Backyard Beekeeper by Kim Flottum

Author:Kim Flottum
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Rockport Publishers
Published: 2005-03-26T16:00:00+00:00

Shown is a cross section through an old comb. Note the layers of cocoon, propolis, and gunk. This comb should be replaced.

If spring has been late, or if good weather has come in spits and spurts, your colony won’t build as fast as an established colony in the same place during the same time. Keep feeding your colony as long as they are taking any of the sugar syrup. They may take it for a few days when it’s cool, and then stop when the weather warms, plants are blooming, and the bees can fly.

Sugar syrup may develop a black mold in the pail when the bees don’t eat it for a couple of days, or it may actually ferment if the weather is warm. A good rule of thumb is, if the look or the smell of the syrup is such that you wouldn’t drink it, don’t give it to your bees. Sugar syrup is an inexpensive and easy way to ensure your bees don’t run into the stress of a food shortage, even for a single day.

You don’t want the queen wandering up into these brand-new honey supers to lay eggs and thus darken the honeycombs, so you need to provide a barrier. There are lots of management tricks you can try, but by far the easiest is to place a queen excluder between the top brood box and the honey super(s) above it. When the top brood super starts filling, move a frame (or two or three) with some honey (and no brood) into the super you are going to use for honey. What you are doing is laying some ground rules for management. Above the queen excluder—only honey. Below—honey, pollen, and brood.

The frames with even a little honey above the queen excluder send a message to the food-storer bees that this is an acceptable place for nectar and honey to be stored. Given all this room, and the open invitation to store the food, the food storers will (almost always) begin moving honey up, leaving the three broodnest boxes for mostly brood, pollen, and a little honey.

In the warmer regions, this activity is going strong by early spring (by early summer in the coldest areas), so be prepared ahead of time with the right equipment.

Once you’ve decided that your colony is growing at an acceptable rate (recall the brood ratios of 1:2:4), the queen is doing well, food is coming in at a pretty steady rate, the weather has calmed down, and available room for incoming nectar storage is running low (all frames have some comb and none are empty), you can consider adding additional supers for surplus honey storage.

At this point, the sugar syrup feeder has served its purpose and can be removed. If you don’t remove it, some syrup may be taken by the bees and stored in the honey super. This isn’t a critical mistake, but some of the honey you harvest will be sugar syrup, not floral nectar.

You can’t have this happen if you are selling honey, but the bees don’t care one bit.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.