Preparing Nucleus Hive Boxes


We painted our nucleus hive boxes yesterday. A friend came over with a spray painting rig and helped us out with some leftover paint from another job. That really helped. It was a big job, close to 100 boxes and lids.

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We are selling beekeeping supplies and equipment

Gerrit makes and assembles all kinds of hardware which are currently for sale: deep hive bodies, telescoping covers, solid wood bottom boards, inner covers, frames, and 5-frame nucs. Equipment such as smokers are for sale as well. All are new. These are available in College Station, TX.

Arthur occasionally has some of this equipment available for sale in the Dallas areas as well.

Contact us for prices.

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Hot Wax Dipping Equipment

Today was a long hard working day, about 10 hours worth. Gerrit and I dipped our woodenware in a vat of boiling parafin wax mixed with Brazilian gum rosin. We have a tank setup in the back yard with a natural gas line run to a burner underneath the tank. Into the tank we put 300 pounds of parafin and 200 pounds of rosin and brought the temperature up to 300 degrees F for treating boxes, bottom boards, bait hives, and the wooden frame part of telescoping covers. They are submersed for 10 minutes in the boiling liquid, which boils out residual water in the wood, and when the wood is removed from the boiling wax/rosin mixture, the mixture is absorbed into the wood, preserving it and making it rot and water resistant. Beekeepers who treat their woodenware this way do not have to paint it, and it lasts about 5 times longer than it would just being painted.

I did not count how many boxes and bottom boards and top frames we treated, but it was a constant job all day long from morning until dark.

We used a frying/candy thermometer to keep track of the temperature and had a fire extinguisher nearby just in case of an accident since wax is a highly flammable hydrocarbon.

We will be using this equipment for our beehives, and we will also be selling equipment to people who want to keep bees themselves. Gerrit is very knowledgeable and patient and explains to people how to assemble equipment and answers various questions to help beginning beekeepers.

Today was a day of hard work and we are both very tired, but we got a lot accomplished.

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Busy Making Equipment

I’ve been busy this week making reversible bottom boards for beehives. We sell these for $20 apiece. Of course we use them on our own beehives. If we do not sell any, that is no problem because we can always use them at some point. We have sold quite a few, and our customers say they like the quality of our equipment.

The design is by Gerrit Westover. One side provides a 1/2 inch entrance, and the other side provides a 3/8 inch entrance. He did all the cuts by table saw, and I did the assembling. They are glued (Titebond III waterproof wood glue) and then stapled with a staple gun. All of them are homemade. It’s time for me to take a break now. I have a big blister on my thumb from hammering the boards into the slots with a rubber mallet. As you can imagine, we used quite a bit of lumber in making these.

We also sell deep boxes (unassembled), frames (unassembled), beeswax foundation, telescoping covers with sheet metal tops, and inner covers with shims. Pretty much everything you need to put together a beehive except for the bees. When we get enough untreated small cell bees in the future, we plan to sell complete hives with the bees, ready to go, but that won’t be for a while. Right now we’re just selling equipment.

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On a warm night

Last night I decided to go out and take some flash photos of some of our small beehives. Believe it or not, there is plenty of room inside the hive for expansion. I think the bees on the outside are the “field force” and just passing around nectar to concentrate the sugars and invert the sugar. First light in the morning, they take off for foraging and the bees outside the hive are minimal. Right now is the middle of summer heat and dearth here and many bees are gathering water to help cool the hives using evaporative cooling. We got about 3 gallons of good honey from a cutout in Bryan, Texas, this past Saturday and are processing that honey and comb now. When the weather cools off in another month or so, flowers will start blooming again and there should be another nectar flow. That will help them get enough stores to make it through the winter.

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Making Beeswax Foundation

Gerrit and I made beeswax foundation today. Our foundation mill was made by Myron Kropf, an Amish fellow who lives in Arkansas. He specializes in producing and selling nucleus colonies of small cell honey bees.

To make foundation, we melt beeswax in a turkey roaster, then dip a board that has been soaked in water in the melted wax until it gets a wax coating. We peel that off and stack them between sheets of newspaper. We save them until we get enough to make it worthwhile to run them through the 4.9 small cell foundation mill.

The cylinders are wrapped in plastic sheets from plastic bags and this time we used soapy water to help them not stick. We rinsed the foundation sheets in clean water after running them through the mill. It’s quite a bit of work and we never look forward to doing this task, but it helps us be self-sufficient so we don’t have to buy as much commercial foundation. We also use our own recycled wax from our own beehives, so the wax is less likely to be contaminated with pesticides since we do not use any pesticides or other chemicals in our hives.

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Grafting to Make Queen Bees

Earlier today we went out to our bee yard in Wellborn and made up our “Starter Colony” to start another batch of queen cells. We shook bees off from about 6 or so frames into the starter hive and then brought it back home. Before shaking the bees in, we prepared the hive with a frame of pollen, a frame of honey, the frame with the queen cups between them and a drawn comb to the outside of the first three for the bees to cluster on–five frames in all. We put the frame with the queen cells on it before grafting to give the bees a chance to start polishing them and working on them and therefore when we graft they might be more likely to make queen cells out of them.

This evening we went back and found a frame with eggs and newly hatched larvae on it from which to graft young larvae into the queen cups with their royal jelly. We picked the frame from a bee hive that has healthy, gentle bees that I really like. Gerrit did all the grafting using his “Chinese grafting tool,” a headlamp, and another homemade tool to take down the cell wall to make it easier to lift out the larvae using the grafting too.

The starter hive has extra space in the bottom and screens for ventilation as well as a plastic dish with moist sponges for water since there is no way for the bees to leave or come into the hive after it is closed up.

We’ll leave the frame with the grafts in there for a day or a day and a half, then transfer it to the “Finisher Colony” which is a queenright colony with the queen below an excluder and the queen cells up above between two frames of open brood. They will finish feeding the larvae and seal the cells.

The first grafting we tried a month ago went pretty well. I hope this one goes well too.

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Another Busy Day

I thought that today would be an ordinary day like any other as I began to paint bee equipment.

Then I got a phone call from Gerrit. He had gone to our out apiary to check on the bee hives there and take some notes. He found a hive that was just in the process of beginning to swarm and had many swarm queen cells with virgin queens emerging from the cells right as he was watching them. He phoned me and asked me to bring out some equipment so we could make up nucleus hives from all these new queens, and save as many of them as possible. I did so, and we broke the swarming hive down into two frame mating nucleus hives (since they were virgin queens), as well as borrowing some frames of brood from other hives and putting queen cells into them. In all, we made up 18 new nucleus hives from the queens that had already emerged along with the queen cells from which the queens had not yet emerged. If all these are successful, as well as the hives we already made up previously from the queens we grafted, then we now have 57 bee colonies. They are not yet production bee hives, but most are small and mid sized nucleus hives that are just building up.

It therefore turned out to be a rather busy, hectic day. I returned home and picked up more equipment and went out a second time and we worked until dark to try and use all the queen bees and queen cells that we found. We brought the new nucleus boxes home and found places to put them in our yard. As Gerrit and I work together, we discuss what we see and what each of us think is the best thing to do in each case. We learn from each other. Some times we make decisions and try new things that we have not done before, but do it based on past experience and also from what we have learned through reading and watching and listening to what others have done in similar circumstances. It is interesting and challenging.

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Odds and Ends

I painted the telescoping covers today that Gerrit made. The virgin queens in our homemade incubator emerged today, so that means all the queens in the mating nucs should have also emerged by now, probably yesterday. In another week or so they should take their mating flights and a week or two after that they should start laying eggs. We quickly made some queen cages and queen candy and put the queens in them with some attendant worker bees.

The bees in the mating nucs have pretty much settled down now and are foraging in the neighborhood. Yaupon is blooming as well as holly and many wildflowers so the Spring nectar flow is on.

Our “experiments”/plans are progressing well and we are happy about how things are going. I call them “experiments” because this is the first time we have done these things ourselves. We have studied and read and watched videos on how to raise queens, but this is the first time we have done it successfully ourselves. It is an interesting learning experience as well as giving us a great sense of accomplishment.

If we can count these mating nucs as new hives, now we have 39 hives, up from 23 a week ago. They may not all be successful, but it is possible that they all could be.

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Mating Nucs

On Friday Gerrit and I made up two-frame mating nucleus hives. We went through our hives, especially the meanest ones, and removed frames of brood and frames of food (where we had them) and were able to make up 16 two-frame nucleus hives. We made some 2 frame nucs by putting 3 dividers into a deep box so it has 4 divisions, each accommodating two full frames. After leaving them queenless for 24 hours, yesterday we put a ripe queen cell into each of the 16 nucs. Today the bees are settling down and orienting and starting to forage.

I took a walk and saw that the yaupon is blooming now and bees are visiting it. I also saw bees on the blooming Burford holly bushes and the blooming wisteria vines in the neighborhood. I enjoy seeing what the bees are foraging on.

We moved all of the larger hives out of our back yard into our out apiary and put them on pallets. We started moving them Friday night (8 of them) and then moved another 8 out there yesterday, so now we have nothing but mating nucs in our back yard. It was getting so that we could not walk into the back yard without being chased by guard bees, so we knew we needed to move them. Our Chinese neighbor also wanted to make sure he would be able to use his riding lawnmower to mow his lawn without getting stung, so we assured him he would be able to do that this coming week. He could have done it yesterday afternoon if he wanted to. We should now be able to walk out into our own back yard without protection now or fear of getting stung. Things are settling down. Stragglers that did not get moved out to the out apiary are gradually joining the nucleus hives and giving them a boost to their populations.

We had 20 queen cells and used 16 in the mating nucs. We put the other 4 into a homemade incubator to keep them warm and see how long it takes for them to hatch. These are all new things for us to do, but it is a great thing to have all that work done that needed to be done in a timely fashion. Gerrit and I each got several stings in the past couple of days but we are fine.

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