Backyard Beekeeping: Bee Class

9 May 2023

I just completed my community college beginning beekeeping class - 3 hours of classroom instruction and 1 1/2 hours of bee hive maintenance demonstration at a suburban backyard apiary. I discussed this class in an earlier post: Backyard Beekeeping: Back to School. The field trip to the apiary was this past weekend. The apiary supports the instructor's business, Bridgetown Bees, which sells bee hive NUCs (small self-contained bee hive starters (nucleus) with fully populated frames), bee packages (bees without the frames - queen, workers, and drones), and bee products (honey, wax candles).

At one point he had 80 populated hives and there were dozens active in his backyard. He said it takes about an acre of forage to support one hive and that bees tend to stay within a 2 miles radius of their hive - so, he must be servicing all of his neighbors . The average hive honey production in the Portland metro area is about 40-45 lbs per year, but he said that one year he had a hive that produced 360 lbs!

Workers returning to the hive with pollen.

Extracting a Langstroth frame from a box that he uses to raise bees for NUCs. A Langstroth frame is a full 4 sided frame, usually with a backing sheet that bees use to build the comb. On the bench is a hybrid frame that he uses to create NUCs with Warre frames which only have a top bar. Bees create a free hanging comb on the Warre frame, as they would in nature. The hybrid frame allows him to use the same box for both types of frames.

A couple of short videos:

Workers with pollen

Bee taking a breather on white Clematis flower

The "Save the Bees Challenge" was a great learning opportunity for me. I wish that I had been able to take this class before the challenge as I now have a lot more insight into how a honeybee hive operates and how a local beekeeper deals with pests. And only one person was stung... (not me).

I'm still debating whether or not to have a hive of my own. My wife also has to agree...

But, I did buy honey (2.2 lbs) for Mother's Day .

Parents

beacon_dave over 2 years ago

Spotted a couple of bumbles this afternoon entering an air brick on the side of the house.

Not sure if they are planning on using the airbrick as a bee hotel or if their plans extend further on into the basement.

Must be a higher class of bee, as in previous years, bees have made do with the compost bins.
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beacon_dave over 2 years ago in reply to beacon_dave

Spotted this whilst disappearing down another rabbit hole...

"...Exquisitely sensitive accelerometers embedded permanently within the comb of a frame, are able to detect an ultra-short, very high intensity “jolting” pulse from a single varroa mite, even with the frame covered in honey bees..."

https://www.cabk.org.uk/product/hall-2022-varroa-vibrations/

I'm guessing that this 'exquisitely sensitive accelerometer' is probably equally exquisitely expensive or impractical to use in a project but it sounds like detection method that could at least be automated.
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beacon_dave over 2 years ago in reply to beacon_dave

Spotted this whilst disappearing down another rabbit hole...

"...Exquisitely sensitive accelerometers embedded permanently within the comb of a frame, are able to detect an ultra-short, very high intensity “jolting” pulse from a single varroa mite, even with the frame covered in honey bees..."

https://www.cabk.org.uk/product/hall-2022-varroa-vibrations/

I'm guessing that this 'exquisitely sensitive accelerometer' is probably equally exquisitely expensive or impractical to use in a project but it sounds like detection method that could at least be automated.
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Jan Cumps over 2 years ago in reply to beacon_dave
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ralphjy over 2 years ago in reply to beacon_dave

One thing that I learned in class was that mites are so prevalent here that you are pretty much guaranteed to have them or get them. The risk is so high from mites and diseases that they carry that beekeepers do treatment twice a year as PM. Fancy sensors wouldn’t help them much. The mites lay their eggs in the bee egg cells, so the instructor said the easiest way to detect that you have mites is to look in a capped cell when the bee has reached the larval stage - the red colored mites are very visible on the white larvae.
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