Compact TBH Transfer (step 1)

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Time to transfer the swarm from the rapidly filling compact hive into a full size Kenyan top bar hive.  For a first step, I thought I would get the small hive up off the ground so the bees could start getting used to aiming for a big white box instead of a small grey one.

The joy of standard dimensions - 450mm wide hives mate nicely!

It was fascinating seeing how the returning bees were hovering where the hive used to be, which might have been three feet away (you can see the timber it was sitting on to the right of the legs in the picture).  It really amazes me that they can fly for hundreds or even thousands of metres with such accuracy.

After a minute or so, I noticed that some bees had landed on the hive and were busily fanning.  More and more bees landed on the hive and also sat on the outside fanning, and after five or ten minutes, it was business as usual.  As you can see from the picture, there is no excess build up of bees and they have resumed normal flying operations.  Clever things!

Transferring Langstroth Bees to a Top Bar Hive (take 2)

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Early in 2012, I attempted to transfer bees out of a Langstroth hive into a top bar hive by relying on their alleged predisposition to move downwards.  In short, this didn’t work.  Either there’s a grand conspiracy by all the Warré proponents to propagate this falsehood, or there was something specific about my setup that stopped the bees.

My personal belief is that bees won’t migrate into an “open bottomed” hive from a sold bottomed one. With my new colony rapidly filling my transport hive, I needed another four-footer and decided to build a dedicated “hybrid hive”, freeing up the TBH for the existing top bar savvy colony.

After posting my lack of success on the biobees.com forums, one of the members there said he’d had the same problem, until he built a hive that allowed sideways migration.  I decided to try the same basic design, adapted to use the existing partial roof.  I figured this would also let me use a Langstroth-type super if I ever decided I wanted to do such a thing.

The assembled hybrid hive body.

The hive was made out of 3/4″ thick plywood, of which I used about a 4′ x 4′ sheet.  The ‘handles’ along the side are 2″ x 4″ pine.  The trickiest part of the build was marrying up the diagonal Kenyan sides, because the top edge is the reference point, but you can’t assemble upside down for obvious reasons.

I clamped one of the followers into the end of the top bar section, and then dropped that into the V shaped gap at the end of the Langstroth section.  A quick check to make sure the top bars lined up, and then lots of glue and screws.

Another deviation from the Chandler design was to keep a solid floor.  As stated earlier, I believe bees don’t like building comb out in an area that is more exposed to air than where they are already.  Michael Bush seems to suggest that (in his experience) the need for loads of ventilation is overstated.  This would certainly be the case in a hollow tree, etc., where the only ventilation is likely to be the hole the bees enter and exit from.

The entrance holes are made to be compatible with the existing hive

Speaking of entrances, I drilled three holes such that it would sit in the same place, relative to the hive body, as the top bar hive.  I figured this would minimise confusion for bees returning to the hive.

Once complete, I moved the existing hive back a couple of metres, and swapped the frames into the new hive.  I didn’t have any spare Langstroth frames, so it was a moment of truth when I put the first one in and it fit!

 

The completed hive in situ

I built the hive and transferred the bees on the weekend before I had to travel for work, so I was filled with trepidation when I returned.  When I opened the hive, I found an almost complete comb on the first top bar.  So after not expanding downwards for 11 months, they had expanded sideways in 5 days!

To sum up, there are too many variables to draw any conclusions about this experience.  As someone once said, bees do things invariably, or something like that.

My next challenge is to work out how to get the bees out of the Langstroth section so I can replace the frames with top bars, and then return them to their original owner!

Hived swarm success!

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Three weeks ago, I saw a swarm of bees coalescing in one of our apple trees.  I went a grabbed the transport hive, which had been sitting idle since its last occupants had absconded earlier in the year, and went to work to capture the swarm.

This proved to be more difficult than I expected, as the swarm was near the centre of the tree, and there was also some sort of creeper coming up through the tree, meaning than rather than a single branch to clip, the bees were across multiple branches in multiple directions.  Finally I got a solid quantity of bees into a container, which I dumped into the hive a few metres away on the ground.  At first I saw that other flying bees were crawling through the entrance into the hive, so I was confident I had the queen.  However, after a few minutes, the bees started pouring out of the hive again, and heading back for the tree.

The bees exiting the hive once they realise the queen isn't there

The second time, I got a larger quantity of bees into the hive, and once again the rest seemed to start heading in, again only to leave and form a large ball on the side of the hive.  I was about ready to give up, when I noticed there was still a collection of bees in the tree.  I gathered that the queen must still have been in the tree, so I grabbed those remaining bees, and then shook the whole swarm off the side of the hive into a large plastic tub, and then dumped the two lots into the hive.  This time, the remaining flying bees headed into the hive and stayed there!

A few days later, I decided to check to see if they were building comb.  What I saw instead was a swarm of bees about 8 metres off the ground above the hive.  There seemed to be bees exiting the hive to join the swarm in the tree.  There was nothing to do to capture the swarm, and figured that even if I could, they were just going to abscond again.  Very dejected, I went off to ponder the life of a beekeeper and did some other jobs around the farm.

Later in the afternoon I returned to see that the swarm had moved on, but there were still a few bees coming and going from the hive.  I decided to open it up to see if they’d made any comb, and found a hive full of bees, and two small combs!  The other swarm must have been just that, another swarm – I guess there would have been some sort of interaction between my colony and the other swarm, and that’s what I saw.

Five days later I opened it up to have a look, and found two reasonably full combs, one even containing a little honey.  Another week, and there were five combs, and some brood, and after three weeks, the hive is more than half full and I need to move them into a full sized hive so they don’t run out of room.

Biltong

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It’s been a while since my last post, but there have been many things going on at Philarly.

Completed biltong - over $100 worth at the market rate.

Lately I have switched to Paleolithic nutrition, which I will write more about another time, but it boils down to not eating grains and other starchy things like potatoes and legumes.

The area where I have found the biggest shift is “snacking” – admittedly I am a lot less hungry now that I get my calories from fat rather than carbohydrates, but there are still times when it’s a bit too long between meals.  The perfect solution – biltong!  If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a little like beef jerky, but a whole lot nicer and easier to prepare.  Basically the process is:

  1. Take some lean meat (I use a 1.5Kg beef topside roast, but just about any meat will work), cut it into strips about 15mm thick
  2. Coat it in salt and let the meat sweat for an hour or so
  3. Wash the salt off with some vinegar
  4. Cover the strips in a spice mix (I used about a tablespoon each of cracked black pepper, brown sugar, chilli flakes, and ground coriander)
  5. Hang for 3-7 days depending on temperature and humidity – basically until the meat turns black.

Biltong box. You don't need anything this elaborate!

You can just hang it anywhere that flies won’t get to it, but my father-in-law happened to have built a drying box just for this purpose, so I used that.  It has a lightbulb to generate a little heat (of course, thanks to the eco-facists, incandescent light bulbs are very hard to find!) and therefore some airflow.  I found mine was taking too long to dry, and had picked up a little mould, so I added a small fan.  The hooks are just little pieces of MIG wire bent into an S shape, but paper clips could be used to achieve the same thing.

The false floor is a ‘disposable’ piece of MDF, in that it absorbs all the blood and other liquids that drip off, and it also prevents cold liquids dropping on, and shattering, the light bulb.

My first batch was too salty (although still very tasty!), so this second batch got a much more ‘aggressive’ bath in vinegar before being spiced.  My advice would be to give it a go – you don’t need all the paraphernalia in the picture – a cardboard box with some bamboo skewers through the sides, skewering the meat would do much the same thing.  I think the meat and spices for the batch you see in the first picture (which would be about 600-700g) would have cost about $25, and maybe 30 minutes of preparation.  With biltong and jerky costing something like $4-5 for a 25g packet in the shops, it makes good financial sense.  You can tune the spices to your tastes, and most importantly you know exactly what is (and isn’t) in it!

UPDATE!

3.5 days and it's done!

I left the second batch in the dryer for about three and a half days, and it has turned out great. The cure is spot on – not too salty or vinegary, leaving plenty of room for the spices’ flavour.  Only problem now is that my ‘waste not, want not’ approach to life means I have to force myself to eat the early overly salty batch first!

I highly recommend using the fan if you have an enclosed box.  Alternatively have a muslin bag or similar and hang it somewhere out in a breezy location.

Transferring Langstroth Bees to a Top Bar Hive

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First off, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!  The colony of Italian bees (although now they are less Italian, having been bred out by their new King Island queen) have been doing very well in their Langstroth hive, but it was well and truly time to move them into their top bar home.

Phil Chandler advocates the “chop’n'crop” method to achieve this, where by one chops the sides off the frames, and then crops the comb to fit the inside of the top bar hive profile.  Watching the video of this process, it seems easy enough – in practice, we found that the “chop” requires a saw, and the “crop” is messy and would kill a lot of brood.  Obviously this entire process is very disruptive to the hive, and since I was in no hurry to get them out of the Langstroth hive, I decided to let them transfer themselves.  The principle I was relying on was the same that underpins Warré beekeeping: bees will move their brood downwards if possible.

The TBH a Langstroth shaped hole in the roof. The follower board is partly under the roof at right

I built a Chandler dimensioned top bar hive, but placed thicker side rails (35 x 90mm) to give sufficient width to sit the Langstroth hive on top without it overhanging, and I also cut some thinner top bars (about 30mm wide) to allow for gaps for bees to pass through and up into the Langstroth box.  I placed the follower board (a solid movable end that allows the top bar to be slowly increased as the bees expand) to line up with the edge of the Langstroth box.  This gave the bees eight top bars matching their eight existing frames.  I made a shorter roof allowing 355mm (the width of the Lang box) to remain exposed.  I finished this by stapling a double thickness of black plastic (pond liner) to the plywood top for waterproofing.  Rather than messing around with hinges (since it had to mate up with the other hive) I just placed four locating pins into blind holes.  Given its shorter length and lighter construction, lifting the roof section off is not an issue.

A few dozen bees left on the baseboard

Once I got the new hive into position next to the old one, it was (amazingly) simple to lift up the Langstroth box and place it onto the top bar hive.  Initially, the resident bees didn’t even seem to notice, apart from the few dozen on the baseboard. This made me think that the Warré folks are really onto something when they add new boxes at the bottom of their hives rather than the top as per ‘traditional’ bee keeping methods.

The Langstroth box was attached and sealed with gaffer tape, because I didn’t want bees trying to enter through little gaps in the woodwork.  Finally, I placed some gaffer tape where the box met the peaked roof, to direct rain away from the join.  The intent is to avoid “actively” inspecting this hive until such time as the bees have moved down into the top bar chamber and I can remove the Langstroth box from the top.

All taped up and nowhere to go

By the time I was taping up the hive, the foraging bees were returning and wondering how to get inside.  You could almost hear them thinking “Hang on, there used to be an opening just here” as they walked down the front of the Langstroth hive.  There were a good few dozen bees trying to get into the hive via the mesh at the bottom, and a persistent half dozen or so that were convinced they could sneak in where the roof met the hive, which was sitting proud of the side rails by 3mm or so.

After about 30 minutes, the bees seemed to have it all figured out, and were coming and going via the new entrance.  I climbed under the hive, and with the help of a very bright torch I had received for Christmas, I took a photo of the bees moving through the gaps between the top bars.

This photo was difficult to take

The next day, I didn’t notice any bees trying to get in where the old entrance was, and there seemed to be more activity generally – I suspect that the bees have renewed vigour now that they have some room to make comb.

Three days later at about 10pm, I did another one of these “underneath” inspections, and saw the bees building comb on the top bars, so I think it’s safe to say that the technique is sound.  Hopefully when I do the next check, I’ll see some decent combs being developed and take a photo.

Addressing the five survival needs for the long term

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With the new year approaching, and ever more depressing news about the global economy, I have been thinking about preparedness. Jack Spirko outlines five survival needs, I have listed them below in the order they appear on his website.  I am not sure if that suggests anything about priority, although water does stand out as the most critical, so perhaps they are.

  • Water
  • Food
  • Shelter
  • Fire/Energy
  • Security

I am a fan of bushwalking, and whilst I bought some backpack hiking gear last summer, I haven’t found time to use it in anger yet.  I think it is easy to see these survival needs from a self-reliance point of view.  In my case, it would be something like:

  • Water: ~1 litre GI water canteen (1 quart?), ~2.5 litres (a gallon) of additional plastic bottled water, water purification tablets.  Also, I would ensure to have a map that had reliable water sources indicated on it.
  • Food: Whatever I take – I would plan on carrying 50% more than I think I need.  I’d rather be sore than hungry, and it’ll only get lighter.  If I was hunting I suppose I could try and shoot something (we have no shortage of rabbits) – I don’t really know anything about snares and traps though.
  • Shelter: I have a great little compact bivy tent, and an extra fly to give some decent rain protection.  I also have a self inflating mattress – Jack pointed out in a recent podcast on wilderness survival that a significant amount of body temperature is lost through ground contact.
  • Fire/Energy: I have a couple of lighters, and a couple of boxes of matches in a ziplock bag.  I really should get one of those ferro rods – they are almost useless for starting fires by all accounts, but lots of fun to play with when one has fast burning rifle propellent around :-)   I have a great LED head torch that lasts a very long time on the two AAA batteries inside.  We also have some other small LED torches, but they break if dropped, so I suppose I really should buy a better one.  It seems like I would want to be not trying to move at night in a survival situation though.
  • Security: I have a GPS, and I would be definitely be leaving an itinerary before I left on a hike.  Jack also made the point in the same recent podcast that you should leave an itinerary with multiple people – I certainly hadn’t thought about that!  I guess from the American self defence perspective, most of those folks would probably be thinking about what gun/knife/martial art they should be packing to provide “security”.  I think that’s where Australians are maybe a little more relaxed – we don’t tend to assume people mean us harm.  I’d always have a couple of knives with me, and I guess if I was hunting I’d be carrying a gun, although using one as a self-defence means in this country (irrespective of the circumstances) is essentially charging yourself with manslaughter.

What I found more difficult was translating those five survival needs into more of a self-sufficiency perspective.  It really made me appreciate just how dependent I am on “the system” to provide almost all of these too me right now.  Again, let’s work through the list:

  • Water: Right now, we’re on town water.  I do have a lot of roof area, and plan on installing a pair of 22,500 litre (5000 gallons) water tanks to collect it.
  • Food: We have some bits and pieces in the garden, but nothing noteworthy (apart from a few ratty apple trees).  We do have a lot of beef walking around, but cattle are not really practical for a small family as you have a lot of meat that (even with freezing) doesn’t keep long enough.  One possible solution ties in with security.
  • Shelter: We do have a good house, and good sheds, and very soon we will own it free and clear.  I am at least moderately “handy”, so I could probably maintain the house at least to a “make work” standard.
  • Fire/Energy: We are on the power grid, and we truck in wood for our fireplace over winter.  I am toying with the idea of moving to grid connected solar panels (we have a good roof for it) but that still relies on the grid, unless you go for a DC system which then needs specialised appliances, lighting, and batteries.  I am going to plant a native wood plantation in our most distance paddock (half a dozen acres worth) which I am hoping could fuel a rocket mass heater sustainably.
  • Security: We live in a real quiet out of the way spot, in a small town, with neighbours we know really well.  I think this is the best form of security and probably the only one that is going to work out in any sort of long term degradation of our current standard of living.  Community is very important, because whilst it’s very rare that you could be completely (or even significantly) self sufficient, even a very small community could be, provided they are cohesive and coherent.

Moving to a preparedness mindset can be quite daunting – you suddenly feel very exposed and naive about a great number of things, but I have found its helpful to focus on the things you have going for you sometimes.  You can’t afford to be complacent about your weaknesses, but it does help to think about your own strengths from time to time.

Maybe you might also do an audit of your long term preparedness situation versus your goals.  I know I found it to be a useful exercise.

Mini Top Bar Hive – A New Hope?

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I was speaking to my bee keeping mentor today, and was discussing my plan to combine the remaining bees from the feral cut-out hive (still in the mini-TBH) with the newly queened colony from the Langstroth hive in my four foot long TBH.  When I got home it was still warm, so I decided to have a quick look in the TBH, since the bees are still very active coming in and out of hive.  One observation I will make about my feral locally adapted bees is that they start foraging earlier, finish later, and stay active even in light drizzle.  The Italian bees in the Langstroth hive seem to be a lot more precious!

Anyway, upon removing some top bars from the empty end of the hive (I really should put a follower board in there!) I immediately saw a dead bee pupa on the floor of the hive. I quickly had a look at the combs from the cutout, which I noticed had been partially filled with honey, and quite effectively attached to the top bars, and found two queen cells (at least that’s what they appeared to be?) on the edge of one of the combs.

Regicide In Utero?

As far as I know (not that I know much!) the only sort of bee that ends up like this in a queen that has been executed in utero by another queen!  It has been 16 days since the feral cut out, so it is possible that a queen could have been born by now.

The final top bar (which contained the newest honey comb from the cut out) had been firmly attached to the end of the hive by a lot of burr comb.  I didn’t have a knife to dislodge it, and given the small population of the hive, I don’t want to risk losing a single bee if I can avoid it.  I did notice a quite a number of bees fanning their tails in the air near that comb, which as I recall is a way the bees indicate “the queen is here!  Come protect her!”

Anyway, exciting times – it seems I could indeed have two colonies.  I will be making up some sugar syrup for the top bar hive tomorrow – whilst they have collected some honey, I am quite happy to keep supplementing their diet until they start building new comb (and laying brood) in earnest, which I will take as a sign they are thriving.  If I do have a queen in the top bar hive, there is a hive full of Italian stallions next door (drones) so she’d have a reasonably good chance of a successful mating flight!

Quick DIY: Making 1/8″ Mesh for Top Bar Hives

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I posted this idea at the Natural Beekeeping forums a while back, but now that it is proven, I thought I’d repost it here.  You need 1/8″ mesh for the bottom of a Top Bar Hive, and I couldn’t find anything suitable at my local hardware shop, so I had to adapt 1/4″ mesh to the job.

1/4 x 1/2 = 1/8

Pretty simple stuff really – I used a pneumatic stapler at about 50psi, and it worked a treat.  Driving in car with a hive full of angry bees didn’t see any of them escaping the hive, so that’s effective enough for me!