The Double Queen Hive Returns!

Latest picture of the home yard: like five minutes ago.

 As you can see, I got the 8-frame hive in today.  And the double wide is a double double.

But back to the double queen hive:

I guess I missed a queen cell when I was in the hive a few days back.  They seem intent on superseding this queen for a third time.  The first one I took and put in a hive that was queenless last year.  The second one is now in a hive of her own.  I think I'm pushing my luck if I don't let this one be.  Plus it's obvious the old queen is not a high performer by herself.  In fact, due to the timing, this new virgin may actually be her granddaughter.  She's certainly different colored, more like the locals than the original or her daughter. 

It may be an interesting trait of this hive though that the old queen is not disposed of even when it's obvious that she's not pulling her weight and I wonder why that is.  I wonder if her daughter or granddaughter will keep it.  I don't think the old queen is laying many eggs at all though she's not yet a drone layer.  Tell me what you think.

Christmas Oregon Trip Report

I went Oregon for Christmas and brought back some good stuff.

I brought back 24 deeps and a shallow with frames, a frame grabber, a hive tool, and a bunch of Parker Shims.

Unfortunately though, it seems that the cold snap we had while we were gone killed 3 of my six hives. That means I'm going to have to work extra hard to build up this year to have good numbers for the following year. Hopefully I can still pull off a decent harvest. It is a setback, but it is doable.

Good news though, I now have 54 deeps plus two double wides (more on them later). That's enough for about 11 whole hives, though filling 25 boxes with foundation will represent an investment. It's going to take a bit of time to rehabilitate that many frames and get them ready to go on hives.

I'm gaining some experience with the double wides. They seem good for keeping empty boxes on to keep moths out, but it seems that they would have difficulty changing positions between the stacks in winter time. Also, I've noticed them move out of the entire bottom box just as with a regular hive when they have room.

More information to come as it is gathered.
Sol

First Summer Inspection

Did my first summer inspection today, I guess the first day of summer was just a few days ago, oh well.

I do tend to have a bit of a hands off approach when it comes to beekeeping, I'm not the type of guy to inspect his hives every week. I tend to go a month or more between inspections. Hopefully that will change this year as I now have a handful of hives that should be able to be consistently producing throughout the summer.

The year in recapitulation: This spring I started with four hives. One hive is the one that I bought as a nuc from Dixie two years ago when I lived in Springdale. Three hives came from the five I transported from Oregon. One of those was a standard size cell never treated hive that was given to me. In May or so, I received two more nucs from Dixie, this time in deep frames (thanks Don.) I had intended to do inspections and work the hives before I left for Honduras the second week of June, but at the end of the day, I just didn't have enough time so I just stuck boxes of foundation on the top of the single deep box of each hive. I had also split the hive originally purchased and gave the new hive five frames of brood and the queen. I also put a single deep on top of this hive before I left.

As I was writing below, I realized I needed a documentation system, so here goes.

Hive # Description
1 Originally purchased from Dixie in 2007 currently housed in a doublewide
2 Split from #1, contains queen from #1, five frames of brood. Added box foundation June 8
3 Hive from Oregon, barely survived winter, winner best performance so far this year
4 Gifted Oregon hive, housed in doublewide
5 Purchased this year from Dixie, hived in one box, deep added June 8
6 Purchased this year from Dixie, hived in one box, deep added June 8
7 From Oregon, acceptable performance, now in 4 deeps.

Forward to today.

Started by inspecting one of the Oregon hives. It looked ok, nothing special though.

Then moved on to one of the new hives. I popped the top and realized immediately that it was time for another box, and keep in mind, this box had been on there for about 2.5 weeks or so. So I went and got the gear I needed and came back and started to take the hive apart to insert frames in key places. My rule of thumb for today ended up being the following. In each hive, I took the bottom two boxes and mixed in an empty box of foundation. Two frames in the bottom box and four frames in each of the next two with the new box comprising the third box up and containing the displaced frames from the lower two and the four new foundation frames. I did this on each of the hives except the two doublewides which I will explain later. That same manipulation was done on each of the new hives and the split from the original purchased hive.

Hive three is doing very well with a packed out top deep. I added a new deep at position 3 with foundation 2-4-4, I'm going to need to harvest this one soon, I don't want them to swarm.

Hives 1 and 2 are a special case. 2 was started from one, and seems to be doing fantastically. 1 is queenless with laying workers, so I took two frames with some brood including eggs from 2 and put it in 1, we'll see if it survives. If not, 2 will become 1 again since the hives will be merged. If that happens, I just need to time it right so that when 1 dies, it won't get robbed out because it has alot of uncapped honey. I think maybe I should have left more brood with eggs in 1, I may have taken too many. 2 did start out quite well though.

The problem is, now with a number of hives doing quite well, I don't have enough boxes to complete the configuration. With seven hives on a 5 box unlimited broodnest configuration, I need the equivalent of 35 boxes of which I have 34. Fortunately I cancelled the three new queens from Dixie, decided to get on the top of the list for three nucs for next year. but I do still have the freshly made lids for those. If 1 fails, I will have what I need, but I would rather that it succeed. I do have seven boxes in the shop with nothing useful in them however. They need to be filled with the existing new frames I have and then the old frames need to be cleaned out and installed with new foundation until I have what I need.

One thing of note for all of today was that all of the hives were a bit feisty. I think I got stung at most of the hives, totalling around a dozen stings or so. I got several in my right wrist which is now swollen. It seemed that the bees needed excessive smoke to keep them occupied. This may be because it has not rained (beside yesterday) for approaching two weeks and it was getting kind of dry. Though there is plenty of clover on my property, the flowers may have been shutting down nectar production due to the dryness. This could have led to temperamental bees. The sting that hurt the most was on my knee, my pants have a hole there. I felt another bee climbing up my pants on my upper leg, so I waited until I knew exactly where she was and then hit her (and me) pretty hard with my hive tool. It hurt a bit, but succeeded in killing her without stinging me.

I need to order some bottling tools now that I know I have honey that needs harvesting.
Sol

A New Hive Design, the Doublewide

I got this design for the most part from BWrangler. However, his design is not built like a standard deep box, rather his is built as a whole unit more like a topbar hive. As you can see here, this box is built exactly like a regular deep box, only twice as wide so it will be able to use standard tops and bottoms. You can see my standard migratory top/bottom design with my Parker Shims as landing boards. The only difference is that there are two of them side by side. This great open space leaves room for 22 frames if they are kept free of propolis. If there is too much propolis on the spacer parts of the end bars, it won't fit 22.

Below, you can see approximately how the hive would look during the production season, and indeed any other time of the year. Boxes are stacked up just like normal except they are in tandem. It would be possible to use two of the double wide boxes or more to super the hive, but that would make it nigh on impossible to get to the bottom of the hive because a box with 22 frames should weigh somewhere in the range of 200 lbs.

The benefits if they are what I'm told they are will be quite useful. First, the hive will never be more than three boxes tall which makes it easy to work. Secondly, according to BWrangler, this type of hive is his most productive. I hope that it will support a large broodnest and the ability to draw good brood comb for starting a bunch of new hives. I'm planning on starting around six this year if I can swing it. I can split the four I have into four more, and I have already ordered 2 nucs from FatBeeMan. One idea is to take one or two frames of brood from each hive (from each according to his ability) and be able to spin off one new hive per week during good times.

At this point, I just need to get all the tops/bottoms, shims, boxes, and frames ready to go so I'm not scrambling to catch up with hives that are about to swarm this spring.

Sol Parker

Welcome to Parker Farms

This is a start up blog in which you can follow along with the stuff I'm doing. I encourage you to add your ideas, or comment on mine.

I started beekeeping in 2003, I started with 20 3 lbs packages from Koehnen's in Northern California. They have been kept completely chemical free (including the non-poisonous kinds.) They have been kept on 4.9mm foundation for the entire run except some aquired along the way who are still in transition.

I practice what is known as unlimited broodnest management, more or less like Dee Lusby in Tucson AZ. She has been my inspiration for most of my beekeeping ideas.

I am building a double wide hive currently. The idea is borrowed from BWrangler, he calls it a long combo hive. Check out his site. The hive consists of a single bottom hive body that is twice as wide as normal upon which is stacked supers. This is a completely new idea for me this year, keep watching for updates.

This is my farm, this is my business, I am a college student so bear with me as I get this blog going and attempt to escalate and expand my business this year.

See ya round.
Sol Parker