Bare minimum hive with no honey supers.
Necessary items not listed below are nails, screws and tools needed for assembling the hives; Mason jars or large pickling jars for inverted jar feeding; 40-80kg of granulated sugar for mixing sugar syrup and candy; paint for the hives; and the R5 hard insulation and Type 15 or 30 asphalt felt used for wintering the hive. (Again, see our How-To page for more info on all that.) Those extra items will come to about $100.
Then add $200 for a nuc box (i.e., the bees) from the one supplier of nucs on the island. (You can contact me for their email address, though I’m not sure they’re actually in the business of selling nucs anymore.) You may have better luck getting your bees from another NL beekeeper instead. (I might be able supply nucs by 2013.) But let’s just assume the bees will cost about $200 no matter where you get them.
Okay then, here’s the one-shot hypothetical order for anyone interested in starting up a single Langstroth hive in Newfoundland in 2012. It’s everything you’ll need for your first summer, fall and winter of beekeeping.
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A word of caution to beekeepers who use hard insulation in their hives for any reason: some ants have an appetite for insulation. Check out this photo sent to me from a beekeeper in Indiana:
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I doubt this kind of infestation would be an issue for beekeepers on the island of Newfoundland or in similar climates (though you might want to look around for ant nests). Ants are usually long gone and out of sight by the time we have to put on insulation in November, or take it off in April. I suppose that’s a benefit of living in one of the chilliest, wettest, windiest places on the planet.
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We added dry sugar to all four of our hives eight days ago, following what some call the Mountain Camp Method of feeding. I took a quick peek under the hood of two of the hives today to see how well they’re taking to the sugar and this is what I saw:
THE FOLLOWING WAS LAST UPDATED ON FEB. 16, 2012.
More dead bees are showing up on the bottom of the foundationless hive, enough to nearly clog the entire bottom entrance. (I first noticed the dead bees on December 22nd.) Most of the them appear to be drones.
Are drones fed like the queen, or can they access and eat honey on their own? I don’t remember. If they rely on the workers to be fed, then my guess is they’re deliberately being starved out of the hive. I’m surprised so many are still around.
I’ve also noticed that the bees in the foundationless hive are clustering heavily in the bottom box. This is what the edge of the cluster looked like a few days ago during the Dry Sugar Feeding (I fed them even though I don’t think they’re running low on honey):
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We decided to give each of our honey bee colonies about 4 pounds of sugar yesterday because the bees have been clustering at the top of the hives for the past few weeks and are possibly running low on honey stores. We fed them dry sugar following what in some circles is referred to as the Mountain Camp method: Place a piece of newspaper over the top bars, pour dry sugar on top and shelter the whole thing inside a shallow super or an eke. Here’s a brief video that shows how we did it:
We sprayed the newspaper lightly to make it easier for the bees to chew through it. The dry sugar will harden on its own by absorbing moisture from the bees’ respiration, but we also sprayed it a bit to get the process started. (Update: Both the sugar and the newspaper will absorb plenty of moisture without having to be sprayed.)
I’m not convinced the bees are running low on honey. All the hives seemed to have plenty of honey the last time we checked them in the fall. Maybe the bees are clustering high in the hives because it’s easier to stay warm up there. Whatever the case may be, the dry sugar feeding was the quickest, simplest precaution we could take. And it sure beats having to mix up a batch of hard candy for them.
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2011 wasn’t a good year for beekeepers on the east coast of Newfoundland. We had a late wet spring, a short cold summer, and we (i.e., the royal we, as in I’m talking about yours truly) made plenty of mistakes along the way. But we managed to harvest about 20kg of honey from our two established hives and it was all worth it.
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Here are some photos from 2011 (about 100 photos, approximately 5 minutes):
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I’m not sure if it has something to do with today’s date (the winter solstice), a recent snowfall or just business as usual, but a pile of dead bees suddenly appeared at the bottom entrance of our foundationless hive today. I wouldn’t have noticed them if we were using a solid mouse-proof entrance reducer instead of the open mouse-proofing mesh. The dead bees would have stayed piled up inside the hive all winter.
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I could still see the cluster poking up through the middle of the top bars in the upper brood chamber. All three of the conventional hives look the same as they did last week, clustering high in the top brood chamber and hardly any dead bees on the bottom board.
I wonder what it all means. Probably nothing.
UPDATE (Dec. 23/11): I just took a closer look at the dead bees. About 90% of them are drones. The foundationless hive always had a large number of drones and not all of them were booted outside in the fall. This must be the last of them.
Continued in Dead Bees and High & Low Clusters.
Our last batch of honey this year was cloudy probably because it went through a commercial extractor that hadn’t been cleaned for a while. (See Cloudy Honey for a further explanation.) Apparently (because I’m not certain), commercial beekeepers clarify their honey by heating it as high as 140°F / 60°C* (a process that also delays crystallization). So it doesn’t make any difference to them if their extracted honey comes out cloudy; they just heat it. I know I’m still new at this beekeeping racket, but to my thinking, heating honey is bad news no matter how you look at it. Whether the extreme heat of pasteurization that transforms honey into plastic-flavoured grocery store goo, or the lower heat used only to clarify honey, I would think both processes either completely remove or diminish the compounds in the honey that preserve the unique floral flavours and aromas. I wonder if I’m correct in that thinking.
I don’t fault commercial beekeepers who have little choice but to meet market demands. The market for some reason demands honey that always looks clear and pretty on grocery store shelves, even if it means destroying most of the natural and beneficial properties of the honey. But given the choice, I’d pick the unprocessed honey every time. Why? Because it’s about a billion times better than honey that’s had everything that was ever good in it heated and filtered out of it. Not that every beekeeper who heats their honey is ruining their honey. 40°C, if that’s typical, doesn’t seem extreme. But 60°C does.
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(It’s a slow news day here at Mud Songs.) I know everyone has been on edge waiting for the results of the Cloudy Honey taste test. Does clarifying a jar of cloudy honey in a bowl of hot water destroy the floral flavours and aromas? Does it make the honey taste like grocery store goo? I don’t know. I haven’t done the taste test yet. But stay glued to your computer. We hope to have the results in this weekend. In the meantime, I’ll answer another question I’m sure has been on everyone’s mind: “Phillip, what are your bees up to these days?” I don’t know. But let’s find out… Okay, I just got back from taking a few pictures of the bees. Check it out:
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| Top entrance from a first-year hive (Dec. 16/11). |
THE FOLLOWING HAS BEEN UPDATED SINCE ORIGINALLY POSTED.
Our first batches of honey this year were crushed and strained from foundationless honey supers in September. The honey has pleasant floral aromas and flavours and is mildly sweet, not overpowering. It’s easy to take. The honey was cloudy with bubbles when we first bottled it but quickly cleared up and took on the appearance of apple juice and still looks the same today. Our last batch of honey was extracted in October using a local commercial beekeeper’s extractor. That honey was cloudy and has remained cloudy. The floral flavours and aromas are dialled down to 8 instead of 10, but are generally unaffected. It’s easy to tell what honey came from the extractor, though. Both of these photos were taken today:
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| Extracted honey (from October 2011). |
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| Crushed and strained honey (from September 2011). |
So why is the extracted honey cloudy? Well…
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