Beemaster's International Beekeeping Forum
BEEKEEPING LEARNING CENTER => RAPID BEEYARD GROWTH => Topic started by: Spear on May 04, 2014, 02:26:45 am
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When I 1st was going to start with beekeeping I was planing on starting out slowly with 2 or 3 hives. However as I have mentioned before I now have 12 hives - 2 bought from a beek from the club and 10 from the widow of an old beek who died suddenly. This was in August last year (2013).
1 of the 10 didn't make it through the winter but I made up for that loss easily by splitting one of the other hives. 2 of my hives have swarmed and I lost those swarms as I was not prepared for them. I had one of my hives do 'boomerang' swarm so I quickly put out 2 swarm traps. Yesterday I noticed a lot of activity around the 1 swarm trap. Then I looked closer at the 2nd trap and there were loads of bees around that one to so it looks like I have caught 2 swarms! Now my step father wants to go and buy 10 more empty hives for me so I can expend my apiary even more rapidly than I was expecting!
Should I get some nuc boxes and try over wintering them so I can sell them next year? I'm trying to prove to my step father that I can make a profitable business of the bees and not just from the honey but from the bees themselves - Nucs, queen breeding, pollen and propolis.
(http://i1315.photobucket.com/albums/t596/Tracy_Spear/Photo0113_zpsaba5b34e.jpg) (http://s1315.photobucket.com/user/Tracy_Spear/media/Photo0113_zpsaba5b34e.jpg.html)
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It is still spring, why not build them into hives and then split them in the spring. I do not know what your flows are like but if you have more coming, that is what I would do.
Jim
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Watching this video will show you the best way to over winter nucs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nznzpiWEI8A (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nznzpiWEI8A)
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MP still overwinters his nucs on like 12 frames 3-4 brood then the rest bee feed.