Beekeeping Thread!

I always look for beekeepers on /an/ and never get any response.

11 hives here, half of them recent cutouts that I've been removing for people. I've been doing this for two years now and really jumped in head first. I'm getting past the initial blast of wonderment and love of the hobby and having to face reality. Beekeeping is still my favorite thing in the world but I can't figure out how to make a net gain out of it. I'm doing it by myself I can't see any viable way to make a net gain. Boxes and frames are expensive. My hives are surviving just fine but the rate that they're collecting honey isn't enough for me to get a substantial harvest later in the year.
Where do other beekeepers land on feeding? I feel like being hands off is best, but maybe not. Should I be dumping sugar water on these guys so that anything else they collect can be used for honey to be extracted? I'm in central texas and it's been a perfect here so far, but I bet we're heading for a dearth any time now.

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>>2416724
I recently captured a swarm and had it in a taped up xerox box in my car. Apparently I missed a spot and wound up driving 75 miles an hour down the road with a car full of bees.

>Beekeeping is an actual hobby people post about on 4chan

Neat.

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>>2416729
I can post photos all day if anyone wants me to.

>>2416724

wow just 2 years and 11 hives? You really did jump in with both feet! Keeping up with woodware/other equipment can be very costly especially if your hives have a strong spring and you need to split them to prevent swarming... I'm down to nothing at the moment.

The only real way to turn a profit with a beekeeping operation would be to make a lot of splits during swarm season if you've got a good spring going weather-wise and in regards to the health of your colonies. You can get 2 or 3 splits off a very healthy colony per year, if you know what you're doing you could get even more. a healthy nuc will fetch 200 on a good day, 140 on a bad one, either way just imagine how much honey you'd have to sell to make that kind of cash

Another way you can make some serious money is by selling pollination services to farmers, but this can be limited by how many hives you have / how many hives you can move / how many farmers in your area have the money/interest in on-site honeybee pollination of their crops

>>2416733
Yeah, my dream is to start running a legitimate queen breeding business, but it seems like you need a huge stock of hives to get that sort of thing off the ground. I plan on experimenting with queen rearing just for fun next year. It seems like selling bees and queens to other nuts is where the only money on a small scale. Doing the semi loads of hives thing for pollination is way out of my league. I really don't want to have to sell honey at a farmers market either honestly.

>>2416730
People post about literally everything on 4chan, you just have to deal with really slow boards.
Fast boards are universally teash.

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>>2416731
Or if nobody wants me to.
Sippin lady.

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>>2416965
Another free pile of bees.

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>>2416731
>>2416965

i dig 'em - moar!

here's what I got from one phat frame in a honeybound hive of Carniolans - this is my first year working with them, they build up slower than the Russians but they seem calmer...

>>2416965

I like how she's drinking from a puddle of honey with a severed wing from one of her comrades floating in it... that's like someone sipping beer from a vat with a dismembered human arm floating around

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>>2417348
Nah, that's a shitty little fly in the honey.

Here's a nice looking medium frame of brood from my first year.

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>>2417501
and a stinger I took out of my arm

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>>2417504
Some nice new comb from a hive in a hollow log that I chainsawed open.

>>2417508
Same colony, it's a pain to get good pics with a suit on.

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>>2417511

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Really I can do this all day, so I'll spare the rest of /an/ for a little while longer.
Here's bee al pacino from when I was sampling for varroa with powdered sugar.

Soapbox: If you keep bees, please don't be a piece of shit and keep your mite levels in check. The other beekeepers in your area would appreciate you not breeding them.

>>2417332
Nice! I'm excited to see how much I can take away at the end of the season.

Does beekeeping make you particularly empathetic towrds bees? Like would you get at all upset at randomly seeing someone swatting/poisoning bees (not yours)?

>>2417560
Nah, if anything it's made me less empathetic. I kill bees every time I open a box because they're just everywhere and get crushed. Individual worker bees are expendible and are constantly born die in huge numbers. When it comes to things like exterminating pest bees, that honestly doesn't bother me either. I'd rather take them but that can be a pain in the ass, especially if removers are going to charge for the service. Honeybees don't even belong on the north american continent, and wild honeybees here are essentially feral livestock. The health of honeybees really only matters to human agriculture and they aren't really in any sort of danger at all. What really matters are native pollinators and other invertebrates. Bumblebees, carpenter bees, burrowing bees, etc. Things that kill bees on a large scale like irresponsible pesticide use aren't bad because they kill people's honeybees, they're bad because they totally rip out the scaffolding that ecosystems are built on at large. Honeybees just happen to be the only insect that people are notice.

>>2417579
excuse grammar, I'm half asleep on a phone

>>2417501

ah, so sipping beer from a vat with a baboon's arm then

>>2417501

beautiful dark-looking stock you have there! solid pattern too...

>>2416965
SIPP

>>2417637

jesus this guy

>>2417637
Nah, flies and bees are way more diverved than we are from baboons. It would be more like drinking from a pool with an iguana floating in it, if you really want this analogy to work.

Is it too late in the year to start a hive?

The area I live in has gone without rain for over 30 days now so I don't know if it's a good time.

>>2417938
It all depends on how many resources are in your area. If need be you can feed them sugar syrup and pollen substitute, and they'll probably be fine. The sooner the better though.

>>2417784
I actually bothered to check and your analogy is very correct!

300 million years for last common ancestor of flies and bees, and around 300 million years for reptiles and mammals.

People don't realize how ancient and different insects are from each other.

What kind of property do you guys live? How big is your property to have hives?

I don't want bees myself but I like reading about beekeeping a lot and curious as to whether or not there is regulations. Like if you lived in a regular suburban neighborhood and would they be considered an issue with neighbors.

>>2418022
Yeah part of why inverts are so well adapted to their lives is because they've just been around for so long.
>>2418031
I have a decent amount of farmland, but you could put a hive or three in a reasonably large backyard without problems. If your neighbkrs have a source of food or water for them they're going to get more bees than usual because they'll optimize foraging but you can provide both to mitigate the prolem. Running a lawnmkwer or other equipment nearby could make a hive unhappy and sting prone.

>>2418022
>I just checked
>"300 million years"
>I believe everything the first link on Google tells me
>[citation needed]

I've been contemplating beekeeping for years now, and I would get a hive at the first chance I had if it weren't for the fact that I am not sure when I am changing colleges and towns.
It could be one ear or it could be two and a half. I'm just not sure.

>>2418137
Who would've guessed that well established facts are easy to find on google. Heavens!

But just for you:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20147900

https://www.geol.umd.edu/~tholtz/G331/lectures/331vertsII.html

>>2418147
>the government doesn't lie to people
>[citation needed]
>Google does not squelch search results and hide factual information to push an anti-god/anti-creation agenda
>[citation needed]

does colony collapse disorder make your work harder?

>>2418149

>demands citations
>believes science is a means by which the government is stifling the god/creation theory

yeah ok... you're probably trolling because citations/provision of hard factual evidence is the god/creation camp's worst enemy.

can we get back to bees please?

>>2418186

In some ways, yes, because we want to find all the answers as fast as possible, but in a lot of cases, colony collapse can just be a result of lazy beekeeping - not instituting pest/disease control can cause entire colonies to abscond, and not requeening an unhygienic colony with better stock is basically ignoring serious problems altogether. Once you remove all the hives lost to poor beekeeping practices, the percentage of colonies that actually disappear without trace is very low.

>>2418186
Not mine in particular.
Like >>2418250 says, I think a lot of colony collapse can be attributed to bad practices, like shipping colonies around the country en masse and putting them in huge monoculture farms. I'm pretty sure that the people working with semi loads if bees aren't keeping a good eye on every single hive the way that I'm trying to. Otherwise colony collapse is mostly varroa mites which really can be a problem if you don't monitor and control them. The only hives I've lost so far are ones that have absconded, but this seems to happen often when capturing swarms and removing established hives.

>>2416724

>Should I be dumping sugar water on these guys so that anything else they collect can be used for honey to be extracted?

If you give them sugar syrup then they will deposit the syrup into the honeycomb with the rest of the honey and then you will end up with a mix of syrup and actual honey which is really no good... never harvest honey from a hive that's been feeding on sugar syrup. they don't know the difference between cane sugar water and flower nectar, so they will just store it all together.

I personally don't feed unless their numbers are dangerously low early in the year or you are nursing a package installation. Maybe late fall you can put some fondant in a candyboard for a weaker hive going into winter.

>>2417511
lol I can't even hold my camera with those stupid thick gloves and all the honey and propolis everywhere.

>>2418149
>allegations

source?

>>2419034
Fun fact, I've taken a lot of phone videos with a full suit on by hitting the screen with my tongue through the veil.

>>2418979
I'm planning to harvest near the end of october, because it stays hot here till novemember most years. I thought maybe they would use up any syrup I fed by the time they started collecting nectar that I want honey from, and that it would be help build il a foraging force faster. Maybe I just stick to pollen substitute, keeping feeders filled is a real pain in my ass anyway.

>>2419040

if you're worried about them getting dehydrated you could always put a feeder with just water in there. that will help! also sometimes I will save the water I use to clean my honey harvesting equipment and feed it to them that way. I don't let the bees clean off my equipment anymore, it just starts robbing situation

Do any of you beekeepers know why honeybees are so nice when compared to wasps and hornets?

I mean, I have a hive of wild ones living near my house and I walk near them all the time without incident

>>2419120

bees die when they sting, wasps and hornets don't. Therefore bees don't tend to go stinging people for shits and giggles.

However, this can be attributed to specific genetics of said bees. A colony of European Dark Bees or African hybrids in particular will often times be more aggressive than most types of wasps. On the other hand, Mud Dauber hornets are generally pretty docile even compared to honeybees and bumblebees.

How bad off would the US be if European honeybees went extinct?
How readily would native species take over their role?

>>2419323

bad. but certain species of bumblebees are still widespread enough that plenty of crops would do alright for a little while, especially since bumblebees pollinate a wider range of plants. However, I think that wider domestication of Bombus Impatiens (Eastern Bumblebee) and Bombus Occidentalis (Western Bumblebee) would be in order... hopefully people will be smart enough to domesticate said strains as well as others in their own regions so that they will not end up invading each other any more than they already are but I doubt it (we have already killed off Bombus Franklini in this way)

>>2419690
Isn't B. terrestris already widely used to pollinate, for example, strawberries?

>>2419695

Yes, the domestication of B. Terrestris caused serious problems for other strains of bumblebees; they were exported to Eastern Europe for domestication where they picked up new diseases and mites from the native colonies out there which spread to Franklin's Bumblebee and the Rusty-Patched Bumblebee upon their return and extensive usage in the pollination of almond crops out in California. Now Rusty-Patched is endangered (the one everyone has been talking about since last year) and Franklin's is completely annihilated for over a decade (although no almost no one even talks about that...lol)

>>2419690
>>2419700
Woah, I've never heard of bumblebee domestication before beyond just putting out a box that you hope they move into. Where can I learn more about keeping bees that arent apis mellifera.

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I captured a swarm and left the queen trapped for a few days so they would settle into my box. Came back and they had covered it in wax. I love bees building honeycomb over things.

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>>2420050

>>2419779

Well, domesticating bumblebees had to start somewhere, so naturally at some point colony zero in the project started with an artificial nest burrow made in a box with the intent to coax mated queens emerging from winter hibernation in the Spring, but has since grown into a thriving business - here's one youtube channel appears that covers it, if only a little: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eeyr8MzRl2I

This domestication business has spread to the states, and you can see more about it by looking up Arbico Organics, which actively sell them in huge quantity each summer. They are strictly sold for pollination services as they do not produce enough honey to be worth while if honey production is your goal.

Additionally, Trigona (stingless bees) are kept in Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and parts of Polynesia. They do produce a harvestable quantity of honey, but are largely kept more for the purpose of preserving their declining numbers, although some trigona honey can be found on the market as a novelty. The Australian youtuber Jeff Heriot has a detailed video series on keeping these.

Now, you did ask about anything OTHER than Apis Mellifera, so I will bring up Apis Cerana which is the honeybee populating southeast Asia and Japan, but these are also part of the Apis genome and therefore just another kind of honeybee.

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I am extremely interested in beekeeping. Lately my fascination in social insects has been at a high.
What are some good books on the general theories of beekeeping, the science behind the methodology and whatnot? I would love to know more about what natural behaviors we are manipulating.

I have a few questions for you folks, a lot of who seem to know what they are talking about.
How much of traditional (with euro honey bees) beekeeping is applicable to other species? Are there any other less invasive options for somewhere like the northwest? I know most wild bees fill other niches, in plant stems and burrows and whatnot. Bonus points if they produce honey.

How small-scale can beekeeping be? Is a backyard hive possible, without being noticeable to very very close neighbors? I know people with traditional hives (stacked boxes with euro bees) and the colony ends up taking up a 13ish foot radius of uncomfortable bee-attack zone.

Pic is of a Eucera sp. , which are found living in tunnels in Oregon forests. At least, I think so. I found the tunnels, and I find the dead bees, but I haven't yet seen a bee come out of the tunnel.

>>2420572

How much of traditional (with euro honey bees) beekeeping is applicable to other species?

You can keep Apis Cerana (Asian honeybee) in the same type of top-bar hive you can keep Apis Melifera (Euro honeybee). Other than that, not really.

Small scale can just be one hive, but then you either need to split the hive as it grows, or let it get 5 ft tall if you don't want a swarm to occur. If you don't have 13 feet to spare, you might want to look into rooftop hive stands. I know a decent amount of people in urban settings do this.

You can easily keep mason bees without anyone noticing. Brushy mountain sells mason bee housing that looks a lot like bird houses and mounts on trees exactly the same

Guy who started the last bee thread here.

My apiary in London is all set up and ready for bees, which I should be picking up in a week or so. I really can't wait to be back in the hobby.

What are the thoughts on the overpriced FLOW system?

One of my hives requeened itself, they should be emerging today, but I jammed a robbing screen on today because it's getting chaotic out there. One hive, or rather one bee, is very aggressive towards me. I normally can sit on my hives, but this one lady always comes and buzzes me just for going near them now. Not sure it's the same bee but it's just a single bee that seems to hate me. I walked out of aggro range and she kept after me. I ran down the street and she was still madly buzzing my head and ear. She didn't stop until I ran down the block and around the corner. Absolute madwoman. Going in later today to check the requeened hive and make sure everything is ok. They are three boxes deep and might need another (all those unemployed nurse bees went to town expanding honey production). I'll also check the other hives to see if they need room, I have to assemble some more boxes really quick, might not have time to paint them.

Anyone use supplements in their feed? I'm putting feeders in all the hives because of the dearth and these robbing problems, just to see if they'll take em. I'm not a honey monger, I just want maximum bee expansion so I can aggressively split next spring for 10+ hives (running 4 right now). One hive, despite being 3 boxes strong and full of bees, showed signs of chalkbrood a while ago (weird Craigslist nuc aquisition) and I haven't seen any girls bringing home pollen as much, so I mixed up a local company's pollen substitute and dropped a patty in each hive. Gonna check to see if they're taking it and add more today, the protein should help ensure brood is strong. Used some weird "minerals and probiotics" feed they had for sale with their pollen on the disease-ish hive. I know probiotics are a meme but locals have had success with these guys mix, low nosema counts and all. I know someone who likes Honey-Bee-Healthy as well.

>>2421926
It's bullshit, maybe fun if you have a single hive for the lulz, it would just cause massive robbing in my apiary. Too expensive to scale. May make people avoid inspecting

>>2416731
.What do you take photos with? I'm not a photo nerd but my bee obsession makes me want to get into macro photography, but the whole DSLR + macro lens shit is money better spent on /k/ and bee stuff. I'd drop a few hundred on a point and shoot though. Probably should focus my efforts in working with webcam/pi stuff for useful bee metric analysis instead of showing how precious my bees are up close. I stream beekeeping stuff to Twitch sometimes and the webcam picks it up pretty well.

>>2422339

>One hive, or rather one bee, is very aggressive towards me. I normally can sit on my hives, but this one lady always comes and buzzes me just for going near them now. Not sure it's the same bee but it's just a single bee that seems to hate me. I walked out of aggro range and she kept after me. I ran down the street and she was still madly buzzing my head and ear. She didn't stop until I ran down the block and around the corner. Absolute madwoman.

seriously? just swat that bitch. very easy way to tell if its the same bee each time lol

>I'm not a honey monger

this is probably the best way to go about it.

I havent used supplements, but one of my hives is showing some signs of possible foul brood ... very worrying. I gotta go back in tomorrow and verify if it's european foulbrood, or american foulbrood... the latter of which calls for a gallon of gas and a match

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well, no foulbrood, but upon doing some research it looks like they had some sacbrood issues which the bees ended up clearing up... but these hives have produced me so much honey this year i'm out of jars which is possibly the best problem i've ever had in my life

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So I did this for the first time, I was given some wide-mouth mason jars so I put a foundation-less frame into one of my honey supers so I could cut out some rectangles and cleanly plop them in my wide-mouth jars. I've seen jars of honey with chunks of comb in them at the store, grossly overpriced. Maybe I can get some hipsters to pay double the normal going rate of a pint! lol

>tfw my wife and father-in-law raise bees and I'm an apiphobe
I like them fine enough, I just don't want them anywhere near me (the buzzing gets me something fierce). It hasn't been much of a problem thus far since the bees tend to keep to themselves and the few ladies who DO bother me tend to go away if I tell them to (I know that's not actually the reason but it makes me feel better thinking of it that way).

Unfortunately we just got a fourth hive of Italian bees, and those little bastards have no sense of personal space. It doesn't help that their hive was teeming with mites, wasps and disease (the guy who used to own the hive didn't take care of it even slightly), so I'm concerned they're going to affect our established hives.

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can anyone recommend me a good way to learn about beekeeping?

Ive been really interested in beekeeping for a while now but im not sure how to start

>>2418247
Aren't you just the bee's knees.

>>2416724
As far as I know, the sugar syrup it's only when you can't do anything else. I mean after the harvesting and/or - I know nothing about Texas - just before winter. Split up the hives, try to make your own frames, check on youtube. The rest is just learning, watching, don't be shy to ask other keepers. Plant more wild flowers - be careful which ones you choose -, trees or just take some of the boxes and put them on the bank of the woods, fields when it's blooming. One of the most important is try protect them from invasive species and wasps. But as I said I know nothing about texas. Never forget bees are very important.

>>2427051
I'd look for local clubs or similar organizations. In my opinion, beekeeping can be learned basically on the fly and explained as individual situations arise (though classes are fine too). Otherwise, read First Lessons in Beekeeping.

>>2427051

youtube videos!

>>2426478

>we just got a fourth hive of Italian bees ... their hive was teeming with mites, wasps and disease

that's Italian honeybees for you... go with Russians or Carniolans and this problem will take care of itself

>>2422345
Very last response.
I just use a plain iphone 6 with an app that allows for manual focus. It can shoot pretty small stuff but I'm thinking about getting a cheapo macro lens attachment. Everything I've posted is a screenshot from video as well, so it can do better.

How do you get started doing bees? Isn't it prohibitively expensive?

>>2428783
You just read up and then get all the stuff. Suit, smoker, hive tool, brood box, and a nucleus hive of bees will maybe run you around 250 to 300 dollars. Initial costs for equipment are kind of high, but a hive is pretty hands off and cheap after that. You really only spend more on hive boxes as they expand and produce honey after you have all the initial stuff.

>>2429146
>>2428783
Yeah, if you want to maximum poorfag you can, theoretically, make foundationless frames and langstroth boxes out of scrap wood, catch swarms with bait hives during the right season, ghettorig a veil on a hat, use a prybar for a hive tool, and smoke them with a can or some old school shit, cigarettes if you smoke em. It would be a pain, especially if you didn't have beekeeping experience, but at this point I feel if I was impoverished or post-apoc, without any of my gear or furniture or bee suppliers, I'd be able to start up beekeeping anyways.

>>2426452
I usually buy honey with honeycomb in it, I pour out the honey into my pot for later use and then chew on little bits of the honeycomb like gum. It's delicious.

I like bumblebees and bees that aren't cocks, but I don't care for honey. Is there a reason to keep bees if you don't eat honey?

>>2416700
Im new to this but really would like to get started. Figure it's too late now and next spring I would start. Any tips, tricks, must haves, dont haves, would be fantastic. I would love yo go somewhere and figure everything out or just see everything.

>>2430736
I'm not in it for harvesting honey, I'm in it because I love bees. There are random niches for making money, most beekeepers I know who are above a few hives but below full-time-job try to pick up these niches to make the hobby self-sustaining. Queen rearing is one, making nuc hive splits and selling them on Craigslist or via local groups is another. The big money in beekeeping right now is pollenation contracts; California needs almond pollenation around February, so people load up trucks of hives and ship em off to Cali orchards. A standard pollination rental contract is signed and they pay something like 10-20 bucks per frame of bees, so a double deep 10 frame hive with a good queen nets you 200 bucks. Obviously transport and such has costs, so there's an economy of scale with this one. If you want to just run a couple hives in your backyard (always do at least two so you can compare and use one hive to rescue the other if needed), it's a fun and entertaining way to spend your money if you're into inverts. Nothing better than moving frames around while tons of bees crawl all over you harmlessly. If you're just doing it for fun, you can make your hives look really artsy like ecobeebox's laser carved hives or pretty paint jobs, make it nice yard decoration. You may also want to look into top bar hives, they can be fun to work with and easy to build yourself.

>>2430757
Buy books, read everything. Buy gear over winter, order queens in Jan/Feb.

Recent hive stories, fellow beekeepers?
>pop open hives to check feeder levels
>no smoke or gear cuz it's just a quick peak, no cigar cuz quitting smoking
>D fine, A fine, go to open B
>fucking bees pour out like water
>head immediately surrounded in guards
>shut lid and run from apiary with guards still buzzing me
>oh god sting me anywhere but my visible face
>run halfway down the street
>turn around and see bees right behind me
>get stung on scalp a few times
Fucking post-solstice bees, I swear man.

>>2430864
I live in NE ohio, its cold in Jan/feb.

>>2430951
You order them in Jan/Feb so the suppliers know how many to breed, you pick them up in April or so. It's livestock, advanced planning is needed. My local bee store didn't take orders until Valentine's Day and kept allowing orders until they run out of capacity to breed that many. Bees came in April.

>>2430864

>Fucking post-solstice bees, I swear man.

sounds like they requeened with africanized genetics... requeen before that bitch produces swarms

>>2432209
Naw I am north of the AHB area, they just are -sometimes- shitty. They produce well, and they're from some sketchy dealer anyways so I figure they maybe have had some disease hurting them. Mite counts are low but I saw signs of chalkbrood a couple months ago (just some mummies being dumped, frames all appeared fine). I have started feeding them a protein booster and a probiotic/random shit additive that some larger scale friends have used successfully to reduce nosema, chalkbrood, etc. Did an inspection today and they were totally fine, I just need to read their moods better. Last time I popped in, I didn't give them much warning, didn't have my usual cigar, and it was twilight so everyone was home. Really was my mistake. It's Hive B and I nickname them Beda; I read somewhere it means warrior woman in some old Euro language, and it maybe means trouble in Russian.

I've heard anecdotal evidence that sometimes the meaner hives are more productive. Mo' honey mo' problems.

>>2432738
It seems to me like the meaner hives out of my ten have been the most successful this year. In texas it seems like africanized genes are unavoidable anyway, and maybe something about them just gives bees success in this environment. They certainly spread through feral populations quickly. I always wear a full suit and don't even have to fuck around with smoke or moving slowly at all. I definitely lose a lot of bodyweight in sweat though. Who knows, maybe there's some sort of niche market for hyperagressive guard bees. I migjt just start breeding them.

How feasible is beekeeping in suburbia? My mother wants to start keeping bees here in Massachusetts and she doesn't seem all that dissuaded by the price of starting and the regular need to open the hive and check for mites, wax worms, loss of queen, etc.

She has a haphazard plan currently:
2 langstroth hives (exact combination uncertain, hows 2 deeps and 3 mediums?) placed in the now abandoned sand box backyard, fenced in, shaded by trees in summer, bit more sun in winter

Buy 2 boxes of bees of what ever is available in spring, requeen with queens produced by local breeders. Ideally she would like bees hardy for the climate and preferably gentle.

Still haven't heard back from the town on any local ordinances on bees, such as property line rules, permits, or max hives per property.

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>>2434982

I am operating out of Western Massachusetts, in a suburban setting. 5 hives, all is well. As far as I know there are no actual laws about how many hives you can or can't have. As long as the bees aren't pissing off your neighbors, you're good to go.

a 2-deep structure is best for overwintering. The bees can store 150+lbs of honey and make it through the winter without having a structure that is too big for them to heat. Just make sure it's ventilated well enough for moisture to escape. ventilation is even more important than insulation/warmth, believe it or not.

I wouldn't use more than two mediums on a hive. Don't use the mediums until the first two deeps are filled - if it gets to the point you think you need a third medium, harvest what honey you can to give them more room.

Dan Conlon operates out of Deerfield and specializes in the production of pure-bred Russian queens and nucs. I recommend him as a bee supplier.

I use something similar to an old sandbox - an old gardenbox filled with gravel.

good luck to you and your mother anon

>>2435325
Hey, thanks for the reply. Makes me feel a little better about the suburbia thing. I live out east right in between Boston and Providence so the pick up only supplier out West might be difficult for us.

The thought behind the 3 mediums was for having 2 extras that can be easily swapped when they fill it. May be I over thought it, would just having extra frames be better?

Anyway, next Spring is still a long way off so there's plenty of time to plan.

>>2416731
Do it anon. I tried to get bees this year but the winter was harsh so orders couldn't be filled and beeks that were selling nucs were charging $250 per nuc.

>>2430736
Pollination. I had to hand-pollinate all my squash plants and it's a pain in the ass. Even if you don't harvest the honey, having bees in the vicinity will greatly increase your berry and melon yields.

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>>2435357

>The thought behind the 3 mediums was for having 2 extras that can be easily swapped when they fill it. May be I over thought it, would just having extra frames be better?

well, it's always good to have some extra hive equipment on hand in general - if your hives are healthy you can expect to be forced to make splits to suppress swarming.

As far as "swapping" them out when you take off a medium for harvest, the best way to do this is just extract the honey from the frames, and put the emptied frames back on the hive asap. The bees will repair all the comb within 48 hours and if the hive is doing well and you're in a nectar flow, the box will be full again in about 4-5 weeks.

make sure there is a queen excluder between the medium box and the deep boxes. After the bees initially draw out the frames.

For harvesting it's also great to have extra boxes on hand because that way you can just put the frames you intend to harvest in the spare boxes, walk those inside, and leave the active hive intact. At least, this is how I do it.