Hi Dangerous, stick to the strategy of the bloke who tells you to change your comb regularly. I change mine quite frequently, any excuse to cut it out & replace it & I’ll do it. Mainly a high % of drone comb, a frame chock-a-block full of pollen. A low % of worker comb. To name 3 excuses. Nothing is wasted here. I retrieve the wax from the old comb. The water used in the process is good in my vege garden & the leftover slumgum is also fantastic in my vege garden, the earthworms absolutely love it. I’m able to swap wax for foundation without any money changing hands so why wouldn’t I take advantage of that? I’m off to the bees before breakfast again, bye
Why do you recommend cutting our pollen? Isn’t pollen essential to good brood production?
Hi Adam, it absolutely is, however in my area there’s an over abundance of it, it’s what bee colonies use to buildup to swarming strength & right now (early spring), there’s plenty of that going on around here. A full frame of pollen takes up room that could be used for brood or honey. As quickly as I remove it, the bees are replacing it. Removing it is a part of my swarm control strategy. I’m currently getting one phone call per day about swarms, however I’m flat out preventing my own bees from swarming to chase any. bye
Wow, you sound like your the ultimate authority on “all things bees”.
I suppose that is a good problem to have. Is there a way to extract the pollen to be able to use it for future bees or personal medicinal use?
If you put acracides such as cumaphos or fluvalinate or amitraz into the hives, it will build up in the wax and in that case the wax neesd to be removed. But all the foundation is already contaminated with them, so it’s not a lot of help to put wax foundation in when trying to remove the contaminates.
Grout did the research on the cocoons and the combs getting smaller. The fact is they will get smaller until they fall below a threshold that is natural size and then they will chew them out. Besides smaller bees have a shorter gestation time and that will help with the Varroa mites. If you are using typical large cell foundation (5.4mm) there will be a lot of cocoons before they chew them out.
You can use a pollen trap to collect pollen, I have one but dry rot has taken it’s toll on that. I collected a lot of pollen with that years ago but in my area it was more trouble than it was worth, especially when it rains, the pollen goes mildewy. I have never explored the possibility of harvesting it out of the frames. It occurred to me while attending my bees earlier that the other reason for me removing it is my SHB strategy. The worker bees wont protect pollen like they protect brood. Therefore removing full frames of pollen gives the beetle less places to lay eggs. I found that beetle prefer brood, dead bees & pollen, in that order. I think dead bees & brood would be almost equal to each other as far a beetles priorities are concerned. Did you see the size of the swarm in the flow video? That’s how they get here.
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You lost me with those big words. I just like nice frames in my brood. Something you did say that I thought was brilliant. “Keep the same size frames throughout your hive”. I’ve always done that, I’m constantly moving frames from the brood to the honey super & vice versa as long as the ones I’m putting into the brood are 95% worker comb. It makes good sense in my case to replace frames with a large cocoon buildup because that cocoon buildup takes up valuable honey space. I just like it when I take a full frame of honey to extract & most of that weight is actually honey.
I do, but not for his reasons.
Most of my colonies are artificially swarmed every year so I get a new box of drawn brood frames per AS
Yes, that’s basically the same reason my frames are fairly new. I guess my preemptive swarm control strategy is similar to an AS. I found one hive today ready to go. I took a large nuc off it with 7 of the 9 brood frames & replaced the 7 brood frames with foundation, that should slow em down. I found a few other hives had swarmed over the last 2 days, they would have been BIG swarms. I’ve been crook the past 3 weeks with a wretched flue, I was worried about the ones that swarmed & couldn’t do a thing about it. I gave them last priority because they’re in a rural area, my other hives are near houses, so I’m giving them first priority as far as swarm control goes.
Another saying one of those blokes used to say was “you can always tell a beekeeper driving on the road, he’ll be driving on the wrong side of the road, looking at the trees”
Another thing I remember one of those blokes saying is “you never stop learning something new about bees”. I believe that to be very true.
The main thing is to have an open mind to new ideas, observe the bees behavior. Query unusual behavior. The bees don’t do anything without a reason.
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