Expanding Your Apiary Part 1

it's a pleasure to be here I've come to speak with this club quite a few times I don't even know uh it's been fun over the years just once a year once a year for some years I made a boo boo uh this right here n a HB stands for North American honeybee Expo and Butch was there and he saw this presentation there in Louisville and he thought that might be a good choice for your Club so I need to take that off from now on I forgot about it it's uh it's it was geared towards that big crowd there a lot of people came that were thinking about how to expand their outfit from a hobbyist to a sideline or perhaps a sideline to a commercial and so the first half of it is almost just entertainment and then the last half we talk about splitting and the possibilities of how you might want to expand your apiary um I use the word apiary really uh it's it's expand your outfit you know I I like to use the word outfit so how many people here want to expand their outfit anybody quite a few so what does that mean does that mean uh 5 to 10 or 10 to 100 or 50 to a th000 I mean what's that mean for you that means 40 to 50 40 to 50 from from 40 to 50 yes sir okay all right baby steps baby steps yeah well we're going to talk about baby steps and not so baby steps in this presentation you can make a mistake by going too fast so this is a fun picture for me I'll talk about the pictures as I go that's part of the entertainment part of it this picture was taken probably about 10 years ago in Jasper Florida we were on uh we were in an Orange Grove I hesitate to call it Grove it was like an orange town this was a Grove that was 42 square miles and you literally could get lost I had to use the you know Northeast West on the dash of my truck to make sure I knew where I was going in this place so we made a as you can see we made orange honey that year so it was kind of fun this orange crop business is starting to disappear I'm afraid to say um this green they call it the Greening I don't understand it completely but the orange trees in Florida are really suffering and I don't know that they're going to be around much longer without some sort of uh divine intervention or something they're they're really a mess um for the last two years I was unable to find or purchase Orange Blossom honey which I had been doing every year we sell a lot of honey and I buy a lot of honey and Orange Blossom was traditionally one of those those varieties that I like to uh purchase because it sells really well and for two years running I was on able to get any and uh right now this year it's not looking so great of course The Season's not over over yet maybe something will occur Orange Blossom honey is very unique and I really like it so anyway that's a fun picture with me and Sam there that that's a fond memory for me so goals cost time and methods all legitimate concerns if you're trying to expand your operation um what what's your goal the goals really do dictate you know um the cost that's going to be involved in this thing anybody that's buying any kind of be keeping equipment at all these days knows that there's an extreme cost now there is a pretty good payday at the end of it all and when I in our store when people come in and ask questions about what it's going to cost in this box and that box and by the time the list gets added up they're kind of in sticker shock and I also have to add that there actually is a Payday at the end of all this if you're successful you know if you can just make a five gallon bucket of Honey a year I mean that's a fairly good amount of money honestly depending on whether you wholesale bulk it out or retail if you can retail it it's actually hundreds and hundreds of dollars so there is a Payday uh the time you know how much time do you have if you've got a full-time job you probably have no business running two or 300 colonies because you're just going to kill yourself and the methods of course of how you're going to accomplish that and we're going to talk about all these things this is a fun picture this is Sam once again so this you know how crazy are you I mean you want to expand your operation just to how nuts are you here um Sam was an interesting person he worked hasn't worked for me for probably six or eight years now he was a a Kung Fu black belt artist and taught classes in it too and he was good to have around because he was such a good worker and he said something very interesting once when he talked about you know how you become a master of beekeeping and he says it's all about the Reps he says it's just like Kung Fu the more you do it the more you got it and he was right you know what but if you can just if you got 100 colonies and you work them all year long and you probably popped a a lid off a colony a thousand times in one year that's how you get good at it so Sam was a character but he was good to have around and this was just a a load of bees that we were getting ready to send to Wisconsin that particular year I used to send bees all over the place I don't do it anymore I've downsized and I just stay home but uh these numbers are kind of this is just a generalization hobby want to 50 uh 50 can be that can be a lot of work honestly that can be a sideline right there sideline 50 to 300 again 300 can really feel like a full-time job depending on how you're working them and what you're going to have to make up your mind on is you know there there's two ways to make money at this beekeeping thing you can just produce and sell or you can develop uh what do they call it value added products where you take honey and perhaps you infuse it perhaps you make it into me perhaps you do a lot of things that makes it more valuable than it was in the first place so you know I have a couple friends that are full-time making a good living with just 300 350 colonies but they're doing all this extra stuff too so you know there's two ways of looking at that of course full-time 300 and up uh for sure you get above 300 you're talking about a full-time job I often get asked the question you know how many uh colonies can one person run and uh the average operation with with the average amount of output you know depending on you know like I mentioned if you're not trying to go crazy with all these value added products one person can run 400 colonies perhaps 500 colonies and do a pretty good job I did it for years honestly at one one year I actually ran 700 colonies by myself I did everything I delivered the honey I extracted and I honestly I just about made myself sick that year when it was over I said I this has got to come down a notch and up until that point I'd had the help of my teenage sons who both left home um on good terms one went to college and the other wanted to be a rock star and that's that's all good and I so that one year after they were all gone I I had been at 700 and I just stuck with the 700 I did a really good job had my bees in really good shape at the end of the year I really had gotten to the point where I was making myself ill and I knew I need to needed to bring it down and I brought it down to about 450 so here we go this can get expensive fast this honey house belongs to a friend of mine in marville Tennessee and in case you haven't guess he's extremely particular about everything his hives his he I was over there speaking at the marville club uh oh just a few weeks ago and his truck looks just like this you know so he's that kind of guy and you're going to have to decide how you want to approach this I asked him if he would make a floor like that all over again if he had it to do again and he said probably not because it's like buying a new car every little scratch kills you you know and so he has to take very good care of his floor but there's a serious amount of he's just a sideliner I don't know how many colonies he's got he's over 100 maybe 150 I don't I I don't even know what to guess here he's got tens and tens of thousands of dollars he built the building he and then through that door is his warming room where he brings in the crop so he's got some serious money invested I have a friend that has just retired from commercial beekeeping and he ran 500 colonies by himself for decades and he said the problem with beekeeping as a living is he says I'm making the same amount of money as a uh you know as a journeyman plumber or Carpenter but he says I've got 20 times the investment they just got a van and some tools and I've got hundreds of thousand dollars worth of stuff but if you take care of it if you take care of it it actually is an asset that is liquidable later and that's how I've looked at my business I've always thought as I've grown throughout the years if I had no problem buying something and perhaps even buying it on credit as long as I thought it would pay its own payments and uh at least Break Even earn that earn the money back that made the payments and perhaps make my life easier make the work easier and uh my attitude was eventually this thing is paid for and I'll have that asset that's worth something that's my 401k I haven't saved money I just keep investing in my business over and over my wife once asked me when are we going to stop spending money and I said well when we're done beekeeping because that's how it works you know just say just endless output of money but I've got a tremendous amount of Assets Now that are that are worth something almost 95% I would say paid off and so when my time comes that's that's my retirement and that's how I've approached my business so don't be afraid of spending money on this thing if you take care of the stuff it's something you can sell later and if unless you take that attitude the money you're about to spend if you're expanding your operation just it's just crazy it doesn't make sense until you say okay I've got something here that's worth money this is something I can sell later turnover trade whatever anyway I just have to sh share that picture because it's so beautiful um let's see forecast your purchases by defining your goals by right or buy twice now this is easier said than done but if you know where you're going if you have have a goal in mind and you're confident that you're going to do it um a lot of people think they want to do it and then never quite pull it off once they find out that this is beekeeping is like digging ditches with overalls on the summer and you get stung at the same time and why in the world am I doing this but if you're something you're confident you're going to do and you're going to stick with it try to look ahead and buy what you're going to need in in the end like an an extractor is a good example perhaps the truck you're going to buy perhaps the building you're going to build you know there's so many ways to look at this even if you just got 5200 colonies you're going to need a truck I mean you're not going to do this in the back of your volswagen you know so you know what what's the in what where am I going to be and just what's the right vehicle what's the right extractor and extractors and stuff the expense can just scare you to death you know my extractor now if I was buying it brand new would be like 60 or $70,000 and that is my extractor I see the sorry I forgot what the picture was up there that's my extractor that darn thing the brand new today is worth 60 or $70,000 and that's just the extractor that's not all the tanks and all this stuff but again when I'm ready to be finished here that's an asset that can be liquidated and that's how I approach it this is back in Arcadia Florida me and a friend of mine Alberto helping me load that semi TR um is that your goal do you want to be a full-time commercial beekeeper are you going to be loading semis that could dictate the type of equipment that you're going to going to purchase and the type of land you're going to purchase and the trucks you're going to purchase and all of these things so looking ahead again buy right or buy twice easier said than done perhaps you don't have the money to buy it right which was in many cases my problem but it's something to consider yeah don't go 5 to 500 it's not going to work um Crash and Burn yeah very very a very good description of what's going to happen I I've sold nukes and packages and been aware of people that had 10 or 15 colonies for three or four years and had a really good crop and they got out the calculator and the pencil and they say my goodness I can make some serious money at this and go out and take a loan or you know borrow money from their parents I remember one guy doing that serious amount of money and then in a couple times those people that had bought nukes to get started from me and I became aware of their situation would call me three or four years later and say we've got a lot of really good used equipment to sell because they didn't grow with the outfit they just went Kaboom running 500 colonies is a whole different skill set than running 15 you have to grow as your apiary grows you have to grow at the same time you just can't go from the ground to the to the heavens in one year year it just does not work because you don't have the skill to pull it off I often say you can triple every year now even that sounds like a lot but if you think about if you got 10 then you got 30 then you got 90 now you got 270 you can do that a smart person can pull that off but you can't go 15 to 500 in one year you're just going to blow it and lose everything honestly CRA you'll certainly will crash and crash and burn that's a fun picture that's a holding yard in byarm Georgia when I used to go to South Georgia I would from that place stage bees and send them North or to California or different places and that's just some bees that are getting ready to be loaded on a semi to go to Wisconsin in that particular year it's Sunset you can't tell by the picture but it's just the sun is just setting we're about ready to pull a semi TR up there and load it up um this is important can if you're serious and you're going to move ahead consistency equals efficiency equals productivity keep it all the same if it at all possible you can see by the picture here that uh stacking these colonies on this truck was very efficient it was easy to tie down it was a good load you don't want a bunch of double deeps and a bunch of deep and a shallow and a bunch of singles try to figure out what it is you're going to do and how you're going to run your bees and For Better or Worse you know you can always change it later but try to get everything the same because suddenly your time becomes uh utilized in a much better fashion and a case in point was me you know I do everything wrong I can tell you what to do now that I've done it all wrong um in the beginning when I moved to Georgia I uh had deeps and mediums and then I got a terrible case of a tennis elbow in my left elbow and I thought if I'm going to keep doing this I better back it on down to shallow so I started buying shallow supers and suddenly I was uh running shallows and mediums and maybe a few deeps through my extractor and what a mess trying to keep the frame sorted it suddenly things were not efficient anymore and luckily I got over my tennis elbow later on and then wished I would have just went with the mediums because the shallows are so inefficient when you compare them to a medium and by the way the way I got over my tennis elbow was apotherapy I just stung myself and it it went away in a week this is 25 years ago and it never came back so that worked for me um we you could do a lecture on just beting therapy if you wanted but you can see how things all being the same could add up to efficiency I think I don't have to say too much about that I think it probably makes sense to everybody um keep it the same if at all possible um again Keep It All Uniform if possible you can see how stacking the just something as simple as stacking equipment on the truck so it'll tie down well uh this is a fun picture all of those guys used to work for me Sam the fell I mentioned earlier is on the left that's Raul in the center and David Watson on the right and that's in Jasper floorida where we were on a gallberry on gallberry locations that year and yes that truck is full and yes that truck's overloaded and it was a Sunday so the scales were closed that's a good nugget what's true I'm sorry this I know there's probably at least one police officer in this room but Sundays are a good time to travel with an overloaded truck because we do it all the time or used to do it all the time I don't it's not not part of my life anymore um so here's some ways you can think about expanding and they're all legit they all have their pros and cons you can catch swarms if you're a brand new beekeeper in the room and you've bought some equipment and your strategy is to catch swarms yeah it can work maybe You' got to find the Swarms you've got to get the calls and so on so it's a legit strategy but just be aware that you may not just get it done right away um purchasing packages is absolutely legitimate walkway splits split existing colonies split with swarm cells and purchase colonies and we're going to knock them off one by one and the first is catching swarms it is cheap and it is easy but back to the my statement that it's a maybe so if you're a brand new beekeeper or don't have any bees yet and this is your strategy just be aware it could take a while if you're going to catch swarms and you're serious about it you need to give your phone number to the local fire department and the local police department because they're the ones that get the phone call saying oh my god I've got these bees in my on my front porch and somebody's got to come get them you know and then they'll call you if they've got your phone number so that works believe it or not and that was a that was in Unadilla Georgia um that's about as easy as it gets it was just a limb on one of those little Pines behind me that's a very nice swarm we just cut somebody I held it while somebody cut it with the pruners and that's what you see right there I'm done climbing 30ft ladders I'm not doing that anymore that's that's that's for younger people I had a next door neighbor that was a beekeeper when I this was 25 years ago too he was an older fell and we I live out in the country so he could do this uh one day I was uh out in the out in the front porch of my house there and I heard a a gunshot and then I heard another gunshot and another and another and another oh my God what's going on over at Al's house is he in trouble and I went over there he was he had a swarm 30 ft up and he was shooting the limb off with a gun and he got it down he got the Swarm that thing just collapsed he had a big sheet down on the ground he knew right where he was going to fall and he had a 30 Ox six and he was just cutting that limb off so that was good old Al okay so purchasing packages is legit um this is just a fun picture for me because this is at our warehouse one year when we were staging pack packages to sell I used to produce a lot of packages when in my Heyday going to South Georgia and all that stuff 8 10 years ago we were producing 1,500 packages a year and 1500 nukes and actually this club was a part of picking up some of that stuff you guys used to come down to Unadilla and you were part of that pick up loads of nukes in some cases 100 150 175 one year I think we 190 we brought back 190 yeah that's a lot of nukes that was fun trip fun were you part of those trips too I got to make one did you yeah yeah they're fun uh packages are interesting uh we'll talk about the differences between packages and nukes pros and cons to both they are good for beginners and for a reason that most people wouldn't think of if you're a brand new be beekeeper you've never had bees before when you install a package rather than installing a nuke you get to watch the growth from day one you get to see the first wax get drawn out and the first eggs being laid and The larva and you see the whole progression and if you're doing this for the fun of it that's fun okay watching that whole process when you buy a nuke you're already buying something that's five frames drawn out the Queen's been laying for weeks and brewed in all stages and you know you miss that little growth period if you're a brand new beekeeper if you've got some experience you don't care about that at all you just want something you can put in the box and try to make some honey the first year that's the big differences between nukes and packages buying a package the first year in this area the odds are kind of against you making Surplus honey in that same season whereas if you get a nuke early enough and it's a good season you could make a super or two even in the first season so but uh um packages are easier to install in my view than a nuke a little less precarious uh you can purchase them earlier than nukes although if you get a package 3 weeks earlier than a nuke don't think you've rained much because the nuke when you purchase it 3 weeks later is four or five weeks ahead of the package because again you've got brood in all stages you've got a tested Queen if the if the beekeeper selling you the nuke has done their job right they've allowed that Queen to lay long enough so that they can read The Brood pattern other words perhaps there she her eggs are be becoming sealed and you can The Beekeeper can look at that and figure out if it's a bad queen or not I know a lot of nuke producers do not do that they just install a queen when as soon as they see eggs that thing's sold and it's gone that's not the best way to do it um so they they can be earlier than nukes they're less expensive than nukes of course in my store this year nukes were 195 and packages are 125 so that's a $70 difference and that might be important to you um they you gain experience by watching All Phases of the colony growth I mentioned that so purchasing nukes again pros and cons there's Sam again that's Mr Harris by the way uh right there the man I said was talking about at dinner good guy I have a fun this is off subject now Terry knows me good enough she knows I go down rabbit holes while I'm talking so here's a rabbit hole for you Terry Harris right there is an older gentleman he's probably 78 79 right now worked for me for probably six or seven years and I have a pretty neat video on him it was meant to be about beekeeping but it turned in out to be a about his experiences in Vietnam and some of his life experiences it's simply called Georgia beekeeper Terry Harris it's a fun story it was really a special interview for me it's worth watching in my opinion anyway um that's nuke boxes on the back of that onton truck when same years you guys were coming down we were those good boxes I miss those boxes you seen those boxes before I have those boxes you have those boxes yeah well uh there was a group of guys in Hendersonville North Carolina that would buy about 400 a year from us and we' we'd truck them up to them you know for a fee and that's what's happening right here they're just loading the truck for a trip up to Hendersonville we used to sell a lot of nukes uh don't do it quite as much anymore so they are easy to they are also easy to install but they're just different uh the queen is established I mentioned that Head Start better odds over packages for honey crop so yeah again pros and cons this this purchasing nukes is well in purchasing packages too is a little precarious that you're kind of at the mercy of the producer there's so much that can be done incorrectly um for instance if you're buying a package and and as a brand new beekeeper you don't have a way of figuring this out you it's kind of like buying a used car from a car lot you're at their Mercy is it good or is it not if you purchase a package from a really highquality package producer they're going to wait and shake their bees or shake their packages in the middle of the day when the field force is out I know of several guys that purposely Shake really really early at the very first light before the bees are flying and they shake you know they don't shake in The Brood Nest they shake from the honey supers and you get a lot of older bees that way and that when you hear about packages failing early supersedure all of this stuff A lot of times it just has to do if the simply with the time of day that the package was shaken um a highquality producer will try to get you a good quantity of young bees in that package somebody who's unscrupulous would probably rather do the opposite get you all their older bees and keep the young bees for themselves but again I don't even know why I mentioned that there's really no way for new beekeeper to figure that one out um and nukes sometimes you when you purchase nukes you are getting their garbage you get the their old black stuff you know stuff that's as black as your tennis shoes right there and yeah most nuke producers myself included I'm going to sell you my frames that I'm not going to sell you my frames that were just drawn out last year you're going to get my three four 5y old frames that's part of the attractiveness of producing nukes it's how I cycle Combs endlessly without having to throw them in the dumpster it's not about selling my old garbage it's about selling frames before they turn into garbage so I'm constantly cycling you know it's like buying new Machinery every two years and sell the used stuff for a good price the the buyer's happy cuz it's cheaper than new and you're happy cuz you're cycling and that's kind of the the game play with making nukes walkway splits um is the worst way to make a queen a lot of people do it I've done a lot of it so it works and there are a couple tricks to make it better there's four ways to produce a queen generally speaking you have swarm cells you have superpure cells you have cells that we graft and produce ourselves as beekeepers and then the lowest the worst is actually the queens that are made under the emergency Queen production impulse if coling suddenly loses their Queen and they make their own uh sometimes it goes great and sometimes it does not and there are some things that you can pay attention to to make the process better and one is right there make sure whatever you uh put in that walkway split that they've got fresh pollen they've got to have good nutrition to make a good Queen and if they don't they're going to the bees are going to they're going to make a queen just like a just like a malnourished mother that has to feed her brand new baby somehow that stuff is going to come out of her system and she's going to get the job done but it's not going to be the premium food that it would have been if the mother would have had a premium nutrition herself if that makes sense make sure you got fresh pollen in that situation and make sure also that you shake in lots of young nurse bees okay it's the young bees that are going to do the job so if you're waking making a walkway split you might consider taking one or two frames of open brood where there's a lot of nurse bees shake those extra bees into your walkway split before you walk away with it to make sure they've got a lot of young bees and the other thing you can do is feed it thin sucrose syrup just because they've got honey in the comb U doesn't mean that it's not stimulating um enough uh sin thin sucr syrup other words thinner than one: one keeping in mind that fresh nectar is very thin much thinner than one to1 sucros syrup highly stimulating it elicits hygienic behavior um it produces an antiseptic situation in the colony I know I talked about it to this group uh in the past but we'll hit on it just for a second here and that is when you're feeding very thin sucros syrup the same thing can happen with a fresh nectar flow the bees are adding enzymes one of those enzymes is glucose oxidase which produces gluconic acid which lowers the pH makes an antimicrobial situation ation a byproduct of that situation is the production of U hydrogen peroxide you're creating an antiseptic situation if you feed very thin sucr syrup you're emulating what happens when the bees are changing nectar into honey and the same thing can happen when they're making a queen they need this and uh to to Really create the very best of queens and then the final thing you can do is uh keep in mind that they the bees usually will uh produce Queens from anywhere from a 24 to 48 hour larvae but occasionally they'll make a cell from something that's older than 48 hours bees feed the same food to a queen cell and a worker cell up to 48 hours it's royal jelly after 48 Hours the worker bees start to get fed something a little different we just I just simply call it brooded food it's no longer the same chemistry as royal jelly so if you're if you got a larvae that has been off of the royal jelly diet for even a little while now you're venturing into a different realm of quality of Queen you know and so what you do is if you go back in four days and look at this thing you'll have for perhaps as many as six or eight or 10 cells in there maybe it's only two but if you can find the ones that are sealed and crush them and leave the ones that are unsealed you just killed all the cells that were made from an older larvae and you've left the ones that were made from a younger Lara so that's that can be a kind of a strategy too now obviously if you don't have any unsealed Queen cells you know what you got to go with the older ones you just pick the best ones also another thing and I learned this one the hard way many years ago and that is that if you make a pretty substantial walkway split that's perhaps four five six seven frames of bees with three four five frames of brood and it's this time of year they're going to make a bunch of Queen cells and quite often the first cell that hatches that virgin will swarm I call it a Virgin Queen swarm and then the the the colony sense they're very optimistic this time of year if you make a walkway split in a very late spring or early summer they're much less apt to do that but right now the first virgin out might swarm on you and even possibly the second virgin out might swarm on you so you got to be aware of that I learned this the hard way 25 30 years ago I made 100 I still remember the number I made 140 walkway splits I was broke I couldn't afford a queen if I had to and I just split all these colonies into four frames of brood across the board and let them go and I had 140 sitting in one location in Hollywood Georgia and the land owner called me up and said Bob you got Hunter swarms in the trees I said well that's funny Ron because there's no queens in those uh there's no queens in those colonies they couldn't have swarmed he said trust me you've got a 100 swarms in the trees and and I went to look and he was right and what they were all these little bitty swarms they were all full of Virgin queens and that's so lesson learned the hard way again so walkway splits work there just do you know there's a few things you can make them better split existing colonies this is a good way to rotate comb if you're um if you're thinking along the lines that I was mentioning by making nukes to keep turning your comb over making your own colony rather than buying them can rotate equipment also if you're thinking of making these things to sell you can consider selling the Box the lid and the bottom board too which is kind of what I'm doing these days so you're rotating everything um it's very cost effective and you can control your stock if you're making your own colonies you can purchase the Queens with the genetics you want or better yet if you're willing and you're not intimidated by the process make your own Queen cells choose your very best breeder queens or we actually purchase an artificial inseminated breeder Queen so we can introduce the genetics we want um what you got a let's see if I've written it down there investment in equipment and not the bees consider this if you've got 20 or 30 colonies or whatever the number and you want a triple you could go out and buy packages and you could go out and buy nukes but if you've got the bees to do it with if you split your bees and only purchase the equipment if you fail you still got your investment but if you went out and bought a bunch of bees and you failed you've only got a portion of your investment so that's something to worth listening to and also uh you you need to understand that you do not have to make a huge nuke to have it ready for winter if you've got 20 colonies and you want to go to 100 but you still want to make honey you don't have to split that thing to pieces one right now today one frame of brood and a frame of food and a queen or a queen cell will be ready for winter if you treat it right now that may uh entail some artificial uh feed later on in the form of thin sucr syrup so they'll build comb and rear brood and all of that stuff the only thing that might slow you down is if you go into a pollen dir but you got poen coming in around here for a while at least a month and a half I would say so you could take those original colonies and perhaps take three or four frames of root out of each one which probably would make you more honey because the darn thing won't swarm on you if it's a big monster Colony like Butch has right now and so it's like a win-win we do it all the time and we do it artificially we we keep feeding later on in summer and keep growing our colonies split split again split again yes you can split with swarm cells works great there is a big button in here that I'm going to talk about in a moment swarm cells make the best Queens as I mentioned and there's that's some some research lately that's showing it's more than just the bees being highly motivated and you know really giving it the very best nutrition they're actually showing that when a queen lays an egg in a swarm cell in relation or in comparison to an egg that gets laid in a worker cell that egg is already better it's already got it's a little bigger it's a little fatter it already has better nutrition before it even hatches so that's one of the reasons besides you know High degree of nutrition that a swarm makes a really good Queen um and also if you have colonies that swarm on you I used to get depressed when a colony swarmed it was like oh man that was a $100 bill it just flew away right well once I got into this idea that I could split the colony in half in thirds in quarters and create more colonies with the cells that they had created I got over that disappointment because I started to look at that as a harvest too now if you've only got five colonies and you don't want 10 or 20 that you know you can still make those splits and you can sell them you can give them away you can use them to requeen another Colony I mean there's a lot of things you can do with a brand new Queen in a nuke box so I would consider just splitting a we do it all the time we carry uh double screen boards on our trucks if we find a double deep Colony that has swarmed we put a cell and brood in the top a cell and brood in the bottom put a double screen board in the Middle with the entrance going out the back and it it just greatly increase the odds of success of that Colony being successful in reining itself newer beekeepers beware you think just because you've got a queen cell in a colony that just swarmed it's there's no guarantee here in fact it's much less than a guarantee it might only be 70 75% odds of success in that situation so when you've got two halves rearing a queen of course it's possible that both halves can fail it's not probable but if one half fails and the other half makes it you just pull the board out and put them back together and you haven't lost much because if your timing's right you still got the same bees that were there when you split the thing of course later on they'll increase in size once the queen starts to have hatching brood and then if both halves make it guess what you got you got two colonies so yeah consider when you when you have a colony that is formed consider splitting it up so you are making that a harvest also purchasing colonies is legit if you want to go from 20 to 100 rather than splitting your colonies to Pieces what about purchasing another 10 or 20 colonies I know I just got through telling you invest in equipment not bees but don't buy all of the colonies just buy some good colonies and split them to pieces and uh that works too split for increase split to pollinate split for honey production all of the above that's in Jasper Florida that's a fun day it was was kind of cold you can look at these colonies here they just come off the gallberry flow there are many ways to increase from existing colonies all have their pros and cons you can actually I know this sounds crazy to most people you can actually produce your own packages and it's a legit way of expanding without even moving frames of brood um get you make you homemade funnel and shake your own packages get you some of those many of you in this room I'm sure have old used packages in your garage that you saved don't even know why you're saving them but there there they are and you can make your own packages move them down the road to the next yard or wherever you've got bees in another spot and start from scratch with a package that you produced it's easy to make packages the main thing is you just got to find the queen this time of year U of course it's going to be really cold tonight but that this might be the last fridge at night at least up in our area um if you take a strong double deep Colony that's full of bees right now you can literally Shake half the bees out of that thing and they'll be fine the bees that are left over will take care of the brood in two or three weeks it'll look like you shook nothing at all so it works I mean people shake packages for a living for a reason now we're going to talk about splitting methods these were single story colonies very strong single story colonies that this method is really good for newer beekeepers that are intimidated at the idea of trying to find a queen you can do this would never have to see the queen it works great in this case we have a pallet of single story colonies all of them are strong up to my left hand there was an empty box it was just an empty box with nothing in it we're shaking the bees off of the assets that we want to use to create nukes with I'm leaving three frames of brood and a frame of food behind in that lower colony I'm shaking all the bees off of course I'm looking for the queen as I'm doing it if I see her I place her in the bottom box and the shaking is over but if you never say see the queen just shake the bees off all the frames you want put them in that second box put an excluder on that single story Colony put the second box on the top and the next day when you come back it'll be full of bees and the queen won't be there now you can take all of that stuff and make nukes and you never had to find the queen the bees will come through the excluder overnight cover The Brood and honey above Queen free works good and this is the process the next day I'm taking those assets and creating nukes and this is the way we like to make nukes that we're either going to sell or increase with a frame of food then a nice frame of brood like this sealed brood is it's helpful to have some good sealed brood that's either hatch hatching in the moment are going to hatch very quickly that way uh the nuke's going to have some nice young bees to really to grow quickly uh we'll put two frames of brood with a frame of food you can see this Frame right here the center is hatched out but all that per periphery there the perimeter is still hatching so that's a really good frame to give a new Colony uh young bees that have both never been out of the house and are very ready to accept a new Queen the older do not like to accept a new Queen when you're when you're having a bad stinging incident in your beard you can bet that most of that is coming from the older Field Force forging type of bees they're the ones that are feisty fiery don't want to be messed with don't want to accept a new Queen but if you can get rid of those your odds of getting your queen accepted go up greatly so shaking extra bees in our case in upper box I would have put a couple extra Combs that attracted bees up through the excluder I'll actually use that comb in the nuke and then the end result will be this one Foundation one food two Broods and one drawn comb and we'll put either a queen cell in there or a caged Queen and we'll feed it we'll put a one gallon bucket on it and they will draw that Foundation out and 3 weeks later that thing is ready to sell because the queen that we put in will start laying within 2 or 3 days so 3 weeks later she's got a bunch of sealed brood we can really read the situation and if we put in a queen cell we give it five weeks because that's how long you need another two weeks you know for a Virgin Queen to mate and start laying over using a caged Queen so that's the time frame three weeks five weeks depending on whether it's a caged queen or a Virgin Queen Queen cell again provide the nuke a lot of good nutrition because dependent on how you made it it might have just lost a lot of its Field Force and if you're if you're really want almost a guarantee of success do it when there is a nectar flow and the bees are much more likely to accept a new Queen than if it's a dir um you can even do this artificially by feeding um we feed when we make nukes right off to help with with Queen uh introduction gorged bees always will accept a queen or cell or whatever it is you're doing gorged bees will accept a situation much better than hungry bees that are experiencing no nectar flow no feeding but if it's a dir you have to feed in such a way that you're not causing robbing if you cause a robbing frenzy in your beard your queen acceptance just went down the tubes so you have to be very careful when you're feeding if there's a dir the pictures I just showed you came from this yard which was dedicated to making nukes this season it made four nukes That season and a super of sour wood honey it was a good year so so what we did is we made three nukes off of those singles in between each round we would feed put a two gallon bucket of feed on them thin sucro syrup we'd leave them with the four frames you saw earlier three frames of brood and a frame of food we would draw it almost to the edges we didn't want them to plug out we'd get them working on the ninth frame or so and then we'd split it again and then we did it again and we we did it three times then grew it out to be a single by the 1st of July put a super on it it made most of a super these made most of a super of sourwood again it was a good year then after the sourwood was over and we collected that honey we did it again we split them right after the sourwood and then grew both the split and the colonies out to be ready for winter and we love to use double screen boards I mentioned them earlier they're a great way to make a nuke for several reasons this is the same routine we're shaking the bees off the cone homes putting the assets above an excluder just like we did in the in the single story colonies instead of putting them in a nuke box we put after we put them over an excluder this is on a double deep we'll come back and we'll just take out the excluder and put in the double screen board and we'll introduce the cell or the queen into that third story now there's a couple things happening here that are advantageous one is the nuke is in the same yard it was produced so all of the older bees go home every bee that knows it its way home goes home all you have left upstairs is just the young bees that are much more apt to accept a new Queen and it so at first you say well okay now I've only got 50% of the bees what about The Brood staying warm you have the heat that's generated in the bottom Colony coming up through the double screen and you actually only need about 50% of the bees that you would have needed to take care of the same amount of brood and then after they get over the shock of this whole thing and get reestablished a week later that extra warmth allows the queen to expand The Brood Nest even faster in three weeks this thing's going to be like five or six frames of brood and then we Harvest it and there might be a frame or two of brood left behind with a little bit of assets if you're using this as a swarm control measure you knock that bottom Colony down pretty hard so it won't swarm on you and if your timing is just right now you can take the assets that are left over and put in the colony below and boost it just as the honey flow is starting one of the problems with swarming is that if a colony peaks in population before the honey flow starts it's a given that in many cases it's going to make preparations to swarm if it peaks in population just as or just after the honey flow starts the odds go way down so if you can trick The Colony into peaking after the honey flow starts uh the odds of making honey are much greater and that's our technique for trying to create swarm control there's a lot of ways Checker boarding I know Butch and Bill all these guys here can tell you all these methods and that's that's a lecture in itself our method is to split the colony down to a level so it'll Peak after the honey flow starts if you're doing this technique and collect that nuke right as the honey flow starts you boost it with whatever brood and bees are left upstairs there and suddenly you've got a stronger Colony right on the that did not swarm right on the verge of the honey flow or if you really want to get crazy you can take that nuke kill the queen down below and recen the colony with a five or six frame nuke guess what you just created you just created a monster B Bomb b bomb that thing and if you if your timing is just right and the flow has just started they'll just settle into making honey and you just re queened I mean there's just so many possibilities to do with this technique so mated queens or queen cells pros and cons to both mated Queens give you a two week Head Start uh theoretically if you're buying it from a a reputable producer you know that Queen's good highly likely to do a good job for you in the nuclear celling or the nuke you're using but there is an advantage to Queen cells too and that is they go through a little bit of a brood break which is a healthy thing for a colony when a colony swarms in nature that slight brood break is actually a healthy thing it's time for viruses and things to kind of settle down a little bit before they fire back up again so there's benefits to both I of course like using Queen cells because we're you know using our artificially inseminated uh breeder Queens to create the genetics and our outfit that we really want this was in Unadilla actually this is near monuma Georgia which is right next to Unadilla this yard in in those days we had a a cell building yard that was 72 colonies and we were producing 600 to 900 cells a week and Tommy came out of the shack with these frames and he just had to have his picture taken because you can see not only are they beautiful cells but there's only just a couple missing so he's really he's really happy and now if you're doing a walkway split or you're grafting the biggest mistake that people make is trying to go too early you got to make sure you got drones that are mature enough to make and uh just because you see a drone in the colony doesn't mean he's ready to mate a drone needs to be 2 to 3 weeks old to be mature enough to mate to be more precise the minimum age for a drone to be mature enough to mate ranges between 12 and 16 days and if you want to graft or produce your walkway split what you need to know you have in your colonies is mass quantities of drone Pupa that are in the purple eye stage once they have purple eyes they're going to be mature enough to mate at the same time that your Virgin Queen is ready to make if you do the math it adds up pretty good that's a dedicated drone comb which we use and um they're green as you can see PCO makes them Acorn makes them I think man lake has them and we try to put one in every Colony not only because we want lots of drones but I just took a picture of this today in the beard last beard we were in um I had a colony that had taken brand new Foundation and took a big corner of it and made it into drone brood which was supposed to be nice worker brood and so not only did it create this drone brood but it screwed up the frame right next to it because that drone brood sticks out far enough that the comb next to it has to become concave to accept that so if you've got that going on in the middle of your brood Nest your brood Nest can actually become inefficient now if you look at Mother Nature they can rear anywhere the so the research says anywhere from 17 to 33% of their comb will be drone brewed but they always put it around the outside you don't see it in the middle kind of put this picture in your head let's say it's um early February or late January in your Colony has just started to produce a lot of brood and it's trying to build up they're not building drone brood yet they won't be doing that for another month but if you've got a bunch of drone cells in the middle of your brood Nest they've got to keep that warm too you know it's like having a house that it's too big you got to heat the whole thing so the one room is warm enough and so I I and it's just me I've never seen any research on it it's just me talking and theorizing but I think having drone comb in the middle of your brood Nest creates an inefficient brood nest and and H same thing happens in late summer too when they're not rearing drones again so we always try to put one of these frames in every colony and allow them to have a place to rear drones without screwing up all our good worker comb and yeah they're still going to make a mess they're still going to be some Corners here and there and the the typical Burr comb in between the two boxes it's full of drone brw but if you have a green frame I call them green frames if you have a drone brw frame in there you're going to have a lot less of that so I recommend putting one in every colony and of course the first thing that somebody's going to ask is well aren't you rearing a bunch of mites because mites prefer drone brood and the answer is yes and no um they're going to do it trust me they're going to I mean this mother nature they're going to this is a reproduction mother they're going to find a way to make a bunch of drones whether you provide it or not and if you're into doing mechanical uh might suppression techniques taking this drone comb out uh every time you get sealed and put it in the freezer is a good way to bring your mit's number down so a lot of people use this situation for bringing their mites down too uh overwintered nukes um again if you're you can keep splitting into late summer and if it's just a small two or well I won't say two three or four frame nuke you can over over winter at over a double screen board on top of a stronger colony and guess which colonies are going to be your very best colonies the next spring it's going to be the nuke you made in Late July into August because the queen is going to be superior Queens okay let's talk about Queens for a moment I got time right we're not init okay all right let's talk about Queens for a minute the very best production Queens right now are queens that were reared in late summer last year because just like human beings Queens have to get a little bit of maturity under their belt before they give you their highest production brother Adam who wrote the book beekeeping at B buckfast Abbey and is famous for producing the buckfast line of bees wrote in that book that he would make late summer nukes over winter those Queens in the nuke he would requeen his production colonies with those queens and they were invariably his best producing colonies the next year now so why would you want to so we're all about putting new Queens in in the spring and that's a good thing too because a queen from this given calendar year will head a colony that is much less likely to try to swarm than a queen from the previous year a queen from the previous fall will be less likely to swarm than a queen from the previous spring and so on and so on it basically comes down to the older the queen is uh the more likely she is to swarm the thing you don't want to have happen in your colonies and I saw several of them today in mine is have a queen that's gone through two spring Cycles because they reach this massive Peak whatever it is500 2,000 eggs a day and if they do that two times they in my view they have now just seen the top of the hill maybe they're not completely over it but they their Peak is behind them and you can actually have a queen that's only a year and a few months old that has experienced that or you could have a queen that's almost 2 years old that's only experienced one spring so there's kind of this this thing you got to figure out out um I know I I try to recen every year I don't always get it done there's several colonies we don't get to for whatever reason but I'm an advocate of requeening every year if you can because you'll have better production you'll have less swarming and you'll have better overwintering quite often when you talk to somebody that has you know had 10 colonies and six of them died and you ask well how old were the Queens I don't know you know well if you got a two or a three-year-old Queen in there your odds of over winner just went down dramatically a year from this a queen from this calendar year is the one that's most likely to make it through the winter and give you the most robust colony in the spring excuse me when when do you recen there what is the best time of the year for the purpose of when do you when do you requeen spring summer fall all have their advantages and disadvantages if you Reen in the fall and you're in a dir and you fail because the bees are robbing and it's just crazy the odds of of them uh successfully making another queen in order to overwinter are much lower than if you do that in the spring if you were queen during a nectar flow your odds of acceptance go way up if you try to introduce a queen really early like March and you're buying the queen out of South Georgia you might get be getting an inferior product because they're always pushing the envelope down there and not just Georgia everywhere in the country uh they're always pushing the envelope and putting out Queens right on the verge of when that's acceptable and sometimes they're not made it properly you might even get a beautiful brood pattern and think you've got the perfect Queen but if she's only made with two drones guess what's going to happen she's going to get superseded and that's a lot of times when people have queens that are getting superseded in May or their package is getting superseded in summer that's what's going on the queens weren't properly mated so there's pros and cons to all of it honestly yes sir so to recap so setting up for sex would be a for success would be after the summer solstice somewhere 30 days or so around he's suggesting that after the summer solstice would give you the best odds of everything overwintering a good production Queen the next year yeah I would agree with that yeah absolutely so feed to stimulate if you're trying to make colonies again I mentioned earlier that you can do a lot of uh growth artificially with sugar syrup and there's some facts to know providing a steady but moderate amount of thin sucro syrup will maximize your growth again we're talking about something like perhaps one and A3 Parts water to one part sugar or one and a half Parts water to one part sugar you want to be pretty thin to em emulate um incoming fresh nectar now that's what's the difference between what you you got the bucket and and then the the uh Mason jar on top well for just for the fun of it it's not a mason jar it's a 5B Honey Jar which are too expensive I'm sorry but they are but it's almost two it's almost a half a gallon and so it depends on the colony in this instance uh some of them needed a gallon and some only needed half a gallon it's just as simple as that we we often use the 5B Honey Jar for five frame nukes and save the gallons and the two gallons for the colonies but not always sometimes we put a gallon bucket on a nuke if they can take it um that's just a fun picture that's in uh Clayton Georgia out on warwoman road I know that doesn't mean anybody that much to anybody else but that's a crazy name for a roades through there pardon me I GRE up trail riding up to warom so you know warwoman okay you know why it's so famous then nobody knows okay I probably shouldn't even say this raven County where I am from is where the movie Deliverance was filmed okay and my be yards on warwoman road are just five miles from where a lot of that stuff we won't go down that road providing large volumes of thick syrup will promote weight gain but significantly reduce the stimulation effect if you're just trying to put on weight that's the time to use one and a half or two to one you know sugar over water and that would be late in the season that's not what you want to do if you're trying to grow colonies because they'll gain a lot of weight instead of producing a lot of comb and brood this is how we approach sugar syrup right here they all have their pros and cons if you're buying a nuke or a package right now I would recommend using onet to one because you not only want to grow brood and create comb but you also want to gain weight now if you're if you're just feeding colonies to expand them so you can split them again that's where the thin stuff comes in you don't want to just have the colony put on a lot of combs of food you want to have them put on Combs of bread Rood that's where the thin stuff comes in this is the last slide this is a self-promotion part of the presentation and some of you guys know many of these people uh this was last summer a couple have gone and a couple more have come it's always you know this constant overturn that's my wife right there in front of me susette who is retired now and boy is she happy um yeah we have four permanent people in the pouring room we call it the pouring room room it's where we pour and package our honey uh several beekeepers in that picture several retail girls several Warehouse guys a couple that work in the wood shop we have quite a business going on it's just kind of grown organically I haven't really you know really pushed it hard it just happened um a friend of mine who's gone through the same thing he says it's just kind of like holding on to the steering wheel and hope the tires don't fly off um I I it's been a very long time since I've actually made a code call cold call on a honey customer and when I first moved to Georgia for the first 3 or four years we had some good crops of honey and I had to really work at selling it and after three or four years I didn't have to do that anymore I don't do it we don't call anybody it just comes to us by word of mouth and every year we grow anywhere from 5 to 15% without trying and kind some some words of wisdom uh you know learn the hard way if you provide a really good product and really good service and you're just honest and do the best you can and yeah stuff's going to happen that famous philosopher Forest Gump says stuff happens you know right well it's going to happen to all of us but if you're doing the best you can I think you're going to grow just naturally the universe is going to provide and that's just the way it is and I like to say that uh you can spend 10 years gaining a good reputation but it only takes you 10 seconds to lose it if you're just not if you don't care so you just got to care about what you're doing and I think everything generally works out for the best YouTube channel pardon me your YouTube channel yeah I always forget to do that I don't I know YouTube channel I do have a YouTube channel for those of you that don't know who I am it's just my name it's Bob Benny and the last name is spelled b as and boy i n n i e we have over 200 videos now I was shocked it was just a month ago I looked at that and I go what I said this got to be a mistake sure enough we got over 200 videos some of them are very good some of them are boring it's just you depends you know some sometimes I do good and sometimes I don't and by the way if this turns out good and looks good it it'll come up on YouTube so all this information will be up and if it didn't turn out good and I don't like it you'll never see it again that's how that works so i' I've done I have taped more than shows up on YouTube we have a joke in the beard take 10 take 10 the YouTube videos actually look make me look smarter and better than I am because I'm getting good at editing all the ums and the and the old craps you know those are all eded out you know and then U if I didn't like what I said we do it again now I've been actually while I'm speaking to you tonight I'm listening to myself and I've made quite just did it quite a few stutters you know stop start type of things I don't know if this is YouTube worthy depends if if I can edit it out really good or not but the slides you know sometimes what I can this is my trick you know I I edit in the slide and then I can edit out me for that half a second when I screwed it up so you don't realize that I stuttered or something like that cuz the slide is hiding it that's my trick anyway we have a nice store and by the way yeah if you're not that far away Butch how long does it take to get to our place from here 20 about hour and 10 minutes hour and 10 minutes yeah took me an hour and a half through traffic through traffic yeah anyway we do have a very nice uh be supply store and we're actually growing it right now we're remodeling it if you haven't been there in a couple months you're going to be surprised when you come in uh we're making a really concerted effort to be a really nice be Supply soon we will have a very nice website up or nice enough and I'll give it to you but with a hesitation because if you go there now you're not going to see be supplies we're still building it and it is bluid honey company.com and within a month or so I hope that site is up and be supplies will be available on the website but and it's a fun place to go you can look through plate glass windows and see the processing rooms and and if you're if you're like me when I'm shopping for something I want to touch it and see it you know rather than just order it online and it's close enough to where you can do that and we actually are trying to be very mindful of our prices we're trying to play the middle ground we're not trying to gouge we're not trying to give it away uh quite often our prices are right in there with man Lake and day D and this pricing and what a struggle it's almost like daily we have to check out what the most recent cost is and adjust I won't go down that trail today okay um I know it's I've taken a long time we've been here a long time I'll just take a few questions and then we'll be done with it does anybody have a question

Channel: Bob Binnie

Views: 34,478

Keywords: how to expand my apiary, bob binnie bees, how to grow my bee business, Bob Binnie Blue Ridge Honey Co, how to grow my honeybee business

Id: NwwTi-hZloE

Length: 64min 55sec (3895 seconds)

Published: Sun May 12 2024