By: Ed Simon
The three parts of this collection are subsets of the 263 hints, definitions and informational tidbits gathered in over twenty years of beekeeping. I hope they are helpful.
Jar Feeder – Usage
When inverting a jar feeder, they will leak syrup until a vacuum is formed at the bottom (now the top) of the jar. Once the air pressure is equalized on the outside and the inside of the jar, it will stop leaking. Hold it away from you until this happens.
Laying Worker – This is a situation where the queen has died, and a replacement queen is available. The pheromone produced by the missing queen is reduced to the point where a worker decides to produce eggs. Indications of this situation are:
- Eggs not centered in the bottom of the cell. The worker’s body is not long enough to correctly place the egg.
- Multiple eggs in a cell.
- All drone capped cells. The eggs were not fertilized.
Marking Queens – They tend to fly away.
Bees will fly to the light. When marking a queen, use this trait. First, convince your spouse that queens don’t sting. Then, hint that the bathroom is an excellent work area. Next, ensure them that if the queen escapes, you can find her before the next shower.
Close the bathroom door, remove the curtains from the window and turn off all the lights. Then use the windowsill as a workstation for the queen marking.
Note: Unless you are concerned about the date/year of the queen, yellow or white are easy colors to find. Red or green on a bee-colored background is difficult for a person that is red/green color blind to see.
Note: Be sure to allow the marking to dry before placing the queen in the hive.
Measurements – Keep them handy.
Keep a “Story Board” in your work room with all the measurements you need to build your equipment. This one is hung directly above my saw.
Migratory Pallet – This unit is used by beekeepers who transport their bees to different sites to provide pollination services. It usually holds four Langstroth hives. The pallet is the bottom board. This unit allows for the use of pallet lifters to load, position and unload four hives at a time with minimal physical exertion.
Migratory Top – Used by commercial beekeepers as a top cover. When using this style cover, there is no need for an inner cover. A hive tool can pry open this style cover without any problems.
Mowing Grass – The bees really get upset.
It only takes one time of mowing the grass in front of the hives to convince you to not do that again. Unfortunately, your spouse requires the grass to be mowed.
Old shingles to the rescue – Placing an old but serviceable tar paper shingle in front of the hive will at least keep you from bumping the hive when mowing. If more depth is needed, then add a second shingle. You will still have to mow the grass, but you won’t have to get as close to the hives and possibly bump them with the mower.
Nuc Creation – The easy way.
You now want to expand your apiary by creating nucs, but you don’t have time to or you can’t find an elusive queen. Select the brood, pollen and honey frames you need for the nuc and place them into a new hive body after brushing all the bees back into the hive. Put a queen excluder back on the hive followed by the newly created box. Then close the hive and wait an hour or two. The bees will move up to cover the brood and bee-less frames. The queen will not be able to get to the selected frames. Now you can move the queen-less frames to the nuc box.
Paper Towels – Indispensable!
Cheap bulk paper towels that can be tossed away can save you an unbelievable amount of time compared to cleaning out cloth rags.
Package – How bees are shipped and distributed to beekeepers. They are normally two sizes. A two pounder which holds 5,000 to 6,000 bees or a three pounder which can hold 7,500 to 8,500 bees.
Note: Bees are sold by weight not by count.
Pails – Food safe pails.
A good place to get free food safe pails is your local bakery or food store that has a cake department. Icing is used by the gallons. You may have to clean them but that is a minor inconvenience.
Paint – Free for the taking.
Free exterior latex paint is available at your local recycling center. Five-gallon pails are usually a mixture of all the half-gallons or less that were turned in. Occasionally full or almost full gallons of one color are available. The bees don’t care what color their hive is, and a pink or yellow hive body adds pizzazz to your apiary.
Painting – Bag your brushes and roller.
When painting multiple coats of paint, you may wait days between the applications. Place the roller and/or brushes in plastic bags. They won’t dry out!
Note: Recycled bread bags work great.
Painting – Spackle the edges.
Use external spackle to coat the raw edges of plywood and the end grain of boards before painting the units. This makes painting easier and helps reduce the rot and ply separation caused by moisture.
Pasture Gates – They are there for a purpose.
If you have your hives on a farmer’s property, pay attention to the gate positions when going to the hives. Make sure the gate is in the same position when you leave as it was when you got there. A loose animal will lose you your apiary privileges with that farmer and all his friends.
Propolis – Hive glue used by the bees to hide imperfections in the hive.
It is a mainly a mixture of plant resin. It has antiseptic and antioxidant qualities. It is most prevalent restricting the entrance to the hive and cementing the cracks between hive bodies. It is also used to encase foreign matter, which cannot be removed from the hive (dead mice). Flexible and sticky when warm and brittle when cold, it can be harvested by the beekeeper and used in medical tinctures.
Queen Bank
When you place caged queens into an area that will allow non-caged bees to take care of them, it is called banking. The easiest is to place a queen excluder on a hive and then put the caged queens above the excluder. This way the colonies’ queen cannot get to them and they will be cared for by the colony.
Queen Cell
When more than one queen cell is built, the first queen emerging attempts and usually succeeds in killing her rivals. You can usually identify this situation when the queen cell has an opening on the side of the cell.
When a queen emerges normally, the cell is opened at the bottom of the cell. Often the “door” is still attached.
Queen Cell – Pinching
One way used to delay or eliminate swarming is to “pinch” the queen cells. This entails killing queen larvae while they are being developed and before they are old enough to allow the old queen to swarm. Therefore, keeping the hive and the volume of worker bees intact. Please be careful doing this. If you pinch all the queen cells and you did not realize that the colony had already swarmed, you have just killed the replacement queen and eventually the colony. There may not be larvae young enough to raise another replacement queen.
Queen Emergence
When a queen emerges from her cell in a normal manner, she will chew the bottom of the cell open. This usually leaves the cell cap hinged to the cell. When the queen was killed by an earlier emerging sister, the cell has a hole in the side of the cell through which the older sister killed her (Sororicide).
Queen Marking
If the reason you are marking queens is so you can find them then ignore the RGBPV color scheme that identifies the queen’s year of birth. Use one or two bright colors and stay away from red and green. Over 10% of the USA’s male population has some degree of RED/GREEN colorblindness.
Raw Honey
Raw honey has a fluid definition that is whatever the seller defines as “raw” is “raw”. As a minimum, it usually is honey that has not been heated above a certain temperature or has had any of the pollen removed through super filtration. Truly raw honey is comb honey where nothing other than packaging has been done to it. Raw honey in a jar has been strained at a minimum and probably filtered but the pollen remains in it. What is your definition?
Recycling Locations – You can find almost anything there.
When looking for parts/pieces or ideas for re-purposing goods into beekeeping equipment, haunt the recycle stores. Most items are reasonably priced. Some stores to visit regularly are:
- Goodwill
- Habitat for Humanity ReUse Stores
- Salvation Army
Removing Supers 3 – Less sticky supers when extracting.
The burr and cross comb you didn’t cleanup has come back to haunt you. Even if you tried to keep things orderly, the bees have a way of getting ahead of you. When this comb is broken it creates a sticky mess. To help eliminate this problem, try this procedure.
The day before extraction, remove the supers then swap and reverse them.
- Remove each super. Place them in order and all the fronts facing the same direction.
- Reinstall the supers starting with the first removed. At the same time make sure the front of the next super is now above the back of the previous super. This placement maximizes the possibility that torn comb and runny honey will not be replaced back in the original position.
- The bees will clean up all the loose honey by the next day and the removal should be a lot less sticky.
Rock’s Position – Positioning of hive cover weights.
The position and attitude of the weight can provide information you need to remember. Before starting inspection of the ten or twenty hives in your yard, place the brick or rock in a certain position on each of the hives. Then after the inspection is complete for that hive, place the weight in a different position. For example, the top center for a completed good inspection and the rear center of the top for a hive that needs food. This provides an instant view to the status of each hive.
A complete list of all entries collected is published in Build Beekeeping Equipment. It is available through www.LULU.com. It contains a full set of unabridged entries in a chapter called “What Your Mentor Forgot to Tell You.” Under the LULU sales section, search for “Beekeeping” to find this publication.
