The Everything Guide to Living Off the Grid (19 page)

Position your hive so the entrance faces east. This way the early morning sun will alert them to the new day.

Because flower nectar will often evaporate in the morning hours during the summer, the sooner bees are out of their hive foraging, the more honey they will produce.

The best position for a hive is where it will also have afternoon shade, shielding the hive from the summer sun. Shade, rather than sunlight, will give the bees more time to concentrate their effort on making honey, because they won’t need to work on carrying water back and forth to cool the hive.

Basic Equipment

A manmade hive is built to imitate the space that bees leave between their honeycombs in nature. The dimensions are fairly standard and should be copied exactly if you decide to make you own beehives. The following equipment is used within a hive:

• Bottom board:
  a wooden stand that the hive rests upon. Bottom boards can be set on bricks, concrete blocks, cinder blocks, or any stable base to keep the hive off the ground.
  
• Hive body or brood super:
  a large wooden box that holds eight to ten frames of comb. In this space, the bees rear their brood and store honey for their own use. Up to three brood supers can be used for a brood nest.
  
• Frames and foundation:
  frames hang inside each super or box on a specially cut ledge, called a rabbet. Frames keep the combs organized inside your hive and allow you to easily and safely inspect your bees. Frames hold thin sheets of beeswax foundation, which is embossed with the shapes of hexagonal cells. Foundations help bees to build straight combs.
  
• Queen excluder:
  a frame made with wire mesh placed between the brood super and the honey super, sized so workers can move between the brood super and the honey super but keeps the queen in the brood super, so brooding will not occur in honey supers.
  
• Honey supers:
  shallow boxes with frames of comb hanging in it for bees to store surplus honey. The honey supers hold the honey that is harvested from the hive.
  
• Inner cover:
  placed on top of the honey super to prevent bees from attaching comb to the outer cover. It also provides insulating dead air space.
  
• Outer cover:
  placed on top of the hive to provide weather protection.
  

The following equipment is personal gear:

• Smoker:
  a beekeeper’s best friend. A smoker calms bees and reduces stinging. Pine straw, sawdust, chipped wood mulch, grass, and burlap make good smoker fuel.
  
• Hive tool:
  looks like a small crowbar. It is ideally shaped for prying apart supers and frames.
  
• Bee suit or jacket, veil, gloves, and gauntlet:
  this is all protective personal gear worn when working with bees.
  

Generally you need light-colored over-gear to keep your clothes clean and to create a barrier between you and the bees. Bees are not threatened by light colors, so the color of the suit makes a great difference as to whether the bees will attack or not.

Thin, plastic-coated canvas gloves, rather than the stiff, heavy leather commercial gloves, are supple and allow you more movement. Gauntlets are long cuffs that slid over your gloves to keep bees from climbing up your sleeves.

• Ankle protection
  —elastic straps with hook-and-loop attachment to prevent bees from crawling up your pants leg.
  
• Feeders—hold sugar syrup that is fed to bees in early spring and in fall.
  

How to Purchase Bees

Usually the best way to start keeping bees is to buy established colonies from a local beekeeper. Often a local beekeeper might even have a colony he or she wants to give away. It’s better to get two colonies at the beginning, because that allows you to interchange frames of both brood and honey if one colony becomes weaker than the other and needs a boost.

Have the beekeeper open the supers. The bees should be calm and numerous enough that they fill most of the spaces between combs.

Moving a hive is a two-person job. It’s easiest to move a hive during the winter when they are lighter and populations are low. The first thing you want to do is close the hive entrance. You can accomplish this with a piece of folded window screen. Then look for any other cracks and seal them with duct tape. Make sure the supers are fastened together and the bottom board is stapled to the last super. Remember to open hive entrances after the hives are relocated.

If you are buying the colonies, realize that the condition of the equipment usually reflects the care the bees have received. If you find the colonies housed in rotting hives, don’t purchase them.

Installing Packaged Bees

You can also buy packaged bees and queens. Bees are commonly shipped in 2- to 5-pound packages of about 10,000 to 20,000 bees. Keep the packages cool and shaded when they arrive. To transfer bees to their new hive, set up a bottom board with one hive body and remove half of the frames. Spray the bees heavily with sugar syrup (one part sugar to one part water) through the screen on the package; the bees will gorge themselves with syrup and become sticky, making them easy to pour.

The next step is to move the queen, which will be in a separate cage. Pry off the package lid, remove the can of syrup provided for transit, find and remove the queen suspended in her cage, and reclose the package.

The queen cage has holes at both ends plugged with cork. Under the cork at one end you will see that it is filled with white “queen candy.” Remove the cork from this end and suspend the queen cage between two center frames in your hive. Workers bees will eventually eat through the candy and release the queen.

Shake the original package lightly to move all bees into a pile on the bottom. Take the lid off the package again and pour the bees into the hive
on top of the queen. As they slowly spread throughout the hive, carefully return the frames to their original positions. Replace the inner and outer covers on the hive. You have successfully created your first colony. You must now feed the bees sugar water until natural nectar starts to appear.

Managing Your Hive

You want your bees to be at their maximum strength before the nectar flow begins. This way, the created honey is stored for harvest rather than used to build up their strength. Feeding and medicating your bees should be done in January through February. Because the queens will resume egg-laying in January, some colonies will need supplemental feeding of sugar syrup.

By mid-February, you should inspect your hives. You should be looking for population growth, the arrangement of the brood nest, and disease symptoms. If one of your colonies has less brood than average, you can strengthen it by transferring a frame of sealed brood from your other colony.

If you use two brood supers and find that most of the bees and brood are in the upper super, reverse the supers, placing the top one on the bottom. You want to do this because it relieves congestion. When a colony feels congested it swarms, looking for another place to live. If you only have one brood super, you will need to relieve congestion by providing additional honey supers above a queen excluder.

Annual requeening can be done in early spring or in the fall. Most feel that requeening is one of the best investments a beekeeper can make. Young queens not only lay eggs more prolifically, but they also secrete higher levels of pheromones, which stimulates the worker bees to forage.

In order to requeen a colony, you must find, kill, and discard the old queen. Then you need to allow the colony to remain queenless for 24 hours. After that period of time, you can introduce the new queen in her cage, allowing the workers to eat through the candy in order to release her.

By mid-April your colonies should be strong enough to collect surplus nectar. This is when you should add honey supers above the hive bodies. Add enough supers to accommodate both the incoming nectar and the large bee population. Adding supers stimulates foraging and limits late-season swarming.

During late summer and early autumn, the brood production and the honey production drop. At this point, you should crowd the bees by giving them only one or two honey supers. This forces bees to store honey in the brood nest to strengthen the hive. Colonies are usually overwintered in two hive bodies or in one hive body and at least one honey super. Be sure that if you overwinter in one hive body and a honey super, you remove the queen excluder so the queen can move up into the honey super during winter. If your colony is light on stores, feed them heavy syrup (two parts sugar to one part water). Bees should have between 50 to 60 pounds of stores going into winter. A hive with a full deep frame weighs 6 pounds and full shallow frame weighs 3 pounds. You can pick up the frame to estimate the weight of the hive and stores. Never allow stores to drop below 12 to 18 pounds.

Common Problems

The common problems you encounter when raising bees are swarming, stings, and diseases and pests that can affect your hive.

Swarming

You cannot prevent bees from swarming all of the time. You can, however, make a swarm less likely by requeening your colony with a younger queen. You can also have a “bait hive” in place in case a swarm occurs. Bees will cluster within 100 feet of their old hive while the scout bees search for a new hive. A bait hive is simply an attractive home waiting for a swarm to discover.

Stings

If you keep bees, you are going to get stung. You can reduce stinging greatly by taking precautions and wearing protective gear, using a smoker, and handling bees gently. However, the likelihood is that you’re still going to get stung. If there is a chance you are allergic to bee stings, you do not want to keep bees. If you are not allergic, you probably will find, as most beekeepers do, that although stings still hurt, after a few bites there is generally less of a reaction.

Honeybee Diseases and Pests

Honeybee brood and adults are attacked by bacteria, viruses, protozoans, fungi, and exotic parasitic mites. Additionally, bees and beekeeping equipment are attacked by a variety of insects. Some insects, like the wax moth, lay eggs on the equipment and their larva gnaw boat-shaped indentations in the wooden frame or hive body to attach their silken cocoons. With heavy infestations, frame pieces may be weakened to the point of collapse. Some insects, like spiders, actually eat bees. Disease and pest control requires constant vigilance by the beekeeper. Contact local beekeepers to learn about the diseases and issues prevalent in your area and how to prevent and cure them.