The Week o' the Swarms

[Next post from the original first year blog. Edited to update it.]

I filled all the hives with bees this week. It taught me to have faith in the weather. The first sun-drenched dry days of the Spring happened this week and the bees were ready to take advantage. As I wrote earlier, my friend Karen had been hunting for swarms. She came up with a treasure! She happened to know of someone with a grove of bee trees, just beginning to swarm.

The owner happens to be a guy in tune with his land and the natural rhythms involved. He has a wonderful grove of mature Ash trees next to a pond. There are about 6 colonies of honeybees living in the hollows in the trunks. He watches and sees them swarm every year in the springtime. This year Karen happened to be there. We immediately got the first swarm (well, second swarm, really. The first swarm had already moved into his duck box high on another Ash tree.) and transferred it to Karen’s Top Bar Hive. Two more swarms followed in the next four days. The weather was perfect: warm, cloudless days with great sunsets.

And on Mother’s Day, the local Swarm List finally granted me a call to retrieve a swarm. City bees! A big fat swarm on the side of a condo in downtown Eugene. It was a dry swarm, and I got stung a lot though my own carelessness and newbeek mistakes. Molly even got a bee in her hair that stung her. But the swarm ended up in Ed’s Eagles' Rest Beeyard, after a trip to the country in a cardboard box.

By the time I got the two other swarms from the Ash tree grove, I kind of got the hang of moving the bees, and no more stings (so far). Now all the hives are filled with new swarms of delighted, happy bees. Two at Ed’s, one at Karen’s and now one in my hastily assembled and not-quite-fully-painted Warre` hive in my back yard.

The Warré Thing

[Next post from the original first year blog. Edited to update it.]

So I ended the last blog entry by stating that I had a brand new 48” TBH for the garden, didn't I? I just finished putting the last coat of paint on it last Thursday. I was looking forward to putting away the table saw and concentrating on catching swarms for awhile.

Uh uh.

Karen and Maria fixed that. Like everyone around me in the Willamette Valley, these two friends experienced a near total dearth of honeybees as their early gardening began. Their wonderful landscaped garden had been doing fine for a long time, thanks mostly to a secret honeybee colony that had taken up residence in an old duck box. This year the racoons made short work of it, and voila (translation to english: wahl-lah) … no honeybees.

And then somehow my 48” Top Bar Hive came to rest in their garden, and not in mine.

Before I gave up my 48” Kenyan TBH, I had been corresponding with Nick Hampshire about Warré top bar hives. After I gained awareness of their advantages and disadvantages, I had halfway decided to build a couple for me and Ed to add to the small apiary in his rural Eagle’s Rest garden next season. Relocating the new 48-incher just put the Warre`s higher on the "to do"list.


Now Nick has about a ton of information on Warrés including great plans for newbees. Fortunately/unfortunately I found it hard to discover where the notes were to the actual configuration of Warré top bars themselves. This led me back to the quest at the center of this blog: collecting information newbees ought to have but somehow is made obscure by the wise. I say fortunately, for this led me to David Heaf and to his great discussion group in the UK. Through his wisdom and advice, I got on with the Warré construction project with renewed confidence in the wider application of natural and organic methodology.

So … now having given up the 48” KTBH, table saw still in place, and a ton of plywood left, it's become obvious that Warré hives are soon to be a reality.

Uh … plywood? Yes, that is the very first of the by-now-not-surprisingly-unanswered-for-newbies questions: is plywood okay for those heat and scent-sensitive and more precisely cut out Warrés? Nick got me an answer in record time. Yep, newbees, it’s okay. Here’s proof in a very kewl backyard plywood hive. (Oh and forget about that “gassing” issue re plywood. It’s less than negligible levels when compared to the trace elements of toxic crap your bees are going to carry into the hive in their little pollen baskets ….)

The core of this new development for me is the idea that we can start this year to gain some experience in beekeeping the natural way in both horizontal and vertical top bar hives. That's worthwhile, don't you think?

Okay. Karen is busy searching for new bees (no … not newbies), Maria is gardening, Ed’s monitoring the KTBHs at Eagle’s Rest for signs of occupancy now that we’ve got the lemongrass oil baiting those hives; and me, I’m busy converting all those decimal inch-fractions on the most familiar Warréhive plan to simple (real) english measurements so that a normal person can use them with a normal tape measure or ruler. (I'll notify the Wise Ones, and ask them to consider revisions for us newbees.)

Redecisions, Redecisions

[Next post from the original first year blog. Edited to update it.]

Hives:

Hmmm. This week two of the top beekeeper experts over on the Organic Beekeepers Yahoo group posted that for their length 2-foot or 3-foot Top Bar Hives aren’t a good idea. Basically their reasons were first that the volume would be too small -- that the honeybees would “swarm too much”. Second, there wouldn’t be much production of honey; at least that’s what I took to be one comment. One of the experts cited the case of some African hives that were 5’, 6’ and even longer. The other expert felt that 5’ was about the max. At any rate neither of them would consider 24” or 36” TBHs.

So this is exactly the kind of contradictory information that hangs up us newbees when we’re starting out. This is the kind of stuff I’m hoping the blog will acquire information to clarify.

Half of the websites, books and magazine articles about top bar hives recommend 36” hives to us fledgling TBH beeks. e.g., If you look on the links list below there are many plans and pictures of 3-foot top bar hives. PJ Chandler (whose site first convinced me there was hope of natural, sustainable beekeeping) says this, “If you are a first-time beekeeper and currently have no ambitions to keep more than one or two hives, I suggest you start with a 36” long box. If you have some experience with conventional hives and want to start nucs and run four or five or more colonies, then go for the more capacious 48” model” [it’s on page three of the ‘How to’ plans]

There are a surprising number of 38-40 inch hives. Actually they are 97 centimeters and above. I suppose that’s a legacy of the original Kenyan and Tanzanian hives? Now when you look at these pictures of hives in developing countries, they look to be less than 4 feet, don’t they? And these are for serious beekeeping.

Sam Comfort’s video showing him working TBH’s was a big source of new information for me when I first saw it. He was using Top Bar Hives that appeared to be around two feet and three feet long, as well as some Langs. (I didn’t see any Warre’s.)

Christy Hemenway of Gold Star Bees posted something on the Top Hive Group “I don't see the need for you to be discouraged so much as I see the need for you to become very well-versed in how to maintain a three foot hive!”

I guess the most definitive answer to hive length I read was from BillSF9c over on that same Top Hive group, “A medium [hive] may swarm sooner, but that enables another hive if you split before it does. It's not good or bad. It's choices, depending on need &/or intent. Why, do you want bees? Why, do you want a TBH? Why do you want a hTBH? (horizontal, as opposed to vertical...) Engineers say, "Form, follows [needed] function. Function is defined by need/desire(s.) Write yours down, in order of importance, and go from there. See what fits.”

Bees:

Even though I’m desperate for bees, I turned down a chance to do a cutout this week. It is a 12+-year-old hive in a well house. I don’t even have a full bee suit, nor the expertise to know how to attempt the capture, so I politely declined and sent the offer on to a longtime beek in my area.

So far the two hives in Ed’s garden are empty, but I refreshed the lemongrass oil on Sunday. This is about the first week in the Willamette Valley where our weather hasn’t been below 40 at night and constantly rainy. On those few days in March and in early April where there was sunshine, I saw just a few bees out and foraging, however Ed’s rural garden is suddenly alive with ‘em.

I’m thinking very soon something will happen to get us some free bees. My little 24” hive is ready to put next to an inaccessible wild hive that’s close to swarming, the owner says. (We’ll see.)

Meantime, I have a brand new 48” TBH for the garden.

Posted by Tom Warren at 5:42 PM 0 comments

Decisions, Decisions

[Next post from the original first year blog. Edited to update it.]

With the call from several prominent organic beekeeper folks to get more new people helping the honeybees to recover, I decided to be one of those involved; I spent last Fall and Winter reading, researching the net, and amassing a ton of info (check out the links section), … and making a plan. Long story short, here’s some of what I came up with:

Hives:

Originally, like you and every other new beek, I only knew of the standard Langstroth hive system. As I got into research, the drawbacks multiplied. They cost a lot, what with all the parts. And – paramount for me – the whole system seemed to be if not anti-bee, rather cruel and exploitive. My wife came to the rescue, understanding my reluctance, but wanting me to succeed with an effort to help the bees. She showed me a link to P J Chandler’s Barefoot Beekeeper site. Immediately I found that I had been correct in my displeasure with the Langstroth system. Chandler was the first to enlighten me to what was wrong, and how to proceed. By the time I got to Anarchy Apiaries’ site, I knew I was on the right path.

I started with Chandler’s plan for a Top Bar Hive. After doing a lot of research on TBH designs, I modified it to incorporate ideas that seemed important for my area. I ended up with hives that are closer to Hirschbach Apiary‘s New TBH plan. Abundant rain in Oregon means a watertight cover. Screened bottom boards at the time I was constructing seemed necessary for mite control, at least until my bees could be regressed and their resistance strengthened. Later, I realized there were ventilation issues with a closed TBH hive in high moisture areas (rain again), so the screens stayed, but I added a closed bottom board. My only addition to TBH design ideas was to realize that the closed bottom board didn’t have to be attached, but could simply be a tray the hive sat on. The screened bottom board (SBB) is then able to be adjusted with spacers, and the tray/bottom board is easy to move and clean.

I chose a Kenyan style. I just like the lines. (I hadn’t paid much attention to Warre` hives when I was building my TBHs, basically because until I looked into them more carefully I assumed they were just Langstroth hives done “organically”. I’ve since learned better and next year I may build some.)

Acquiring Bees:

After reading comments from Dee Lusby, Michael Bush and others I didn’t want to buy packaged bees. Not even small cell bees. I thought it was better to go with local feral bees already adapted to my area, and naturally ‘healthy’. There have been feral bees in my little part of Oregon since they first escaped from the original pioneers almost 200 years ago. After WWII the farms and poultry ranches in the area began to shut down, and this resulted in another big wave of abandoned bees swarming into the surrounding forest and savanna areas in the Cascade foothills. There are some really old colonies up past the treeline. I’ve got people alerted to watch for swarms.

I decided upon two other strategies for acquiring those bees.

First, I found the best place to get the best, most organic lemongrass oil for luring swarms. You can’t grow your own and process it and end up with anything more pure and organic than the stuff from Mountain Rose. This weekend I set up two hives in my friend Ed’s wonderful rural garden and baited them with the lemongrass oil.

Second, I’m on the local swarm list through the Beekeeper’s Association. A friend of mine who keeps bees said she got more than a call a week all during swarm season last year, so I’m hopeful.

If toward the early part of Summer I haven’t been successful with either of these ideas, I know this nice lady who raises organic bees down the road from Ed’s garden. I’ll just whine at her until she gives me some bees.

I expect that I’ll end up with some sort of feral hybrids. Then I can spend the next few months identifying the strains, if possible. I don’t think it really matters, do you?

There’s a lot more to it all, but as of today that’s where I’m at with my plans and my decisions.

Ho Hum

[Next post from the original first year blog. Edited to update it.]


Another blog from another new beekeeper. The web is full of them, the webrings overcrowded with ‘em. Lots of ‘em are dead, or long forgotten, or languishing with no posts for the last half a year, prolly ever since the package bees first absconded, or the blogger died of anaphylactic shock next to his new hive, or maybe the spouse found other tasks to assign ….

So why put one more beeblog up on the net?

Well, I was standing over by the fence in the cyberspace beeyard and noticed a couple of things: First, there was a closed gate so that it was hard for a certain group to get in. That group is all the world-savers, tree huggers, environmentally conscious and aware activists who are busy doing their world-saving, tree hugging activist best to deal with their own tasks, whether it be whale saving, tree sitting, anti-nuke protesting, or the thousand other pieces of business that we desperately need to get on with across the planet. But in the back of all their minds is one more nagging thought that somebody ought to be focusing attention on the poor bees and doing something about their plight before they all go missing like all the dolphins did a la` “So long and thanks for all the pollen!” Beekeepers as a whole – while a sizable minority of them are themselves world-savers and environmentally aware folks who “get it” – beekeepers as a whole are speaking another language. Since I have some (ahem) readership amongst these world-savers, I figure I could blog my way towards switching that nagging thought with some information that would be understandable to them.

Second, the organic, sustainable, no-treatment-no chems, bees-know-best, survival-of-the-fittest, regress-back-to-the proper-bee-size Bee Guardians have yet to make a serious stab at providing adequate cross-over information that Warre`/Top Bar Hive using newbeeks (Beek = slang for beekeeper) find it very difficult to acquire in their beginning efforts. There is the tendency for the established beeks to speak code based upon Langstroth language and trust that TBHers can translate, surmise or generally apply non-TBH methodology to their fledgling operations. (There are a few notable exceptions, and you’ll find them in the links section of this blog.) But on the whole there are gaps in the beginner’s knowledge base that remain unbridged.

I figure that as I go along, I’ll get us TBH newbees some real answers that we can write down somewhere and pass on to the next class. Less reinventing the wheel; and less trying to adapt inadequate search engines to scrounge through disorganized bee forums where the information lives in dribs and drabs. Maybe we’ll eventually get a little pamphlet, website or smallish paperback full of how to actually do TBH splits, engineer SC foundation to TBH shapes, redesign hive plans to account for regional temperature and ventilation issues, blah blah blah, yadda x 3. See? There’s some stuff left to learn in Beginning Bee class. I’m gonna take notes and post ‘em here.

Okay. So I start out as a newbeek, with one skill in my favor as I go about beginning beekeeping. My dad was a Master Carpenter and I worked with him for a lifetime. I can build stuff outta wood. Killer bee hives. (No … not “Killer Bee” hives, Killer “bee hives”) I’ve built two Kenyan type TBHs that now sit in my friend’s garden out at Eagle’s Rest. I’ve got two more in the shop, and I’m studying Warre` designs for next season.

I joined the Beekeepers Association
and I’m on the Swarm List,
and the hives have been sprinkled with lemongrass oil
and the lady beekeeper down the road will prolly give us some bees if all else fails.

Lemme know what you think, what you need asked and answered ….

._.

Why Bees?

[This is the first post from the original first year blog.]

It’s kind of a Postcivilateum idea.

After you’ve come through the several stages of Earth Crisis Awareness (denial, despair, my x equals world saving, ... yadda x3) you arrive at this perceptual clarity where the actual possibilities of doing some actual good – rather than sending a check and singing Kumbaya – are actually apparent. By y’self … can’t save the whales, nor the amphibians, nor the coral reefs by acting locally, even if you think globally.

But …

You can save the bees. Locally. All you need is a back yard and some scrap lumber. It’s a whole movement, ya know? Organic, sustainable, hands-on beekeeping. One voice says that beehives should be more plentiful than televisions. The respected queen goddess of beekeeping says we need hundreds and hundreds of new beekeepers to get involved.

We H. Saps made Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), weakened the honeybee to susceptibility to varroa mites, and umpty other diseases that are killing them off. We should take some responsibility to fix this. Imean, do you like having the plants that provide your food supply pollinated or not?

Yeah. So I’ve started a whole ‘nother blog to rant all about it. Check out the links and resources and see if ya wanna save some bees too.

And, besides, ... the Goddess wants you to save them.