Bee Positive

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>>934899
It really depends. If you're trying to produce honey commercially, you need to invest a lot of money in things that will increase production at the expense of hive health and consequently things to keep them from dying at your hand. If you're producing honey for personal use, you can afford to leave them adequate amounts, taking only what you need, and they'll do fine on their own.

I grew up with honey being a family hobby and have been wanting to get into it myself as an adult; I drew up pic related as an easy way to make a top-bar hive, if you want to save yourself from paying for a langstroth. With top-bars, you have to remove whole sections of comb, and never take more than 25% of it, but that'll be enough for personal use.

bumping for interest

>>935406
There's probably not a lot of people who have much knowledge about this. I'm no expert, but I'm the guy who grew up on it, I can probably answer the simpler questions you'd have.

>>935409
When I get out of the city I want to raise bees primarily for the environmental factor, with honey being mainly for my coffee and tea

Is there any significant cost besides the initial investment into building the hive?

How difficult is it to regulate temp/humidity in a hive? From the little research I've done that seems to be one of the biggest issues that kills bees and causes fungus

Are there any plants that I should remove/not plant on the land that fuck with bees or their honey?

If the life of the hive is nearing its end, is it as simple as just building another hive for them or do you need to like get new bees or what

>>935416
You'd be looking at a couple hundred for a langstroth and another couple hundred for a good European honey brood (or you set the hive out with some raw comb in it and cross your fingers). You could spend a fortune on a hotknife, a centrifuge, a smoker, a complete bee suit, ect. but if you like my top bar design, that'd basically be free; because you're not doing all that other crap that commercial growers do to eek out an extra 5% more honey. You just pull out one or two bars, break the whole comb off into a bucket, put the bars back and close the hive up. You probably wouldn't even need to suit up for that, but I'd still recommend smoking them first. The actual processing with a top bar is just mashing up comb and filtering out the wax (or you can eat the comb whole).

Temperature and humidity are mostly issues because of how commercial grows work. As long as you don't constantly move the hives and feed them processed sugar, they'll stay pretty healthy on their own if they sit calmly in the shade. It's kind of like asking how to regulate the amount of pesticide you have in your soil when you plan on gardening organically; it's just not something you'll have to worry about.

Plants are going to be pretty much the same, a healthy hive will travel several miles to find good pollen, it's only when they're restricted to commercial monocultures that they'll use plants that are toxic to try to make up the losses.

Subsequent generations will swarm if the population is high enough (which will happen if it's a healthy hive). Having a free hive for them to take over will make the swarm end quickly, otherwise you either have to control the numbers (which isn't healthy for them) or they'll find someplace that you didn't intend on them going like a random hollow or maybe an attic (which isn't healthy for you).

>>935416
cont.

Bees having been doing this for a very long time without our "help". most of what beekeepers try to do, like taking too much honey and replacing it with sugar, putting in plastic forms to restrict comb size, restricting the feeding flora to a single plant, ect, only puts excessive pressure on the bees and reduces the quality of the honey. Taking only what you need (less than 25%-30% typically) and letting them worry about everything else will get you the highest quality and best tasting honey you'll ever taste.

I recently purchased a property containg 4 apple trees. My father in law told me If I got a couple of Bee hives it would help increase my apple yield. True? Worth it?

>>935534
Definitely true, increased polination increases most yeilds; commercial bee keepers actually get paid to truck their bees onto farming fields. How worth it it would be would depend on how much work you plan on putting into bee keeping and what type of apple it is (whether you'd actually use it or not). You could put in an hive that you don't maintain at all, and toss a quarter bag of worm castings under each tree and easily double or triple your apple yeild with no extra effort.

>>935537
To clarify, I wasn't saying that more work would offer more return, just that more work may not be worth the extra effort (an unmaintained hive will polenate just as well as a micromanaged one).

>>934903
Ive fucking seen that infograph 8 times now,

I dont know how to cut wooden planks with scissors.

Help, pls respond.

>>934899
Beekeeping isn't hard at all. Just set up hives and leave them alone until it's honey harvest time. If there's any flowers with nectar in the surrounding couple of square miles, they'll find it. By far the most accidents with bees happen when people are fucking with them

And you could plant that area sure, but consider the cost vs the benefits. That's how much money spent, and for how much honey? A colony of bees will need a hell of a lot more flowers than that little patch just blooming once a year to survive.
If you want to plant that flowers and stuff for YOU because YOU like it, then go ahead. The bees will work with whatever, and you need to keep that perspective in mind.

>>935882
That's kinda cool, actually. I've only post it twice.

I would have thought more people would comprehend "cut, affix, attach", so that's my bad.

>>934903

What does the inside look like when it's working?

I don't get how a hollow log with wood strips in the middle results in honeycombs... is it a onetime use, reusable?

Complete novice fyi.

>>936487
No problem, I should have gone into more detail when I was putting that together. I'm planning on making a video this spring when I go out and build a few.

Bees naturally seek out hollows as places to build their hives. This design is basically just an artificial hollow, so that it can be easily opened and harvested without causing damage to the rest of the hive. When they find a good hollow, they build it from top to the bottom, and along the best support. By putting in bars, the bees will build the comb along the bars instead of in any other direction, so when you open the hive, you can lift up one bar and there should be one whole section of comb on it. You break off the comb, place the bar back into the hive, and they'll rebuild it and fill it with honey again. As long as you leave them enough honey that they can feed themselves during the winter, they'll keep building more and more comb until they run out of space, at which point they'll swarm (some of the bees will try to find another hollow to use).

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>>936839
forgot pic

>>935882
You can achieve the same effect by cutting a 55 gallon food grade plastic drum in half, and using lumber for the top bars.

>>939076
No, actually you can't. Not only will bees avoid synthetic materials when natural spaces are available, wood has a much higher R-Value; a hive would die in a plastic tub in most climates.

>>935882
It's called grip strength, child

Get the beekeepers handbook. Read a lot. If there's a master beekeeper in your area, spend some time with him.

Bees range farther than you think. The work isn't too bad but it's continual. Just be aware of what you're getting into.

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>>935435
> Subsequent generations will swarm if the population is high enough (which will happen if it's a healthy hive). Having a free hive for them to take over will make the swarm end quickly, otherwise you either have to control the numbers (which isn't healthy for them) or they'll find someplace that you didn't intend on them going like a random hollow or maybe an attic (which isn't healthy for you).

So what could you do to help this out? Build another home for them to use when they need it?

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>>941846
>Build another home for them to use when they need it?
Yes.

>>941846
Yes. Queen culling is also another way of managing when/if a hive swarms

>>934899

1 - Bees are very easy. If you are growing them for mass honey or queen production, it can be a science, but for keeping bees in general is super easy. You buy the boxes and the bees, and spend the first few months monitoring their growth, gradually adding a new box to the hive as the bees fill up the existing ones. Once you reach 3/4 boxes per hive that is generally enough. From there they will be basically self-perpetuating. You can take honey during the summer and as long as you have left enough for them by the time fall/winter rolls around, they will feed on the honey and survive to the next spring.

2 - Planting flowers is great, but bees also get a lot of pollen and nectar from trees. You would be aiding them by providing the right species of flowers, but your 2 acres is a small patch compared to the size of the area they will be foraging in.

>>934903

Any concerns with rot or fungus? Do you have to dry out the wood really well, and make sure it's not exposed to rain?

>>941846
Or you can do splits when your hives are doing well.
Pretty much what you would do it grab some honey frames, brood frames, and egg frames and put them in another box and scrape in some bees. The remaining bees think that the others just swarmed so they don't have to and the transplant group thinks they swarmed. They both end up with more room and can keep growing.

>>944064
Bees naturally hive in living or dead wood hollows. I've never heard of rot or fungus being a problem, but I would imagine that the powers that be made the bees capable of dealing with that sort of thing.

With untreated natural wood, the hive will decay just like all the other wood in the area, less one factor: if the hive is elevated on a frame it won't become saturated with water the way logs on the ground will. This should prevent most forms of decay. And since the hive should be situated in the shade anyway, if it's under a tree you're pretty much golden.

I devised this system because I wanted a way to attract native bees to hives that could be built with minimal tools in locations that can only be accessed through intensive hike-ins. This allows me to benefit the growth of a natural resource while also increasing the availability of foragable food in locations where resupply points can be more than a week away. If you're trying to set something up at home and have the extra money, a Langstroth may be a better option for you, but if you want to guerrilla-grow some top quality honey on government land, this top bar hive will cost you almost nothing, it'll just take a lot of cutting to set up.

#beehivesmatter