Best way to add colonies?

[Finman]

.

If you have nerves to wait, it comes (at least here) a period when mai n yield is almost finnish but the hive makes brood with full speed. When these bees later emerge, they cannot forage and they do not see the winter.

Now You may devide the hive into two strong parts. When you have allready a nuc with good queen, both parts lay a box full of larvae. Summer continues and you get good colonies.

It depends what are your pastures and when is the time to do that trick.
I have pastures where main yield meets the end very suddenly and pastures where continuous pollen flow keeps brooding on. From these I get one box winterers or two box winterers.

Here August is such a month when bees do not get any more surplus but they rear all winter bees. During August the hive size drops from 6-7 box to 1-2 box.

Our yield flowers are very stable with their schedule. Summer is short and there is not much time to speed up or slow down blooming.
Red clower is only plant to where human has influence in late Summer. Now red clover is very popular and it blooms in late Summer if it has been cutted in midd Summer.

Forage balls made possible to cultivate clovers. In dry hay clover is fragile and it will be crusched to the ground.

 

[drstitson]

"a "standard" nuc hasn't got the strength to make a Q worth having"

sure - unless the nuc is made using a sealed queen cell from a strong hive.

 

[sugarbush]

Nothing to do genetics, but that size of nuc is not able to rear normal size queen. It is often not bigger than a worker. And mostly emercegy queen are not valid in honey production. Almost all queen larvae have not enough food. There is missing that brown stuff = extra food.

Finman: You better notify the several dozen commercial beekeepers here in the US who make their living producing nucs by the 1000s using walkaway splits... Mike Palmer for example would surely want to know that a practice he has been using for 30 plus years is going to destroy his livelyhood.

 

[Skyhook]

When the nuc has a capped brood farme When the new queen has layed a full frame and it is capped

give it to the big hive Remove said capped frame to another hive where the capped brood are able to pupate without losses

take from it again a frame of emerging bees Swap above frame for a frame of emerging brood.

The upshot is that the nuc gets emerging brood best part of a fortnight before it would, if it had needed to wait for it's capped brood to emerge. OK?

RAB

Thanks RAB, not a procedure I've come across before but I get it now. Would you use this in other situations, eg trying to expand a nuc quickly to fill a BB?

 

[susbees]

.

Wow...that's some winter wrapping Finman!
[Joke ]

 

[Finman]

Finman: You better notify the several dozen commercial beekeepers here in the US who make their living producing nucs by the 1000s using walkaway splits... Mike Palmer for example would surely want to know that a practice he has been using for 30 plus years is going to destroy his livelyhood.

But I have read too how to rear good queens, and they are not grown in 3 frame emergency nucs.

Commercial beekeepers make odd things.

Like two guys here said:" We have hives in 10 hive units. We have 15 minutes time to handle this unit. We look one hive and do the same trick to all".

I visited to commerial beekeeper to buy stuff.
- I said: " I have 20 hives and I have not time to go them through at at weekend. I must take now a free day from job"

- 3000 hive owner said: "Oh boy. We went 450 hives through today. 2 guys are in extracting room and 3 guys handled hives. We did not even speak to each other. We were busy."

But However. Even if your million beekeepers make queen with emercengy system, I do not want those bugs.
Walk away bugs - well...
.

 

[sugarbush]

But I have read too how to rear good queens, and they are not grown in 3 frame emergency nucs.

Reading about it and doing it are two different things. One of the problems I have with US Apiculture is that it is narrow minded. There is more than one way to skin a cat.

Just because you disagree with a method based on what you have read, doesn't make you right... The attitude you express with almost everything you post is what got you banned from the American Beekeeping Forum. You catch more flys with honey... Try being less critical of other people's methods. I understand that your English is poor and maybe some of the attitude expressed in your posts is related to the language barrier, I have given you the benefit of the doubt for many years now.

 

[Finman]

Reading about it and doing it are two different things. One of the problems I have with US Apiculture is that it is narrow minded. There is more than one way to skin a cat.

Just because you disagree with a method based on what you have read, doesn't make you right... The attitude you express with almost everything you post is what got you banned from the American Beekeeping Forum. You catch more flys with honey... Try being less critical of other people's methods. I understand that your English is poor and maybe some of the attitude expressed in your posts is related to the language barrier, I have given you the benefit of the doubt for many years now.[/

Blaa blaa. Don´t teach duck to swim. I have nursed bees this 50 years. I have enough experience and knowledge to say what is worth doing.


I have seen hundreds 3 frame nuc queens what they have reared. Nonsense.

If you ban me you ban, but don´t cry there
.

 

[victor meldrew]

The attitude you express with almost everything you post is what got you banned from the American Beekeeping Forum.now.

Whoa! This isn't the American Beekeeping forum !!
Mixed with loads of practical knowledge , finmans posts often display more than a little irony .
All in all he is more than welcome here
VM

 

[Luminos]

Whoa! This isn't the American Beekeeping forum !!
Mixed with loads of practical knowledge , finmans posts often display more than a little irony .
All in all he is more than welcome here
VM

 

[Monsieur Abeille]

Blaa blaa. Don´t teach duck to swim.

Mixed with loads of practical knowledge , finmans posts often display more than a little irony .

and quite a bit of "raw" humour

 

[Bob Bee]

Whoa! This isn't the American Beekeeping forum !!
Mixed with loads of practical knowledge , finmans posts often display more than a little irony .
All in all he is more than welcome here
VM

too

 

[Finman]

Thanks Pals! I did not expected that!

 

[johnandyrob]

Iv had some great advise of Finman and some great links that have helped me allot. The difference of opinion my come from what works in the U.S may not work in Europe.

 

[Finman]

Iv had some great advise of Finman and some great links that have helped me allot. The difference of opinion my come from what works in the U.S may not work in Europe.

USA and its forums have one big difference. Much opinions come from Florida, Texas, California... In Europe level it means altutude of North Africa.

Summers are long. Winter temps are often +20C. Hives and nucs have time to grow.

I live on same altitude as Alaska. Helsinki and Anchorage are at same level 60 degree. Alaska beeks often kill their hives in Autumn and they buy new bees in April. They use same hives as in Florida. Reason is that the whole USA uses same beekeeping methods.

Insulation issues are unknown. Some uses 60 kg winter food. I manage with average 20 kg in long winter.

I have for example written that US beekeepers never write about "queen rearing of local stocks", which are adapted to different latitudes.

Southern bee business rules the whole country.
.

 

[oliver90owner]

Skyhook,

Thanks RAB, not a procedure I've come across before but I get it now. Would you use this in other situations, eg trying to expand a nuc quickly to fill a BB?

This was translation of Finman's previous post, but if I was in a hurry, yes I would reinforce a nuc like that. I do it regularly for spring expansion with stocks, if I have three weeks to spare (otherwise I might just transfer foraging bees to other sites - easy enough to do, when you actually think about it).

For instance if you were moving two of your colonies to OSR, there is no reason why you should not temporarily weaken the other colony, to ensure the production stocks were really strong to get the surplus - three weeks before (for emerging brood transfers) or at the time of need (for foragers).

Two really strong colonies (and effectively an expanding nuc, perhaps) are likely better than three average ones. It really depends on how intensive you wish to be. Commercial operators do it all the time, I assume.

I would usually pile in enough nurse bees to a nuc that they were well provisioned, population wise, and make my nucs early enough to avoid wasp attack. But if needed it is a standard way to increase quickly, given you have colonies which can afford to lose emerging brood for a fortnight.

I am not needing to do these tricks too often as I am a simple hobby beekeeper, and am not in any great hurry to advance nucs (I only knock them up for replacement queen operations, really). If I was relying on bees for an income, it would be a different situation altogether.

Think about some of the less-than-ideal nuc-supplying merchants; bees, brood and queen into nuc today, sold tomorrow. There are several ways of moving things along, some acceptable and some very short term tricks of the trade.

RAB

 

[Finman]

.
What is the idea of moving capped combs and emerging combs

(When you add bees with moving emerging brood and shake the old bees off, nothing will happen to foreign queen.)

When I have extra queens and I want to build them to profilic hive, I do not want however spoil my best hives before main yield. Summer is short here.

When I make a 3 frame nuc, it needs a frame of emerging bees. New born bees do not return to their original home. The queen is able to lay one comb or two. I add bees I it needs.

But queen lays a small hive full in one week. It is not able lay any more and it must wait that new workers emerge. It takes 2-3 weeks and then it may lay 2 frames because one frame must have food and pollen.

If you take a capped brood comb to the big hive and incubate it there, during 4 weeks you get 4-6 frames of brood from nuc queen. From this you get a whole box full of bees. = from 3 frames to 10 frame hive in one month. Is that fast enough?

A big hive has losses but after 2 weeks it start to get new nuc bees..

The idea is that the byed queen makes brood much more with the aid of big hive and a big hive doe not loose its foraging power much and it need not feed the extra larvae.

*** When the whole box is full of bees, it takes care itself. Only you take care that move extra food to big hive that the nuc has maximum space to rear brood.

*** when the nuc is small and it has few foragers, take care that they have pollen store all the time to be used.

.

 

[sugarbush]

I was trying to coach him a little so maybe the next time he signs up he doesn't get kicked out for the 4th time or 5th; I lost count.

I have read a lot of what he has posted for a very long time, and he often makes good points and shares valuable information, but it is wasted on the fact that he is hot headed and stubborn so people write off what he has to say frequently because they don't want to read the garbage. If he finessed his approach a little he might actually impart some of his knowledge to the greater beekeeping world.

Finman as you know the Walkaway split is a method developed by Mike Palmer and other Northern New England Beekeepers. While we do not have reindeer roaming around in this part of the country it does get quite cold.

One point you seem to be missing is that a walkaway split is done with a 5 frame Nuc...

Now I agree that there are better and more complicated ways to split hives, but a Walkaway will get the job done in it's simplest form. Simple is useful; if you look back to the second post, nobody had a clue what you were talking about, which is why you had to elaborate on it.

 

[mbc]

Southern bee business rules the whole country.
.

Interestingly, all I've read about walk away splits has been written by Northern States beekeepers, Charles Mraz and Michael Palmer primarily, and these two beekeepers seem to me to be extremely knowledgeable, practical and pragmatic, not the sort to ignore substandard queens. Admittedly these arent talking about leaving a three frame nuc raise its own queen, if I remember correctly, both advocate leaving two strong halves, i.e. a full langstroth brood box, the queenless half to raise its own queen ( doing this to most healthy productive hives, thus preserving a varied gene pool).
I think, more than the scrub queen theory, the reason I wouldnt try it in Wales is that it can take three weeks for a virgin to mate, whereas American beekeepers take it for granted ( almost! ) that their virgins will mate around four days after emergence.

 

[Poly Hive]

A major difference is we are a wet climate and the continental USA and Europe are dry.

Makes a huge odds.

PH