types of smoker fuels used

Beekeeping & Apiculture Forum

Help Support Beekeeping & Apiculture Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
My bees are on another site so I use pet wood shavings and a bit of newspaper for convenience. Have tried all sorts but this is easiest to carry around.
 
Rotten wood picked up dog walking. Free and produces a cool smoke. I usually top this up with herbs...Lavender,bay,rosemary...whatever I have growing.
 
Rotten wood picked up dog walking. Free and produces a cool smoke. I usually top this up with herbs...Lavender,bay,rosemary...whatever I have growing.

You using the smoke to calm the bees or cook them. lol

Sounds like your having a bbq with all those herbs, bet the bees smell nice after. if it goes wrong would be a nice honey, herb smoked bee.

Oh btw i just use rolled up empty egg boxes. not sure if they are good but i get lots free due to cooking at work.
 
When I use smoke it is oak shavings as my mate is a cabinet maker -free fuel by the sackful.
 
I've been using the thornes big bag of cedar shavings, it's actually quite good, and has lasted me all season and probably enough for next year.
 
loo roll inners and a lump of pine wood. Cardboard easy to light, packed tight burns for a while, and so does the lump of wood once it's going (I don't use the dead crumbly stuff)
 
I stash away bits of rotten wood when I find them, break them up when they're dry and use the bits for smoker fuel. Sycamore is something of a favourite. Once it's fallen or been cut it only has to look at damp soil to start rotting.

James
 
hessian sack is favourite fuel, but have been known to use egg-trays if only inspecting one colony
 
Walking the dogs, and the wife was with me, LOL, I found a massive tree keeled over it seems naturally and truly rotten.

I harvested a carrier bag of inner rotten wood, which I can only describe as completely rotten, dry and holding shape. I canna find better words for it.

Wonderful fuel. Cool pale blue smoke, and one chunk lasted me all the active season. Which in it's self says how little smoke I have needed this season.

Thanks Murray.

PH
 
Hi

I use wood shavings, egg boxes, straw, newspaper and bits of wood lying around the woods. I had read somewhere about mixing it with herbs and had also read that we shouldn't smoke our bees too much as it confuses them gets mixed with the all important pheramones of the hive, which take a while to build up again. I smoke when necessary going into the hives but try to do it sparingly. You can buy little vegetable blocks I hear for the smoker around £3.40 for 100 but I think the smell is sickly sweet and would prefer the smell of smoke from wood/paper/straw etc. Hope this helps.
 
Tried lots of things to get that perfect cool smoke - going to try puff balls next year - see article

What shall I put in my smoker?
The Puffball (taken from Curiosities of Beekeeping by L.R.Croft)
The Rev. W.C.Cotton (born1814) founded while a student at Oxford, the “Oxford Apiarian Society.” This was an attempt to save the lives of bees that might otherwise have been killed by sulphuring. To achieve this end, Cotton advocated the use of the puffball fungus to stupefy the bees when taking the honey harvest. He wrote:-
The fungus does them no harm: It makes them drunk, which is good for the bees, though bad for men, as they get well in 20 minutes and are all the merrier afterwards.
The BBJ of November 1942 informs us that the use of the puffball (Galvatia gigantia) was still in use in West Sussex and that beekeepers in the Godalming district occasionally employ smouldering Polyporus betulinus and Doedolea quercina to anaesthetize bee colonies. The same journal informed its readers in July 1949 that beekeepers on the Yorkshire moors still use the puffball, however many of them are very secretive about it. In more recent times a firm in Timaru, New Zealand , is reported to use the puffball to anaesthetize bees during queen rearing.
In a study of anaesthesia of honeybees by smoke from puffballs, W.F.Woods reporting in J.Api. Res., (1983) found that the smoke from burning human hair had a similar effect to that produced by the puffball. This he attributed to the presence of hydrogen sulphide in the smoke.
The Rev. John Thorley 1671-1759 (extract from Great Masters of Beekeeping by Ron Brown)
…..”His secret was the use of smoke from a dried fungus, used as a narcotic to calm, and even anaesthetize a hive of bees. Variously called ‘frog cheese’, ‘pug foist,’ ‘puck,’ or just ‘giant fungus’ (today more commonly called ‘puff-ball), he describes how he obtained them (as large as a man’s head sometimes) from shepherds and farm workers. When fresh they could be sliced and cooked something like mushooms but on drying in summer or in a slow oven the fungus went brown and finally consisted of a fine powder in a tough outer skin. He describes taking a piece the size of a hen’s egg on a stick and holding it smouldering slowly under a skep of bees so that the smoke and fumes went up into the colony (no purpose made smoker in those days). In a minute the bees would drop off the comb like hail, into an empty skep, and wake up apparently none the worse an hour or two later. He used this technique to harvest honeycombs from skeps and box hives (instead of killing the bees with sulphur), and to unite two or three stocks with no fighting. He would also examine the bees, identify the queen (usually the last to fall down), even count and weigh them to arrive at the number in a swarm or weighing one pound. An illustration in his book shows him seated at the study table making a detailed examination of a number of anaesthetized bees. (Some years ago I found two or three of these fungi, the size of a mans head, dried them all summer in the greenhouse and successfully used a small piece of the brown matter wrapped in hessian in my smoker, to control the occasional colony of very aggressive bees. I have hesitated to speak much about this, for fear that young people might wish to experiment with it, as a narcotic drug, on themselves).”
Editor’s comment. I have asked a learned mycologist about the dangers regarding puffballs and I was looked at in amazement. It is not likely to be effective on humans—we don’t really know how or why it works on bees but if Ron Brown says it works on very aggressive bees it might be worth drying some to have in an emergency, just in case one should come across a nasty colony on a bad day.
 
My Carniolans react very oddly to smoke, usually falling asleep on me or an assistant en mass when I use smoke. When they are arsey anything natural-
Wood shavings, rotten wood pine cone or needles
 
Back
Top