On Thursday, a friend of a member of the entomology department, Yuji Inoue, brought a homemade Warre beehive (sans bees) up to the Agriculture Building #1, and we placed it on the roof of the building with my other hives. In this type of hive, the bees build their comb suspended from the inner cover. There are cross supports so the comb will not fall when you harvest honey. Honey is harvested by using a wire to cut the comb between supers. Honey is harvested by removing the top super and then crushing the comb from that super. New empty supers are added at the bottom for the bees to expand the nest downward.
I have top bar hives, a traditional log hive, frame style hives, and now a Warre hive on the roof. The log hive is the only one with bees living in it right now. Yuji’s bees (he keeps Apis cerana japonica, or at least he used to keep them) all died from pesticide poisoning in Kitakyushu where he was keeping two hives of the native Japanese honeybee. He brought a gas torch and some beeswax and melted some of the wax on the bottom of the inside top cover of the hive and also in front of the hive entrance. Hopefully the smell of the wax will attract a swarm if we’re lucky. He gave me the leftover wax for me to use in my hives.
We talked about our beekeeping experiences and had an enjoyable time. He has been keeping Japanese honeybees for about 6 years. It’s disheartening to want to keep bees and to have kept bees, and then to have all your bees die on you.
He was happy to see the bees active and “happy” in my hive. He told me that he bought his first Warre hive and then made subsequent hives using the purchased hive as a pattern. I have wanted to make my own Warre style hive, so maybe I will be using his hive as a pattern to make one or more of my own.
The morning before Yuji visited, I took my own gas torch and burned the inside and outside of two of my cedar box frame hives to eliminate the aromatic smell. The aromatics might possibly have been the reason the swarm I tried to hive in one of the boxes decided to abscond. That’s one possibility, and a likely one, I think.
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