Hi everyone! New to Bees and looking for a Nuc Brisbane/Ipswich

Interesting Jeff, Buderim isnt too far from here, if Jeff is ok with questions from time to time.

From what I have seen, @JeffH is extremely responsive to questions, so long as you pay attention to the answers… :smile:

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Thank You @Dawn_SD & @BeeMaster86, yes paying attention to the answers is the key. Another bit of advice I can offer would be to set yourself up with an observation beehive. I learned something the other day by observing my observation beehive.

I thought my o.b.h. was really low on honey so I turned it on it’s end & poured some honey in through the entrance, then sat it up again to watch the bees eat the honey. That was all fine. I decided to add more honey, but this time a larger amount. The second time a lot more bees got involved with cleaning up the honey, however I must have let a few SHB loose in the hive during the process. What I saw was a lot of bees trying to clean up the honey at the same time as a lot of bees getting involved in dealing with the SHB’s. It was a bit chaotic for a while until everything got back to normal. HOWEVER, what did I find the next day? Two holes in the comb that only appear after SHB have done the damage & worker bees clean it up. During the chaos a couple of beetles had a chance to do some damage & possibly lay some eggs in the brood. Lucky I had enough workers there to fix it up, otherwise the beetles would have taken over the whole hive.

What was the lesson learned? Honey spills over the brood are not good, especially large honey spills in areas where SHB are present.

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Ill have a look at one for sure. Id like to go a flow hive, but they are a bit of reach for me at this point starting out. Maybe hive 2 or 3 will be one. I notice you put a mat of some sort on you frames in your videos @JeffH, is it lino? And whats it for may ask?

Oh and have watched Nova tales from the hive, twice, very good doco, will check out City of Bees

Well done Wayne. The vinyl mat (yes, lino) stops the bees building comb from the top bars of the frames to the underside of the lid. It is especially useful when the hive is still only one box. It means you can lift the lid without disrupting the frames & thus upsetting the bees. It is also useful on a single super. It encourages the bees to build across all the frames, rather than going up to the lid before going across to all of the frames.

I recently had a call out where a lady couldn’t work her bees because she had no vinyl mat & the bees built comb right up under the lid. She couldn’t get the lid off because the bees got too cranky. Her having 7 frames in a 10 frame box badly spaced didn’t help her situation one bit:)

That video, “City of Bees”, although over 50 years old gives us a good understanding of how bees clean & air condition their hive, how they communicate the honey source, how they produce wax & more.

Thanks Jeff, I thought it was something like that. I watched City of Bees, for its time it was amazing work. The end was off topic a bit though lol.

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Just found your video on the mat! Hive is of to get the nuc colony settled in as well!:grin:

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