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Dang Cheezer, if you winter even half of these bees, you will be in the BEE BUSINESS next year. I admire your innovative spirit. I have read of beekeepers that buy new packages of bees every year. They rob them of everything they produce and let them starve in the winter. It appears you made a deal with such a beekeeper. Good on you for saving the bees. Keep us posted, as this is a UNIQUE situation.
 
Tec:

My life has been governed by math and physics. I am a slave to tried and true procedures and concepts. Snell's law, Poison's Ratio, Boyle's Law, trigonometry, basic calculus and ............ such have governed my life. When I started with bees, I intended to be innovative, but I always come whining back to forums and friends for advice, and as of this moment I have not thought of one single new initiative. I remain a good old soldier that does his duty with traditional devices.

I was not the guy that brought us out of the caves.
 
What you are getting is a shook swarm. As you are aware the procedure works well in the early time of the year. My concern is the break in brood tho a good thing for the control of Varroa, comes at the worst possible time. All the brood that the bees are being shaken off of are the winter bees that are needed to live the distance so you have a population that survives into the spring of next year. For them to survive the long time into spring, you need to get the bees raising brood 4 or 5 good frames. As you mentioned feed heavily and feed pollen patties. The more real pollen in the patties the better the food the better the bees produced. There have been studies linking the quality of bees produced with the nutritional value of the protein used in making the food feed the brood. In the spring patties are used to stimulate earlier brood so to boost a colony, if the bees lack a little longevity in their life it is not critical as they were raised to be in the hive for the few weeks early in the year when needed. The bees in the fall need to last till early into spring, not dieing off early.
I would suggest placing 5 hives tight together side by side, entrances in alternating opposite directions. Us a sheet of 2" insulation both under the bottom boards and over top of the hives.
If you can get the comb drawn and brood raised the bees should make it thru the winter. Keep track of the costs of feeding to compare with what it would cost to buy a nuc or package in the spring. I look forward to updated to this experiment and hope it works out well for you.
 
Discussion starter · #26 ·
Got the bees yesterday, wow were they strong hives. For them all shook and in the hives as well. I would say average 8 lbs per hive, and I also brought back several 25-30 lb cages (workers only) to spread around to some weak nucs I made and to spread around these hives. I set out 2 55 gallon drums or syrup toget them started right and boy you should see them today!!! About 80 hives in that yard all together now. Ill try toget a picture or two thrown up later today.
 
Discussion starter · #27 ·
Update: About 10 of the hives are on there 2nd deep box at this point. They have went through roughly 130 gallons of feed so far and I have about another 200 to feed them. They all have several frames at this point and are anywhere from 4-10 frames of brood averaging 6-7. They have put away tons of stores, both syrup and pollen and the queens are still laying heavy and they are still drawing wax like crazy. They also are week underway capping most of the stores as well. I will end up adding another deep to more of them soon.
 

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It sounds like you are well underway of getting them thru the winter. With 6 to 7 frames of brood should equate to 12 to 14 frames of bees surviving into the spring.
I take it the beekeeper you got the shook swarms off of, shook the bees to down size the number of colonies he was over wintering and splits in the spring as swarm control and to increase to the number of colonies he wants for honey production. It will be interesting to see how the 2 groups of hives survive. Whether having the bees over wintering on clean syrup and clean pollen substitute patties, fair better than hives on stored honey and collected pollen that could have traces of who knows what in it.
Good experiment, Interested to hear what the results are in the spring. Keep posting and keep us up to date.
thanks Keith
 
Discussion starter · #31 ·
The beekeeper I got the bees from actually doesn't overwinter any hives. He buys packages every spring, runs them for honey all year, and then shakes the hives out in the fall.

I ended up not buying pollen substitute (yet) so all the pollen they have so far is natural. I would bet though that the vast majority of the rest of syrup.

I still have one more good round of brood to go through if I'm lucky I might even get 2, even if the second round is smaller, a frame or two helps.

Nope not worried about lazy bees lol, I even skipped the frame feeders I have just been open feeding from 55 gallon drums.
 
I hope you will keep us up to date on your venture. A cost comparison to; packages or nucs or established hives, come spring, would be great.
I will reserve my opinion of a no good, dirty rotten, flea bitten varmint of a beehaver that would starve to death hives of honeybees.
 
Cheezer, did you get your bees from Householder? I know he sells his bees every fall.

Ray, there are many ways to run hives. I would not judge someone who uses a different method than I do. Shaking bees out in the fall has been practiced for many years. The cost of packages has slowed the method but it is still done.
 
Wow! Cheezer32 you are the man. I would never have believed this would work this late in the season. Good luck and thanks for sharing this with us.
 
first what camero said!

one should consider limiting any criticism of any method associated with beekeeping until one knows the full breadth of the + and - associated with a decision. I can recall sometime back in not so distant history having a discussion with honey householder myself and found his thinking on the issue to be interesting. at the time and with some similarities to the historical closure of the Canadian border some years ago I myself though that the constant elevation of the cost of nucs and the increased uncertainty of obtaining packages in a timely manner might in time alter the - of this decision.
 
Discussion starter · #36 ·
He doesn't kill his hives anymore, he sells them as "shake out" hives every year in the fall. Usually another large commercial beekeeper comes in with a thousand empty singles, shakes householders bees into his boxes and heads south. I got lucky to get 50 from him as he is usually a large order only dealer, and 50 to him is not a large order. Actually rather small.
 
Discussion starter · #38 ·
not to much going on, the hives clustered up and looking good. The only problem I have ran into so far is a few of the hives running low on food. So far I have had enough extra honey frames that I just add a deep on top of them, they are good otherwise.

On another note I have a few nucs (my stock not the package bees) that I swear are growing in population! Now fully filling there five frame boxes, I've seen hives that raise brood small amounts of brood through winter for whatever reason and stuff but I have about 4 of these guys this year that didn't get the cold weather memo and i don't know what's going on! Do I add a box of drawn comb? or what. I'm not complaining, just haven't seen this before.


​Happy New year everyone!!!
 
Hi everyone . I'm new here. Want to share my experiment . Last yes I lost half of my bees to mild month of January . Cold nights and really warm days. Here in WNC for many bee keepers that was a disastrous time. This yearI decided to try an internal heater that so far have very promising results. I used two gallon internal feeder. Filled it with water, placed solid wooden plank on top as a lid . Inside I placed 10 gallons aquarium heater. Those things have a thermostat & keep temps at around 70 F. Bees this year are much more active. Consume expected amount of food. It is very inexpensive and efficient.
 
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