Paul Beer

😲Wow how unpredictable and extreme 😵

I will answer some now. Just to reinforce my thinking ya know. I reduced the entrances yesterday after you said. It was a detail i had forgotten about. Blocked one side of plastic hive entrance. Have inserted wooden entrance reducer with larger opening on other hive. I put OA strips in 4 per FD box on Monday. No signs of chewing yet. I will basically follow the known guidelines for this treatment and i plan to never use any synthetic type. Never done alcohol wash or sugar shake as believe it or not I'm not that curious about exact mite levels. I saw 2 bees with dwv crawling away from the hives back in November so put bayvarol in. But i took the bayvarol out in exasperation early this year, having made up my mind to use OA. Saw one mite after opening about 50 drone cells last week. I find the rest of your q's thought provoking as i have read over all of it but can't remember thoroughly. At the moment I'm mostly interested in how much honey we can take off, we had been thinking of leaving it all on but i read a discussion about on this forum and seems like almost a consensus that feeding sugar water is acceptable. I would prefer to leave them at least 15kg honey each from May. I'm looking forward to learning how to monitor the inside of the hives in winter. A side interest is comparing the 2 different hive types long term.

Update, I couldn't wait any longer so had a peek and the brood is good increased and mostly sealed now and also there is new brood on another frame, so 3 frames total including the donated one from the other hive. But what I immediately noticed when opening the hive is the calmness. So I'm as happy as can be about it. They have enough honey tommy dave, almost 20 kg. But of course I'm hoping for more, now that they are on the right track. The other plastic hive has about 30kg honey. We got them as nucs in mid october so a bit late starting.

Oh doh ok.

Oh.. good I suppose. We got one conventional wooden and this one to compare. It takes ordinary wooden frames, internal dimensions are standard. My whole approach has been based on curiosity and whatever is innovative. When we started thinking about hives I tried googling for comparisons but could hardly find anything at the timeso decided to jump in and find out for ourselves. Experienced beeks are quite opinionated about the technoset as it is plastic. Stoney lost thousands of them I think in the big fire 😣😵 if we had more money I would like to have got a polystyrene hive as well. Our bees seem to be going well in this plastic hive so far.

OK.

Just showing off our first bearding which happened today, it's only like a 15yo kids beard I know, but hey it makes us feel like we belong with the big guns. Humid 28 deg they were hanging out most of the afternoon until 8pm

Ya I really hope it is not drone brood 🤨

I agree cBank although I have not identified robbing occurring yet, I'm probably too new to recognise it. How on earth do the commercials get through all those hives! The heat, the sweat in my eyes. Today my smoker would not go. It either won't go or goes so well that I don't want to extinguish it. My bees are so understanding... I feel that I could easily work the calm hive without a suit one day. They never even seem to notice me

Yup ok will do frazzledfozzle, I did not know myself how long they were queenless but there was no brood left. I read quite a bit about the situation before asking here as I knew it was a common occurrence for new beeks, but I just became confused and lost perspective on it, and it would have been easy to waste money and time going the wrong direction. I was fairly sure they were going to turn into laying workers. I'm glad I asked for help here.

Hah dansar it was the same stuff for me! Broad beans, brussel sprouts, peas. For my kids we eliminated trying to feed all that stuff ---=> a lot less pointless suffering.

I've just done an inspection and I'm delighted to report, I noticed the hive was calmer and there is a small patch of new open brood 😅 a sight for sore eyes after 6 weeks of nothing. It was only about 200 I suppose so the new queen must have just started but yay, looks like there's time to strengthen the hive before Autumn. I installed OA narrow staples for the first time today, so I will watch the ground outside the hives with bated breath. Thank you for the help everyone.

Yes but...

Nothing excited or drew me into this, it was only because my young son was very interested that I became interested. I find that I have spent $2000 on getting into it a few months ago and now would be lucky to get $500 for everything if we wanted out. I believe all newcomers or people interested in beekeeping should be warned away from it because there are far too many honey bees and too much stored honey in NZ and you are only making even more. Having said that, I am excited for the day coming soon when we eat some of our multiflora honey. We could have bought an entire shopping trolley full of all kinds of honey for $2000 though. Enough to last the rest of our lives. I am curious though how to figure out the hive density where we live (our hives are at home). I was thinking of doing a drone flyover. Maybe we have the only hives within 1km and therefore are sittting on some kind of urban gold-mine 🤑 shh don't tell anyone

Like a can opener. Alright I will stay out of there for a while.