I think it is cool. Bees are very good for pretty much everything.
Learn all you can before getting bees. Especially if you want to get honey from them. It takes weekly inspections to stay on top of them. Especially swarm prevention and what to do if they swarm.Nice! Wife and I will eventually add bees to our little homestead. I make mead. Someday I wanna make it with our own honey.
Definitely. I do appreciate the tip.Learn all you can before getting bees. Especially if you want to get honey from them. It takes weekly inspections to stay on top of them. Especially swarm prevention and what to do if they swarm.
Kaymon Reynolds on YouTube gives very good information. He's a commercial bee keeper but his information works for backyard bee keepers too. There's a lot of popular channels on YouTube that are bee sellers and I don't recommend those for wanting to learn how to produce honey. They will have you splitting them to make more hives. It's a learning curve to find the sweet spot on bee numbers and not making weak hives that don't produce.Definitely. I do appreciate the tip.
Being on year 9 of living out here and slowly growing as a homesteader, I understand nothing comes easy. Adding anything new and the learning curve is usually a long one.
Old time beekeeper here, 30+ years. We called them Welfare Bees because you gotta feed them and fuss and mess with them and hope they survive.I just put a suicide swarm in a 5 frame medium nucleus box. They are called suicide swarms because this time of year they are usually very small clusters. It's usually a death sentence for the swarm and the parent colony it came from. No drones to mate a new queen in the parent colony and not enough bees to support the queen in the swarm.
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I put a frame feeder with some sugar water and some honey to get some extra scent to get them interested. I'll have to do a thorough inspection in my hives and confirm queen's in them.
If I don't find a queen in one this swarm will be combined with it.
I've got a double stack deep nuc I can put a double screen inner cover on and put this little cluster on top and gain some heat from the bottom hive. That is unless this is from one of my hives and then I'll tear any queen cells out and newspaper combine.Old time beekeeper here, 30+ years. We called the Welfare Bees because you gotta feed them and fuss and mess with them and hope they survive.
Use your old hives for swarm traps. Put a couple drops of lemon grass oil in them next spring.I've tried with bees and could never get them through the winter.
Now I just refuse to throw money away to buy bees.
Still have all my stuff and tell everyone to "call me" if they have a swarm, I'll gladly come get it!
Thinking back I should have spent the money on maple syrup equipment.
Been thinking of doing something like that.Use your old hives for swarm traps. Put a couple drops of lemon grass oil in them next spring.
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