Various tasks

With the help of my friend, Teruo Shiki, who is a carpenter/craftsman and has a shop full of all kinds of power tools, I/we made a few new pieces of equipment that I had wanted to make. First of all, we made some hive top feeder boards to feed liquid honey to the bees. A hole to fit the bottle lid was cut in the middle of a board that would fit on top of the hive. The lid of the inverted jar full of honey with small holes poked in it is put into the hole in the board above the brood nest so the bees can take the honey. A small lip was also built up around the edge of the board so that there is a gap between the top bars and the feeder. Hopefully there was a vacuum formed by the honey dripping out slowly and hopefully it came out slowly enough that the bees could take it up and it will not make a mess dripping down the inside of the hive. In all, we made three different sized boards for hive top honey feeders, one to fit each hive size.

There seems to be no nectar flow going on right now and this is honey that these bees had before so I am just giving it back to them so hopefully they can use it to build more comb and store the honey for surviving over this coming winter. This colony has not even filled up a single box with comb, brood and stores yet.

Shiki san also helped me by cutting some triangle strips which I then used a compressed air staple gun to fasten to the bottom side of the top bars of some frames I had put together. The V points downward and can then be used as a comb guide for the bees to build on. It is what we would call “foundationless frames” that the bees can use to build comb on at some point. It is just one of the things I wanted to try out.

The last thing we did was to trim off both sides of each end bar so the frame centers would be 1 1/4 inches (32 cm) wide. This is also to get the bees to build small cell comb. When downsizing western honey bees to 4.9 mm diameter cell size, the frames need to be closer together than they are in modern conventional frames. It was nice to get that task completed too so that equipment is now prepared to help grow properly and naturally sized honey bees. The western honey bees should physically be the same size as the Apis cerana native honey bees in order to be able to naturally overcome mites and diseases without any chemical treatments.

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