THE LITTLE GOLDEN FOLK !
(Page 3 of 10)
March/April 1974
By Bill Benintente
Directly above the brood chamber is one or more supers, or storage sections. Each is a duplicate of the brood chamber (although often only half as deep) and contains 10 comb frames where surplus honey may be stashed. You can stack as many as five of these supers on a hive and reap the sweet liquid as it comes in . . . or you can wait until the honey flow ends and do all your collecting at once.
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The storage supers are topped with a honey board, or inside cover. This is a plain piece of wood with reinforced sides and ends to keep the bees from gluing the top of the hive to the uppermost story. The board also has provision for a small device called a bee escape. This gadget is fitted into the center of the panel, which is then slipped below a super that's full of honey and ready to be taken away the next day. During the night the bees in the upper level descend into the lower parts of the hive and-due to the action of the one-way bee escape-can't return. Come morning, the storage chamber is empty of workers (or nearly so) and unloading is easier all the way around.
Last of all, on top of the hive, is the telescoping cover . . . so called because it slides down about three inches all around the uppermost super. Its metal upper surface-generally made of galvanized steel-protects the whole caboodle from rain, snow and nasty weather in general. And that's it! A hive's queen spends most of her time (all of it, if you can so arrange) in the brood chamber, being fed and gently groomed by young worker bees and laying upwards of 3,000 eggs a day. Apart from this reproductive function, her presence is essential for another reason: The latest discoveries seem to indicate that she secretes an unidentified "queen substance" which keeps the colony in good, productive spirits and inhibits the workers from laying. (In the absence of a fully developed female some of them may do so, but their eggs produce only non-working males or drones and the community soon becomes weak and demoralized.) Without the hive mother's secretion, the bees know within minutes that they're queenless and become loud, nasty and generally uptight. You needn't worry about that, though, because you'll be buying a healthy young queen with your nucleus and she's good for at least two years . . . up to five, in exceptional cases.
Since it's undesirable to have the queen laying her eggs in the upper storage sections of a hive, some beekeepers top the brood chamber with an optional device called a queen excluder: a flat frame the same width and length as the hive's other sections, covered with a heavy inset wire screen. The openings in the mesh allow the worker bees to pass through and deposit surplus honey in the upper stories, but keep back the larger queen. (The passages are also too small for the drones . . . which exist only to furnish a mate for any virgin queen the colony may produce. Meanwhile they have an easy life hanging around the hive and gorging themselves on honey, and the screen prevents them from eating up your potential harvest.) Most pros, however, frown on the use of the queen excluder because it may lead to swarming and subsequent loss of half or more of the colony. An alternative is to keep presenting Her Majesty with empty comb in the brood chamber. Then she'll usually be happy to stay and lay her eggs there.
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