Can you not breed your own queens I wonder?
Apologies, not accustomed to your location.
Queenbreeding needs drones, lots of drones in the air, unless you go for artificial insemination. So, you need many hives which produce drones. And that is a problem in Panay where rice (= pesticides & herbicides) is everywhere and the remaining nature is used for charcoal or the land is contended (placing hives resulting in family feuds). So, finding a clean area big enough to sustain 50 hives has been my quest over the past 3 years and it looks like we found a solution in a very unlikely locationā¦
The coming year will tell us if weāve got a fighting chance here in the coastal area.
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Then could you ( or anyone) point me in the direction of anybody that can inport queens there ? Thanks againā¦glad the local source is working out.
Try Jojo joyiedj@gmail.com who has done this before.
Regards,
Paul Holtslag
Nasidman Island, Ajuy
+639162233349
There are always plenty of drones out there. Your hives donāt need to produce them.
Hai Michael,
Plenty of drones? Welcome to Philippines. We have local āwildā bees (Dorsata, Trigona, Cerana), but beekeepers with honeybees are far apart and the local market does not appreciate the Trigona (āStinglessā) honey. The closest beek with Millifera had ca.30 hives but lost all her stock when local farmers used pesticides without warning. The next beekeeper is 75km away in the city where I am trying to relocate our hives to as this seems to be the only location without excessive pesticides. It is a struggle in Philippines, too much pesticides and not enough bee-friendly trees/flowers (*). But there are some areaās which are more successful. The mountain area of Baguio has a thriving beekeeper community and that is where we currently have to get our queens. A ferry ride, a car trip, a one hour flight, 9 hours in the bus and then the next day the same reverse.
Hence our quest to get more drones in the air locally and start producing our own queens. So, we need more hives with happy bees producing sufficient drones.
(*): The local (fruit) trees seems to be in a symbiotic relationship with the local bees and often exclude the millifera. This is not a real surprise ofcourse, but it limits the area where millifera can thrive. In our case, that is the city where the wealthier people have nice gardens along a mangrove area. Google Earth does not give me a lot of hope for alternatives in my area as coconut farms have been chopped down to provide building materials and a rice-monoculture has developed over the past decades without any priority to diversification.
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So you say there are no wild Apis mellifera? If there are any and if they have been wlild very many years, the whole Island should be pretty evenly inhabited. Drones tend to be good at finding queens and queens tend to be good at finding drone congregation areas. My guess is there are plenty around somewhere, but I canāt know that from here. Hard to imagine that mellifera wouldnāt work most of the same flowers as cerana. Cerana is slightly smaller, but not that significantly smaller.
I always let them have all the drones they want. That is usually, at the peak of drone rearing about 25% drones.
Michael,
Wish we had wild millifera. Have not spotted any here. 2 years ago, I was lucky to have a team from the UPLB university here to catalogue the bees around Panay (the main island). The teamlead is nicknamed the āQueenbeeā and has many years experience, so I am quite confident with their findings. And the answer remained āNoā, no wild millifera. But I became a bit familiar with the Trigona and they now have captured my heart. Wonderful engineers they are and their honey is uniquely different. Pity there is no market and I can get only 100ml per box per year. But that is outside the scope of the Flow forum, I supposeā¦
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New to bee keeping . I am in subic area , actually Barretto , I am planning on getting a flowhive , will need a nuc . Bee breeds ? Any help appreciated . Where to get a nuc ?
Read previous contributions. Strongly suggest to get trained in Baguio with the SLU (see facebook SLU Beekeeping Training Centre) and go home with a couple of nucās. They are of FB and email.
Regards,
Paul Holtslag
Nasidman Island, Ajuy
+639162233349
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Thanks , will check them out
Hello Mark
I just signed on with forum and saw your post from back in June 2017. I live in Valencia, Negros, and was wondering how your bee keeping is going by this time?
Iām thinking of starting a hive, and any info, would be of great help.
Regards,
Don
Good day. Iām interested on the flow in the Philippines. Can you kindly add me up for having some advise. Thank you.
Best regards,
Ralph
Iām interested on the flow in the Philippines. Can you kindly add me up for having some advise. Thank you.
Best regards,
Ralph
Hi @nucopia,
Iām from Echague, Isabela, Philippines also. can we connect. very interested on this initiative.
thanks,
Ralph
Experiences with beekeeping in Philippines. Letās keep it short, please feel free to ask questions later.
- I lived on a 27ha. island, it proved too small to sustain beekeeping. I started with 4 hives, got to 12 eventually, but never produced enough drones, the bees were not happy, they did not produce enough honey. I tried moving to a mangrove area, that was not effective. Too much wind, not enough flowers in spite of planting lots of stuff. Moved the remaining hives off the island, but keep planting stuff I know the bees will like, maybe I can pull the colonies back in a few years.
- Moving the bees to the āmainlandā was very, very difficult. Filipino farmers in our area are a bunch of individualists, they do not coordinate pesticide and herbicide campaigns. They use way too much and preferably unannounced. A fellow beekeeper on the mainland lost all her 40-odd hives and now gave up. Using Google Earth to locate a suitable area showed that it was āMission Impossibleā. It turned out that the only suitable area was right in town. In an affluent area where people have big houses, they like nice gardens and ofcourse no one keeps bees. So my colonies there have a good time there. e.g. Negros is completely differentā¦
- Honeybees are imported. Most Filipino vegetation loves Filipino bees. A friend had lots of problems trying to get honeybees to forage in the local jungle. I have a lot of success with stingless bees. And guess what: they are freeā¦ Just open your eyes and you will see them everywhere and with the induction method, you can multiply your colonies free of charge. And the honey from the stingless bees is potent stuff. But you can get only about 150ml per colony per year, but there is a guy with thousands of colonies, so that adds up.
- I got stuck with the corona disaster while visiting friends in South Africa. Here, people value honey. In Philippines, most people think that this sugarwater in the supermarkets is āhoneyā and they wonder why my honey is so āexpensiveā. Difficult to explain. You need to create your own market, but the positive side is that this education is crucial if ever the Philippines is ever going organic.
- Whatever I did, I could not get my bees to accept the Flow. Probably because they were not happy. When I am back in Philippines, I will try if the remaining hives in the new area in town can be converted to Flow.
- Read my previous posts how to get the Flow into Philippines, DHL is very problematic.
Any questions?
P
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Hi Pablo, Iām a newbie here, but I really interested in the flow hiveā¦
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Hi! I am new to beekeeping and would like to order a starter bundle. Where can I order since the website does not offer shipping to Philippines. Thank you!
The original option was to ship via DHL which could have worked. But, we have bad experience with DHL in Philippines (customs issues, delays etc), so we ordered via friends in Australia and they put it in Balikbayan boxes and of course that worked very well. I had asked Flow to put it in the Balikbayan boxes, but they could not do that for me.
Butā¦ beekeeping is not just putting bees in a Flow, you also need to get some knowledge about your bees or it will not work.
I suggest you contact the SLU-EISSIF for Basic Beekeeping Training
Venue : SLU-EISSIF Beekeeping Center
Address : Ciudad Grande, Baguio City
For additional information: (074) 443 9573/ 0910 877 2555
They give training in honey bees.
However, honey bees are not native in The Philippines. While there are some succesfull beekeepers in the Philippines, I had serious problems as I am living on a small island and the environment is quite unfriendly to honey bees.
Keeping native bees is another option you could consider.
They are easier to keep but give you a lot less honey, even if the quality is exceptional.
Info: UPLB (Stingless Beekeeping - Filipino Style ā PlantingSeeds).
I could give you a lot more info on this subject if you want, send me a PM