THE LITTLE GOLDEN FOLK !
(Page 5 of 10)
March/April 1974
By Bill Benintente
Another method of hiving requires only one super instead of two: Set up a chamber filled with frames of foundation, suspend the queen as I've described and remove five of the ten panels. In their place insert the shipping cage (open side up), provide food and close the hive. Again, you can inspect the colony after four days.
RELATED CONTENT
The mystery of colony collapse disorder continues, but researchers are finding widespread evidence ...
The Backyard Jungle PartXII: Hover Flies
July/August 1985
By Ron West
Here's the...
Bees and their pollinating skills are said to facilitate the production of more than $15 billion in...
Appreciating the role bees play in plant sustenance; volunteers on organic farms; powerful pruning ...
How to prevent and extinguish chimney fires....
SPRING FEEDING OF BEES
By the time you get your mail-order nucleus settled in their new home, it will probably be around the middle of April . . . still a lean time for bees in most areas, with little pollen and nectar to gather. If your colony is to build its strength quickly -a watchword in beekeeping-you must continue to feed them artificially for the first few weeks. (This stimulates early egg laying.)
One way to nourish your bees is with syrup fed from a Boardman bottle feeder. This gadget costs about 50d and is simply a wooden insert for the hive's entrance, perforated with flow channels to carry the food to the interior. Inside the block-upside down-is a cap from an ordinary Mason jar (pierced to let the contents escape slowly). You supply the jar and fill it with warm syrup made by mixing granulated sugar with an equal amount of water and heating the two until all the crystals are dissolved. (Don't scorch the mixture or you'll surely harm the bees.) If you think that refined sugar can't be an ideal diet for your colony, I'll agree . . . but it does ward off starvation and is recommended by just about every beekeeper.
A much better food-and one that's needed for normal brood rearing, even if you also give the bees sugar syrup-is pollen. Most of the bigger beekeeping supply firms sell it at very reasonable prices (averaging about $2.00 less per pound than the same item costs in most health food stores). The USDA recommends the following supplement for spring feeding:
Sugar/water: two parts sugar to one part water by weight.
Pollen/soy: one part fresh dry pollen to three parts soybean flour by weight.
Pour this mixture over and through a cloth and drape the fabric on top of the frames in the brood chamber. This is really the best way to feed your babies for the first few weeks in spring.
The following pollen substitute is less satisfactory than the one above, but is sometimes recommended:
I urge you, however, to feed the formula containing pollen if you can. The point is to get the bees on their feet and laying as quickly as possible so that plenty of workers will be ready to handle the spring honey flow. Pollen fed early in the season will almost always assure this result.
Note, though, that bees must not be fed pollen in the fall . . . when anything but the purest of honey or syrup will kill them. Since these fastidious housekeepers never excrete inside the hive, they may go the whole winter without releasing their waste. Impure foods will give wintering bees diarrhea, and if it's too cold for them to fly outside and relieve themselves, they'll die in the hive by the thousands. (In his exhaustive work The ABC and XYZ of Bee Culture, A.L Root states that the cause of winter dysentery is not pollen, but unripe honey . . . or the fact that the colony is too weak to withstand the cold without constant fanning, which causes the insects to eat too much. -MOTHER. )
Page:
<< Previous 1 |
2 |
3 |
4 | 5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
Next >>
