Paul Beer

Here's a thought... in good times it was relatively easy to sell the honey. You did not feel the need of a coop. Now that hard times have come, you begin to re-examine all the issues and possibilities of a coop. Desperate people do desperate things. If it is indeed established, it might run for a few years until good times return. Then it will be gradually abandoned again.

Yay just what my son and I were trying to do today, this should help us

In this message I said more, but purposely deleted some of what I said. I have one technoset hive but I need to repair the feeder, as one side was manufactured incorrectly and the bees are able to get into it and drown. I need to narrow the gap somehow so they can't get in. On my other (wooden) hive I put a beetek feeder which is very good.

Alright thanks, I will. The comb layout. I'm basically wondering how to go about reducing the frames down to the appropriate number and arrangement, making decisions about which to remove and when. At the moment the brood/pollen/honey are spread throughout 2 fd and 1 3/4 in both hives. I looked at Kiwimana's guide. Also i need an afb check/certificate. I expect to pay for this. Is there someone who can come look?

Cool how this thread is developing. Whoever is new at beekeeping needs to somehow keep correct info and let go of wrong info. My son especially watched heaps of YouTube videos over 2 years and we joined a beekeeping club 6 months before buying nucs. I would say, things just tend not to go how you planned, but it is still vital to plan and research. I find much better help here in this forum than the club. But now i feel a need of some mentoring as we go into winter. I'm sure you will get the right idea very soon now that you're connected here MissOlivia. One of the most perplexing aspects i discovered was, who or where to buy a nuc from! I tried a couple of people at the club but they just seemed not that interested. I hope you go well from now on

Purple Tansy (Phacelia). I researched what to plant in our garden for bees. Sunflower, seemed useless, just bumble bees. Marigold > useless. Lavender, ok they attracted a few bees. Clover was good but not at first. Then I planted purple tansy seeds after hearing about them from Philbee .. the bees have gone insane on them, they've been foraging from dawn til after dusk every day.

After reading your message I found where to get some seeds and planted quite a lot around my garden and the bees love it! Purple Tansy

Doh my mistake i did not notice that the article mentioned Australia along with nz at the start. But still ok to send to US

John you have probably been over and over this.. how do we know that comb honey can not be taken to Au or US? I can not find anything that says it can not, only that it should be declared, and may be inspected. For example http://www.beesinca.com/2015/05/getting-honey-through-customs.html?m=1

Thanks for posting this Abbot. That seems bizarre for a NZer to enquire about importing a jar of comb honey when we already have truckloads of honey here. SMH lost for words really. I was considering getting into selling comb honey myself. Maybe we also ought to import a few possums

Rotate the box while lifting slightly so that it breaks the wax. You certainly don't want to lift out those bottom frames attached to the top frames, they will likely break off and fall damaging everything and greatly upsetting the bees.

😲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.