re: Anyone here keep Bees?

One give can make 8-10 gallons of honey and requires very little real estate

The collecting honey part is the fun part to me.

Catching swarms has been fun too although I’ve only caught one

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Catching swarms is pretty exciting.

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A guy that works for me will get 2 or 3 swarms every year about this time. We will be spraying a field or even just driving down the road and he will notice a swarm. He just caught one about 4 days ago while we were spraying cotton fields.
He doesn’t wear a bee suit or anything and I have never seen him stung. The last one he got he just raked them off of a limb into an old chemical box. It was about 3 pounds of bees and he got $90 for them.

I saw him reach up into a hole in a tree one time and break off a piece of comb and walk back towards me eating it and did not get stung. Really is one of the craziest things to watch.

I know Roundup is bad for bees but is it an absolute no go when you have a hive. Even around fence lines and concrete?

I have sprayed roundup around my hives for the last four years. I don’t treat for mites or small hive beetles and have only lost three hives out of 18 this past year. There is one study out there that shows glyphosate (active ingredient in roundup) affects the digestive tract of bees over time, thus weakening the hive. I’m not sure that I believe it or not. People are so against Roundup that they will “alter” the studies to get the results they’re looking for.

That’s a tough question. Varroa mites are the number one killer of honey bees in the US. Most beekeepers treat their hives with oxalic acid. It kills mites but can kill bees as well.

I refuse to treat my hives. Eventually there will be a strain of bees that can coexist with mites.

One thing that I have tried with good success is VSH (varroa sensitive hygienic) queens. They are a strain of bee that was originally developed by the USDA Bee Lab in Baton Rouge in the late 1970’s. They have the ability to smell the capped brood that have mites, chew the capping off, pull the infected larvae out of the cells and throw them out of the hive. This breaks the life cycle of the mites.

Over the years, this strain of bees has improved from making little honey, but being really good at removing varroa, to being good at removing varroa and decent at making honey. They may make a little less honey than typical honey bees, but they can survive the mites.

Placing your hives in full sun helps with mite as well.

I recently added beetle traps as just a preventative measure, have not seen any yet.

For some reason the girls were a bit stingy this afternoon and lit my arse up then I went in the hives today.

I am really experimenting a bit and have a lot going on, added a super and divided all the frames with comb and added foundationless in between in both supers to one hive as the wife wants cut comb.

Added a super full of plastic double waxed Pierco frames to another today and could not believe how much they liked them, this may become my go to.

Ebay flow hive is lagging badly at this point and I understand why I was advised to skip this route but am hard headed so......

3 months in and learning a lot, if anyone wants to chime in on frame spacing this is my next topic to address.

Im hoping yo catch a couple more swarms. Have only got one so far and it was a small one. Struggling

Out of curiosity why did you put it in a nuc rather than a 10 frame.

Asking to learn not question your methods.