The Five Hour Beekeeper

Traditional Approach To Beekeeping

To date I have basically been following what I shall call the “traditional approach to beekeeping”.  This is detailed in My Beekeeping Calendar and involves a lot of activity and time.  It can be summarised as:

1. Inspections every 9 days from May-August to reduce swarms
2. Integrated approach to varroa management, including swarm culling and use of chemicals
3. Production of liquid honey requiring a day of extraction

I have found myself too busy to do any of this particularly well resulting in what I call the “Low Intervention Approach”.

Low Intervention Approach To Beekeeping

1. No swarm inspections – just catch the swarms as they happen.  This has been 80% successful (I caught 4 out of 5 swarms in 2016).
2. Same integrated approach to varroa management as previous
3. Move towards section honey

The Five Hour Beekeeper

In my desire to reduce the chemicals, reduce the effort further and spend more time observing the bees, my approach for 2017 is described below.  This has been massively helped by the Thermosolar Hive team providing me with two of their hives.  As a reminder, this hive allows increases in the temperature in the hive to kill 100% of varroa. (links below)

The Thermosolar hives I am receiving will have a 14×12 National brood body (this is where I will insert 4 drone frames), 1 super that I will put below the brood body (to create more worker bees) and two Ross Round supers to go above the brood box.

The approach can be summarised as follows (and their are relevant links at the end of this post):

1. Anti-swarm approach to reduce swarming
2. Thermosolar hive to eliminate varroa and improve bee health
3. 100% section honey using Ross Rounds
4. Observing the bees to determine if they have a queen, any disease
5. Open a hive only when I need to

My first year will be a bit different as I move over to the Themosolar hive but generally the interventions will be:

• Intervention 1: The first day it is 15C in Feb/Mar: inspect for disease, add 2 new drone comb frames to hives and remove mouseguards
• Interventions 2 and 3 (optional if we get an early 20C day in the year): Complete a solar treatment and again a week later.  Note: the important solar treatment is in August.
• Intervention 4: April: Add Two Ross Round Supers
• Intervention 5: End July: Remove Ross Round Supers and remove drone comb to ends of hive
• Interventions 6 and 7: August: Complete a solar treatment and again a week later
• Intervention 8: September: Feed if required (I am aiming to not have to do this by removing supers early and having healthy bees)
• Intervention 9: October/November: Add mouseguards

And generally observe the bees and take action if problems are evident.

In theory, each hive will take about 5 hours of effort per year, including harvesting, and allow more time to observe.  Let’s see what happens in practice.

Any thoughts at this stage to make my 2017 beekeeping, using the above approach, more likely to be successful?

Postscript

I have received comments on beekeeping forum and I wanted to capture my further thoughts and actions:

1. Thermosolar Hive – I am going to contact my local government bee inspector, to see if they want to get involved in order to work out how to best test the thermosolar hive and to give independent results.  I want results to show impact on varroa and on the brood (and on drone sperm if possible).

2. Anti-swarm method – I’ll keep count of the swarms over the years using this method.  Results will somewhat speak for themselves, though it will also depend on how well I time insertion of drone comb, weather conditions, etc.

3. Ross Rounds – Richard Taylor (author) had a few approaches to developing section honey, two of these were about using shook swarms and regular swarms and one of them was about swarm management and taking the approach we generally take to make regular supers of honey.  I am going for the low intervention, latter, approach.  However, if I do catch any swarms (mine or someone else’s) I will be putting them into a super with QE above and flat comb throughout.  The results will speak for themselves (kind of, as my honey production has not been great yet in recent years)

More Information:

• Thermosolar Hive – My review
• Thermosolar Hive – A conversation with the inventor
• Thermosolar Hive – External link
• Anti-swarm method – My review
• Ross Round Sections – Assembly & Harvest
• Ross Round Sections – What I learnt
• Observing bees, read: At The Hive Entrance by H. Storch (opens PDF)
• My “Traditional” Beekeeping Calendar