trays gives good control.

I’ve found that the least messy way for me to water trays is by misting with a spray bottle – every other method that I’ve used results in muddy water running everywhere and only a little soaking in. Check soil moisture every day until you’re sure that it has stabilized where you want it – moist, but not dripping wet.

Note that you need to label your trays – I use recycled pieces of plastic mini blinds.

A plastic seed starting chamber like this is very handy, but not absolutely required. You will have to remove it soon after your plants emerge, but until then it helps to keep the soil evenly moist and the air warm and humid. If you don't have one of these just lay a sheet of plastic right on top until you see plants starting to emerge.

Then cover with one of these plastic domes if you have one. If you don’t have one of these you can simply drape a piece of saran wrap over the tray, but if you do that you will have to remove it as soon as you see plants emerging from the soil. The cover holds the moisture in so that you shouldn’t have to water again until it’s removed.

My simple grow light setup uses regular 4' shop lights and bulbs - not expensive "grow" lights.

I use plain old 40 watt flourescent shop lights to start my plants indoors and it works great. As you can see the fixtures are just sitting on top of props that I have made out of one by six scraps, but you can use whatever you have. You want the lights to be as close to the plant trays as is practical or your plants will grow tall and leggy. Now that compact florescent lights are widely available you could also use those in any lamp fixture that you have. You can easily get CFLs which are equivalent to a 100 watt incandescent light – should be great for a smaller operation.

Last year I built a very simple bottom heat system which has made a tremendous improvement in my success rate for starting all kinds of seeds. If you don’t have bottom heat, then try to keep the soil as warm as possible 24 hours a day. On top of a refrigerator or an upright freezer is a good place or on a shelf right over your water heater or a heat appliance. The regular average room temperature of your house is probably not warm enough for best results. The lights also won’t really work to keep the soil warm because they won’t be on 24 hours a day. If you look at this planting soil temperature chart you will see that most plants want the soil temp to be around 80 degrees Fahrenheit for best germination. If at all possible use some form of bottom heat.

A simple analog light timer is all y0u need for starting your own plants, but you need one that is big enough to handle the load of all of the lights that you are going to plug into it.

For good results you must have a timer to control your lights. Erratic lighting or 24 hour day lengths will be bad for many plants. Be sure that you use a timer which is rated high enough for the total wattage of lights that you will be using. Set the on period to correspond with or extend the actual daylight hours – in other words don’t try to have your plants day and night be opposite of the real day and night otherwise ambient light will interrupt their sleep just like it would yours. I set mine to go on at sunrise and off at about 8 PM. I currently have the day length set for about 13 1/2 hours, but when I start planting tomatoes and peppers in a few weeks I will increase that to about 16 hours of light per day.

Once I start this process every winter I love to get out in the plant room to visit and check on my plants. The warm moist air and the smell of clean soil and growing things along with the sun light coming through the windows really takes the edge off of winter for me. That and a cup of coffee is a great way to start the day. Round up some seeds and soil, and see if it doesn’t lift your spirits as well.

My humble plant work room. Really just a small well insulated room on the side of my garage with 4 windows, and a concrete floor that I don't have to worry about getting dirty. The light bench is sitting on top of 5 steel barrels full of water for thermal mass which help to moderate the temperature. You can see the rope light that powers my bottom heat there at the lower right. On the far end of the bench I have just enough counter space to pot things up. I love it.

Honey Bee Queen Rearing

2010-02-05T01:58:35Z

This post is probably not going to be very interesting unless you keep honey bees – Or want to become a bee keeper. Sorry about that, but there will be more gardening content coming soon.

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.

The Ultimate When to Plant Guide

2010-02-01T19:56:56Z

Pay attention. This may be the most valuable tidbit of gardening wisdom anyone ever hands you. Of course it also might not be.

When to plant – every seed packet you pick up has a little map on the back with 4 or 5 colored zones and planting dates for each zone. Or they have cryptic advice like “whenever soil can be worked”, “after soil has thoroughly warmed”, or “after all danger of frost.” Forget all that. Plant when the soil is the right temperature. Period. Depending upon how sheltered your garden is, or if it has shade in the morning or afternoon – or if it is in a greenhouse or cold frame – those dates are just about meaningless. But, the soil temperature will almost never lead you astray because the ground temperature changes slowly – it is slow to warm up in the spring, and slow to cool off in the fall. Not wildly swinging with every warm or cold front.

Seed Germination time in days at different temperatures

degrees F	32	41	50	59	68	77	86	95	104
parsnips	172	57	27	20	14	15	32
onion	136	50	13	7	5	4	4	13
spinach	62.6	23	12	7	6	5	6
lettuce	49	15	7	4	3	2	3
cabbage		51	17	10	7	6	6	9
carrots		50	17	10	7	6	6	9
celery		41	16	12	7
peas		36	14	9	8	6	6
radishes		29	11	6	4	4	4	3
asparagus			52	24	14	10	11	19	28
tomatoes			43	14	8	6	6	9
parsley			29	17	14	13	12
sweet corn			21.6	12	7	4	4	3
cauliflower			19	9	6	5	5
beets			14	9	6	5	6
turnips			5	3	2	1	1	1	3
lima beans				30	17	6	7
okra				27	17	12	7	6	7
peppers				25	13	8	8	9
snap beans				16	11	8	6	6
cucumbers, summer and winter squash				13	6	4	3	5
eggplant					13	8	5
watermelon					12	5	4	3
muskmellon					8	4	3

As a general rule seeds that can germinate at a lower temperature are also more resistant to rot.

If you study this table you will begin to understand why those melons never came up – too cool/wet and they rot, too warm – they just never germinate. You will also understand what “as soon as soil can be worked” means – a lot of things can be planted in 41 degree soil (or colder) and will just take a long time to come up unless the soil warms first like in the spring time – in which case they spring up quicker. You can also understand this – if it will germinate in very cold soil then the plant will probably tolerate some cold spring (or even winter) weather. So – onions, lettuce, spinach, and those which will germinate at 32 degrees can be planted any time after the weather cools down in the fall and they will basically come up when the time is right and be fine – especially if they are sheltered in a cold frame.

If you are starting seeds indoors you can see why it’s so hard to get tomatoes to come up in that sunny (but cold at night) window – those little plugs of soil do cool off quickly unlike the soil in your garden. Those tomatoes, peppers and other warm season tropical plants will get off to a galloping start if you can consistently keep them a bit warmer – like with home made bottom heat made from rope lights.

On the other end of the chart – when it is too hot for the seeds to germinate, most plants start to stress or die from heat, especially if they aren’t kept watered. So those cool season crops need to be planted when it is cold so that they can make a crop before it gets too hot. Warm season crops will do great if you plant them when the soil is just barely (or almost) warm enough, and then cover them with a fabric or plastic row cover or cold frame. Cucumbers really will come up in 3 days if you do this.

BTW, one of those digital kitchen thermometers works great for checking soil temp. If you don’t already have a cold frame then cut the bottom off of a 2 liter coke bottle and leave it in the garden pushed into the ground like you were covering a plant with it – check the temp under that in a day or two, and you will want to get a cold frame. Of course you can also cover your seeds with the bottom of a 2 liter bottle (or plastic milk jug) until they come up.

If you take this one thing seriously and plant your garden as early as possible, but when the soil is warm enough you’re gardening prowess will leap forward by the equivalent of 20 years of experience. I sure wish someone had handed this to me 20 years ago!

Need planting information for something that isn’t on the chart? Search using this customized Google search engine. Try searching for – zucchini soil temperature – for example.

Gardening Search Engine – all results are from top US Agricultural Universities.

Greenhouse Collapse!

2010-01-31T00:02:24Z

If you’re thinking about building a greenhouse here’s an opportunity to learn from my misfortune.

This is bad.

Only 3 inches of ice and snow did this to my hoop-house.

I think I’ve discovered a design flaw in my 50 dollar greenhouse.

Fortunately After removing the snow from my collapse greenhouse it's almost as good as new. But, I think I can prevent this from happening again.

This isn’t a great thing to find on a winters morning, but on the other hand a minor fail like this is just the thing to help improve a design. Fortunately I got the snow off of it before any real damage was done – this time. If I didn’t live in the (usually) sunny south it wouldn’t have taken me over a year to discover this design flaw. So – to anyone who’s been inspired by this blog to build a greenhouse… Sorry about that.

Here’s the thing – as long as rain or snow runs off and doesn’t accumulate which it usually doesn’t – all is well. It’s even OK for a little bit of snow to accumulate on top, because it just falls right off of the steep sides, and no harm is done. But once the peak starts to sag then it doesn’t run off like it needs to, and it can build up more weight making it sag even more, which allows more to collect, more weight, more sag… Until you get an ugly surprise.

So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to run a 2×6 ridge pole right down the middle at the peak of the greenhouse so that the snow (or rain) should slide off before it builds up enough weight to do this again. I hope.

I will also have to beef up the end frames a little bit to accomodate the extra weight of the 2×6 and of any snow that does accumulate on top. If I were starting over I would probably either:

Use more ribs and put them closer together
Use larger pipe for the ribs – probably 1 1/2″ PVC conduit.
Both.

BTW, there are many hoop houses in my area and in areas that get lots more snow that work fine and don’t collapse when it snows or when the wind blows – including a HUGE commercial operation about 10 miles away that grows hydroponic lettuce year round. My design just needs a little refinement.

For example:

Ontario Canada

If you never fail it’s probably because you never do anything.

As soon as I can I’ll post pictures of the improvements.