A Beekeeping Diary - Introduction

A Beekeeping Diary - Introduction

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Interest is really building now for a more self-sufficient, healthy and resilient style of non-migratory beekeeping in the northern states. Unstable honey prices, mites, africanized bees, and the misguided efforts to make beekeeping fit into an industrial and business model have all converged to leave our community in a kind of smoldering ruin, and the number of colonies in the U.S. at dangerously low levels. Something new and different needs to grow out of this wreckage if our community is to recover and have a positive outlook for the future. A newly configured beekeeping community may be important for having a future at all--we know how important honeybees are for the entire food system.

Over the last two years I have described in this magazine my own ideas about what constitutes health and resilience in northern beekeeping, and how I am trying to move one small apiary in this direction. In practical terms what Im really discribing is how to get honey production, nuc production and queen rearing to function smoothly together, in a place with a very short growing season. Success on these fronts makes an apiary extremely productive and stable; able to withstand shocks and disruptions of many kindsbiological, economic or social. This stability is what enabled be to overcome the shocks caused by both tracheal and varroa mites, and move more or less steadily forward toward better and more productive beekeeping over the last 15 years. Overlaying a queen rearing, stock selection and bee breeding program on top of an existing honey producing apiary also has enormous potential to increase the interest and enjoyment a beekeeper gets from his or her work.

The problem is to get all these different jobs to fit together right and not compete with each other. So, as a contribution for 2007, Ive sketched out a monthly diary describing the seasonal jobs and how Ive organized them after many years of trial and error. In a rather disjointed fashion, Ive also expanded on a few points that I think are especially important, or which caused me a lot of difficulty. All these notes are intended to be published so that they will describe the activities a month or two in advance of the actual growing season underway. This way, you can copy my system and use my dates exactly if you wish to. Dont worrythere are no copyrights or patents that can be infringed upon! But my real purpose is to just give you a starting point and encourage you to experiment and come up with a system that fits in really well with your own location and personal circumstances. Im also especially interested in helping younger beekeepers who are building up apiaries from a small beginning. This is the best and the easiest place to incorporate the principles of genuine health and stability, and take full advantage of the resulting productivity.

My dates should work fairly well in the dairy farming areas of the northern tier of states; where clovers, alfalfa and basswood provide the main honey crop. To make optimum use of all four seasons in the star thistle and goldenrod areas will probably require some adjustments. Further south, youll have to experiment to find the best time for raising queens and starting nucleus colonies. It should be worth the trouble; with milder winters you could achieve a very high survival rate in the overwintered nucs, and a correspondingly high productivity per box.

Id like to dedicate this diary to all the working beekeepers who followed their own lights, worked hard in their own apiaries to solve our current problems, and shared their results freely with the beekeeping community. Id especially like to thank a few of these people that I know personally: Bill Mraz; Erik Osterlund; Hans-Otto Johnsen; and Ed and Dee Lusby. Without their help and encouragement I would very likely not have survived this long as a beekeeper. Well all need to emulate the independence, determination and generosity of these people if beekeeping is to survive as a great hobby and way of life for future generations.

DECEMBER, JANUARY, and FEBRUARY

In northern New England, winter usually moves in to stay, crushing all arguments and objections, sometime in December. During the last few days of November, Im almost always finishing up the last pressing outdoor job of the season: melting the cappings wax. Like many other jobs in the apiary, this one is done, Im afraid, in a somewhat primitive, old fashioned, and low-cost way. A 55-gallon drum is set up over an outdoor gas ring; the kind you would use for a family reunion-sized pot of clam chowder. A few inches of water is brought to a boil in the bottom of the drum, and the dry cappings are added and meltedlittle by littleuntil the drum is nearly full of liquid wax. You must of course stand right there the entire time the flame is lit. If the mixture boils over, you will discover that hot, liquid beeswax burns very much like the gas flare over a Saudi oil well.

The minute the last bits of wax have melted, the flame is shut off and the scum is skimmed off the top. The wax is then dipped out with a bucket, and poured through a screen into pails that have been swabbed with warm soapy water. The pails are covered and left overnight. When no more wax can be skimmed off of the drum, the remaining slum, wax and water are stirred and reheated to boiling. Then the whole mixture is poured through a burlap bag secured to the top of an empty drum. Most of the remaining wax ends up solidifying above the water in the bottom of the drum. You need heat and pressure together to get the wax out of old, dark combs; but for dry cappings my method works pretty well. From each drum of dry cappings I get about 60-70 lbs of beautiful wax, and two gallons of slumwhich can be sent, along with your old combs, to a rendering plant where steam and pressure will remove the last few pounds of wax.

So, December arrives, and with it the best time of year for the beekeeper to rest. The labors of the previous season are over, and the next one still seems a long way off. The honey crop has been harvested and probably sold, and the bees are all packednothing more can be done for them until late March or early April. This is the time to relax, visit friends and neighbors, and be thankful to have a job like beekeeping during times like this. I especially enjoy reading and writing during December, and I might get the winter work started in the shop, or cut brush if theres no snow on the ground and the sun is out. But this is the time of year to stop being in a hurry, retreat inside by the fire, have a complete change of pace and enjoy the winter holidays.

In January begins the process of gradually ramping up for the coming season. Most days I work at my desk in the morning and in the shop during the afternoon. Some bright sunny days are saved for skiing or making excuses to go to a few bee yardstapping on the colonies and wondering if the future survivors can be identified by the sound of the cluster. My old bees always had some kind of a sound coming from the winter cluster. Since I brought in the Russian stock, I now have many clusters that are completely silent at 20 degrees (F). I have to tap on them to be sure there are bees inside at all.

Winter is of course the time to get your equipment ready for the coming season, and in a place with such a short growing season you want to do as much of this as you possibly can during the cold weather, so that all of your working time can be spent caring for the bees during the spring and summer. If you have an apiary thats expanding rapidly, adding a queen rearing section, or selling a large number of nucs, then the production and readying of new equipment becomes a really major concern, and can keep any full-time workers busy all winteror longer if youre not careful. The photos show the two special pieces of equipment I have been building and using for many yearsfeeders and bottom boards for nucleus colonies. The feeders take up the space of two frames, and divide a standard hive body into two completely separate compartments; with a place to feed each colony individually. The bottoms are made like old-fashioned single bottoms, but they are the same length as the hive body, and set up to accommodate the nucs on the 3/8 side, with entrances on opposite ends of the box.

If you want to catch more than 300 queens in one season, I think its worthwhile to make up special frames and boxes for the mating nucs. Whether youre producing queens just for your own use or for sale, catching and caging them is always the bottleneck, and everything possible should be done to facilitate this process. The smaller the nuc is, the faster you can find the queen. But when the nucs get too small, they need more attention to keep them from starving or absconding. The optimum size for combining fast queen catching and trouble-free maintenance is probably a 6 5/8 box holding two nucs, each consisting of four half-length frames and a small feeder. However, at my latitude, these would have to be recombined into larger colonies for the winter. I consider it an enormous advantage to have as many of the new queens as possible wintering in separate nucs, and surrounded by their own workers. So my compromise is to use standard have bodies divided into four separate compartments. As you can see from the photos, each box is divided permanently in half with a wood and tin divider. These halves are again divided by the moveable feeders; the same way as with the nucs on standard combs. By moving the feeder, adjacent nucs can be combined together if necessary. Thus, each box can hold two, three or four nucs. The bottom boards provide four entrances, one on each side of the box. Two-way nucs will almost always have a higher percentage of successful matings than 4-way nucs. But Ive always found my 4-ways to be a successful compromise, and with many advantages. In the late fall, these boxes are set up for winter just like the nucs on standard combseither on top of honey producing colonies, or four boxes packed together on a pallet.

Any serious amount of time I might have had for goofing off during the winter got snuffed out a few years ago when I started making my own foundations. How many of the troubles experienced by beekeepers over the last 10 years were caused by the build-up of mite control chemicals, and other pollutants, in the wax combs? No one can say for sure, but it seemed to me that this was a really important issue if colony health was to be restored. Its worth repeating: the wax combs are really the liver of the colony, and protect the bees by absorbing toxins that find their way into the hive. If the combs become oversaturated with contaminants, then the bees and brood are constantly exposed to the powerful, hormone disrupting chemicals that we have been using to control mites, and/or to other pollutants. Even the plastic foundations are sprayed with wax, which could be of dubious origin.

It took a lot of time and frustration figuring out how to produce 2-3,000 sheets of foundation from my own wax in a reasonable amount of time. In fact, I can remember saying that making foundation is much harder than dealing with mites! But now that I have a good system, its become very interesting and satisfying. About three weeks in February are devoted to this job. Its quite a thrill to be involved in all the bees activitiesfrom building the equipment, to raising the bees, producing honey, selecting the next generation, and finally helping them to build new combs from the wax produced right here in the apiary. It still takes more time than most commercial beekeepers would be comfortable with, but the out-of-pocket cost for foundation is now very low; and together with the health and self-sufficiency aspects, I think its well worth it.

A Beekeeping Diary #3: Early SpringUnpacking and Evaluating Colonies

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You often hear it said around here: April is by far the cruelest month. At this time of year we can spend one whole day outside in the warm sunshine, and then look out the next morning to see a blizzard in progress, with a foot of snow already on the ground. In fact, the extreme high and low temperatures on record for the first week ofApril are only about 10 degrees (F) off of our usual extremes of heat and cold for the entire year. These transitions and setbacks can seem especially brutal in the early spring.

I try to work through this season, and get myself slowly ramped up for the return to continuous outdoor work, by gradually unpacking the bees, getting a rough idea of the size of the clusters, and recording the location of the best looking colonies in each family group. Its often too wet to drive into many locations, so at first things go pretty slowly and I have to carry the packing cases out or make weather proof stacks in the yards. Just about the time when the last packing cases are being removed is usually the low point of the yearas far as the bees are concerned. This is where the verdict is finally handed down, and the results of your management scheme are plain to see. After a tough winter, and/or heavy losses, it can look pretty depressing. Im afraid that even after what I would consider good results over winter, many beekeepers would not be very impressed if they came here in early April. There seem to be way too many empty spaces, and the clusters are very small. But now I know better than to spend any energy being discouragedeven if my losses are near 50%. With almost all surviving colonies headed by young, tested queens; extra queens in the baby nucs; and the ability to raise a few early cells if need be; the apiary still has enormous potential to recover and produce surplus honey and bees when the weather becomes favorable. Since the arrival of tracheal mites, Ive had four or five springs with 50% winter loss. I used to worry about all the boxes of comb, honey, and foundation packed into the shop. Now I pace up and down while the April showers drum on the roof; counting the stacks over and over, wondering if I will have enough. Even when Ive lost half of my colonies over the winter, I can still sell some bees in the spring and also propagate the apiary back to its original size. I may have lost some of the honey crop by doing this, but overall my production of bees and honey has remained quite well balanced. Even while going through the process of eliminating treatments from the apiary and having heavy losses, I sold some bees every year except one. My 10 year average honey crop, which includes all of my disasters, is 89 lbs. During the last five years, when the apiary has been run without treatments of any kind, the average has been 96 lbs per colony.

So, there are ways to protect yourself and recover from heavy losses, without migrating to the South. If youre propagating your own stock, a heavy winter loss can also become an asset in future years. After a 40-50% loss, the stage is set for filling all of your equipment with really well-adapted bees, and achieving much better results in the coming years. Going through this process doesnt require any kind of extraordinary beekeeping skill or esoteric knowledgejust steady work and a willingness to re-orient your thinking. Much of the potential of northern beekeeping has remained invisible during the era of cheap transport and easy availability of bees and queens from the South.

Ive made early April sound pretty grim; but it is at least the time when winter finally has to make way for spring. There also occurs now one of the most wonderful and exciting events of the whole beekeeping year: the first good day for the bees to gather pollen. Around here this pollen comes from the soft maples, and the event usually takes place sometime between April 10-15. There was one year when the bees could gather lots of maple pollen on March 30; and I recall at least two years when they had to wait until April 21. But whenever it occurs, you can go right to the calendar and mark down another important date: in exactly three weeks there will be new bees hatching out in quantity once again. A new season is underway.

A Beekeeping Diary #4: SpringThings Are Getting Busy

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The last two weeks of April and the first week of May are one of the most interesting and critical times of year in this apiary, where lots of nucleus colonies are carried through the winter, and the most promising of these overwintered queens must be established in the honey producing colonies before the main flow starts in June. During late April and early May is the best time to rank all the surviving colonies, and make a preliminary list of potential breeders. Usually Ill start with the honey producing colonies. Hopefully, this is where the breedersthe most important queens in the apiarywill be found. If you remember from last years essay: the colonies are all marked with colored tacks indicating when the colony was last requeened and what family each new queen represents. These queens come from the isolated mating yard and have a clipped wing. They are at least 20 months old and have lived their entire life among bees and combs untreated since 2002. Their first winter was spent in nucleus colonies and then, in 2006, they headed honey production colonies that made a good crop. To be considered as a breeder, a queen must pass all of these tests and still be heading a healthy, vigorous colony after her second winter. In the spring of 2004, I could find only one queen with all the qualifications of a fully tested breederthe daughter of an SMR queen I obtained from the Glenn Apiaries. In 2005 I got 3 breeders from the overwintered honey producers. 2006 was the first year when I had a really good supply of these breeders, with extras in some of the families. Interestingly, by this time it was getting hard to find breeders from the SMR linesmy other families were gaining in strength, while the SMR families were in decline. (Dont read too much into thisall of my SMR families came from just two pure SMR queens. This is much too small a sample to use for judging the whole program.)

When I cant find all the breeders I need in the honey producing yards, I have to go back to the overwintered nucs and use queens that are only partially tested. This is how I maintained all my families during the brutal first stages of the selection process. The method seems to be sound, as the apiary has been gaining in strength and resilience year after year.

Now back to the nucleus colonies. I try to go around and rank all of them in one or two days during the last week of April. This is one of the most interesting jobs of the year. All of these queens are the same age, and its very clear to see which individuals and families are stronger after their first severe test. At this time I just mark all the nucs with a number (by lumber crayon) indicating the size of the clusters inside. In April you can learn about 90% of all there is to know about them by peeling back the corners of the grain bags used for inner covers. I only look further if there seems to be a problem or if its a colony that might supply a breeder queen; or become a drone mother.

Even though Im not planning to graft any large batches of cells until the last few days in May, I need to identify the drone rearing colonies right away during the first good spring weather when pollen is coming in from the maples and willows. If grafting is going to start on May 31, then the selected drone mothers need to start laying eggs in the drone combs around May 10. Remember, if youre using an isolated mating scheme with a relatively small number of colonies raising the drones, you are not mating your new queens to those drone rearing coloniesyou are mating them to the mothers of those drone rearers. By using some of my overwintered nucs to rear drones, Im always mating the new crop of queens to some of my breeders from the previous year. While evaluating those old breeders in the spring, I try to find the four best (representing four different families) that have not superceded and still have a healthy and vibrant colony after the queens third winter. If possible I also try to use each family for rearing drones only once every four years. 24 nucs headed by daughters of these four chosen colonies become the drone mothers for the current season.

On May 10 the dandelions are almost always in bloom, and I put the first drone comb in when the colonies are still in one box. I like to use old combs for this with a total of --1 side of drone cells per colony. I make sure the colonies are strong (adding bees and brood if necessary) and put the combs toward the center of the brood nest. I watch these colonies much more closely than any others in the apiary right at this timeespecially if a good dandelion flow is underway. 7-15 days after the first comb went in, the colonies are moved to the mating area and put on top of a second box containing seven combs of capped, liquid honey and three empty combsone of which is another drone comb. 10-20 days later, a third box is added on top containing some honey, empty combs, and another drone comb. In the marginal conditions around my mating area, this seems to give the drone mothers the right combination of room and extra stores to keep them raising drones at the right time, no matter what the weather brings. They get very little attention after the third box is added.

But I got a little ahead of things, because were supposed to be back down in the valley just starting on the real spring work. Sometime during late April or early May, once the colonies have all been numbered and accounted for, the steady outdoor work begin in earnest. Its an amazing time of year, and there always comes a day when we go to bed still worried about the poor bees and whether they will survive at all, and wake up the next morning to find that they are already completely out of control. Nucs need to be moved to their most advantageous locations, and the honey producing colonies need to be requeened and equalized. All these jobs must go steadily on, rain or shine, during the entire dandelion honey flow; which usually extends roughly between May 1 and May 25.

Once the process has begun, the general plan is to move a load of nucs each morning, and then spend the rest of the day equalizing, requeening, and adding more room in the honey producing yards. But the weather of course plays a big role in what is actually accomplished and when. If the days are warm and sunny, then a lot of manipulation and requeening gets done. When its cold and wet the moving process goes on all dayto free up more time later when the weather breaks.

Nucs are moved into the honey producing yards to replace winter loss; into holding yards for customer pick-up; and to other locations specially set up for producing the next crop of nucleus colonies. After ranking the nucs its easy to move and then deal with them in the right order, starting with the strongest. The colored pins show at a glance the family inside; and so they are routed, little by little, to the most advantageous places.

I always have one yard holding the baby nucs brought down from the isolation apiary in late summer. In spring they contain between -1/3 of my most valuable new queens and its important not to waste them. I use these queens to requeen honey producing colonies, or to head up splits made from those colonies. I like to do requeening in the spring by spending a couple of days just finding and removing as many undesirable queens as I can. Then on the third day, I catch all the queens needed from the baby nucs; clip their wings; put them in the introducing cages with a couple of workers and a plug of candy; and then transport them in a special box where I can keep track of the different families. As the queens are caught, a few of the poorest are left behind. The boxes ofqueenless brood are now stacked together with these weak nucs. In a few weeks these stacks will provide the bees and brood needed for this years isolated mating yard. Those poor queens come right to life once theyre surrounded by lots of young bees and brood, and if drones are raised, they are always representing last years breeders. After this job is done the caged queens are taken straight to the queenless honey producers and pushed between two frames at the top of the brood nest. Since I stopped treating the bees, I dont think I have ever lost a queen using this procedure during the dandelion honey flow. Each colony is marked with a colored tack, showing the family of the new queen.

I work at all these jobs every year, but each season is a new experience depending on the weather, the condition of the bees, and the demand for bees, queens and honey. Much of the strength and resilience of the system comes from its great flexibility and high production per box. In April and May the decision can be make to offer more bees for sale; or to direct more resources into honey production or queen rearing. In a spring following very good winter survival the spring work seems like a scramble just to get all the nucs off to the customers and be sure all the other colonies have plenty of room. Following a heavy winter loss theres less income in the spring, but theres also more time available for each surviving colony, and many things can be done that are impossible in other years. If youre moving towards a completely untreated apiary, the survivors left after a tough winter are the basis for much greater success in the future. By confining all colonies in one box during the entire dandelion flow, and removing combs of sealed brood, bees and new honey whenever they begin to get crowded, an amazing number of new colonies can be created during May. If you start these new colonies with queen cells, many of the varroa mites in that sealed brood will be too old to reproduce by the time the new queens brood is at the right stage for an infestation. This plan may in fact be a workable way to reduce varroa levels in the entire apiary. Even here, where the main honey flow starts in June, Ive had good results producing honey with these new queens by confining them to one box and supering over an excluder. When I remove the honey, I put an empty shallow super below each brood nest, and these colonies usually surprise me by gathering almost all of their winter feed after September 15. The Russian-type bees have saved an enormous amount of time and money in the fall by finding most or all of their own winter stores. In the spring they can have a much smaller cluster than Italians need, and still make a good crop of honey.

A small batch of queen cells can work wonders in early May, but in general I dont recommend grafting any large batches until the very end of May or early June. There are too many other jobs to do at this time, and the weather can easily go against you. Use May to ger your overwintered nucs straightened out, the breeders and drone mothers selected, and your honey producing bees set up with plenty of empty, drawn combs, and a few combs of old honey as a reserve. If set up right in May, these colonies require very little attention for the rest of the seasonjust supering and then harvesting the crop. The best time for raising new queens will come soon enoughin June and July.

A Beekeeping Diary #5: Early SummerQueen Rearing Begins

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I know that summer doesnt officially begin until June 20 or so; but around here we really need to have all of June as a summer month. Otherwise our only warm season would be too short and we would get very depressed. The weather in Vermont has been described as Eleven months of winter, and 30 days of damn poor sledding. But thats not accurate. The poor sledding part lasts about 90 days, and starts on the first of June.

As the work of selling bees, requeening and equalizing colonies starts to wind down toward the end of May, the focus shifts to the cell-building yard and preparations for making nucleus colonies. The first steps in getting the queen rearing process started actually do occur in Maycollecting the breeder queens, managing the drone mothers, and setting up the first group of colonies for raising cells. At the moment I am raising five or six batches of about 250 cells, and grafting the first batch on May 30 or 31. I use a schedule where a new batch of cells is ready every eight days. In my cell building method, the cells are started and finished in the same box. If I wanted to have cells ready at shorter intervals, or every day, I would move to a two stage process, using separate starters and finishers. You can find excellent descriptions of many such methods in Harry Laidlaws Contemporary Queen Rearing; a book which everyone who wants to raise a large number of queens should possess.

My own method was lifted from Brother Adams book Beekeeping at Buckfast Abbey; (another must for all beekeepers) and adapted for Langstroth sized equipment. Over the last four years I have also made some changes so that good cells can be raised in colonies that are never treated, and with varroa constantly present. I use this method and the 8-day schedule because the method is extremely reliable and the schedule spreads out the work and the risk. Its almost always possible to work around or through periods of bad weather. Since I started in 1985, I have always had good cells to put out on the appointed day, and only one batch of queens was completely lostduring a two week steady deluge in 2000. Raising extra cells in each batch, and doing all of the queen rearing during mid-summer also helps in maintaining a high rate of success.

In the grafting yard I have 30-40 colonies designated for cell-building. Each colony raises just one batch of cells, so I move gradually through the yard, using groups of 4 or 8 colonies for each batch. These colonies are given excluders and honey supers whenever they are needed, but the brood boxes are always worked the same way, no matter how many supers are on any one colony. The groups used for the last batches of cells are started off in the spring as small nucsso they dont reach their peak populations until they are needed for cell building in late June or early July. There are usually between 12-20 breeder colonies in the yard, in special boxes with excluder partitions. Extra frames of bees and brood from the breeders are used to strengthen the cell-builders if necessary. Ten days before I want to graft into a certain group, I make sure each colony is strong in two boxes, and has brood in all stages. There must be no preparations for swarming underway. The queen is either found and placed below or shaken down into the lower box and the excluder is placed between the two brood boxes. This job is called Set-Up.

On the sixth day following Set-Up, I go through all the breeder colonies, where the queens are confined on three combs by an excluder partition. Usually I move a frame of sealed brood to the other side of the partition, and give the queen a clean empty comb, or a comb from the same colony where bees have been hatching for at least a few days. These combs will have plenty of 12-24 hour larvae on the grafting day, and can be easily identified and removed, even if it is raining. I call this job: Working the Breeders.

On the ninth day following the Set-Up day, the upper brood box is examined, and all queen cells present are destroyed. Some of the bees are shaken from each comb to make sure no cells are missed. Two frames of honey are removed, and a frame of freshly stored pollen is placed in the center of the brood nest. As far as I can tell, one of the secrets of always getting good queen cells is to make sure that frame of pollen is next to the cells while they are being built. The pollen must be just recently packed into the cells, without any glaze of honey over the top. I collect frames like this when I am making nucs, but in this case you must also be sure there are no eggs or unsealed brood anywhere on the frames. Usually, I take a clean, empty comb and fill 2/3 of one side with pollen pellets from my pollen traps. Lower the comb carefully down into the hive, keeping as much of the pollen in the cells as possible. By the next morning any spilled pollen will have been dumped outside the hive, and the rest will be packed into the comb, ready for use by the nurse bees. The only other thing to do on this day is start feeding the cell-builders, if no honey flow is in progress. I call this day: Prepare.

The next day is for: Grafting. In the morning each cell-builder is worked as follows: The lower brood box with the queen and brood in all stages is set alongside the original stand on a super horse. The upper box (which was prepared the day before) is set on a new bottom board on the original site. This box is now the cell-builder. A space is made next to the pollen comb, and the grafting frame with three bars of empty plastic cell cups (48 total) is inserted to be polished before the grafting is done later in the afternoon. Four to six frames of bees are then shaken from the queenright box into the cell-builder. The bees are either shaken through an excluder, or the queen is located first and set aside. While youre doing this shaking, one of the brood frames should be removed from the queenright box, and replaced with a frame of honey. It should be a frame with brood that will be sealed during the next six or seven days. As each cell builder is prepared, these frames can be put into an empty hive body until four have been accumulated. Then two frames of honey are put on each side of the brood frames, and the whole box is placed, above an excluder, on any other colony in the yard that is building up too fast, and can spare some young bees. Well come back to this box in a couple of days.

Any supers and the feeder are now returned to the cell-builder and the feeder is refilled if necessary. The queenright box is screened, covered and loaded on the truck. When the whole group of cell-builders have been worked this way, the queenright boxes are taken to another location. Currently Im allowing most of these colonies to recover their strength for about three weeks, and then using the brood and bees for nucleus colonies.

After lunch, I return to the cell-builders and do the grafting, using the special frames and cell cups that were being polished for the last few hours. Remember the breeders had empty combs put into them so that plenty of 12-24 hour larvae are available and easy to find on the grafting day. The cell-builders have fresh pollen and unsealed honey or syrup. They are crawling with nurse bees, but have no queen or open brood. Just a couple of hours after making them up, these colonies are already desperate to raise queen cells, and if they have a little syrup to work on every day they will build excellent cells even during the coldest and wettest possible weather. They will also build great cells during a heavy honey flowwhich is not true of some commonly used queen rearing methods. Most methods work best during a weak or moderate honey flow, when colonies are gaining a couple of pounds every day.

Now, heres the step I added when I started raising cells in untreated colonies: Two days after grafting, I go back to those boxes of brood and honey frames, set on top of strong colonies on the grafting day. By now lots of young bees have run up through the excluders to feed and continue capping the brood. On the second day after grafting, I lift those boxes off, and return one frame of sealing brood, with adhering bees, to each cell-builder. I also shake in the bees from the frames of honey. This way the cells are started in the optimum situation where all the royal jelly must go into the queen cells during the critical early hours. Then, some additional bees are added for finishing, and the worker brood attracts varroa mites away from the queen cells as they are being sealed. Ive read that varroa mites dont infest queen cells, but apparently my specially selected strain of mites never learned to read, and I can find them in the queen cells if I dont include this extra step. If this cell building method is made into an 8-day schedule, producing successive batches of cells, then this extra job occurs on the same day that cells from a previous batch are harvested and put out; and so the work can be conveniently done at the same time. In general, its best to go to whatever length is necessary to produce high quality queen cells. The entire future of your apiary is represented in those cells, and cutting corners here is really short sighted. Over the last ten years many beekeepers learned, at great cost, that poorly reared cells and queens (and/or those reared in unhealthy environments) are worse than useless. Always plan to raise more cells than you actually need. Even the most experienced and capable people swing and miss sometimes when Nature throws a good curve ball. The trick is to always get at least a solid hit, and not strike out.

In the event of a dearth, the cell builders should be fed while the cells are being built: for five days after grafting. On the tenth day following grafting, the cells are removed and taken immediately to the nucleus colonies. Inside the cell carrying box I record the origin of each group of cells and also the identity of the nucs which receive them. The cell builder (after checking on that last-added frame of brood for rogue queen cells) is given a cell and then left alone for three weeks before checking on the new queen. Just after cell building they are very strong and have no brood to feed. They can store a lot of honey in the first 10-14 days if a flow is in progress. During the next four weeks they have very limited potential to produce surplus honeymost of the remaining bees are needed for building a new brood nest. After that, their honey gathering ability rises once again. At any one time, the grafting yard has colonies in all these different stages, and so the yard as a whole takes advantage of any honey flows that occur. The overall average honey production is very good, and with the extra colonies created during the cell-building process, these are the most productive colonies in the apiary. The broodless period interrupts the build-up of varroa mites, and even with open mated queens from tested mothers, a good percentage of the cell-building colonies survive the winter and have healthy clusters the following spring ready to start the cycle over again.

For anyone who wants to try raising successive batches of cells this way, heres how it works on an 8-day schedule. It would be nice to have a 7-day plan and have the same days off every week, but that would create a 14 day interval for catching queens from the baby nucs; which is not quite long enoughespecially for Russian-type bees. These are the different jobs to do on the 8-day schedule I use:

Day #1: SET-UP

Day #2: PREPARE

Day #3: GRAFT

Day #4: CATCH QUEENS

Day #5: PUT OUT CELLS

Day #6:

Day #7: WORK BREEDER COLONIES

Day #8:

(#6 and #8 are your days off, with no scheduled queen rearing work. Im sure youll find something to do!)

Start your calendar like this: first decide when you want to graft the first batch of cells. Mark 3/1 on that day. The top number always shows the job to do on that date (Grafting); while the lower one shows which batch of queens is being dealt with (the first in this case). Then count backwards 10 days on the calendar, and put 1/1 on that date. This is the beginning of your queen rearing seasonthe day you Set-up the first group of cell builders. After that the 1-8 pattern repeats itself as long as you want to keep raising cells and queens.

Now look at my calendars for May and June 2006 to see how the whole thing works. I only write the numbers in when there is some actual work to be done that day. My queen rearing season begins on May , when I Set-up the first group of cell builders. Things go slowly at first, and theres no more work to do until May , when empty combs are put into the breeder colonies (Work Breeder Colonies). On May I Set-Up the second group of cell builders. On the th I Prepare the first group of cell builders, and the following day I Graft into them. As time goes on the schedule fills in, and as you can see by June -- I am Working the Breeders for batch #4; Setting-Up batch #5; Preparing and Grafting batch #4; Catching batch#1; and Putting Out Cells for batch #3. During July, after the last grafting has been done, the schedule gradually winds down, and by early August the only thing left to do is catch or check the last batches of queens.

This all looks and sounds much too complicated; but its like calculusonce you can see the flow of it youre all set. In practice it works very well. The work goes steadily on no matter what the weather is like, and theres time to keep up with the honey producing colonies, and do some other things as well. Next month well look at the nucleus colonies that receive all these queen cells.

A Beekeeping Diary #6: SummerMaking Nucleus Colonies; the Main Honey Flow Begins

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Beekeeping has been present in this part of Vermont almost as long as European settlers have been herethat is, since the 1790s. During all of that time, beekeepers made up most of their new colonies during May and early Junethe natural swarming season. Before moveable frames, these new colonies were started with swarms that emerged from tested, overwintered colonies kept in box hives or gums. In the early days of moveable frames and queen rearing, many beekeepers in the North raised their own queens; and if you read carefully in the old books, you can see that they sometimes continued rearing queens and making new colonies right through the summer, if they needed more bees. Once young queens were easily available from the South however, most beekeepers in the northern states settled into the pattern of making up new colonies in late April or May, and headed them up with queens selected and produced in a completely different environment. Where I live in Vermont, the Mraz family followed a different plan starting in the 50smaking strong nucs in the spring and letting them raise their own queens. But with a very short active season for the bees, there are lots of other important jobs to do during May, and there have been plenty of years when weather conditions here were very unfavorable for both raising queens and making splits in May. After the huge losses caused by mites and low honey prices, and with Africanized bees spreading through the South; its really important now to select and propagate bees more rapidly in the North, and move towards healthier and more locally oriented beekeeping systems. I still make a few splits in May, and sometimes even raise queen cells for them, if I have extra brood that needs to be spread out, or if winter losses have been especially high. But the best time for producing queens and nucs here is during June and July.

My production of queens and nucs varies somewhat from year to year depending upon the results of wintering; the demand for bees, queens, and honey; and what else my queen-catching helpers are up to during the summer. But my first, third and fifth batch of cells always go into the baby nucs in the isolation apiary. Once the 8-day schedule is started, I make up between 100-200 new colonies for each cycle. Whether the nucs are made from baby combs or standard deep frames, the procedure is always the same. Empty nuc boxes with the feeders in place and screens already in the entrances are made up in advance and stacked in the yards designated to supply brood and bees.

All of my summer nucs are made up as if they were going to be used as mating nucsin other words, with the smallest amount of bees and brood that will make a healthy, viable colony. By waiting until summer to do this, you optimize the whole process in several dimensions. Warm to hot weather is finally here to stay, and so fewer bees are needed for each nuc initially. Also, the colonies supplying the brood and bees are now at the optimum size for splitting into nucs. Once you get into the second week of June, each good frame of sealed brood will start a new colony. A donor colony that could be made into three or four new colonies in May can be made into 6-10 colonies in late Juneif youre planning to winter those new colonies as nucs occupying one box or less. Days are long during mid-summer, allowing more opportunities for mating flights; and drones are superabundant in areas with lots of honey producing colonies.

The baby nucs are all started with the first one or two batches of cells. You remember a few weeks back that stacks of this special equipment were created as the overwintered queens were caught and used for requeening. Additional boxes of empty comb were also added as necessary, and by early June they are usually heavy with dandelion honey. When making up the nucs, each stack is taken completely down and broken up. The boxes are carried a short distance away and put on long benches next to other benches already holding empty nuc boxes at a convienient height. Each nuc is made up of four frames as follows; starting next to the feeder: One frame of honey with bees; a good frame of sealed brood with bees; and then either a frame of pollen or unsealed brood with bees. The fourth frame will be either a frame of foundation or another frame of honeydepending on whether the nuc will be set out in a good honey area or up in the mountains, where nectar resources are poor. The frames are only glanced at quickly as they go into the nucs, and any queens spotted are removed. Those heading good colonies are caught and caged. Most of the remaining queens are easy to find when the cells are put outlook in the nucs that are crowded with field bees. Any that still slip by are given away by having brood in all stages when the first new queens are caughtso, cases of mistaken identity are very rare.

Now, heres a trick I discovered that helped me a great deal while weaning the apiary off of treatments: After mining all the brood and necessary honey and young bees out of a stack, there will often be many frames of honey and/or pollen left over. By putting them back at the original site (with perhaps a frame of eggs on each side) it gives the field bees a place to go, and keeps the pandemonium at a nearly manageable level. If these depleted colonies have the queens returned to them, or receive cells the next day, they will often recover and go into the winter healthy and strong. By taking all the brood away, youve removed most of the varroa mites, and if they are not re-infested from outside, it takes mites longer than one year to threaten them again. So, even stock that cant fight varroa too well can be helpful and productive as you gradually more toward the goal of non-treatment. I do the same thing with nucs made on standard combs.

The baby nucs are set out in the usual way for mating nucsspaced apart in long, irregular lines with plenty of landmarks nearby. The cells are put into them one, two, or three days after the nuc boxes are set out. After one or two baby nuc yards are established, all remaining nucs are made with standard combs. Queens are caught from the baby nucs every 16 days, and either sold or used for starting nucs on standard combs. Once they have queens established, these standard frame nucs are left alone, for the most part. Theyre all intended for overwintering and testing the new queens. But theres nothing preventing you from selling them in the fall, if gentle bees are needed in the South.

At the very beginning, I made up many of the summer nucs on standard combs by taking a couple of frames of brood from many different honey producing colonies. But I soon realized that it was much more efficient and productive to maintain certain yards specifically for nuc production, and to split up entire colonies during the nuc-making process; as was done with the baby nucs. By having these yards a few miles away from each other, the loads of nucs can be moved back and forth between them as the nucs are made up over a period of 4-5 weeks. In the early summer, each yard has about 30 double story colonies in one cornerlooking much like a honey producing yardand a much larger expanse of empty pallets spread out nearby. By the end of the season, the corner originally filled with bees is largely empty, and the pallets are now occupied by 150-200 nucleus colonies. These nucs are made up in just the same way as the baby nucs, and they can be started either with cells or mated queens from the baby nuc yards. The first ones are set up initially with two of my split boxes on each pallet. This will leave room for them to grow onto eight frames later in the season. The nucs made later are set out with four of these boxes (eight colonies) on each pallet, and most of these nucs will remain on four combs until the following spring.

The clover honey flow starts during the nuc making process, and a few days in June are devoted to putting on supers and taking the pulse in the honey producing yards. But for the most part, its a busy and exciting month focused on the cell-building bees and starting a new crop of nucleus coloniesheaded by your own tested and well-adapted stock.

A Beekeeping Diary #7: High SummerThe Main Honey Flow; a Crop of Honey and Bees

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Around here, our honey cropthe excess honey we can sellcomes from the various clovers, birdsfoot trefoil, purple vetch, alfalfa and basswood. Because most of the open land is actively farmed or grazed, and has a heavy clay soil, star thistle (spotted knapweed) has only established itself in a few places. Goldenrod is common on unused land and odd corners, but doesnt yield abundantly at this elevation in the southern Champlain Valley. Together with aster, it provides some welcome weight gain in the broodnest at the end of the season; but I think I have only seen one or two years when the fall flow was strong enough to push up into the supers. If you go just a couple hundred feet higher into the foothills, then goldenrod starts yielding really wellbut you also begin leaving our most productive honey plants behind.

A.E. Manum, of Bristol, Vt., was a commercial beekeeping pioneer in the horse and buggy days. He was one of the first to have several outyards. In one of my old copies of The ABC of Bee Culture, theres a great picture of his wagon and a team covered by homemade white bee suits with holes cut out for the eyes and earsas if horses could join the Ku Klux Klan in those days. After the Age of Oil, future generations are going to have a tough time taking care of their outyards with horses if the Africanized bees get mixed into all our bee stocks! But anyway, Mr. Manum claimed that almost all of his crop came from the basswood treeand it could have been true, because he also described having very large crops some years, and others of complete failure. By the time Charlie Mraz came here to work for J.E. Crane in 1927, white and alsike clover were the principle honey plants. At that time, all the beekeeping work has oriented around one goal: to have colonies in optimal condition for storing between June 20 and July 20. It was possible to have a honey flow in August, but in most years the last good honey flow of the season had played itself out by the ene of July, if not earlier. The available honey plants, current agricultural practices, and the hot, dry summers caused by the Adirondack Mountains rain shadow, all played a role here.

Since that time, three things have occurred which changed the nature of our honey flows, and the potential for getting a crop in this area. The first two involved the introduction of new honey plants: birdsfoot trefoil and alfalfa. The third is a more nebulous thing: the breaking up of old weather patternstemperatures and rainfall are becoming more unpredictable.

Alfalfa was almost unknown in this country until a series of very severe droughts crippled the farm economy in the 1960s. One of my bee yard owners told me that his 600 acres of hayland yielded only 200 (70 lb) bales in 1963. At that time these clay soils were not considered suitable for alfalfa, but a few farms had established test plantings. And these were the only fields that stayed green and continued to grow during those very hot, dry summers. After that the acreage devoted to alfalfa grew rapidly, and now it is grown on most farms in rotation with corn silage. All this corn is another new development since the 60s, and has made a serious dent in the supply of clover blossoms available to the bees. But this is compensated for somewhat by the alfalfa in the rotationdense stands of an excellent honey plant with great potential for nectar production during the former dearth of late July, August, and even September. There are some years when the bees never get even a whiff of alfalfa nectar; when the farms succeed in making three cuttings at the optimum timejust before bloomingwhen alfalfa has its greatest nutritional value. But in the majority of years, weather and other factors will conspire to provide a period of significant bloom.

Birdsfoot trefoil is a legume that grows very well on clay soils, and growing the seed was a minor industry in this valley for a time. This seed-growing is gone now, but the plant has become completely naturalized, and when conditions are favorable it can spring up everywhereincluding on lawns and abandoned land. It comes into bloom with the clovers, but stays in bloom for a very long time. So, like alfalfa, it provides a potential source of nectar during the second half of summer.

Sometimes it seems like there are only three major events in a season of honey production here. First is the availability of new pollen from the red maples and willows that enables the colonies to start serious brood rearing. Second is the dandelion bloomwhich makes a very strong build-up flow. Then comes the summer honey flow. We watch, with keen attention and in great suspense, as the hayfields start to regrow after the first cutting comes off. In some years the grass springs back and easily competes with the clovers, suppressing their growth. But in other years the grass almost disappears as clover and trefoil forge ahead everywhere and come into bloom. Sometimes the unused land is green the entire summer, fading gently to brown as the old grasses dry up late in the season. But the next year that same field could be painted with pastel colors for the whole summer as clover, trefoil and purple vetch take over. (Ive never been able to tell, beforehand, what kind of a year it is going to be in this regard. Sometimes I think the whole valley must go through a kind of nitrogen cycle: moving slowly from grass to legumes and then back again.) Tractors and mowers try to be out there at the right time; but often the weather interrupts this military-style campaignits either too wet or too dry. The bees might gather a crop in between rain showers, while the land is too soggy to support machinery. Or the alfalfa might bloom for weeks during a droughtwhen the plants are too short to be worth cutting. Sometimes a large percentage of a good crop will be gathered in just seven or eight days; either all in one week, or spread out through the season. Other years, the bees seem to gain half a pound every day for months. Wet, dry, hot, cold; as far as I can tell, its impossible to say what makes a good and bad honey year in the southern Champlain Valley. Bumper crops and crop failures have occurred in both wet and dry seasons. Charlie Mraz once told me that he kept careful weather records during his first 20 years in business here, hoping to identify the best pattern for honey production. But finally he threw the book away and decided: When the Good Lord turns on the honey faucet, we get a cropand when He shuts it off, we dont! All I know for sure is: there arent very many things in this life more exciting than producing a crop of honey.

During July, as my queen rearing and nuc making schedule starts winding down, more and more open days appear in the schedule. The explosion of growth in the apiary during June and the first half of July is wonderful to watch, but its always a great relief to back off from the relentless schedule and start the calmer and more routine work of guiding the new crops of honey and bees toward a successful conclusion in the fall. Now I can spend some more time with the honey producers, trying to get the last of the supers distributed right, and cleaning up the yards in readiness for removing the crop.

The best time for checking the new queens in nucleus colonies is two weeks after the nucs were made upif they were started with mated queens; or three weeks afterif they were started with cells. This is the nucs weakest point, when they are covering as much sealed brood as they can, but still have no young bees hatching from the new queen. After removing the covers, you can see at a glance if each colony has enough (or too many) adult bees. And the presence of sealed brood on one of the two middle combs indicates the successful introduction of the new queen. Usually this can be ascertained by lifting the comb just a couple of inches. If everything looks good so far, theres nothing much more you can profitably do at this point. Save your energy for later, when the nuc is crowded with new bees, and you need to decide whether to let them grow onto more space or not. If a nuc has no sealed brood at this time, then your introduced queen must have been rejected, or failed to mate if you used queen cells. These colonies are examined to find any rogue virgins or mated queens just starting to lay, and then combined with their neighbor, by moving the feeder off to one side. Any nucs that still have an old queen at this pointdespite your best efforts earlier when the nucs were made upwill almost always be crowded and have brood in all stages. The extra brood and bees from these are helpful for boosting any nucs that are too weak, and need some help. I usually end up keeping these old queens if her bees look good.

By establishing these nucs in pairs, you are getting set up to overwinter, and test, the largest number of colonies on the smallest possible amount of equipment. When queens and colonies start to fall by the wayside, nucs can usually be combined with their neighbor, and all the combs and boxes stay in active use. By propagating a large number of colonies this way, you are also getting a significant portion of your apiary into a situation where it is less susceptible to varroa damage, and far more likely to survive the coming winter. If both parents of your new queens have the proven ability to survive and thrive without treatments, then you have the potential to move the whole apiary toward the goal of non-treatment in the coming years. In an apiary like this that has stabilized, the honey producing colonies provide the breeding stock; and the nucleus colonies provide the means to quickly amplify that stock into the coming generations. A crop of summer nucs also provides a way to recover quickly from a serious loss; and of course provides a valuable product to sell in the spring. I hate to mention it but theres one more reason to raise crops of both bees and honey in the summer: Because of the small space they need to occupy, these nucs can almost always find the resources they need to form a viable winter cluster, even when the honey crop is a failure. Ive seen some years when, for all practical purposes, there has been no honey crop; but so far (knock on wood) I have never yet seen a failure in this crop of bees. Please keep in mind that I have always used stock that was well adapted and proven in this area; and that the vast majority of my new queens were raised from mothers who had come through the system themselves.

After all this work theres an important note here at the end. During the last week of July and the first week of August, theres a good opportunity to have a week or ten days of vacationafter the cell-building season is over, and before the last big push of the warm season: harvesting the honey crop, and making the last manipulations in the new crop of bees.

A Beekeeping Diary #8: Late SummerExtracting Honey and Expanding Nucs

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Around here the most likely time to have very hot and humid weather is during July. One of my farming friends always crosses out the word July on his calendar, and writes in another four-letter word. It can be just as hot, for a short time, even in late September, but August is usually when the steady heat of summer first starts to break. The days are noticeably shorter now, the corn starts tasseling out and, even though you cant see it yet, somewhere out there in the distance, fall is coming.

I dont use any heat in my honey extracting process, except a small amount on the uncapping knife. The extracting room is also unheated; so its best to remove and extract most of the honey during August and early September, when the days are still warm, and robbing has not yet become too ferocious. I used to start extracting on August 1, but now I wait until the 15th, because theres another very important job to do during the first half of Augustgiving the nucs room to expand if they need it.

When I first started making up large numbers of summer nucsin the 80sthe tracheal mites were having a serious impact on most colonies. With the native Champlain Valley stock, I could make up 4-frame nucs in June and the first half of July, and leave them in that small space right through till the following spring. Even when the boxes plugged out, very few of the new queens swarmed out in the late summer or fall. I did have some trouble with colonies absconding in very hot weatherwithout leaving any queen cells behind. Propping the outer covers up kitty corner on top of the grain bag inner covers helps out here somewhat by allowing night air to flow through the colony and keeping things a little cooler. As the years went by, and the bees were less affected by the tracheal mites, the nucs would plug out faster, and some swarms started to come out.

After the varroa was well established, and I started leaving nucs and nuc donors untreated, the same pattern was repeated: at first there were some nucs, made up in late June or early July, that never managed to really fill their 4-frame space with bees and honey by the end of the season. Even the best ones required several weeks to plug themselves out. Then, after a few years of selection, the boxes would fill up faster and faster with bees, brood and honey. But by this time I was dealing with Russian bees, and they didnt like to stay put during late July and August if their box was crowded and a honey flow was in progress. So now, if the second half of the summer is favorable, I allow many of these nucs to grow onto eight combs during late July and August. You can see from the photos how the pallets start off with four colonies in two boxes during June and July, and end up with four colonies in four boxes by the end of August. Sometimes there are drawn combs and old frames of honey that can be used up in this process, and I would prefer to use all drawn combs for the very last nucs that are allowed to expand later in August. But I dont like to use moth crystals, and any unprotected brood combs are usually quite lively with wax moths by this timeeven if they have been sitting on the cool cement floor of my shop since early spring. So, my summer nucs have to draw new frames of foundation in order to expand during August. This is the best of all place and time for Russian bees to draw new combs, and they will do a great job if a honey flow is in progress. I make up the extra nuc boxes in advancewith feeders and eight frames of foundationand store them in the shop, which by now should be nearly empty. Starting around July 25, Ill take ten or twenty of these boxes early in the morning and start expanding the 4-frame nucs that have built up the fastest, and are now hanging out of their boxes, even in the early morning. In a few days these colonies should be well started drawing out their new combs, and so I will do another ten or twenty; and so on until August 15 or until the honey flow stops. On any one day, this job is usually completed before noon; before the heat of the day really sets in. These bees are very valuable, and the queens have already made a big step towards proving themselvesby building up rapidly dispite the constant presence of mites. It pays to do this job carefully, and to prevent any queens from being lost during the process.

Late summer honey flows are unreliable here, but even so, I never feed any bees during this time. The percentage of nucs allowed to grow onto eight frames depends on the vitality of the bees and the strength of the late summer flow. In some years, two thirds of my summer nucs have been expanded this way; in 2006, conditions were so poor that not a single one could grow out of its original 4-frame space. In either case, by the middle of August the apiary has reached its maximum size for the year, in terms of colony numbers and brood nest potential. By using a system like this, an unbelievable number of combsharvested from dead colonies in the springcan be restocked with bees in one year without buying bees or bringing in poorly adapted stock. In a good season, if all the old combs are already occupied by June, then a large supply of new, uncontaminated combs can be drawn out and set up in the very best position to help your apiary forge ahead in the following spring. In my system, to be really prepared for a good season, eight combs or frames of foundation must be ready for every frame of brood devoted to summer nuc production. I visited a beekeeper last fall who has a slightly longer season than I do, and who was able to work this system two complete times in one year. He needs at least sixteen empty combs or new frames for each frame of brood devoted to making nucs in the spring. The early North American pioneers of modern beekeeping (1865-1920) were an amazing bunch of people who solved all kinds of technical problems and created an extremely productive and dynamic industry with a small amount of capital and in a relatively short time. But they either never discovered, ( I doubt it), or never utilized the enormous productive capacity that can be tapped by the simple process of making summer nucs, and wintering them on 4-10 combs. This capacity wasnt necessary when the country was filled with bees, good queens could be obtained cheaply from the South, and when AFB was the most serious challenge. But now we really need to use this untapped potentialfirst to replace the heavy losses many beekeepers are experiencing; second to breed large and diverse populations of bees that can thrive on their own again without treatments; and third to start producing surplus bees in the North, to counteract the effects of Africanization. After 20 years of working with this system, and having positive results in all these areas, I no longer have any doubts that these problems can all be solvedat least in places where bees can stay in one place year-round. There may turn out to be other, better ways to solve these problems, but no one can say any longer that theres no clear avenue or way to proceed.

And now on to harvesting honey and extracting which, with a good crop, uses up most of our working time from mid-August to sometime in early October. Little by little, the preparations are made during late July and early August: setting up the extracting room, mowing the yards, preparing drums, and deciding in what order the yards will be harvested.

My extracting room is pretty simple; in fact its built on a30 trailer. Theres a small dark room for storing 75-80 supers overnight, and enticing the few remaining bees out of the stacks. Combs are uncapped with a vibrating knife, and extracted with two 30-frame radials. The honey is settled in a series of four 1000 lb. tanks, which does an excellent job of cleaning the honey without heating or filtering. Theres just enough room for the empty supers to pile up in front of the 2nd door, and the honey is finally drawn off into drums or pails on the outside of the buildingearly in the morning, before insects are flying. With a special series of pipes, I can fill 10 drums before I need to move them and start over. My system would be considered very small and unproductive by most commercial beekeeperssome of the honey producers I visited in Saskatchewan last winter could extract my entire crop in one day! But its quiet and pleasant to work in the honey wagon, and the size and capacity was chosen on purpose to keep the apiary from growing too large; to keep it balanced between the production of bees and honey; and to ensure that I could participate in all the different jobs.

I usually use both fume boards and escape boards to harvest the honey. With just one small truck, I have to take 2-4 loads out of each yard when there is a good crop. During good weather, I start with the fume boards, and reduce the supers in a few yards until 2-4 are left on each colony. After that, if the weather turns cold or rainy, I can return to those yards with the escape boards, and the harvest can proceed more or less continuously throughout any changes in the weather. If youve succeeded in eliminating treatments from your apiary, a lot of stress can be eliminated at this time of yearthe harvest is much more relaxed and enjoyable if youre not rushing to apply treatments, and worrying constantly about being too late.

A Beekeeping Diary #9: September and OctoberFinish Extracting; Feeding and Moving Nucs

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With a good honey crop, extracting will continue for the whole month of September. This month usually begins as the end of summer, and finishes as the beginning of autumn. We like to push steadily on during this time, so that as much honey as possible can be extracted during warm weather. Its usually sometime in September when the bees will start robbing the truck, and making the harvest more difficult. There is some goldenrod and aster honey around, and the bees will keep packing it into the brood nest on warm days. But underemployment has set in, and in every yard there are thousands of bees ready to reclaim the honey we have moved onto the truck. Having a small truck, and taking only 35-50 supers at a time helps with getting the honey out quickly, but things dont always go according to plan, and all beekeepers with long experience have at least a few stories about robbing that got completely out of control. Much of the honey harvested in late September and Octoberis lifted off of the escape boards. Sometimes this can be done early in the morning or even during light rain, when few bees are flying. One way or another, the work goes steadily on until the last honey is spun out in the first half of October. During that last week or two, its getting too cold in my unheated honey house, and the honey has to be run through the system quicklyor its liable to set up in the tanks. It hasnt happened yet, but who knows, perhaps by the time you read this

There is, however, one thing that interrupts the harvest during the last week of September: feeding. I built 100 hive top feeders in the early days, when I had just 100 colonies, and since then, except for queen rearing, those feeders have spent most of their time gathering dust in the shop. Even in the disastrous year of 2006, with poor foraging in both summer and fall, I fed only a few of the honey producing colonies. Some of those big crops obtained by Italian bees need to be adjusted somehow to reflect the amount of fall feeding required, and the labor of carting the syrup around. The most profitable bees are usually those that can produce a large crop of honey without needing much extra attention. The Russian-type bees fit the bill very nicely at the end of the seasonthey almost always find 100% of their winter feed without any assistance from me. (But Ill be the first to admit that they need more attention in the spring than Italian bees doto keep them from swarming.) Even before I had Russian bees, I found that this system of overwintering many nucleus colonies selects strongly for frugality and the desire to pack the brood nest with honey and pollen in the fall. These traits were magnified faster than any others as the process of propagation and selection within the system went on from one year to another. In fact, it seemed impossible to slow this process down, or stop it. At the beginning, I fed the nucs a fair amount of syrup in the fall, and again in springsometimes filling the feeders three times in late September, and once again in March or early April. Even my local bees, who were very frugal and maintenance-free in double stories, had trouble storing enough winter feed and raising enough bees for a viable winter cluster in a 4-frame space. I used to haul syrup out to the yards on a sled during February, so that I could save them in mid-March, as soon as it was warm enough for the bees to take some more feed. But this changed quickly, and in a few years only a small amount of feed was needed for the nucs. The coming of the Russian bees pretty much marked the end of feeding bees at all; except in a disastrous year like 2006, when a few double stories and about 2/3 of the nucs were given some supplemental feed.

Once the last honey is drained out of the tanks, and the extracting equipment is all washed and put away for the winter, the last big push of the season has come to an end. In the second half of October theres usually a chance for some time off before the days become too short, and the nasty weather of late fall and early winter sets in. But theres still one more important job to do sometime before mid-November: marking the nuc boxes and moving them to their winter locations. Once all the boxes have been provided with their colored tacks(showing the origin of the queen(s), the mating scheme, and the date of mating)the nucs are ready to move. This used to be a big project when the nucs all had to be moved from their summer locations and set on top of the honey producing colonies. I did it little by little, each morning moving just one or two loads of 25 boxes into their winter locations. But now most of the nucs are wintered on the pallets right where they were made up in June or July. This saves an enormous amount of work, and after five years of experience with both warm and very cold winters, appears to be a completely satisfactory winter situation for these valuable colonies. A few loads of nuc boxes are moved, so that all the pallets are full, and all the nuc boxes can be packed in groups of four

And so with the honey crop safe in the shop, ready to process or ship to a buyer, and the nucs all in their winter locations; its time to breathe a sigh of relief, slow down, watch a few soccer games, go for a walk, and enjoy the last few warm days of another busy season.

A Beekeeping Diary #10: November and December: Packing bees; Blowing Out Failing Colonies.

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When November arrives, I start packing, beginning with the 2-story honey producing colonies. If, early in the month, there appear to be a good percentage of these with PMS symptoms or non-viable clusters, I will spend a couple of days breaking all of them apart between the two boxes, and marking those that have clusters obviously too small for wintering. These colonies are left unpacked, and the bees blown out and the equipment recovered during early Decemberwhen its too cold for the failing bees to fly into neighboring colonies.

Im not convinced that healthy, well adapted bees in doubles need to be packed, even this far north. There are a lot of bees in this valley wintered successfully year after year, with no added protection except some insulation under the outer cover. But I have a set of Canadian waxed cardboard packing cases, which I built up during the years when all my nucs were wintered on top of the honey producers. The nucs definitely benefitted from top insulation and these packing cases. I still use them now for the honey producers, with a piece of 1 rigid insulation on top of the inner covers, and the outer covers and a rock above the cartons to keep off the rain and hold everything in place. They are easy and fast to put on, and will last for many years if stored dry during the summer. Im sure the bees only need them during the coldest and windiest weather, but I feel better having them on, and the work is all done in a few sunny, cool days.

Packing the nucs is a more serious concern, because they do need to have some insulation and wind protection in order to achieve the optimum results. No effort should be spared to protect these colonies, because they represent the solid middle, the real strength of an untreated apiary: new queens (hopefully better than previous generations) surrounded by their own bees, in a situation where varroa mites are always present, but have not yet been able to achieve a geometric population growth. These are the bees that allow you to maintain an apiary without treatments, and still recover and make progress even after a serious loss in the other parts of the apiary.

The idea for wintering these nucs in groups of four boxes on pallets came from the Pedersen family of Cut Knife, Saskatchewan. In two ABJ articles*

*(footnote #1: ABJMay 1995: Outside Wintering of Single Brood Chamber Hives; ABJ March 1996: Outside Wintering of Single Brood Chamber Hives Revisited.)

they described how their wintering success and profitability improved as they began rearing their own queens and moved from indoor wintering and outside wintering of doubles, to wintering all colonies outdoors in one box, set up in groups of four and packed together on pallets. If they can do it in central Saskatchewan, surely I could do it here in subtropical Vermont. (In February I had the pleasure of meeting some of the Pedersens, and was able to confirm that their wintering method has worked well in all the years since the original articles were published. They also told me that varroa mites have not yet arrived at their far-northern location!)

As far as I can tell, after five years of experience, including two very long and cold winters, this method of packing and wintering nucleus colonies is just as successful as any other scheme I have heard of or tried myself. Wintering nucs above double story colonies is excellent, as long as those double stories dont have too many varroa mites. When I started really pushing to remove all treatments from the apiary, I knew I would need to find another method, and place, to winter the nucs. So far, wintering them in yards of their own on pallets has been completely successful, with much less insulation than is used by the Pedersens. The only drawback I can think of is the greater possibility of being completely buried in snow at the end of a long winter when the first good days for cleansing flights come along.

Its nice to pack the nucs at just the right timeon sunny days in November (or even early December) when its cold enough to keep the bees clustered all day, but before snow and ice start to stay on the pallets. The trouble is, by waiting for just the right time, it sometimes gets to be too late. Because the bees have been flying from so many entrances on each pallet (sometimes 6 or 8), I try to pack them in a cold spell that will keep them inside for at least a couple of days after wrapping. Before pushing the boxes together, I put screens in any extra entrances facing into the center of the groupotherwise some of the clusters move into the warm, tight space between the boxes, or sometimes even migrate into another box. My friends in Scandinavia convinced me to try putting insulation under the boxes as well as on top, and after a couple years of trials, I started putting a piece of foil-faced rigid insulation under each nuc box for the winter. They are cut to fit inside the rim of the bottom board, and if they are a little thicker than the space inside the rim, the insulation will always be pushed tight against the bottom board and also make the box very easy to slide into place on the pallet. After putting in the bottom insulation pieces and removing all the outer covers from one pallet, the boxes can then be pushed together, and the four pieces of blue styrofoam placed on top of the feed bag inner covers. These bags wick away a certain amount of the moisture and air from the top of the cluster, but still provide a place where the bees can cluster right up near the insulation and retain their heat. For many years, I didnt use any other ventilation at the top, and healthy bees seem to be perfectly comfortable in this set-up. The heat of the cluster is retained, the bees stay quiet and dry, and any excess moisture condenses on the front or back of the box. This water sometimes runs out of the entrance, forming a scary looking icicle, but the bees inside would be warm and dry. Only colonies in poor healthbothered by mites or whateverbecome too active in winter, and build up too much moisture in contact with the bees and combs. Now that I have let the mites run rampant on the bees for several years, and there are some unpredictable losses in the nucs each winter, I have been giving them some more top ventilation. The healthy colonies dont seem to need it, but the colonies that perish over the winter are able to dry out by the time the pallets are unpacked sometime in April. The combs are preserved in much better condition. Just folding back the grain bag covers so that inch of the top bars are showing before putting on the rigid insulation seems to provide enough air flow to allow the combs to dry out if need be, without harming the healthy clusters in any way. A single piece of tar paper, cut in half lengthwise, is then stapled around the four boxes. These are made up in advance, with holes already cut out for the entrances. The top edge is folded in toward the center and stapled to the styrofoam just enough to hold it down. A few slits are made along each side on the top corners where the tarpaper is folded over, to allow moisture to escape, but without exposing the bees to any kind of draft. The pack is finished with one or two pieces of rolled roofing or heavy building felt, and two of the outer covers on top, tied down with twine.

Normally, tying down the last of the nuc 4-packs marks the end of the outdoor work in the beeyards for the seasonexcept maybe for cutting some brush if there are sunny days and the snow holds off. But if a number of colonies have been selected for blowing out, this job usually goes on in December, sometimes with snow on the ground. The important thing is that the temperature be cold enough so that the bees from the failing colonies dont fly into the good survivors after they are blown out. Its a dreary job, but the equipment is preserved in excellent condition without extra moisture or mold, and it saves lots of time in the spring. Its best to stay ahead of things if you possibly can. I havent had to do this job for a couple of years, but no doubt there will be another opportunity sometime in the future.

A Beekeeping Diary #11: DecemberConclusion

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So, after almost a year, weve arrived back where we started this column, doing the very last outdoor job of the seasonmelting the cappings wax on a nice day in December. Its a good job to end the season with. Theres not much to it except showing up and keeping an eye on things. Soon it will be time to retreat inside, to rest and enjoy that time of year when one seasons work is over, and the next ones still seems far off in the future. There are always plenty of things to reflect upon Ill end this column with a few thoughts that seem most important to me at this point, and which I hope will help anyone who wants to use the information from this series of articles.

Of necessity, these columns were written many months in advance of when they appear in the journalin some cases more than a year in advance. So, I cant tell you here whats actually going on in 2007; youll have to write or call me to find out about that. Everything described in this column came from the actual experience of running my apiary, but I tried to make it into some kind of an ideal average season, and also to mention some of the extremes that might be encountered. To describe any one season would have been immensely misleading, because they are all quite different from each other nowadays. For example, Ill describe what happened during 2005 and 2006, which were about as different as two beekeeping seasons can be

Bees were slow to get started in the cool spring of 2005. There was quite a heavy loss of colonies (40-50%) after a more or less average winter. As usual, the heaviest losses were in the honey producing colonies. Things seemed discouraging at first, but some bees were sold, and plans were made to optimize results from the remaining colonies. With a reduced number of colonies, each one can receive more time and attention. After reserving any suitable breeders, most of the remaining honey producing colonies were requeened with queens from the baby nucs. Before moving the standard nucs out of their winter yards they were equalized, and then used as a source of sealed brood as they became strong in one box. A small batch of early queen cells was raised, and three honey producing yards were filled with nucs made from these cells and sealed brood with adhering bees from the overwintered nucs. (Moving sealed brood into nucs started with queen cells is a way of removing mites from the donor colonies, and then depriving those mites of optimum breeding conditions in their new home.) These early nucs were set up in my split boxestwo nucs per boxso that each box would be almost certain to get a new queen from my cells in any but the very worst weather conditions. These new queens were later confined to one box with a queen excluder during the honey flow. After this work was done, the remaining overwintered nucs were moved to honey producing locations and set up in the usual configuration of double deeps, and then supers above a queen excluder. The slow spring turned into a very favorable summer, with good foraging weather right through the fall. A good honey crop was secured, (115 lb. average), and a large new crop of nucleus colonies was generated at the usual time. Many new frames of foundation were drawn out as well. No fall feeding was necessaryeven the colonies with the 10-frame brood nests made enough honey for winter after all the supers were removed. Best of all, the honey producing colonies were in great shape going into the winter, with few signs of stress 3 years after any treatments had been applied.

Now, on to 2006 Excellent conditions for bees continued right through the winter of 2005-2006one of the mildest on record. Spring came early, with warm sunny weather and excellent pollen flows in April. With 90% of the bees wintering in good condition, four years after their last treatment, there was a lot of euphoria around herefor about two days. Soon it was clear that these bees were expanding much faster than I could keep up with them. Then, about May 8, in the midst of trying to deal with this huge premature growth of 800 brood nests, the weather pattern shifted, it began to rain, and we moved into one of the worst beekeeping seasons probably ever experienced in these parts. If there were any days when it didnt rain between May 10 and July 4, I cant remember them. Getting nucs ready for the customers was all done with rainsuits, veils, and soaking wet gloves. An amphibious vehicle would have been a big help. It soon became difficult or impossible to get into many of the yards and, even in the rain, swarms started to emerge everywhere. Swarms hanging in the rain for days, and then finally departing for who knows where. I dont see how any of them could have survived. At first I wondered if it was just my bees that had gone crazy; but everyone was having the same trouble, no matter what kind of bees they had. In colonies that didnt swarm, the queens stopped laying eggs, and so by the end of June, when bees are usually reaching their peak populations around here, most colonies had little or no brood at all, and it was impossible to tell whether a mated queen was present or not. There was very little brood for making summer nucs at the usual time.

By mid-July the weather had improved somewhat, but the damage had been done and it took the rest of the season for the colonies to make even a partial recovery. A few hot days during the basswood bloom made the only summer honey flow of any note, and Im told that when theres not enough sunlight in May and June, the legumes capacity to produce sugars is greatly curtailed. So it seemed in 2006. Even with decent weather in August, and a fair bloom, very little honey was brought into the hives. By delaying queen