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Here is Where I'm At - How Do You Suggest I Move Forward?

22K views 69 replies 22 participants last post by  squarepeg 
#1 ·
I have been talking with people on the "Brother Adam" thread, and I realized it had wandered too far from the hypothetical, to my specific interests. So I thought I'd begin anew here.

I have 13 colonies of bees. I would like to be treatment free, but fully understand that goal to be a difficult challenge and I am certainly aware of the great controversy that surrounds how to get there.

I would like to maintain a sustainable population of bees; raise my own queens and not have to buy new bees every year. In another thread on a similar subject a while back, Mike Palmer suggested that one would really need around 100 colonies to be sustainable, saying that you'd need those numbers to select from and to handle the ups and downs without collapsing, and to be able to maintain your genetic program (he did not use these words - I'm summarizing my understanding of his post).

Anyway, I have 100 colonies as my goal. I am planning to a lot of nucs; probably 3/4 of my total in the future.
Right now, I have:

• 4 Queens from three different local beekeepers - all from within 1 hour of my home. Each has been raising queens here for at least a decade.
• 3 Queens from walk away splits from those queens
• 5 Buckfast Queens from Bill Ferguson in Ontario
• 1 Queen which I got with a swarm in early June. I'm assuming by the timing that this queen has overwintered at least once here.

Right now, 6 of my colonies are overwintering nucs.

There are several beekeepers in within a few miles of me, but I do not believe any of them has more than a couple of hives. Many of them would have queens from the same local beekeepers as the ones I have came from. The rest would be some of the annual import from Hawaii. Some of those come from Kona, and I think they brought some in from Big Island as well.

How would you recommend that I proceed in reaching my goals? Should I attempt to bring in a particular stock? Should I 'deepen the pool' and add the bees of other breeders? Or should I just work with what I have?

What are some of your thoughts?

Adam
 
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#2 ·
Id work with what you have.

Whats your reasons for going treatment free? There are alot of treatment options other than chemical. Also there are alot of management options to help control varroa. If your idea is to raise bees and live off bees, your going to have to treat and manage your diseases. There is no way around that.
 
#3 ·
I think everyone would like to go treatment free, wouldn't they?

I've used oxalic vapor and drone comb removal. And will do what I have to do to make it work. But I've never tried treatment free, and figure it's better to try it sooner - while I don't have many colonies - than to try it later, when I have so much more at stake.

On the other hand, I feel that if I am running a lot of nucs, and splitting a lot, the the brood breaks should stem the tide of mites to some degree as well. I'm certainly not against anyone else's methods, and I love to hear about them. I'm just trying to find the best one for me and my own bees.

Adam
 
#5 ·
Yes, everyone would if it was possible and if it were just as easy as figuring breeding will solve the whole issue. Breeding has focused on this problem for quite a while, and we have yet to find anything that satisfies the problem.

We take bees out of their natural environment, we take them pretty much where ever we choose to raise them, we manage them in workable frames and manipulate their growth to manage production from them, we feed them to manage growth and to prevent starving, we move them to flowering fields and into conditions more suitable during durths, we wrap them up or move them to help manage the winter, we choose the breeding selections for them to bring in traits and characteristics more suitable to our needs,
So when it comes to disease control, why would we not treat to control the disease pressures? Everything else we do to manage the hives is not natural or normal for the bees,.?
 
#7 ·
How would you recommend that I proceed in reaching my goals? Should I attempt to bring in a particular stock? Should I 'deepen the pool' and add the bees of other breeders? Or should I just work with what I have?
Patience Grasshopper.

This is a long term project and nothing you're going to accomplish overnight...or in a year or in five. You need to build up your numbers, learn successful queen rearing, bring in other stocks to incorporate with yours. Change over the drone population in your area, and select and select and select.

You have all the parts of the puzzle...the options have been given in answers to all your questions. Get out there and do it...and have your failures and successes. Two steps forward and one step back...or...

Inch by inch, row by row, gonna make this garden grow...
 
#8 ·
Listen to Michael.....he is a wise man.

I understand your frustration....you want to do things "right". you can ask and read all you want...but the true learning is when you are in the field by yourself, making decisions based upon what you know......and late at night when you are second guessing everything you have done.

Deknow
 
#9 ·
there you are adam, and straight from the masters' keyboards. i believe you are asking all the right questions and have a good idea of where you want to go.

i'm not sold on treatment free for the reasons ian laid out. on the other hand, i will do my best to propagate bees that require little to none.

justusflynns, beware of eating raw honey, it contains formic and other organic acids.
 
#14 ·
Adam,

I've found keeping very detailed records pretty well shows me my mistakes and which colony/queens are actually doing best in my area and for my management.

One of the great benifits of being treatment free is that queen selection actually becomes much easier.


Like you I'm at that growing stage with lots of questions (40 hives wanting to get to 500).


Don
 
#20 · (Edited)
Adam,

I don't think you need that many colonies. Introduce lines that have traits you want time to time to keep your diversity around. It really depends on what other drones are around too, if you think it's scant you can boost your drone counts with various methods and have dedicated drone mothers with different backgrounds if you want to keep desirable traits around. Just keep in mind like people are saying, it's something you work up too and it's good to set goals but keep them flexible. I think it just really comes down to taking queen data, evaluating hives for behaviors/traits you like and making sure you keep those stocks around while bringing in outside genetics in time to time to keep hybridity at a reasonable level. I would say with 10-15 good breeding hives you'd be set for a small-medium sized operation. Grafting and screening from those you could easily add 20-30 production hives a year just selecting 2 good daughter queens from each.
 
#22 · (Edited)
I didn't mean to create a thread about treating or not treating for mites, but I do appreciate that it's a part of what I outlined as a goal.

Ian, I feel ya. I do. I'm not suggesting that I wouldn't treat if I needed to. And have no illusions about it perhaps not being possible. But I've never really tried not treating in earnest, and when I read that others are doing it successfully to whatever degree that amounts to in relation to their goals - then I feel that I should give it a shot at some point, and what better time to do it than now? What does anyone really know about beekeeping that they haven't themselves? You know what I mean?

To me, treatment free means not doing things specifically to combat mites - it's all related to the mite issue. At the same time, I also recognize that creating a nuc-based operation could have an effect on mite counts, so that is potentially a 'treatment' of sorts. Also, I am hoping to stack the odds in my favor by making more colonies on less gear.

Mike Palmer and Dean - Absolutely. There's no question that it all hangs on the doing. At the moment, we're looking at getting our first snow here tonight. The bees are in for the winter. I've moved to my winter activities, which amount to research and building. In the basement workshop, I'm building enough gear so that I come out of hibernation with the gear for 45 hives - 30 of them double nucs as you have shown in your presentations.

• I've been working with another local beekeeper here, trying to learn whatever I can from his experience, and to have someone who doesn't wear out on the subject of bees to talk to. I did a cut-out with him this summer, and plan to do more next season. I've visiting still others to glean what I can from what they know as well.

• I built 10 swarm traps last winter, and secured places for them this season. I got one swarm, and had lot's of activity at others. I have secured places for them again next spring.

• I have tried to contact anyone around me that has worked on raising queens in the area to learn from them.

• I have been in contact with provincial authorities regarding the closed border regulations, and succeeded in getting a permit to bring in queens this past summer, which is how I got the Buckfasts.

• I have been in touch with science departments of Canadian universities to try and get information on what they know about resistant bees in our climates, and to learn what they can tell me about the progress of any projects aimed at building mite and disease-resistant stocks in Canada.

• I have been in contact with breeders in different parts of Canada regarding their stock in case I decide to apply for 2013 permits.

• I have secured sufficient yard space close to home. One of those yards is quite isolated from other beekeepers, and could be a mating yard site in the future. The city I live in (where most of my bees are now) has a pesticide ban, and has had one in place for three years.

• I will begin to work on queen rearing this season, which I need to learn and am excited about.

• After three and a half years of continuous bee-obsession on my part, my partner Angie, has gone from annoyed, to tolerant, to a sudden and very strong interest in bee-products-based-handmade-soaps-and cosmetics. This could be the greatest development yet.

• Local pollination is something I'm looking at, as the province is a huge fruit grower (apples, blueberries, cranberries, etc) and has had a consistent shortage of bees. There are also an increasing number of organic operations here, which is nice. People are getting as much as $150 a hive, and most of the farms are within an hour and a half of my house. This is part of why I'm aiming at higher numbers. Also, none of the farm areas are very large, which means that bees placed there for pollination still have a pretty wide variety of other types of forage around. So I feel like pollination locally is not going to be especially hard on the bees... (thoughts?)

• Beyond that, there is a government incentive program offering any beekeeper who has at least 50 hives in pollination in a season, a grant of as much as 50% of the cost of any expansion they want to do.


So that's a potential shot in the arm if I get to 50 and still want to expand to reach that 100.

I am interested in creating a viable sideline. I'd like to reach $15,000 annual income after expenses. I have not created a business plan or anything yet, as I'm still really just focused on learning about the bees, and which aspects of working with bees I enjoy most. I have made all of my gear out of reclaimed lumber and have spent very little money. Everything I'm building is designed to be cost-effective and as efficient as possible.

I am not over-extending myself economically at all, and won't unless I have a viable business plan.

At this point, it's just doing and learning; thinking and planning.

Adam
 
#32 ·
I am interested in creating a viable sideline. I'd like to reach $15,000 annual income after expenses. I have not created a business plan or anything yet,
That's all? $15,000 from 15 production colonies and 30 wintered double story nucs isn't difficult. The plan isn't difficult to initiate.

So, in the spring, you have 15 colonies and 30 nucs. Manage the two groups separately. The production colonies should give enough bee resources to keep your numbers up. Might even make a bit of honey...but any honey harvested is gravy. The nucleus colonies are given a third story at the beginning of May...comb if you have it.

Allow the nucs but build well, and begin harvesting brood and bees from them. Timing? Don't know NS, certainly before they begin swarm preparations. I start here about mid-May, removing brood for cell building. If I were you, I would buy queens at first. so all your brood and bees from the nucs, goes into making more nucs.

Harvest brood in rotation...harvesting what the nucs give you, one or two or three combs, replacing with comb if you have it, foundation if you don't. Foundation will slow the process. After a couple harvests, you knock the nuc back to two stories, then one, then knocking the remaining bees and brood back to a beginning nuc in strength. If the queen is still prolific, let her stay. Re-queen if she's showing her age. Let that remaining nuc build up as you would a new one...into the second story, and winter all your nucs in two stories.

Using comb as replacements, I harvested 900 combs of brood from 50 double story nucs in 2011...not a good honey year. 900 combs of brood is enough to make 400+ nucleus colonies. From your 30 nucs, using foundation, I would expect you could make at least 5:1 new nucs to wintered nucs. That would leave you with about 150 nucs going into winter.

You shouldn't have more than about 10% winter loss in your nucs, once you are experienced enough. That leaves you 135 in the spring.

You sell 100 four or five frame nucs for what? $125-130? You have four or five combs left over to use in the process. In a few years, with enough combs to use in your nuc making, you can approach 10:1 in your nuc making. You can figure it out from here...how much income you might glean from your bees at that point.

But, early in this, when you're at 5:1, your income should be around that $15,000 you are shooting for. Income from your nuc bees that don't have to be treated, are a back-up for your production colonies, can be used in your breeding program, and require very little in initial investment.

That's how I would write a business plan if I were in your position. You folks chasing the elusive honey crop about the countryside, you should consider this plan. Good honey crops are few and far between. Honey is expensive to produce, in labor and equipment. The money is in the bees.
 
#40 · (Edited)
That's all? $15,000 from 15 production colonies and 30 wintered double story nucs isn't difficult. The plan isn't difficult to initiate...
Great. Good to hear a comment from you that doesn't make me re-think everything I'm doing.

Might even make a bit of honey...but any honey harvested is gravy.
That's what I'm thinking. My friend/mentor in the area is building a well-equipped honey house and I will be able to process with him for a low cost if I need it. I have a 28 frame extractor and can do things myself if harvest is not huge. There are good operations around who will buy anything I want to sell as well. At this point, I don't see honey as my core business, but I have relationships with people that do.

The nucleus colonies are given a third story at the beginning of May...comb if you have it.
I don't. That's a big challenge at this point, and a part of why I made the decision last year to move from top bar to lang - harvesting gets rid of your comb in a tbh. I still maintain some top bars, and in the urban environment, I can see people being really interested in some top bar nucs, so I'll keep some of that around, but not much. Right now, I have 5 full tbh's and don't have plans for more.

How do you suggest I build up from where I am, given that I have next to no comb resources?

To recap, I have:

• 6 overwintering nucs (5 new Buckfast)
• 6 production colonies
(I have one weak one as well, but I don't think it'll make it. That will leave some comb though)

Allow the nucs but build well, and begin harvesting brood and bees from them. Timing? Don't know NS, certainly before they begin swarm preparations. I start here about mid-May...
To be safe, I might say 3rd week of May, but swarming really takes off June 1 here.

Harvest brood in rotation...harvesting what the nucs give you, one or two or three combs, replacing with comb if you have it, foundation if you don't. Foundation will slow the process. After a couple harvests, you knock the nuc back to two stories, then one, then knocking the remaining bees and brood back to a beginning nuc in strength. If the queen is still prolific, let her stay. Re-queen if she's showing her age. Let that remaining nuc build up as you would a new one...into the second story, and winter all your nucs in two stories.
So this process of expanding, harvesting back to one box, and then expanding again before winter - let's look at the timing of that.
If I add a box 3rd week of May, and I've only got foundation, what's my schedule going to look like if I want to be back to the one box by July 15? I figure that's when one want's to be making OW nucs up for the following winter if I don't have enough drawn comb. With comb, I'll move to an August 1 date. This year, we had a dearth and I didn't have comb. My July 25 nucs were light and I had to feed. They built comb pretty well, but were just shy of drawing out all the foundation.

You sell 100 four or five frame nucs for what?$125-130?
We're in the land of a $150 norm for 4 frames - often for weak nucs. Some people complaining about 4 frame nucs this year coming with one empty frame.

That's how I would write a business plan if I were in your position...
Mike, you've given me so much good information this year, I feel like I should send you a Christmas present. Some of it has been hard to swallow (like the post about really needing 100 colonies for a truly sustainable operation), but I very much appreciate it. Lot's of work ahead. I've got a basement full of cut stock, painted parts drying, and an order of pine planks from the mill... It's my winter time machine. In a cloud of sawdust - POOF! - it'll be spring.

Thanks again,
 
#25 ·
Im not against developing bees that are more tolerant to diseases,
we as beekeepers can bring these traits into our operation to help minimize the need to relieve disease pressures
disease is always going to be part of looking after animals, no way around it. Our ability to manage those disease losses is what allows us to manage bees

here is a project I am supporting ,

www.saskatraz.com

If your interested in natural selection, this project will be right up your alley. The amount of effort these people put into this project is outstanding. And I am supporting their efforts by bringing their stock into a portion of my operation. For a beekeeper like myself to achieve anywhere near what they have accomplished is impossible.
Now the other question is how do they measure success in what the project has provided them,.? Time will tell,
The other question is how does mother nature manage the disease pressures naturally? The answer is looking like she wants to manage mites exactly the opposite way we want to keep our bees
 
#57 ·
The other question is how does mother nature manage the disease pressures naturally? The answer is looking like she wants to manage mites exactly the opposite way we want to keep our bees
Interesting you mention that. My reading has led me to believe, that's essentially the trait that has allowed the Primorsky (russian) bees to co-exist with the mites as well. Smaller clusters, and, a propensity to swarm.

If that's what the folks running sakatraz are finding, guess that's what research is all about, and, more often than not, the hard data doesn't point in the direction one had hoped it would lead....
 
#26 ·
Ian, Saskatraz is one of the operations I've been in touch with for potential import next season. The problem there for me is that the information on their progress is outdated, and communication is very slow. I have mentioned this here before. I'm not knocking them, I'm just saying that for a guy on the other side of the country trying to make decisions on where to get bees on a limited permit - one needs clear, up-to-date information, and prompt communication.

Do you have info on their progress since 2009? How are they doing in terms of reaching their goals?

Adam
 
#28 · (Edited)
>>o you have info on their progress since 2009? How are they doing in terms of reaching their goals?

Adam

Thats the thing about these projects,
Im not in touch with the fellows running the project, just the broker selling the queens
From what i understand, the results from the project is not leading the way we would like to have them go, perhaps the way nature wants to manage the mites is by making a smaller hive and swarming more often, not exactly what beekeepers want.
But I posted the project address to show that there are efforts working in a treatment free setting.

Adam, it may seem that as soon as someone mentions treatment free, the conversation gets hung up on that fact. And rightly so. Disease control has to be covered before any thing else can be done.

Why would you manage your hives treatment free in terms to mites, but not any of the other diseases ?
 
#34 ·
Thanks for that outstanding bit of info Michael,

I've gathered from previous writings that you also pack up nuc-harvested frames of brood and boost up normal production hives with them, which makes them better honey producers.

Is that true?

If so, do you leave bees from the nuc on the brood to prevent chilling while driving to yards?

Since you don't do spring splits, can we ask what swarming prevention you practice?
 
#35 ·
That's a real nice business plan Mike and one that could be applied by a lot more readers of Beesource than the plan that we use. A few observations. #1 Mike probably makes it sound a bit easier than it is, first, it's a lot of work and secondly he is a talented beekeeper with a lifetime of experience in honing his skill. #2 If everyone operated as such nucs probably would no longer bring $125 but that would depend on how many people out there are truly dedicated to doing the work it requires. so I will conclude that there probably isn't much danger in that but you would have to develop a customer base. #3. A re-reading of Adams opening post tells us that, like many on here, they are starting out with the desire to be treatment free. The blueprint that Mr. Palmer has layed out is probably not going to be compatible with that goal. One constant in whatever plan you choose is that to get any kind of payback from your beekeeping endeavor requires a lot of dedication and resiliency. Things are never quite as simple as a neat business plan might make them appear.
 
#39 ·
I try to be serious lol

I hear they pay somewhat reasonable pollination fees,
you should pay attention to the guys here who pollinate almonds.
Theme from their conversations are nutrition, disease control, nutrition, moving hives, feeding, nutrition,

yes, small farmers like little beekeepers. But I doubt they will pay you big fees for pollination contracts. More likely they will give you a spot to keep bees on, and will be grateful for your pollination
 
#41 ·
...you should pay attention to the guys here who pollinate almonds.
Theme from their conversations are nutrition, disease control, nutrition, moving hives, feeding, nutrition,

yes, small farmers like little beekeepers. But I doubt they will pay you big fees for pollination contracts...
Good advice on the almond pollinators. But a key difference (I believe) is the size of the farm operations.

From what I understand, Almonds are enormous areas with little else but almonds on them for bees to feed on. We don't have as many enormous, continuous crops out here. A lot of the farms are on hundreds of acres - not 10's of thousands. So the bee diets are not as restricted to the intended subject of pollination. There aren't a ton of farms that are big enough to cover a bee's forage range. By "small", I mean that they are not the Oxford Foods, 20,000 acre types. They are the 300-1000 acre type operation. And they all pay pretty much the same.

However, as I mentioned, the border is going to open to out-of-province pollination. That will likely challenge current pollination service fees. Almost all of that out-of-province need for pollination is coming from one company - Oxford. And Oxford already serves most of their own needs with their 15,000 colonies. They just need more. My own feeling is that they have found the bee business to be too expensive and is splitting up their resources too much to maintain, so I feel like they may be looking to drop that part of the business and to replace it completely by hiring out the pollination - but they know the local beekeepers can't cover their needs. So they've pressed the government to open the border, so they have legal access to more pollination from the bigger operations in New Brunswick and Quebec - maybe Ontario as well. I expect soon to hear that someone has made a huge deal with them and taken over their bees. Pure speculation on my part on all that though.

I doubt the smaller operations will be affected as much, because their contracts are too small for bigger pollination operations to travel far to satisfy.

That's my outlook at the moment. It is of course, the outlook of an outsider at this point, listening to others in the business. So I'm sure it's full of flaws that can only be corrected by experience.

Adam
 
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