By: Earl Hoffman
What does Optimize look like in your apiary?
Please let me share some thoughts and understand some ideas on this topic, if I may.
Your bee operation, your apiary has thousands of inputs and outputs, most of these we do not and can not control (example, the weather is beyond our control).
We do control a few inputs and these are the ones you need to focus on. Please let us list a few inputs and discuss them further:
TIME
How much time do you spend planning and executing and recovering from working your apiary? Every weekend, once a month or maybe a few times per year?
Somehow, you need to acknowledge how many hours you are using. These ideas should spark the idea that some is too much and others are not enough. My rule of thumb has changed over the years. Now I see things as “what percentage of this is good enough?”
My new target is, can I get things 95% complete and move onto the next task? The amount of time and energy to get that last 5% done grows without bounds. So is it good enough?
Photo by Hansjörg Keller on Unsplash
Examples are, did I get the varroa mites under control? Maybe three mites in a hive alcohol wash is good enough. Did all of the hives get enough empty honey supers before the nectar flow? Again, do you have time to analyze each hive and determine the exact number of empty supers each hive needs, or do you use the blanket approach?
I do grant you that some people want their bees to be a science project, while others would rather that their bees would act more like goldfish. Somehow you need to find a balance.
MONEY
How much money do you or can you spend on your bee operation? Can you learn to break even, or better yet can you make some sideline money?
As you all know so well, inflation last year and this year is out of control. I have been working bees for over thirty years, when I started, you could buy a good queen for about six (6) dollars. Last I checked most queens are between thirty and forty dollars each.
So lets talk about optimizing, or in this case minimizing the cost to run your beeyard.
Well, let me very quickly suggest that buying used equipment is the WRONG answer.
I have spent days and weeks trying to help old and new beekeepers with used, old, dirty frames and supers. How many times have I seen pathogens express themselves when bees were installed into old dirty equipment? I do not have enough fingers and toes to count that high. Just do not do it !
So, maybe you can make a few more splits or let the bees raise their own queen in a few hives. Trade some of your time helping others, in exchange for queens, drawn comb or new equipment. I know this sounds too easy, but maybe you can sell some of your excess? How about using some of the honey money to buy queens?
At our place, one of our local farmers requested pollination of their organic vegetables. Renting out the bees for a short duration of time was always a good money maker for us.
Think about more ways to sell your honey, beeswax and pollen.
LABOR
How much manual labor, in hours, do we really want to spend in the beeyard?
Complexity is not your friend. If you emulate some of the practices of commercial beekeepers, or even well run sideliners, you will find several key themes.
One
Less is more. Reduce the numbers of gadgets and pieces of equipment in your operation. Notice they use a pallet for hive bottoms and they do not use entrance reducers. Moving from ¾ inch to ⅜ inch hive entrance gives the bees a smaller area to guard. No inner cover, the migratory cover, is one piece.
And many use one size super. My thoughts are every one should at least try eight (8) frame equipment or try running the bees in all medium size supers. Using one size super for both brood and honey is a great labor savor.
Two
The number of hives you run should be back calculated from how much time you have to work the bees. It’s not the other way around. At one time, Carol Hoffman and I were running between sixty and eighty beehives each season.
I know you’re supposed to work fast and move to the next hive, but we sometimes found ourselves spending ten or more minutes per hive just trying to determine what was the correct course of action to take.
Is it queenright? Did it just swarm? What do we do with this hive that is not performing? Eighty hives times ten minutes is eight hundred minutes. Move that to hours and your looking at over thirteen (13) hours to just work the beeyard. Yikes, how many times have we worked bees by moon light because we ran out of daylight? Or catching and marking queens by flashlight?
In my own humble opinion, if you want to only work for an hour or two, please keep your hive numbers below ten.
Three
Set your hives in a horse shoe shape and either back the truck into the center of the group of hives or leave room for a cart or wagon with all of your stuff to reduce the number of steps you need to move between your supplies and your hives. Do not scatter the hives about willy-nilly.
Again, reduce the number of tasks that need to be performed. Time is money, so plan, plan and plan, and only do what you need to do and which tasks are required.
HIVES
Think about what you want your bees to do. Focus and optimize on the goals that you have set out for the year. Are you trying to raise bees to sell to others? If you are, then please do not focus those bees on honey production. Yes, I know sometimes we get lucky and we split bees and make a great honey crop, but best to stick to the task at hand. Optimize your beeyard to your style and objectives. Do you need fewer hives? Do you need more nucs? Should you split all of your hives? Or should you let some of them run with two or three year old queens? In my humble opinion, killing good queens each year just because someone said to, is not a viable solution.
So I end with my original thoughts, please consider these inputs, time, money, labor and hives the next time you want to make your bee operation a better experience.
Respectfully,
EAS Master Beekeeper – Earl Hoffman
