Beekeeping

My dad wanted to do this stuff as he is a bored rich man in his 50ties, I'd be interested to follow this thread and see your progress though.

>>2352209
I'm curious.

How do they manage to do this kind of shape?

>>2352209
Hey man, where do you live? It's cool you are starting a hive. Also what strain of bee did you get?

>>2352252
Instinct and resource conservation strategies. Hexagons are useful like circles, but you waste less material when cells share as many walls as possible.

>>2352252
What >>2352298 said, but it's partly physics. They don't need to try and build a hexagon, but rather build a bunch of small circles of wax right next to each other and push them close. Because it's fresh soft wax, the circles push together and lock into a hexagon, one of the most stable geometric shapes. A hexagon can easily touch 6 other hexagons and all fit without wasting space, plus it is stronger and more sturdy. I believe you could go make tiny wax rings and push them together and they'd do the same thing.

>>2352295
I live in Salt Lake, I got carnolian-italian hybrids. I have a nuc hive of some local overwintered mutts coming in next week.

I shook out a bunch of the package and ultimately more bees started standing on the hive putting out Nasonov pheromone, so they mostly all went into the hive save a couple small clusters in the corners of the package. It's getting colder and going to rain, so hopefully they go join their sisters. Because it will rain and then snow tomorrow, they will end up staying in the hive for a few days working on their infrastructure. When it is warmer, they'll be less inclined to move since they're already setting up shop here, and since the queen was directly released from her cage she'll maybe start laying right away.

There is just so much information to communicate on basic bee behaviour and beekeeping methods, and then on top of that every beekeep has told me they learn something new every time they open the hive. They're fascinating complex self-organizing creatures. Been wanting to do this since I was 10, finally have my own property so I'm going into it full tilt.

>>2352360
bees are animals just the same as you and me, how would you like it if you had to live in some hive huh?

>>2352360
>local overwintered mutts
Cool, that was what I was wondering. A lot of people start out ordering bees from some southern/California mass breeders and end up with weak hives that struggle in their climate.

Make sure you keep an eye out for pests and good luck.

Almost all the bees were in the hive now, save a few who fucked up and were in a cluster inside the cage, maybe 40 to 50. I decided to be a real beekeeper and just reached my warm hand in, slowly sinking it into the mass of bees. Since my hand is warm, they shifted the cluster onto my hand. When most of the bees were part of my new hand cluster, I moved my hand up against the entrance of the hive. There, they smelled their sister's large swarm within and climbed off me walking into the hive. I only got stung when walking away by a girl who walked up into my coat sleeve and got stuck and scared.

I saved 40 bees from freezing by hand and it was the most beautiful thing to see them walking into their safe warm home, the joy a (surrogate) mother feels to see her children saved from death.

One with the hive, one with the cluster.

>>2352432
That's a nice story, thank you for sharing.

>>2352432
You're a good man, anon.

>>2352432
interesting

>>2352209
Do carpenter bees produce honey?

Great news, the weather was cold for the last few days and I think the bees have done as predicted, setting up shop inside and enjoying their new home. They're doing orientation flights right now and it's beautiful, just a mad clusterfuck of flying bees. They all run out of the hive and up or around the walls, then dive off and fly in circles and figure 8s all around. They'll go back to the hive, then jump back into the air and keep going higher and making wider 8s until it's hard for me to see them anymore. They understand time, sun positioning, and landmarks very well so they're basically learning where their house is located. Once they understand how to get home, they'll start ramping up nectar and pollen gathering.

I'll try to get a video on something other than my potato phone. Never been interested in photography except when dealing with insects, kind of want a macro lens or something.

>>2353739
I believe they do, I've read it's kind of thick and rich, but like bumblebees they're more solitary and don't form large working colonies like honeybees so it would be super impractical to get honey out of them. Even with quantity I'm not sure the consistency is usable for people, I know bumblebee honey is like a really watery syrup that you can't really collect. Those sort of bees are good pollinators and I know folks make little "hotels" that encourage them to occupy the area just to keep garden plants pollinated, at least for bumblebees.

>>2353796
Did you put out a sugar water feeder?

>>2353797
Besides the relatively small colonies bumble bees also make very messy hives compared to the neat combs apis species make. You can't just pull out the honey pots as the are scattered around the brood cells. Also bumble bees are mean as fuck around their nest and can sting as often as they want.

Bumble bees are better at pollination of native plants, which is important.

>>2353868
Yeah, most of this "omg the bees are missing" is overblown/misguided in that maybe our agriculture would collapse but native life would go on, though I heard those fucking varroa mites are affecting bumblebee and other native bee populations too.

I'm using a frame feeder; I know some prefer top feeders and all but a lot of local beekeepers have been running frame feeders on the outer frame for a long while and it all goes well. I like that if it gets cold and I need to refill, I can slide my migratory-style top and refill. I'm gonna give them a week so they're really settled, it'll be good gathering weather this week. Next Saturday will be ~22C so I'll remove the queen cage and inspect the hive. I'm trying not to stand too close and make them feel nervous; with established hives I like to just sit a few feet away and watch them for a long time. From where I stand, their buzzing sounds normal so I think they're queenright and accepted her well. Time will tell.

>>2352432
wtf, I love bees now

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This might sound stupid but does anyone else think that the bees need to die to save mankind?

I mean I love bees but with climate change and the ecological destruction of the planet I think we need a major shock. Obviously people being killed doesn't work so it needs to be something else.

We can survive without bees.
Wheat, Corn, Rice etc don't need bees. We can even pollenate things ourselves. But the economic, social and other impacts of the loss of bees would shock people into action. This would lead to a massive push for reduction in emissions etc.

I would gladly individually break the neck of every bee if it meant saving mankind. We have raped the natural world and we need to get Herpes, before we get AIDS.

>>2353909
>This might sound stupid but does anyone else think that the bees need to die to save mankind?

what are you, a jrpg villain?

>>2353909
dude wat

What, corn, rice are shit monoculture crops anyways that are replanted with BT seeds yearly. The bees provide a vast majority of our fruit, which to be fair are mostly shitty monocrops as well. We can't pollinate them efficiently. Breaking bees isn't the answer to stopping monocropped Big Agra food production, variance in grown species would be better for both us and the bees. Industrial pollination operations that have tons of apiaries gather their bees in one place help spread disease between beekeeping operations; it would be better to use regional variants of European honeybees instead of trucking them across the country, or using native bees commercially (though that's trickier). Pollination contract bees don't produce honey as well as production-focused bees because they lack variety in pollen and nectar gathered and are trapped in fields of less-efficient resources, but their purpose is primarily pollinating crops anyways.

Also bees have exoskeletons, no neck bones, and since only the queen and their gonad-extension half-chromosome drones breed you'd just need to disrupt the Drone Congregation Areas to stop colonies from reproducing. It's a terrible idea. This is a very complicated issue that involves multiple aspects of business, society, agriculture and etymology.

>>2353916 real talk

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So why don't beekeepers just breed some peaceful super bee?

Like the africanized ones except they don't want to murder everything.

Why are bees such weak pussies anyways? Oh no pollution and mites too much to handle.

You don't see Termites and Ants giving a fuck about anything we throw at them and we have been actively waging war against both of them with chemical weapons.

>>2353951
We do have peaceful bees. Africanized bees were actually an attempt to make stronger, hardier, more productive bees with the the calmer genetics of European bees, it was a work in progress that got accidentally released from a lab environment.

They're European bees, the main problem mite right now is Asian, and we're talking about them being in America; little is truly natural about the way industrial bees are kept.

>>2353958
How can you even fuck up so hard that you release your test subjects from their lab enviornment?

Fucking third world shitholes I swear.

>>2353966
It was in Brazil I think. The normal range of a honeybee is something like 5 miles, so controlled breeding operations usually space themselves out by something more than that. They were using queen excluders to prevent the queen and any drones from accessing an exit. From what I read, one day someone who was unaware of the experiment was working the hives for whatever reason. They were like "huh, why are these queen excluders on here?" and took them off to fix the hive setup, and the queens swarmed. These swarms traveled huge distances, far more than is normal for European honeybees likely due to their African genes, and they immediately took up vicious residence in the forests around that area, pushing up north and breeding with other feral swarms to massively increase their numbers. They were a lot hardier and their aggression let them take over other hives, so they rapidly entrenched. Fortunately, they aren't good at handling cold; they've been found as far north as the very bottom of Utah, but haven't gone any further north than that (they wouldn't be able to make it through the winter). Now when you're in the southern US and anywhere south of the border, you have to anticipate the threat of Africanized drones mating your queens and introducing their genetics into the stock. Fortunately, their genes are getting diluted and partially Africanized hives may not even be that aggressive. There are some beekeepers down in Brazil and such who prefer them, as they can handle the heat a lot better and produce far more honey. You just have to be very careful with them and know their aggression levels are way higher than normal honeybees, but there are videos of people on YouTube taking off their veil while working Africanized hives to prove that they aren't as bad as some fear.

There are media frenzy horror stories of course, as if these bees are out hunting down humans and such, when really they're just like honeybees with the aggression turned up.