Bob is bottling over million pounds of honey supplies like 1600 grocery stores think he said. Puts in prospective just how much honey Ian producing around 350k lb ayear on average close to 400.000 couple years ago .. pretty amazing ...Bob Bennie helping alot people with his videos very great full. Only few bee keepers on RU-vid you can really learn from Bob is one of those. Tell ya Phil the bee man has alot amazing vids most don't know who he is. One of Ian mentors ...I've learned most from Ian he's turned my operation around
To the the guy that is going to cage the queen, check her to make sure she doesn't have any mites on her. If she in the cage other bees can't help remove the mite or mites.
Sorry I missed this. I had a couple of questions re: that study. 1. They suggest that doing Oxalic Acid treatments during the day misses the foragers - so would it be good to do the treatments at night then? 2. The study suggested that 1g per box does not reduce mite loads at all when brood is present (loads don''t increase but remain static), does that mean that it is useless to use Oxalic Acid to reduce loads when brood is present? Is it only good in very late fall or very early spring when the colony is broodless or almost broodless? OR is it just that 1g is not enough and and upping the dosage to 2+g per box fixes this problem? I have treated some bees in July and I wonder if it was just a waste of time - thoughts?
Thanks for all the helpful information. What do you think about doing a oxalic acid vapor treatment on a warm day in February before there is a lot of brood? Would it do more harm than good this time of year when the bees are holding on trying to get to spring? I'd think it could be beneficial before spring build up?
I used a cage designed specifically for brood breaks that allows the bees to come and go but the queen can't escape. I caged for 19 days then treated with OA vapor. Zero mites after wash.
Exactly ... Can use that same method to bank queens over winter as well. Takes a really strong double deep insulation top and sides .. problem you use reg cages bees will pick one queen and propolize the rest queens just starve. Bees can pass thru the cages they won't propolize them shut
Yeah. They probably didn't realise it. They mention caging for a second and made it sound like will kill your queens. Well, in Europe we caging for brood break over 15 years, all kinds of cages. There is no problem for the queen. In ltaly some put the queen over the excluder on a horizontal brood frame. In a rim made for it, and the cover on top. That's the cage and she's laying it like that. I tried it, works. But i like that small cage in the frame
Always interesting to listen to an old beekeeper with "horse sense" openly share their opinions and views off the cuff like happened here. Unfortunately, when I realized what time it was, your interview with Bob was almost over Tuesday night. Speaking about the longevity of queens.....Joe, I've got one of your VSH Carni's that I got from you in 2019 that's entering her 4 th season this time. I wasn't intentionally trying to hold on to her this long, but her daughters have been so gentle until I refused to cut her head off. I placed my eyeballs on her one day last week and confirmed she's still laying a solid brood pattern, so looks like " granny " is probably going to be giving me a few more daughters this spring. You're looking well Joe....probably better than you've looked in 4-5 years. Now if we can just get Jason back on his feet soon.
Great info Bobbie. I have a question for you off topic. Is it normal for bees to continue to drop dead into the bottom board all throughout winter? Every week I Ck on my hive and scrape out 50 or so bees. Is this normal?
I'm using 4 grams per colony in 10 fr boxes but 2 in 5 fr boxes. I'm not having good luck with my double deeps doing 4 grams twice in 2 weeks. Still having a few die from mites. I'm at 51 from 66. Still not bad because I made my own queen late in the year.