Ahoy-hoy BEE-KEEPERS

[AE-NMidlands]

I'll try to go though all the questions if you insist.... (When people ask me questions about beekeeping I try to remember to ask them "How long have you got?!)
I don't have a disease problem so I don't worry about any special sterilisation. However I did burn the frames of a hive I took over which had died out from terrible chalk-brood - I had never seen anything like it. I think we are too obsessive about disease: using manipulating cloths is banned at our club apiary for that reason... if there is no foulbrood about it's silly not to use a technique which makes life easier for both you and the bees.

How hot does it get? the metal bed will burn you if you touch it after the sun has been on it though, and I do wonder whether there is a risk of it over-heating and denaturing the wax!

Foundation-making is here:

Solar panel and heater - or wider reflectors? there is no point complicating it, some days it works, others it doesn't. There isn't enough wax to run it every day anyway, sometimes with nothing to do I just leave it facing north. Early and late in the year I move it to follow the sun, in mid-summer it works just left facing south - and if we are out for the day that's what happens anyway unless the forecast is for sun only p.m. when it gets left facing SW. A friend has tried to get me to put a solar panel on and a circulating fan in it: again, it's an unnecessary complication

In poor conditions it does a bit (maybe nothing) and then you get a wax deposit as is visible in the evening picture, so I think that shows that in the bottom of the box it's barely above the wax melting point. It's not a problem as you just run it again on a better day, when that gets added to and often fully remelted (if the day is good enough.)

It's clear that the warm air convects within it, some mornings there is set wax on the bed which carried on running from a sock after the bed had cooled and this wax can be seen to melt from the top downwards. It sets and forms a horizontal bar as it hits the shade of the secondary filter but after a while the whole lot melts and starts to trickle through. The receiver has a cup of rain water added when I load the extractor, it lets water-soluble and miscible dirt drop out of the wax cake and sometimes it boils! I lean a sheet of plywood against the bottom of the glass to shade it at this stage!

I have found that it pays to get comb out of frames before melting it, otherwise propolis and other gunk gets welded to the hot bed: I pull the wires out first too, roll up 3 or 4 flattened combs and post them through a tube (open tin with bottom removed) into the leg of a pair of tights which was previously pulled over the tin. Hang the stuffed sock over a hook at the top of the box, or use wire S-hooks. The secondary filter is the gusset(?) of the tights. You get 4 "socks" and a gusset out of each pair, knot them before you make a cut.

The zig-zag wires at the sides are coathanger wire shaped to hold frame ends, I have tried it with half a dozen super frames in, but now I almost always take the comb out first. I sometimes put frames in to sterilise them: you can see moisture bubbling out of the wood through the film of wax and propolis!

I sometimes think I should put this stuff in a book, I have done a Beekeeping In a Nutshell Booklet about 14 x 12 frames, but this probably needs to be more elaborate. There is always more to be said!
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[SafetyThird]

Very neat. We have a solar wax collector at our club apiary though for home use I built one that uses a wallpaper steamer as it’s heat source. Run on sunny days from the solar it costs nothing

[AE-NMidlands]

Very neat. We have a solar wax collector at our club apiary though for home use I built one that uses a wallpaper steamer as it’s heat source. Run on sunny days from the solar it costs nothing

We have one of these: https://www.thorne.co.uk/processing/wax ... 6kQAvD_BwE

but it's not very good. 1) To work best the glass needs to be perpendicular to the incoming sun, mine is jacked up high early and late in the year, lower in mid-summer. The Thornes one will fail to trap a lot of heat because at the shallow angle it will reflect off the glass instead.

2) the temp inside is a balance between heat that is trapped and what leaks out (Insulation.) That one has 1/2" timber sides. Mine is 1" of cedar, 1" of PIR insulation (after the original P-U was found to have melted when I refurbished it) and lined with thin plywood.

3) that one has a silly expensive flat-bottomed fabricated stainless steel collector tray - and wedges on the floor to support it. Better to have a prism-shaped tray which fits in the bottom of a (more steeply inclined) box...

I used one of the steam jobbies during a wax workshop to reclaim old brood comb from the club apiary - and it didn't half stink! We found it was worth running the wax (and condensate) into an aluminium tray but with a stocking sleeve round it, so that the black gunge stayed on top and the wax ran through. The steam destroyed the plywood lid we were using too!

[renewablejohn]

Thanks all from the replies, Martin was the bed poster on "st elsewhere " with as I recall a mix of hives but primarily the "leave em alone type"

I'll measure out space properly this summer & see if I can get away with guerrilla kit, we do have beekeepers in the village (mainly church bees, but one guy is an a-hole, so may seem from further afield info, some years ago that Kickstarter appealed but as it was bad for the bee's I never went there.

And yes, all the rape heavy honey is not my thing, I wonder how it would be (excesses) in brewing?

I have a stash of new Zealand deadliest honey, Greek raw, & Waitrose currently have on offer a wonderful Canadian flower honey (divine) ..all make the regular stuff local to me, pretty poor.

It's a dilemma as you say due to the low quality of rape for the bee's as well as us.

I'll think on, did you ever post pics of you'd solar was extractor? ..I seem to recall something some years back.

I am very much a leave em alone type. Normally on the look out for swarms on my land during the swarm season. If I see a swarm in a tree I will place a fresh clean brood chamber underneath and give the swarm a quick shake to drop it in the hive then retire for an hour to allow the swarm to settle. Then go back and reconstruct all the standard components of a hive inckuding queen excluder, super and roof then leave to get on with it.

[SafetyThird]

I built a wax extractor that uses a spare hive body to hang the frames and then a metal base with a metal sieve to strain the wax. A top board has a hole for a wallpaper steamer and I run it on sunny days off the PV as needed. I tend to keep frames until I have a box full to do.

Mind you, I lost my 3 colonies to wasps a couple of years ago, worst year on record. our local society lost half our hives to wasps, it was carnage. I've not restocked as the past two years have been a bit 'difficult' for a variety of reasons but next year I'll put another couple of colonies in the hives and start up again. An utterly fascinating hobby and one I'm still a beginner at.

We've just bought the two fields (6 acres) in front of our house, which means we now own all the fields round the house. We'll be planting them to wildflower from now on, it'll take a few years to really get them established but they're going to be a haven for bees and other local wildlife.

[AE-NMidlands]

Mind you, I lost my 3 colonies to wasps a couple of years ago, worst year on record. our local society lost half our hives to wasps, it was carnage. I've not restocked as the past two years have been a bit 'difficult' for a variety of reasons but next year I'll put another couple of colonies in the hives and start up again. An utterly fascinating hobby and one I'm still a beginner at.

A friend has just given me a floor which has an entrance designed to stop wasps and act as a mouse-guard too. I can't show it as I forgot to take a picture before putting it under a hive!
He says he copied it from a Youtube video, but I couldn't find it. It needs a 3-m length of treated 4" x 1" timber, so 2 side boards are 460mm and 4 the other way are 416. The back is just butt-jointed and screwed through, a second transverse board is horizontal at the top front. Another is vertical, spaced 8mm back from the rear edge of the top front board and the last is horizontal at the bottom front but touching the vertical one, so it ends up recessed 8mm back from the front of the sides. Open mesh is nailed to the top, needing less than the full square because of the front board width.

Apparently wasps won't go in to the dark space and explore upwards to find the entrance slot, which gives access across the hive, coming out across the bottom of the brood frames. The bees found the way out and got used to the way back in very quickly!
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[renewablejohn]

Help please with a dilemma. Have kept bees for donkeys years and never had a problem of swarming. Next door neighbor took up bee keeping probably 5 years ago supposedly tutored by a local "expert". This year looks to have 5 hives and suddenly numbers have appeared on the hives to identify them and the "expert" has been down and from his actions I suspect they have some sort of disease in the colony but their not willing to say what it is. Anyway my dilemma is out of the 5 hives they admit they have lost 1 and I have seen 4 swarms which I suspect have come from the colony of which 2 I have captured. If I did keep them I would certainly move well away from my own bees for a quarantine period. Would you offer them to the neighbor at market price or give them away to someone else who might look after them better.

[Countrypaul]

If your ndighbours bees do have a disease, then in't it likely that the swarms could also - depending on what it is? If so, giving them to someoe else might not be such a good idea. When my father kept bees, we used to get visits from a goverment inspector to check for deseases, do they no longer do that? The old man that came round used to be a fountain of knowledge and really helpful.

If you are really concered about the likelyhood of desease in your neighbours hives, might be worth having a discreet word with the ministry.

[renewablejohn]

If your ndighbours bees do have a disease, then in't it likely that the swarms could also - depending on what it is? If so, giving them to someoe else might not be such a good idea. When my father kept bees, we used to get visits from a goverment inspector to check for deseases, do they no longer do that? The old man that came round used to be a fountain of knowledge and really helpful.

If you are really concered about the likelyhood of desease in your neighbours hives, might be worth having a discreet word with the ministry.

From what the "expert" was doing to the hive I suspect foul brood so will monitor away from my own hives. As for giving to someone else it would only be to other experienced bee keepers who know how to handle and quarantine swarms.

[cojmh]

Foul brood is a notifiable disease. If it is either variant of foul brood it has to be reported and then a bee inspector should come as a matter of urgency to check.