Can you provide feedback on my bee plan?

I will look into the top feeder option. I am hoping I can drop a quart mason jar into the feeder hole of the inner cover that came with the cedar hive kit.

The instructions from the Apiary said this…
“The 4 frames of brood/bees should be no more than one comb away from the feeder if you are using an in-hive feeder.”

I think I misunderstood their instructions… I think they meant that the entirety of the 4 frames should be no more than 2 frames away from a feeder. I originally interpreted this differently.

My wife is getting jealous of the bees.

Thanks for the advice about the sugar water, I will be extra careful to not burn the sugar.

Candles, chocolates, champagne and dinner with a chick flick can go a long way towards fixing that.

:imp:

Don’t make Michael cry, he is a self-confessed hippie type with good intentions and a wonderful intellect! :smile: He even has a great sense of humor!

I like your new feeder plans. The mason jar is the easiest - you can just put it over the hole, you don’t have to make the hole bigger to fit the lid ring. I like pail feeders as they hold a gallon, but for this year, I bought a Brushy Mountain top feeder with floats. No idea if it will be any good, time will tell.

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Yea. I’ve seen too many sticky dead bees in my time. I don’t want to see them again… If you spray them with anything (and I would not) I would only spray them with water.

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Ask Beaweaver to mark the Queen. Looking at Valli’s video First Video for 2016 - Spring Bees you can see how easy it is to find the Queen.

What’s you take on the liquid smoke? I’ve seen a video with someone spraying it…

the queen marking system is year ending code
1 + 6 White
2 + 7 Yellow
3 + 8 Red
4 + 9 Green
5 + 0 Blue

last years Queen is Blue
This years Queen is White

Some just mark any colour some breeders mark with numbers

Yes they are much easier to find

Hi Lorne, I just hope your not over prepared:). Good luck when your bees arrive.

Yes, a bit of panic is always good - look at how well @busso is doing! :wink:

I tried it. I didn’t care for it for several reasons. The main one is that when I use a smoker, the hive does not smell like smoke the next time I’m there. With the liquid smoke it did. But I suppose if I was in a high fire danger situation, I might consider it better than the fire hazard of a smoker…

Hi Dawn, I must confess that I haven’t been following the forum all that close. I spent a lot of time the last 2 days fixing QX’s to stop queens getting into the honey supers. Guess what I found with the 2nd hive I checked this morning? A queen above the QX. Lucky I had a spare one in my truck.

About this thread: a checklist is always good. I’m going to make one for next time I do a cutout & put it on the fridge. Last time I did one about a 20 minutes drive away, I left my bee suit behind. I didn’t want to wear it there because of the heat. The lady asked me if I could do the cutout out of the ceiling without a bee suit:) My polite reply was “not really”.

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Hi Busso, I’ve never had marked queens. I think it’s a good idea to practice trying to find them unmarked. We all need practice at reading the brood as well. Get good at looking over the brood for any signs of disease etc.

I find that if you check the first brood frame you pull EVERY inspection and do a thorough frame by frame check twice a year you can keep on top of disease with spending half an hour on each box every time you look in.

I have been known to do my ‘due diligence’.

“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”
― Dwight D. Eisenhower

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
― Abraham Lincoln

And flow detractors said us newbies wouldn’t give beekeeping the respect it deserves! Simply because we don’t have to borrow/own a centrifuge to get clear honey out! That makes zero sense. I still have to do everything else with the hive.

I don’t understand this statement, can you clarify? Are you saying that on my weekly visits I should always pull the same brood frame each time (while also doing a visual inspection of all of the frames from the top)? And then, twice a year, thoroughly inspect every frame?

thanks!
Lorne

Hrmmmm… after 10 years of marriage, you think I would have figured that out by now (seems so simple in hindsight). Thanks for the tips!

In the UK, where I keep my bees, I have to look through the brood boxes weekly (10 days if my queens are clipped) during the swarming season.
Mostly it is a quick check to make sure the queen has space to lay and that the bees are not making swarm cells. It’s a quick inspection and takes about five minutes a colony.
In the Spring and Autumn I must do a more thorough inspection for brood disease. This involves checking all the brood fairly thoroughly. It doesn’t take long in the Spring as the colony is relatively small but in the Autumn it is quite time consuming.
If, in your weekly inspections, you have that same good look at the first brood frame you take you will spot disease in it’s early stages when it is easier to do something about it and when it is less likely to have spread to the other colonies. It goes to say that if that frame is healthy the rest are most likely to be as well.

PS. In the swarming season there is no “looking at frames from the top” each frame has to be taken out. If I find queen cells then all the frames have to be searched thoroughly by shaking ALL the bees off them

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And of course, “No plan survives contact with the enemy…” Not that we should think of bees as enemies, although they probably see us that way! :smile:

Every inspection should have an objective - if there are Queen issues looking at the brood nest is the first place you will find it - no not the same frame but looking enough to find eggs and larvae or BIAS (Brood In All Stages) capped and young bees (Nurse Bees) as they will feed the larvae.

If you go into a hive without an objective it can be easily sidetracked - Obviously if you find a problem it needs to be dealt with but not necessarily on that visit. This is whe you should be keeping notes:
Date
Weather
Type of Hive
Queen
QC Queen Cells, Supercedure cells,
BIAS (Brood In All Stages) Eggs, Larvae, Capped and Young Bees and Older Bees and Drones can be noted but tells about the state of the Hive - QR Queen Right
Stores - Pollen, Nectar, Honey (capped)
Disease
Pests
Temper - this can tell a lot about the hive
Treatments
Honey Extraction - Lot, Batch, Apiary, Hive, Date, Filtered, Raw, Heated