Anyone else try out this little hobby? Strangely addictive and has the same thrill of barreling down the front of a mountain on a mountain bike when working on an angry hive.

Tried starting it last year with little success, so giving it another go this year with a much better NUC then last year. It is truly amazing to watch these guys at work, but also a real benefit to the ecosystem. I have a lot of fruit trees and gardens I am hoping these guys can help me with by next spring.

I do. getting good bees early is the most important thing for a beginner. I got 2 hives to start and it allows you to check one against the other which helps. Year 2 is going well.

This is our first year. We have two hives and the both are doing super, no pun intended.

Last winter, the considerably better half and I attended beginner beekeeping classes hosted by our local beekeepers association. They were great and we have a very strong active local association. If you haven't already, you may want to look into joining one in your area. They are a great resource.

Best of luck to you.

Warmest Regards,
Paul

Also see if u have a nearby university with n entomology dept. some offer bee keeping courses. UF has a "bee college" which I hope to participate in next year, supposed to be excellent. and yes your garden/fruit trees/ etc will greatly benefit ( and your neighbors)

May be pushing the envelope to try to start a new hive now for our more northernly friends
(a swarm in June is worth a silver spoon, a swarm in July ain't worth a fly)

I used to have 25 colonies. My Wifes allergies to bee sting meant they went 21 years ago. Sold everything including clothes, knives, supers and 2 frame extractor. I enjoyed it.

I try to get to the local bee club meetings, there is quite an active community here... Of course living in the heart of WNY farm country is a help. I haven't been able to make a meeting in a while as it collides with church meetings.

The bees I purchased were from Bloomfield Honey and one of the owners has been selectively breeding local queens who are better-suited for our local climate. She has had great success with pest-resistant colonies and all of her colonies are pesticide-free. The NUC was literally bursting with bees when I picked it up on Monday. They didn't even fit in the box! They were clinging to the outside of the box so I made the drive home suited up. I suspect that if I had not, I would have taken the time to clobber a deer for spectacular effect.

They were a bit pissed because we taped some of them to the outside of the box when securing the lid, and the fact they were handled a lot in one night. It was quite an experience transferring them from the NUC box into the super. They are quite happy in their new home now as they have a lot of leg room! More bees now than I had at the peak of late last summer.

I'm giving them a 2-week break, and then I will put a feeder on the top in hopes to flush out one super so I can put on the second super. Not bothering with honey this year, but possibly next year. Mostly got them for curiosity and pollination.

Sounds pretty interesting!

Why do people put the hives so close to highways?? and what affect does that have on Mortality? I ussually kill at least one every time I drive buy one around here.

I think only because they get rather heavy, so being able to drive your vehicle up next to them is convenient.

Speaking of which, I would encourage others to give this fascinating hobby a try. It isn't terribly expensive, and it is a lot safer and easier to work on then I thought when I first started. Domesticated bees are passive enough that many keepers wear shorts and t-shirst while working them, but it will be a while before I am comfortable enough to do that. They detect nervous and get cranky fast around nervous people.

The current diseases such as CCD are frustrating, but I believe that if there are a lot of sparse colonies from small bee-keepers, chances are better on overall survival and eventually finding genetic resistance.

Mark

That's fascinating.
I always thought that about dogs & horses too. (and women...ha ha)
I've never been afraid of even the biggest dogs, & I know they sense that.

I'll add bees to our property in a few years. But for now, I just don't have the time to learn what I need to know before getting them.

There is a local group I have talked to and they seem very nice, just takes some time and that is something I do not have right now.

I let a friend keep bees on my place. Get to enjoy them without any work or invsetment.

Good call!

Now I need to figure out who wants to keep their bees out on the farm!!

Post an add on some free venue or the local store. Folks always seem to be looking for a place to put their bees.

It certainly is a fun hobby or business to get into. We started last spring with 2 hives and now we are up to 7. Kids are involved and we figure our equipment is paid for at this point with the honey we've sold and pollination fees. We also had a guy from the local club who was a few hives short for his blueberry pollination contract ask to "borrow" some hives which paid pretty well too ($40 per hive for about 4 weeks of pollination). This week we plan on splitting the other one of our original hives so we should be up a couple more in hive counts.

Bryan

This is something I've thought I've wanted to do for years. I've got plenty of fruit trees/bushes, flowers, clover, and other things to keep them busy and fed.

However, every time I think I want to try starting a hive or two, I look at the cost to start. No matter how I look at it, it seems like it would cost at least $2000 for the equipment to just start out. I attend a lot of farm auctions, and never once have I seen bee keeping equipment for auction, nor do I see it in the local classified.

Great local honey is pretty cheap since I live in a major apple raising area (headquarters for Whitehouse and Mussleman).

Am I looking at this all wrong? I'd sure like to try it!

Thanks,
Ken

Wow, prices must have gone up a lot since I got out of it.

No way it costs that much, and NEVER buy used bee equipment. You may wind up purchasing disease-laden equipment which will give you and the bees nothing but trouble.

My all wood standard hive setup cost me about $275 as a kit that I put together myself, and it was a higher-end unit. Then all you need is the hat, gloves, bee brush, bee tool, and smoker. Save the suit for later as you can use bluejeans and a heavy shirt if you wont be working them for long. Total cost around $325 or so.

Most equipment has been ordered from here and is very high quality:
http://www.brushymountainbeefarm.com/

Some people have tried with success the plastic/foam hives which are much lighter and cheaper and survive winters better. However they do have more moisture problems.

Wow! One more thing to thank the Pond Boss forum for. I don't know where I came up with those numbers. The last time I looked at it, sometime after there was an article about beekeeping in one of my magazines, I thought I made a list that totaled up to about $1600 to get started. Based on your post I checked a number of websites. Most are in the same price range you posted for a complete starter kit, minus the bees.

So, when is the best time of year to start?

Thanks,
Ken

I found a guy on CL looking for a secure place to keep his bees and hives, it worked out great for both of us. I get all the honey I want plus the bees are busy taking care of my garden plants.

Ken,
My bee guy told me Spring is the best, about the time plants start flowering.

A couple of factoids that I remember.

The "average" colony has 40,000 to 60,000 bees/insects/bugs.

Bees, 99.9% female, usually die due to their wings wearing out. They can't make it back to the hive. Of course, birds get some of them.

I annually re-queened with both bred and/or virgin queens. Most breeders mark their queens with a small yellow paint dot on the back. That way they're easier to find and kill when you want to introduce a younger, more vigorous, queen. The old gal will kill the newcomer. Requeening is about the only time I suited up.

When a queens productivity (egg laying) starts declining the bees start readying new queens by feeding some of the larvae "royal jelly". If the old queen finds them she kills them. If a queen dies without a successor the hive goes into a funk. They get dispirited until a new queen can be grown. When she emerges her first action is to kill the other queen larvae that is being grown. Her second action is to leave the hive and fly outside looking for a drone. When they breed, always while flying, the drones body separates and he dies. When it separates, there is an audible snap. You hope that the drone is from one of your "tame" Europeanized colonies. A tramp drone can impart some meanness into all of his offspring. If that happens, you will have an aggressive colony. That means suiting up, smoking heavily, killing the old queen and providing a new one. Since the offending queen can produce more agressive drones you might possibly have to requeen other colonies.

Drones have only one function. They are there in case a new virgin queen needs to be bred. They fly around the hives all day hoping to get lucky. It's their job. They never gather pollen and can't feed themselves. They can go to any hive and will be fed. However, when Fall comes and Winter isn't far behind they will be refused admittance to a hive and denied food. So much for the life of a playboy.

I haven't thought of this stuff in quite a few years.

I received my new NUC last week, which isn't too bad if the NUC is already vigorous. Irregardless you will want to feed them (sugar water usually, sometimes with supplements) to get them ready for their first winter. The later in the season you start, the less likely for success, so I have a lot of feeding to do. The goal is to get them to flush out at least one super, preferably two with a lot of honey stores.

Last year's hive I lost the queen in, started in early July because it was so wet, and wound up with a lot of drones for a while until a new queen was raised. It was too late for them to make it through the season at that point and I lost them to starvation.

Catmandoo,

In our area, the best time to start is in March. (This year, it was even earlier because of the nectar/honey flows). If you already had hives or know of someone who wants to break off and split their hives, you can go ahead and get some NUCS as Liquid has done.

If you lived in just across the line in Virginny, starting in 2013, you could actually get a $200 grant/tax credit per hive to help defray your start up costs. Liquid is right, including my initial two packages of 3lbs of bees and the queen, I have around $400 total in my initial investment of 2 eight frame medium hives.

Everyone needs to read Dave Davidson's post regarding the drones. If the human race conducted ourselves similar to the way a bee colony manages their own, we certainly would not have alot of the problems in our society that we currently have....but I digress.

Bees, and their behavior(s), are absolutely fascinating. After having them for awhile, I can tell you that my father didn't know what he was talking about when he gave me the 'birds and the bees' lecture 40+ years ago...LOL.There's a heck'uva lot more to it.

Regards to all,
Paul

There is actually a color code system for marking queens to determine which year she is from.


Years ending in 0 or 5 are blue.
Years ending in 1 or 6 are white.
Years ending in 2 or 7 are yellow.
Years ending in 3 or 8 are red.
Years ending in 4 or 9 are green.

Bryan

That makes good sense. I guess the guy I bought from either didn't know or knew that I didn't.