Bees coming!

We pick up our bees from Tibor Szabo SR tomorrow in Puslinch, and I think we're ready with a leveled hive base, etc.  

Picking up the bees

In February, Dr./Professor Szabo estimated we could pick up our bees at the end of May.    Well, the telephone rang this morning and bees are scheduled to be picked up at 10:30 a.m. on Friday, 1 May!  Fortunately, the Junior Bee-Keeper has a PD Day on Friday, so he can come along to pick them up and fetch them home; and--perhaps even more fortunately--his parents--one or the other--or both--are free at noon to help unload the two hives from the Honda CR-V onto the bee cart and thence trundle them to the hives base, which I just this morning leveled, and must now raise a few degrees at the rear so the hive floors will drain to the front.    

Turns out that Szabo bees are kept nine frames to the hive, so there will be room in each hive for one frame of drone foundation which we must then remove, along with the Varroa mite burden, in 24 days.   Presumably we can use the candles double-boiler to melt off the wax and this will destroy the two species of pupae just as effectively as squishing.   

Product

Last weekend we were recommended to remove honey supers at the end of July, and again in September, at which point we commence to feed those four gallons of sugar syrup for wintering over.   Oh, dear:   I am far more fond of the fall honeys than the summer honeys with the exception of buckwheat.    Oh, well:   If all 100,000 or so of us get through this first year in robust good health (with the exception of those of us who have died in the line of duty from natural causes) all of us (including those recently emerged from the cell) can be very pleased with ourselves.   RE product, the easiest to make with a child, AKA the Young Bee-Keeper, is chunk honey, which makes a very pretty Christmas present in a shallow wide-mouth Mason jar, so my plan at the moment is to put up jars of chunk honey for the YB-K and me to divide for Christmas presents, and freeze them (to prevent chrystalization).   There will be a little bit of wax for candles, and I have a mold; we can make a candle or two.    Six weeks or so later, if all goes well, we'll have another harvest, and if we're all clear for "product" for Christmas, we can decide what to do next; maybe we will extract?   First year bees may produce more honey for us, if they must manage only one brood box (as at Guelph) instead of two (as in all my books and previous incarnations; I will have to ask at the OBA seminar in May what are the advantages of a single brood box?).      

Pests and diseases

We're fortunate in Southern Ontario to live in a bee-keeping community centered on the University of Guelph.  It's striking that these days there's more emphasis on pest/disease detection and control, and relatively less emphasis on cultural practice.   

RE pest/disease detection and control, obviously small bee-keepers like ourselves must be knowledgeable and vigilant so as not to become the bee-keeper equivalent to Typhoid Mary; and it's equally obvious that optimum sanitation procedures and applied TLC are a lot easier for someone with two hives than someone with 600.   

Just to take one example, if a hive with a single brood box should be sent into winter having processed four gallons of sugar syrup subsequent to honey harvest, it's a whole lot easier for us to feed with optimum sanitation in-hive with a bottle feeder made from a quart Mason jar, having calculated we'll fill it eight times, than to fill a barrel with sugar syrup and stuff the top with straw and tilt the lid so bees can gather the syrup without drowning--and who knows whose bees and how much each hive is consuming?  

For another example,  because Varroa mite females prefer laying in the bigger drone cells on the drone larvae, if in the spring when the queen begins to lay in earnest and the Varroa mite females get the same idea, you insert into the brood box a frame containing drone foundation, which induces workers to raise drone-comb and the queen to lay therein drone eggs, and you remove this frame after 24 days, which is to say, before the drones hatch, and freeze that frame to kill the mites (which also kills the drones therein, of course, but you don't need many drones anyway) you will have dealt a very telling blow to the mite life-cycle without using a drop of medication. 

Great procedure for two hives with a Junior Bee-Keeper, but if you have 600 hives which you're trucking around to this or that orchard and etc. etc.   

Change of plans

The immediate plan is (*= modifications derived from last weekend's seminar), will lay the 2' x 4'  pressure-treated two-hive base made from 2"x6" lumber on the south edge of the south-facing cement floor of the defunct dog-run, and on top of that: 

1. pair of hive-bases with 3" wide entrance-boards angled down;

2. bottom board;

3. screen bottom board (has to do with mite-control)*;

4. brood chamber (single brood chamber; in previous incarnations, we had two)*;

5.  queen excluder;

6.  shallow honey super(s);

7.  inner cover;

8.  telescoping hive cover.   

And the two-hive base must be shimmed level east-west, and inclined slightly southwards north-south.    Then, will be ready for bees; two ten-frame hives ordered earlier in the year and due to be picked up late in May.  

Update 28 April '09

Last weekend, went to a two-day bee-keepers' course at the University of Guelph.   Learned a great deal at this very well taught seminar.   And, this was a reassuring weekend:   seems as if we're in good shape to receive our two hives at the end of May, except that I need to buy a pair of screen bottom boards--another of many pest control devices and procedures new since we last kept bees twenty-five or so years ago.   

Because the pear tree stump adjacent to the first-planned hive site is evidently considered to be prime ground-hog/skunk real estate (an assumption hotly disputed by the Poodle-police), the hives-site is now moved to the cement floor of the long-defunct dog run.   

23-4 May, will go to another two-day bee-keeping seminar, this time given by the OBA.    On the Saturday (which is dedicated to basic bee-keeping, equipment, handling, and so on), the Junior Bee-Keeper will also attend.  

NB:   At the bee-seminar last weekend was a member of the Toronto club, who told me that they're just now in process of putting additional hives on the roof of the Royal York, and struggling with the location of those at the brick works.   

Update

The junior bee-keeper tells me that during March break he walked with his grandmother to see the pair of bee hives on #52 (from which someone recently removed the dark winter covers) and discovered two additional hives, these latter not visible from the highway.