Year end totals

[hedgerow pete]

these are my year end results what are yours?
hives
hive 1 , nuc brought june 2009 no surples stores ,strong
hive 2, nuc brought june 2009 no surples stores ,strong
hive 3, nuc brought june 2009 no surples stores ,week
hive 4, used for breeding 25 queens 14 good 11 killed off ,very strong, 20 kg honey, 18kg wax,500gm propolis
hive 5 , breed 20 queens18 good 2 killed, very strong , 80kg honey 16kg wax ,750gms propolis.
hive 6 , very strong stock, 137 kg honey ,21kg wax, 1.2kg propolis.
hive 7, queen breeders 25, all killed 89kg honey , 15kg wax. 2kg propolis
hive 8, no queens 146kg honey .12kg wax, 1kg propolis
hive 9, no queens, 101kg honey.16 kg wax,1kg propolis,1kg queen substance( waste of time )

i have now rasied 32 nucs for next years planned foray into semi proffesional bee keeping. and i have helped the other two partners to raise thier queens, we have between us set up four out apairies two holding at the moment 149 nucs all strong enough to over winter, all nucs are thermaly wrapped up to retain heat and can be feed syrup from outside with out lifting there lids, we have also made all the hive stands and paths and security systems are in place and working , i have also constructed 1/3 of the hive boxs and a second bee shed this one hold 25 hives

out lays
timber £1267
jars £211
new /replacement equipment , veils suits smokers ect £179.50
concrete blocks and concrete for bases was free, but did have to buy three wheel barrows £75
wood chippins 48 loads at £10 total £480 carpet under lay free from carpet world
petrol £459
new honey extractor parts ( home construted ) £169
security sytems total £691, plus ongoing internet conection costs of 3 x £15 per month, and a one of payment per year of £50 cash for internet connection costs for apairy site 4 and 5

total out lay split three ways for beekeeping semi proffesional project.

personal out lay was £378.50 for me plus the above costs.
income from personal hive was, 6 hives gross profit £892.14making a net profit of £513.64
just in case you think thats great,
total hours worked 400plus,
thats a £1 an hour tesco's pays minimum wages of better than that to 16 year olds,
but i love bees, am i going to do it again next year to right

 

[Rosti]

Pete, a really interesting analysis, thanks for posting.

 

[BKF Admin]

Pete the hive amounts is kg ? not lb ?

 

[hedgerow pete]

sorry i only do french not old english , all wieghts and diamentions are metric. but rember i am in town one of my ladies had a super filled by late aprill, i reckon that between the three hives at most another super together by the end of this month is posible, i have had a massive sesson for three weeks on rose bay willow herb from the canals and there is another flus of another flower just starting , will find out what it is and will post it

 

[Hivemaker.]

How do you get your bee's to produce such huge ammounts of wax,18kg or around 36lb of wax from one hive,and they only produced 20kg or 40lb of honey,even if you melted down every comb in the hive the weight would not add up to 18kg of wax,so how do you get them producing this much.Can you please tell us your method to produce 1kg of queen substance from that one hive?

 

[hedgerow pete]

wax first the middle five frames in each 12 by 14 hive are standard nations deeps, i allow the bees to use the space for drone cultivation, as soon as each foundation frame has been bottomed out as it where i cut the lot of each strip being around 400mm long by 60mm deep and 30 to 40 mm wide and full of drones then each strip is melted down to render the wax free from the chicken treats you can do this around twice a month per frame, dont forget that there will be drone cells in the main brood box frames as well. plus to this when i harvest the honey i dont cut the tops off the cells i will cut it down after spinning to around half depth, i use standard sn1 upstairs and the bees when i under space them can draw them out to over 40mm wide if i choose so there i collect more wax than normal, this harvesting goes on all year long not just at honey harvest.

the honey was poor because i was using them to breed with and with considerable bu****ring about by me this had badly affected them, but i have chosen to produce queens at all costs to the other hive products.

as for the queen substance i borrowed a suction pump from a friend and the idea was collect the QS , but being a complete muppet and novice at it i completly sucked every thing up, so producing over the last 8 months a big jar of rubish thats of no worth or use, the words brains and engage needed to be properly connected, because i harvested from all the cells not just the queen cells TWIT spelt with an A,

as for every thing else its all spot on , because i am sad and have the time to keep records to be evan sadder to go through later.

the other thing i was on about up top was the necture flow is still on for me i have around abouts a canal bank 2 miles long and 15 m wide covered in Meadowsweet which the girls are going mad on which is flowing on after a massive bloom of rose bay willow herb, there will be a conserted effort over the next few weeks to find a way of putting a set of three hives right in the middle of this canal bank side some how

 

[Hivemaker.]

So you started sucking this stuff from worker cells last december,and you did not know that royal jelly comes from queen cells.1 kg from worker cells ,you can't of had many workers left. Why do you use standard frames,then destroy the drones if you have no varroa.

 

[hedgerow pete]

sort of, not realy i was told by the person who lent me the set up what to do, but it was a brain switched off day and completly got it wrong as i said already,

not one of my better ideas

 

[jean]

Average honey production per hive:

Hedgerow Pete: 95.5 kg
Albania Honey Production per hive-17kg

Austria Honey Production per hive-15kg
Belgium Honey Production-12kg per hive
Bulgaria Honey Production-20kg per hive

Georgia Production of honey-12kg per hive

Poland Honey Production-15kg per hive

Germany Production of Honey-40kg per hive
Greece Production of honey-25.8kg per hive
Portugal Honey Production-25kg per hive

Hungary Production of honey-30kg per hive

Ireland Production of honey-12kg per hive
Italy
Production of honey-20kg per hive

Czech Republic
production of honey-12kg per hive

Latvia
Production of honey-18kg per hives
Lithuania Honey Production-15kg per hive
Finland Production of honey-40kg per hive
Macedonia
Honey Production-21kg per hive

France Production of Honey per hive- 22kg

Norway Honey Production-25kg per hive

Romania Honey Production-15kg per hive
Serbia Honey Production-17.3kg per hive

Slovakia
Honey Production-10kg per hive

Slovenia Honey Production-16.6kg per hive

Spain
Honey Production-18kg per hive

Sweden Honey Production-32kg per hive
Switzerland Honey Production-12.5kg per hive

Ukraine Honey Production-15kg per hive

Pete, How the hell do you do it ?

 

[Chris B]

A block of culled drone comb of the size mentioned contains up to 200g wax once melted down. 5 frames therefore up to 1kg. Performed twice monthly gives up to 2kg monthly wax harvest. April to July would be 8kg wax?

Rendered cappings give a tiny weight yield relative to honey weight. 1% ? And what do you mean by cutting back the cells to half depth AFTER spinning?

But what really perplexes me is where did the bees come from to produce 32 nucs? I know of some staggering honey yields in the Birmingham area from colonies that have remained intact but no bees have been bled off in swarms or nucs. What's the secret Pete?

 

[hedgerow pete]

first the honey harvest, because my ladies are in a shed i have a larger than normal amount over wintering, by the use of a night light candle in the shed under the hives i can easily keep the inside shed temps near to or above freezing, i started to sugar syrup feed in late feburary ready for march. we have the tree season first which is normal the street planted cherrys in march / aprill. once they are up and running what i have also done is never allowed the queen to slow the lay so every time we have had more than one wet day i have added/filled/inserted/used a frame feeder so evan if we have had several days of wet the hives had always syrup if needed to prevent the slowing down of the work force, once they get going flat out dont let them stop because of the weather, the shed is at the allotment which i have to go to twice a day to feed and lock down the chickens and ducks with glass cover boards and having all the gear to hand easily i can wizz through the 6 hives in less than 20mins, just to check them.

wax.
i have a better return for wax than honey and i do seriously class honey as a secondry crop to the wax( wax is £14 per kilo, honey is worth only £8 per kilo, why bother with honey wax is more profitable)
now that i have upset everyone and caused alsorts of threads of hatred lets go through the wax collecting meathods
chrisb was spot on with his calc's yes i use 5 frames because it collects a kilo roughly a month but he started in april which is right but we are in august and i still have september to do so thats 3 months missed plus when i condense the hives for winter there will be another four frames completly covered in wax so there is more there,

now down to cutting out wax,

when i harvest my honey which i do several times a season normaly once in early may incase of osr/brassica, second in june in the gap making sure there frames are ready to be filled out with wax and then honey. dont forget i am allways sure there is a massive amount of young wax producing bees on the go by making sure the queen does not slow down with the laying of eggs because of bad weather or a flow stoppage,anyway spinning my frames are the sn1 to people who dont know they are the short nationals but are of the thin frame opposite to the manley fat wide ones, as the bees draw the frames out i remove frames to use else where so by the time the girls are ready to cap there is only 9 frames per super not 11 this means the bees will draw the foundation out to well over 40mm when harvest is finished i then cut the wax cells back to almost 8 mm deep or less sometimes that is 8mm from outside edge to inside the foundation sheet, if i have a urgent supply of wax to fullfill i will remove all the wax foundation untill there is a strip at the to of the sn1 frame that is only 15 to 20mm wide it will not take them long to rebuild especialy when the flow( false or not is on)

 

[Bcrazy]

Hedgerow pete,

Just one question pete,

What happens to the bees whilst your messing about?

Regards;

 

[hedgerow pete]

the last very good question that chris b has asked is the nucs, sorry to confuse but we need to look at a bigger picture first. my self and two other peole have decided to have a go at making some money from bee keeping , unable to fullfill any pollination contracts we are looking at honey and wax and nucs, between us in aprill of this year we have 24 hives plus we have brought in another 15 new nucs.

i use one of two books when it comes to queen breeding but both are the same in principle,
1 remove queen
2 use eggs and put into queen cells
3 harvest cells when capped insert into a small nuc
4 wait for queen to hatch flood area with drones
5 wait a few months and see if they are any good
i have no intention of doing a queen rearing reply so dont start to ask
once we have these queen cell on the go normaly i would do 20 per atempt, i then split the brood box from the main hive down into small nucs, from a double 12 x 14 box set up i would have around 15 frames of brood i steal 5 more one from each of the other hives and we then have a single frame nuc with a few more frames added to each box i end up with 1 of eggs ,1 of sealed brood if iam lucky to have spare , 1 frame of stores and one frame feeder plus one frame of empty cell foundations, this is then shipped to another site where they are left alone apart from topping up the feeders from the outside for a month after which each nuc is opened ,judged,graded, notes taken and shut down again, it is very rare to have a dead nuc but normal its a bad nuc, angry etc.
after another month of being left alone we then start there judging proper once every week they are inspected and notes taken on growth, anger, following, etc theres hundreds chose your own standards, any below standard after four months is squished betwen finger and thumb, does that help you chris b

 

[hedgerow pete]

i dont follow bcrazy can you explain what yo u mean

 

[GingerNut]

wax first the middle five frames in each 12 by 14 hive are standard nations deeps, i allow the bees to use the space for drone cultivation

Hi Pete,

Thinking about this.............would it make any difference if the shorter frames were positioned alternately throughout the brood box? Would there be more, less, or the same amount of wax?

Yours Roy

 

[Hawklord]

Hi Pete, when does your year start/end? The reason I ask is because you haven't posted any colony losses. Most people lost colonies over the last 2 years.

 

[hedgerow pete]

my shed season only started in january with two fornightly inspections , i started feeding with weak sugar syrup on march the first each hive getting two litres one per feeder , two feeders per brood box( weak sugar syrup 1 litre water 300gms sugar)
this was watched and topped up every week durring march i stopped feeding syrup by the third week in march for the tree flows i have in the city several hundred cherry trees flowering does the trick i feed again in the last week in april each hive getting another 2 litres each, first supper of honey was completed by may the first, this is then refeed to the smaller nucs because of the sugar contamination.
and as for the end normaly the ladies will still be collecting in october if its warm enough.

if there is a bad spell of weather i can open up a entrance in the shed to allow for toilet flights, it makes a mess every where but can be done so can i also have a tarp used as a verander infront of the hives as only short toilet flights are needed, when dealing with the out apairies this cant be done and feeding of bees dont start till aprill at the earlest. i can also help to control the shed temp if i want as well with candles, they then use less food/supplies/energy to help them survive the winters, i did not have any hive losses because i use glass cover boards during the winter and a very quick look under the wooden cover ontop allows me to see the sixe and shape of the nest and if needed i can raise the shed temp slightly and then what i will do is either smear a pollen patty on the empty frames or dip it into a suagar syrup liquid to help refill it, this is as it sounds an awfull amount of mothering.
the biggest challenge i had this season was the fact i was doing chemo in the winter from last year and this can seriously mess with ones head physicly as wellas mentaly . ie harvesting the complet hive of egg food thinking it was queen substance .wrong way wrong , but the up side is when i want or am able to do work with the hives i can several times this year when it was chucking it down with rain which is where i steal a march on others,

any help hwak lord

 

[Onge]

It dose sound like a lot of mothering but hey there your bees. Good luck to you.


P.S. Love all the vids you do, keep them coming

 

[hedgerow pete]

does anyone else want to put up thier totals aswell or is it just me so far

 

[Onge]

80 lb from the one hive that I also split into 3 and all the queens from the split are laying well.

I will be taking more supers off this week so more expected.

Pretty good really seeing as its been split so much.