Hot Hot Hot

I have been out of town through the week all month and it has been record breaking hot. Not much if any rain and there are patches of brown vegetation all around. Do wish I had help from a researcher or someone who could set up a real test to see just how well my hives perform. But what I have noticed is that the bees are not "boiling" out of the hive.

What I mean is that last year when I had a Langstroth hive the bees would have hundreds of bees on the outside of the hive all day and night when it was hot. Many people said that was normal and that is one of the ways bees keep cool in the summer. One of the features of my hives should be better ventilation. Even in this heat I have never seen any bees on the outside of the hives. I hope this is because of the ventilation system.

I will open the hives sometime over the holiday weekend to see just how full the hives are. I have been told that the first year not to expect much honey to harvest but I have high hopes.

WiFi

WiFi, Wireless Fidelity, 802.11, and many other terms are all I have been thinking about lately. Take a look at my employer's website. www.xirrus.com

I did get a chance to look into my hives the other day. Just a quick peek, they are growing and making honey. It has been hot the last week and I wish I had a monitor to keep data on the inside of the hives but I don't. The fact that the hive is growing would indicate that they are doing well enough, I hope. Well there is nothing I can do about it anyway I am back on the road building WiFi networks. It pays the bills.

I still hope to get a mass production version of my hive by next season but not sure if I can make it.

I stopped by the farm that is looking for bees and as of yet no one has brought any over and the guy I found who had hive for sale has not delivered. I guess I will have to invest in late season packages and get them installed in August. I need to make one more stop to insure seal the deal.

This is the nice part of bee keeping. Unlike keeping other animals I don't have feed or water them daily. For the most part the best think you can do is just leave bees alone. Give them a proper hive box and they do the rest.

Small Hive Beetles (SHB)

The SMB is a new parasidic insect that makes a total mess out of a hive. There are plenty of resources that will give you all then information you can handle on them but I got them, in one hive. It is isolated so if I get SMB in the other two it will be from cross contamination, or a wild infestation. I hope I not cross contaminate so I hope to keep SMB out of those hives.

There are chemical treatments for them but at this point I don't want to put much of anything in my hives. I want to keep them as organic as possible. They sell traps and I may get a few but I will wait until the bees have a gard time controlling them. Some hives can ward off the SMB or at least keep them under control.

Only time will tell.

New spot for hives.

Hey I just located a small farmer, about 20 acres who has been trying to get beekeepers to put bees on his place but no one will. Don't know why, but I hope to get a couple of hives on his place soon.
His main crop is blackberry's but all of the things he has planted require pollinators. I am excited about the chance to have a place to set up a nice bee yard. It will give me a chance to build a new hive boxes to work out a few more of the kinks in my design. By the time I get these built I should be ready to take the design public.

I currently have three versions built. Version 1 has bees in it and those are were my bee pictures are from. Version 2 and 3 have serious flaws and I am not sure if I will put bees in them. If I do I will need some modifications. I may just take them apart and use the lumber for version 4.

I built version 2 and 3 in a rush and I made some calculation errors. Couple the speed at which I was working on these boxes with the facts that 1 I do not enjoy woodworking and 2 I am not very good at it and you get hive boxes that are seriously flawed and are basically unusable.

However, I was successful in working out better legs and a more compact design that will be better in the long run. So even though I did not succeed in making functional hives I did succeed in learning a lot.

My basic hive design has not changed I just need to make them more "commercial" friendly. I also wish I could draw things on the computer easier so I could transfer my design to the computer. I guess I will have to do it the old fashion way, with a pencil. lol. What I really need is someone who likes to do woodworking and has the skill to makes these things.

I am still driven to transfer this design to some type of mass production setting so I can just buy them in the future. Oh wait, if I mass produce them I will not have to buy them. But maybe others will and more people will get into keeping bees.

What a difference a week makes.

As I watched the hive cam this week I noticed that the bees were building, building, building so I opened the hive and snapped a couple pictures. I tried to get the same angles as last week to see the progress but didn't really do so good. I like the pictures but they don't seem to be at the perfect angles.

Quick look inside the hive

I went for a quick look inside the hives and snapped a couple of pictures.  

The bees look to be on track for a first year hive.  This is the natural formation of a beehive.  From all of the pictures I have seen of honey bee hives that are "in the wild" it appears that they build a ball shaped hive, or 1/2 ball with the top being flat.  In fact they look like the classic skelp or bell shaped hive, the difference is that the skelp is upside down.  So a "natural" comb pattern is basically semi-circle.  The bees then build progressivly shorter comb on each side until the entire hive ends up looking like a ball.  The pictures I took today seem to bear this out. 

Other interesting notes about topbar hives is that the sides are sloped at just the right angle so the bees believe the sides are floor or bottom.

So if you look on the side of the hive in the pictures the bees are walking on the floor.  This is not to say that bees can't walk on any surface, they can in fact walk on just about anything at any angle.  While it looks like the comb is attached to the wall on the right it really isn't.  The bees build comb to within "1 bee space" of the floor and there is 1 bee space between each comb.  To read more on what bee space is and who discovered it go here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langstroth_hive 

then link here for more on the topbar hive. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-bar_hive

Bee Feeder

Here is what I am using as feeder. Bee feeding is over for this season but one of the great things about this feeder is I will be able to use it as a waterer. Bees need a clean water source near the hive.

http://picasaweb.google.com/curtis.hensley/Feeder#

There is a common bee feeder called a boardman feeder. The biggest problem with this feeder is that unless the bees clean up the feed quickly it will leak into the bottom of the hive and make a mess. The good news is that bees usually clean up the feed very quickly so the boardman feeder is simple and has worked great for many years.

The problem with many other attempts to build a better feeder is that they usually drown more bees than they feed. So I thought about this whole idea of feeding bees sugar water and keeping them from drowning.

So the idea came to me that if the water was shallow enough the bees could get out and not drown. The water bottle developed and sold by so many people work great at keeping the water or in this case sugar water bee feed from dripping into the bottom of the hive. The trick was to make the water shallow enough for the bees.

ROCKS. The work great. I did not drown one bee and they were drinking the 1/2 gallon of feed in about 3 days. I was surprised at how quick they drank the stuff but no lie they emptied the bottle every 3 days. I kept the feeders full for about 2 weeks after the new install. I will convert them to water soon. Right now there is more water around than we can deal with, rain, rain, rain.

Rest

I gave the bees a rest for Mother's day. Actually I just decided to leave them alone and it turned out to be Mothers day.

All I did this weekend was look at them through the hive cam. They look like they are progressing well.

I will open the hive next weekend just for a quick look and add more room to get ready for the first "honey flow" of the year. A honey flow is when plants that they bees use to create honey are in bloom. They make honey and collect pollen all year but there are a couple of weeks were they really make most of their honey for the year. And the first one normally starts today, May 10 and least here in Spring Texas.

2009 bee install

Well I finally got around to posting the pictures of the installs for this year. I did pare them down to a series of pictures that walk through the process. I hope you will enjoy.

http://picasaweb.google.com/curtis.hensley/InstallBees#

Worked in a bee yard

I posted a few weeks back that I had contacted a local beekeeper and he agreed I could help. Well I got a chance. It is a long story and I learned a great deal.

What started out as about 100 bee hives were condensed into about 45. Interesting process but there was no consideration for the bees or any type of preservation of genetic groups. We basically checked to see if the hive had bees and about how many. Then swapped and combined hive bodies and honey supers to create a similar height pallet of 4 hives then loaded them on a truck. It was a big mix and match game, much like a shell game.

First, all of the hives were sitting on converted pallets. Each pallet had 4 hives on it. So we went through the yard from one side to the other and opened the top and/or tilted the to look under the bottom. Then started removing and combining pallets and hive boxes until we had combined as many of them as we could to make the same height pallets. When we were done they loaded about 45 hives onto a flatbed truck with a fork lift. Then wrapped the whole thing in a netting and off the drove.

This left about 5 or 10 colonies that were either week or were in odd sized boxes. There were a bunch of wooden boxes left out there and a lot of foundation frames with honeycomb.

I guess this is not a normal process. They had to do this because the yard had been neglected. I guess the guy picking up the bees had agreed he would pay only for full healthy hives and did not want the old or weak stuff. I didn't have time for pictures but it definitely left an impression.

I now know that if I want my hive to be accepted by this type of bee keeper it will need to fit on a pallet and that I need to get 4 hives into the same space as they can get 4 hives. I don't think it would be exact but I think that the benefits of a TBH would be worth the little extra space.

The biggest issue, at least from their prospective, is that harvesting honey from TBH is not fast enough. So I left with many things to think about.

Bottom line is that I am still committed to building the best Topbar Hive EVER!

Hive Cam

I installed a web camera on one of my hives today. Here is the first picture from inside the hive. Now I can look in without opening the box. We will see if this continues to work after the bees get comb built. For now it is just cool to see them in action.

Topbar wax starter

I am constantly on the run and don't seem to have much time to document much here but I will add what I have done to get my hives ready for bees.

For topbar hive that means adding "starter strips" of bee wax. See the pictures I have loaded in picasa.

http://picasaweb.google.com/curtis.hensley/TopbarWaxStarterSolution#

Crushed comb centrifuge

I have this idea that I cant get away from.

It started when I ordered a 5 gallon bucket filter set. It has 3 stages of filters to be used for filtering honey. Then I thought I could build a centrifuge that would use these 5 gallon buckets. I got this idea from a "merry-go-round" I saw at a Renaissance festival. It resembles a may pole, and carry about 20 people. This bucket centrifuge would be huge but not as large as the "merry-go-round" and it would take many buckets of freshly harvested honey.

As the thought continued to bother me I realized this would be a lot of expense and only a very few people would be able to harvest enough honey to use it. However, I did realize that if this device was built in and/or by a small village when not in use it could be used as a swing for children. It would be a blast! I guess if the village was keeping bees there might be enough honey to use this huge device, but not likely.

Then the other night I picket up a large mouth mason jar. Then picked up a small mouth mason jar. With the ring attached the small mouth will fit inside of the large mouth. No big revelation here I am sure many people already knew this.

Then I remembered a website I visited a site where the guy used a mesh as a filter. I think it was mosquito netting. He put this mesh under the ring of a mason jar then taped the mouths of the mason jars together and inverted them much like an hour glass. Over time the honey was filtered into the bottom jar.

I did like the idea but thought the process took too long and tape is a probably not to be had in some areas of the world. So if you have the large and small mouth jars you could do this same filter process without the tape by stacking the small on top of the large mouth jar. It would still take a lot of time.

So if I scaled down the centrifuge to hold two quart jars stacked on top of each other I could speed up the process. The centrifuge would hold up to 8 quarts of crushed comb honey and as few as 2 quarts. Well now that I have just written that it could be reduced to the smallest two jars that you could find.

So now it is time to build a prototype. From this prototype the design could be scaled up to use eight 5 gallon buckets with standard filters.

2 weeks and counting

I will have bees in 2 weeks. I am almost ready. Just need to add the wax for starter strips.

I have the hives in the location that I plan to leave them in for this season. The hives did very well in the last storm, no leaks from the roof and the wind didn't seem to phase them.

So far so good.

New contacts

I finally made contact with a local beekeeper. It took time and persistence but I did it. I now have a part time job helping him on a volunteer basis.

He said he just bought 80 hives from someone that has not tended them in about 3 years and "they are mean" he said. So soon I will get to go with him to split requeen and otherwise try to tame them. He said "it will either make or break you", I took that as a challenge.

PUT ME IN COACH!

He also said they are striped tail and most likely have a lot of African in them and are runners. I almost don't like the idea of requeening all of these hives but I am just here to learn.

Oh and he doesn't really like the idea of topbar hives but we agreed that keeping bees is pretty much keeping bees. Then he listed about 7 different types of hives including flower pots and said bees act the same in all of them. So we are off to a good start.

Busy as a bee

I have not posted here as I have been on a forum across the Internet trying to drum up support.

I fear I did more harm than good. No matter what I said it was wrong. So I made my last post over there. I hope they let me keep my account active. I really like their site, it just seems they don't like me.

Well anyway, I have posted some pictures of my work over the last couple of weeks.

The conservation hive is something I build as a neat idea but alas I think it would not be good for this part of the country. The idea was to build a hive that could be built and placed in the "woods" and left. It would attract bees and they could establish wild hives as a way to re-populate and increase genetic diversity in the bee population.

I think it is a good idea for places that are much further north of the "African bee migration" line. Not that I have anything against them but I think the general population does and it might not be wise to encourage wild hives around here.

That site is also big on using old pallets for wood. So I broke one down and used the wood for this hive and took pictures. I will copy and post my entries from that site here later. For now look at the pictures. I think this little box is cool.

http://picasaweb.google.com/curtis.hensley/ConservationHive?feat=email#
http://picasaweb.google.com/curtis.hensley/PalletDeconstruction?feat=email#

Bees at the White House

I guess the presidential chefs want fresh veggies from the back yard. Hey also have bees for honey. I hope they are topbars.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/19/AR2009031902886.html?hpid=topnews

Injection Mold

I have been asked to explain what I mean by injection molding.

You would have to see the hive to fully appreciate what I have in mind but here is an attempt to explain my intent.

This is the really exciting part for me.

First and foremost the inside of the hive, the part the bees and honey are in contact with will be 100% wood i.e. topbars, entrance and sides. Of course this could be post consumer stock or top quality cabinet grade products. I suppose if the bees gather on the outside of the hive, as the are prone to do, they will be in contact with the plastic but the day to day activities will not be in contact with the plastic.

That being said the hive would be made of a plastic compound that would have to not be UV sensitive and food grade and it would have to stand up to extremes of heat and cold.

The whole thing would be light, much lighter than a complete wooden hive and would be strong enough to support the moving of a hive full on honey. The best part is that when empty it would fold up for shipping. Setting it up would be measured in minutes and would allow the total novice beekeeper or person that is not inclined to build things quick and simple access to the topbar hive.

I also believe it could be produced at a price point that is far less that the same volume Langstrom hive.

Paint

I hate to paint. I am just about finished painting the 3 hives I have built. This is my 2nd coat of paint on top of primer.

I am more convinced than ever that many people do not use TBH because you can't just buy one from any supplier.

I am currently revising the design of the hive legs. The wonderful think about creating new designs is that it sometimes takes hands on doing to better understand and transfer from paper to reality.

Centrifuge extraction of Topbars

I have so many random thoughts that it is hard t remember them at once. I think I have a way to extract topbars with a standard centrifuge extractor. As with all of my ideas I need to try or find someone willing to give it a try.