Does anyone keep bees?

My brother and I have been helping our local bee supplier with his shipments of bees for the past three years. This is what almost $87,000 worth of bees looks like. This also represents over half a million bees in those crates!

Does the beekeeper euthanize or let the bees die in the Winter?

Keith

guessing those are not local packages

Must be a huge markup on bees there. I'm not seeing that amount worth of bees there.

Out of curiosity, how cool is that room?

I’m guessing there’s more than a half million bees there. A three pound package should have about 10,000 bees.

A lot of northern beekeepers manage for a single season. They aren’t concerned about overwintering hives, they start fresh with new package bees every April.

Oh I know. At a certain point northern winters get too long.

Heck, most new beekeepers down here pay no mind to overwintering and as result have to start over come spring. We keep telling them that the beekeeping year actually starts in August. Got to get them cleaned up and in good shape in August or they won't be there come spring.

I had 7 hives going into winter. We have 3 that made it through. There is no feed for them to forage yet, and a lot of days they can't fly because of the cold. I supplement feed them with white sugar and a pollen patty, till they get going. Quite a few hives make it through, then starve because of lack of feed. I find that an overwintered hive will bee your strongest hives, once they get going and best producers. Good Luck old243

The buzzing must be loud in that room.

Yep!Its that time of year.Mine are supposed to be here next week.

Even down here many will starve end of January into February if they're light first of the year. Kind of sad to die just days away from nectar.

Our worst winters are our warm ones where they can stay active and burn through stores. I'd much rather it get cold and stay cold to slow their metabolism down.

Here in Pa, a cold winter usually has more hives survive. But you need a few warmer days, in the 40s , so bees can break their cluster and get to the outside frames that hold honey. It’s not unusual to find a winter die out hive with bees tucked into frames 5 and 6 with full frames of honey in 1-2 and 9-10. If a two deep box hive has a top box full of honey, they won’t run out of food. But it comes down to getting access to it all.

Not an issue for us all our winters will have warm days each month that'll have them active or even flying. I just don't want them active and eating when there's nothing out there to replace it.

We use a shop vac full of soapy water and that kills them. Overwintering bees gets to complicated and expensive so we start with a fresh batch each year.

Nope. They are shipped up from California.

The beekeeper only raises the price by $5 each box. He doesn’t make very much money at all, because he donates hives to the Scouts, friends, and his family. So that also reduces the profit he makes.

The room is kept at 74-76 degrees.

These are four pound packages and the contain about 13,000 bees each. You can see about 225 bee boxes in the photo, but there was over 300 boxes that arrived.

Are there any nectar or pollen sources in Georgia in the winter months? Here in Pa, they won’t find anything until March 1st, and then it’s early tree pollens. In the Fall, asters are the last thing out, usually totally done by Halloween.

It actually is a very soft humming noise.

That’s just shy of 3,000,000 bees.

I was curious as we've already had one 90° day and fans are usually going on packages down here. Heat is our issue.

Extracting rooms as well will have fans and even dehumidifiers though no worries with heat then, you want it hot to help dry out the honey.

Of course heat in the yard is an issue as well. Pulling honey on 90plus days ain't no fun.

You dont like sweat dripping in your eyes with your back straining and trying to lift off a full super? I think that is my worst part as well......I enjoy this time of year but later in summer - I hate the heat working bees and removing honey. To be honest, last few year I have gotten lazy and just pull it in fall and keep supering up....I hate the heat.

There are people in Alaska that keep bees alive all winter. Just have to figure it out, and not buy bees from California. California bees down winter in the north well. learned that the hard way.

I don't have an issue here in MN, either. I haven't bought a bug in over 7 years here.

I can't fathom the money people spend on packages each spring like it's just a "normal" part of keeping bees.

Learn how to control your mites and propagate a little extra each summer for some winter die offs and it's sustainable without buying bees.

Lots of bee havers, mite farmers and not so many bee keepers I've found. If some kept cattle like they kept their bees, their cattle would be dead in short order.

I'm a bee keeper. I spend $100 to make $50 . The same could be said for many of us trappers as well

There’s a well known beekeeper here in Pa who is a big proponent of managing hives for a single season. Here, they call it the Canadian Model.

Buy packages in the early spring. Feed them up. Run every box as a medium. Dedicate two mediums as a brood chamber. In the Fall, after the queen is done with the laying cycle, and brood is gone, shake out bees, and extract those mediums also.

Advantages are….

Little to no mite treatments
Little concerns about swarming
All boxes are uniform, all medium supers
The biggest motivation….Here in Pa, conventional wisdom says to leave a hive 80 pounds of honey to overwinter. That’s 80# you could sell. Here, at $8 a pound, that’s $640 worth of honey. You can buy a lot of $135 packages for $640 . And considering that winter losses in Pa sometimes exceed 50%, you might be feeding that 80# of honey to a hive that ends up dying in March.

I haven’t fully incorporated this model, but I will say, on paper, there’s some merit in it.

Your right. My math was way off!

Had a swarm move into an abandoned hive on my porch today I was getting ready to clean up and supply with new foundation. The box on the top of the hive contains new foundation. They cleaned it out and saved me the trouble

OR, could do like a commercial guy in Canada that takes all the honey and backfeeds with sugar syrup only (actually been known to be a cleaner winter feed than honey, and a lot cheaper). He's a money cruncher and makes his living off his bees in Canada.

I have also found pure honey as a winter feed isn't the best. A 50/50 honey to sugar syrup works for me. With mite treatments and Sugar syrup, I'm at about $40 input cost per hive.

Mite treatments are pretty cheap in reality but many don't seem to want to fool with them so they don't and then come up with reasons why just buying packages are cost effective, which they are not.

Also Swarm Cells make great queens for producing Nucs and expanding. I quit grafting queens and went to using swarm cells for expansion. So easy a caveman can do it

Thanks for starting this thread Husky. This is much more complicated than I realized, I'll have to read up on this!

I bought my first Haskaps, AKA Honeyberries, late last Summer. I bought a little over 200 plugs in 5 different varieties. They started flowering in February. I was not expecting them to flower for a few years. I am guessing they flowered earlier because they are clones of older bushes. Haskaps are native to Siberia and the colder parts of China. They were absolutely loaded with flowers and still have some.

The wild Haskaps can survive down to -55F. The domesticated varieties are good to at least -45F. Blooms can survive temperatures down to -20F. Most of the new, improved varieties are being developed in Canada. I would guess they still may bloom early enough in Canada, Alaska and other Northern states, to help a hive rebuild pollen and nectar stores, before other sources are available, as long as there are some days warm enough for the bees to fly.

Have any of you Northern beekeepers tried using Haskaps to provide an early Spring/late Winter source of nectar and pollen for your bees?

Keith

We use pollen patties which get shipped up with the bees. We cut it up and place inside the hive I give the bees a head start.

We genreally are overrun with fall pollen that’ll hold us to spring. Be interesting to see how those berries would time blossoming relative to the other first spring sources like maples and willow. Around me that bloom is sometime mid to late March on the average. The Haskaps would need to be very close to that to be beneficial. February blooming could be a potential death sentence if it initiated brood rearing too far out of cycle

Pollen is not an issue for us. They'll be hauling in pollen from somewhere every month of the year down here. We actually have to cull pollen bound frames.

But I do like pollen patties just don't need them. Better off without them as pollen patties are loved by small hive beetle. Can't put much more than a egg sized patty on without beetles getting into them.

Beetles aren’t a problem up here. So we can get away with it. There are some advantages to cold weather!

I’ve never encountered SHB here in Pa. Others have, but I’ve never had them.