Expansion by locals wanted...

[qa33010]

    ...this includes my wife.   This may not be rapid for some of you, but for an old cripple like me this is a lot.

I started with a feral colony last year July and have two Russians from this year's packages as well as an inherited two colonies of 'Midnites'  a few weeks ago. 

    My wife is finding farmers and local small landowners that want bees on their land.  She would like me to double (split) what we have and buy at least three more packages (possible six packages with three queens) and look at requeening next fall for future splits and breeding strong productive calm, yet protective stock in a couple years.  After talking with her and the kids I agreed and they agreed to be more active in helping, including taking courses.

My question is this.  Is it better to have a queen available or let the new split grow their own?  I know that it takes time and if openly bred that the queen can be lost or lack proper breeding.   

[Robo]

My question is this.  Is it better to have a queen available or let the new split grow their own?  I know that it takes time and if openly bred that the queen can be lost or lack proper breeding.   

BY letting the new split raise their own queen,  you are setting them back close to a month before they start raising brood, and then almost another month before the brood starts to hatch and replenish/grow the hive.

Providing them with a mated queen is best if you can.

[Michael Bush]

If your goal is to get a lot of hives, you need to give them a queen.  If your goal is to get local stock, you need to raise them.

The underlying concept of queen rearing is to get the most number of queens from the least resources.

To illustrate that let's examine the extremes. If we make a strong hive queenless. They could have, during that 28 days (by the time she is bred and laying) of having no laying queen, reared a full turnover of brood. The queen could have been laying several thousand eggs a day and a strong hive could easily rear those several thousand brood. Then we have lost the potential for about 30,000 or more workers by making this hive queenless and resulted in only one queen. And, actually, this hive made many queen cells, but they were all destroyed by the first queen out.

If we made a small nuc we would only have a couple of thousand queenless bees rearing several queen cells and those couple of thousand bees could only have reared a few hundred workers in that time. But again they made several queen cells and the results were only one queen.

In most queen rearing scenarios we are making the least number of bees queenless for the least amount of time and resulting in the most number of laying queens when we are done.

http://www.bushfarms.com/beesqueenrearing.htm

[Brian D. Bray]

To continue:
If you want the optimum nuimber of queens with the least amount of queenless bees you need to do either or both of Cramming as many queen cells in to a specific area as possible and gather queens by anticipated hatch date. 
Setting up a nuc with several queen cells on each frame and then splitting those frames out to new nucs as the queens reach hatching age is one of the easier ways of raising queens.  It is also why a lot of two frame Nucs are used in the process.
Read MB's articles and other books on the subject and plan thoroughly before jumping off the cliff.

[qa33010]

   Yeah, I do have a lot to study before I plunge in.  I have some info that Jay Smith wrote and am looking for other info.  A stupid question.  When you're done breeding and raising queens what do you do with the queenless bees in the nucs or hives?  Do you do a paper combine back to a strong/weak queen-right hive, shake 'em out and leave them, let them die off or what?  Thanks for the information so far.

Or should this question be in the queen section?

David

[Finsky]

Best way to enlarge yard is to raise big hives and then make nucs from them after yield. Beginners are eager to split their hives and then they loose the teaching how to manage productive hive.

PIC: Here is my best hive just before main flow. It brought over 400 lbs honey. Of coure you may split it into 5 parts but then you get not honey. After yield you may do same trick. But I recommend only mated selceted queen to beginners. To play with swarming or natural stock will be quite a disaster - if you want honey to sell and want to earn. You cannot get 400 lbs from feral stock. They need is to swarm when hive is big enough. Feral bees protect their hives and reproduce via swarming. That is their natural course of life. It match not with  beekeeping business.

Local bees? Really strange word.  German black, Carniolan, Italian, African, Russian .....

To me local means that bee stock have instinct by which they react goon in year cycle.  Life will be very limited if you are going to have "local" bees. And how you keep them clean from nasty habits.

[Michael Bush]

>   Yeah, I do have a lot to study before I plunge in.  I have some info that Jay Smith wrote and am looking for other info.

Here's Jay Smith's last book on queen rearing:
http://www.bushfarms.com/beesbetterqueens.htm

>  A stupid question.  When you're done breeding and raising queens what do you do with the queenless bees in the nucs or hives?  Do you do a paper combine back to a strong/weak queen-right hive, shake 'em out and leave them, let them die off or what?

I use all mediums for my hives and for my queen rearing.  My mating nucs are two frame medium boxes that take standard frames:

http://www.bushfarms.com/beesnucs.htm

So at the end of the queen rearing season, I just keep selling queens and as the nucs become queenless I combine them with queen right nucs.  This year by the end of everything I had 13 five frame nucs with queens that I'm going to overwinter.  If I wanted to I could  have sold all but one of those queens and combined them into one hive, or combined them with other hives.

Some people use mini mating nucs and shake those bees into the other hives (or in front of them) and then put the combs away until next year.  My problem is those combs are often full of brood.

>Or should this question be in the queen section?

Probably.

[Cindi]

Finsky, I am still astounded that one hive can bring in 400 pounds of honey, I remember you said that your honeyflow was only 3 weeks long.  How is it possible?  I also remember something about you had boxes over 4 high, correct, I am too lazy right now to look up previous posts.  I gathered probably 300 pounds of honey from my 10 hives, that reduced down to 5 due to varroa illness.  Great day, Cindi

[Finsky]

Finsky, I am still astounded that one hive can bring in 400 pounds of honey, I remember you said that your honeyflow was only 3 weeks long. 

This case was 2 summers ago.  I feeded my hives with pollen patty and warmed with terrarium heaters. That is why my best hive got 140 lbs honey in June.  Then I brought hive to fireweed fields and it got there the rest of yield.

Normally our yield period is 3 weeks, but sometimes more. Last summer it was 6 weeks.  That means that my hives must be ready to hit when  time is evident.

 

I also remember something about you had boxes over 4 high, correct, I am too lazy right now to look up previous posts.  I gathered probably 300 pounds of honey from my 10 hives, that reduced down to 5 due to varroa illness.  Great day, Cindi

  I have had varroa 20 years. It is not problem at all. It doest not restrict my hive size or yield.

When main yield begins hives must be 6 boxes high. If not, I put together weak hives. 

4 box hive is not able to gather yield from canola. It will be stuck during one week.   I work 100 miles away my hives and I cannot watch them all the time.


When I started my beekeeping I bought swarms. Then I noticed that minimun hive, which is able to handle brood and honey at same time is 2 langstroth boxes. It is  8 lbs bees.

The secret of  6 box hive or two 4 box hive is that in main yield  two hives have more brood and less foragers.  When you put two together, they have one hive brood and two hive foragers.

In our pastures hive may bring honey 15 labs per day. It needs only good pastures and not too much hives in same place.

Our bees fly 8-6 hours per day. Morning and evenings are cold and they do not fly all the time.

[Cindi]

Finksy, I must listen to your words and learn.  It sounds like something good is going on in your country with how you handle your bees. I am going to listen and learn.  Our bees begin flying easily in April and continue on until end of October.  Our bees have the capability to fly from 8:00 AM in summer (or even earlier on warmer days) until about 8 to 9:00 at night.  That is quite a long time to be out working.  Of course earlier summer and later summer the length is not so long.  But, now I wonder, maybe our girls here have it so good with the flying conditions that they do know they have more time, yours "know" that their nectar and honeyflow are restricted to a shorter time, so they work  so darn hard.  I will keep listen and learning, thank you for all your gracious input.  Great day.  Cindi