Beekeeping plans and projects 2012
Posted by Fiona Nevile in Bees | 17 comments
The same honey bee as yesterday. Just going in to get the nectar.
I always start checking to see if they are flying on sunny days. It’s so heartening to see them buzzing in an out of the hive. A real sign of spring.
But this year the hive is silent. I’ve sat beside the pond for ages hoping that eventually they’d appear. But there is no sign of them. All the honey bees that I’ve spotted in our garden must have come from the hives across the road. It’s really disappointing. I haven’t looked inside the hive yet – I suppose I’ve been hoping that our bees are taking a long time to get going. But deep down inside I know that they are dead.
Over the years we have made quite a big financial investment in our bees. We have two big hives, two ‘nukes’ and masses of spare frames. As well as bee suits, gloves, smokers and all the tools that one needs for beekeeping. We’re probably looking at about a £400 – £500 investment.
Beekeeping is not a particularly good commercial venture unless you have a lot of hives (100+) and the time to tend them. If you just have a couple of hives and, over a ten year period, you can cover your costs and make a bit of profit by selling honey you are doing well.
Up until now we have just produced honey comb for our consumption. We like honey comb best and that’s what we’ve concentrated on producing. Last autumn we didn’t need take off any honey and left all the stores for the bees to eat over the winter. If you can spare some honey for your bees it is far more nutritious than sugar solution.
Colony collapse has happened to us before. Each time we’ve been lucky and a swarm has arrived and taken up residence in one of our hives – our garden is full of flowers and nectar so it must seem like Harrods food hall to a discerning bee.
This year we want to do things differently bee wise. Ramping up our beekeeping/honey producing activity is one of the ‘Five Bucks a Day’ projects on my list. It went on the list before I twigged that we had lost our bees so I’d started to make pretty detailed plans regarding our beekeeping future.
OK Five Bucks a Day = £3.33 x 365 = £1215. I’d never make that with just two hives but this is a small project – I’d be delighted with 25% of that (£303). The whole point of Five Bucks a Day is to create and maintain loads of projects, some bringing more than $5 bucks and some bringing in less. The overall ethos is to create multiple small streams of income, to think creatively as well as commercially and move towards a state where you have enough irons in the fire to be able to survive whatever the economy throws at you.
I’d decided to market and sell our honey comb. This is packed in plastic boxes and wouldn’t cost as much as a heavy glass jar to post. There are loads of local beekeepers producing jars of honey but no one offers honey comb so there’s a gap in the market. 250g of honey comb is worth far more than 250g of liquid honey in a jar.
One of the main reasons that beekeepers are loath to produce honey comb is that the foundation – the wax that is extruded by the bees to make the comb that they fill with honey – cannot be reused. Also, the bees have to spend time extruding the comb again. These bees would not be out looking for nectar but they would be looking after the brood, cleaning and repairing cells and so on.
However, I like making the frames and the foundation isn’t very expensive. Also eating the honeycomb can be very good for you – see some of the benefits here. N.B. If you are allergic to be stings, it’s advisable not to eat honeycomb without first consulting your doctor.
I’d also decided that we’d actually farm our bees this year. This is relatively easy. If you have a strong colony and a ‘nuke’ you are set to go. A nuke is beekeeping slang for a nucleus – a half sized hive that is specifically used to raise a new colony of bees.
Obviously you need a healthy colony to start with. You take four ‘brood’ frames plus bees and place them in the ‘nuke’. You add a frame of honey to keep them going. You need to double check that your queen is not moved into the ‘nuke’ by mistake.
When the bees in the ‘nuke’ realise that they do not have a queen they make a new queen. This process takes a month. They might make a few and if this happens the queens will fight to the death leaving the strongest queen to lead the colony.
A lot of beekeepers use nukes as an insurance policy just in case their main colony doesn’t survive the winter. We never have done this but will be doing this from now on. And if our main colony survives we can sell the spare nucleus – market prices start at a minimum of £150 for five frames of bees with a queen.
I had also decided to move our hives from the back to the front garden. Our front garden is big. About five cars’ length from the road. It is also much warmer than the back garden which is a true frost pocket. A colony of bees can use up loads of energy just trying to keep warm during a cold winter.
Now that we have no bees in residence it’s the perfect time to clean out the hives and move them to the new, more protected spot that we’ve selected.
We could get a free swarm of bees locally to start us off again but I’ve decided to invest in some Buckfast Bees. These are gentler than the standard British honey bee and if we are planning to breed them I’d prefer to be able to offer something a little bit special to potential buyers.
Our new bees will arrive at the beginning of June. Meanwhile we will close the entrance to our main hive but leave a front door open to the other one. Just in case a local swarm appears, looking for a new home. If we had the chance, it would be good to compare the output and behaviour of the Buckfast bees to the standard British honey bee.
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If you are planning on selling substansial amounts of Honeycomb, you would bee better off changing your hive type to “Top-bar”, in this type of hive the bees make all thier comb brand=new from scratch, and not on pre=formed foundation. Dont forget there is also quite a lucrative outlet for the “extra” Propolis too!
Hi Fiona,
I don’t keep bees but my parents did for years. One obvious thought is if you can raise the hive up – there are stories of beekeepers keeping hives on the roofs of flats and always getting huge yields – the bees don’t have to fly upwards as they leave the hive. You can also move the hive around, for example to rape, fruit orchards etc. I’m only talking about relatively locally, there are reasons why long distance journeys (to heather moors) are not such a good idea these days, though I’ve done it.
You can make your own foundation, and thereby ensure that you use ‘new’ wax for the purpose (seeing some of the comments earlier), for the bees to build upon to make comb honey. OK, so you have to extract the honey from some new combs, then get the pulled out wax from the (original) foundation, and use that – after cleaning etc – to make foundation for your comb honey.
I’d also say join a local beekeepers’ association – someone may have live hives for sale, or swarms they need homes for. I had to collect a swarm in March in the past, I’d not be surprised if there were not some that early this year. That could be a two month start (and who knows the flower season to come) on bees from Buckfast. The newsletters are usually useful for alerts about pests in the area.
Ach! I feel your pain. We have yet to get a hive through the winter, and will be starting again this spring, with a new package due in April.
Good luck with the Buckfast bees! I’ve read about them and will be curious to see how you do.
Sad to hear that Fiona, it seems such a shame when we’ve had quite a light winter compared to the last couple of years. Interesting article to read, I have considered keeping a couple of hives of bees, but never looked in to the detail, seems there’s much more to it than I thought…good luck
Sorry to hear your colony didn’t survive the winter. It was our worry this year too. We lost our queen last year (very careless of us) and the colony provided another but our season was so delayed we never got enough honey to harvest. We also were’t sure how strong the colony was. Our luck seems to have changed and the bees have been sighted leaving the hive this month so fingers crossed we’ll see honey this year.
Good luck with your new purchase (and with snagging a swarm).
Isn’t that disappointing- do you think it is a one off or part of the world wide colony collapse that is happening with bees?
I think the honeycomb is the best bit as well.
Dear CS,
Please be cautious about your foundation wax and edibility. Most commercial foundation comes from wax provided by commercial bee keepers and is recycled over and over, and is essentially contaminated with bee mite pesticides and antibiotics. Each re-use concentrates the exposure. I did some comb honey last year and it was beautiful but I let the bees draw their own comb out, and I do not use pesticides in my colony. Instead of foundation I insert a popsicle stick in the top of the frame and the bees use it as a suggestion for where to drape the comb. I love my bees dearly and try to give them the best chance at survival. Natural comb has smaller cells and is repellent to varroa mites whom enjoy the space provided by large cell foundation. I wish you so much luck and happiness in beekeeping, the bees have chosen me too!
I’m very sorry about your colony of bees, and wish you the best with your new bee plans! They’re very inspiring. Bees are on my ‘maybe one day’ list.
I am sorry about your colony of bees but wish you luck with your new colony when they arrive. We have had honey bees residing in our redundant chimney for many years and are intrigued every year when the colony splits and a swarm embarks on a quest for a new residence. A quick call to the local “honeyman” and they are enticed into a hive and whisked away. It never ceases to amaze me how efficiently the removal is done. Good luck and best wishes for lots of honey comb – my dad considers the comb to be even better than honey xx
That’s so sad. The decline of bees is very worrying — I think a lot of people don’t realise how essential they are to plant life, and hence humans.