# Apiary growth



## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

Certainly you can grow it.
Because planning and the actual reality of things has a big gap, do so
accordingly to the present environment and the number of bees available for 
the splits. Good luck on this adventure.


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## Snowhitsky (Mar 1, 2014)

I don't have any answers to your questions Cristian but I have a supplementary question to tag on to your post: Given an adequate supply of pollen/protein patties and syrup what is the rate of buildup of a hive population in late winter or early spring? For example, does it double every 21 days?


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## Cristian (Jul 28, 2014)

In my case a hive with two 10 frame boxes full of bees at 1 March should take supers at 1 April . I don't have all the frames in the second brood box , just 6-8 fames because I don't have enough bees in the bxes to fill them so i pull out fames in fall so the bees will cover all the frames that remain in the upper box . 
I don't have a clue about how fast they will build up in late winter or early spring . I hope that a nuc that have 8 frames ( 4 down and 4 up ) could build up until 15 April on two boxes and then to take suppers . In spring I give them from 1 February protein patties ( 10 patties / 1 pund each ) and then i come with syrup and soia flour until first flow is starting . I will se hw they will build up in this spring .


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## crocodilu911 (Apr 17, 2015)

Cristian, 

i wold say you need a lot of patience and money. i am at 16 hives now after spliting them 2 weeks ago( and with tht erain we have been having, i do not know if the queens will mate or mated yet). 
please keep in mind when you make nukes or splits or any of those things, that in my long experience , the best results i have seen were about 85% take on the first queens we put in ( now you can use cells, or virgin queens, or mated, it makes no difference). the worst is about 60%. that means that after a few days or weeks, you have to go back and deal with the colony that did not took the queen. so if you plan 100 nucs, plan to loose 20 of them in the first month. unless you are on their back all the time, but that is not good , becaus ethe queens need time to establish. i usually used to introduce and then go visit after 4 weeks. if the queen laid, the hive got full frames and siroup ( i used to make my nukes on 4 frames, then fill up to 9) and if the queen did not work i would just pick up the box, maybe shake the bees out in a corner of the beeyard, and after i colected all the bad nucs, i would use the frames in the new formed nukes. all my spliting campaine were made with a 25% extra number of nucs in mind. so if i needed 1400, then i made 1700-1800. if more of them worked, the better for me, if not, i still had my planned no of nukes succed. 

i would recomend a simple method for you. i would get 3 bee yards, a few miles apart in a good year round honey producing area. the 30 hives i have now, i would equalize them before spliting. so go thru and mouve food and brood around, before your 1st honey flow kicks in. if you have bad queens, replace with new , mated queens, or, kill queen, and use the bees on some onther hive with a good queen. then once this is all dove, right when the honey flow starts, start a queen making hive, and make sure you have all the queen making geer you need, or make sure you can buy queens at the right moment. and also , make sure the queens have enough place to lay. get all the rest of your gear ready, and maybe 1 week into your first honey flow, start spliting. you also said you will buy 50 x6frame nucs . i hope you buy them before the honey flow kicks in, that way you can split them too.

so i would make splits like this. take the queen you have in the hive with 1 frame of capped , almost hatching brood, and 2 frames of honey. put her in a box, give them a couple of foundation frames, a feeder and them mouve her away into another yard. i would make a yard with all my old queens. one yard with the nukes from the hives i had and one with the nukes i will make of the bought ones. maybe get a helper, as i recomend to do this in one day. since you only have to look for 30 queens in full hives and 50 queens on smaller hives, it should be enough time. 

to recap. you already have a bunch of nucs with old queens in them, and they have bees and honey. after you set them down in the new yard, you can come the next day or 2 days later, and give them siroup, medicate, and check the status of the queens. make sure they are not dead. in that case , i would introduce a new queen (cell, or mated, or whatever queen youhave  ) .
now, you have a lot of hives sitting there opened in the yard, so run back to them and start working ) no i am kidding. so , as you make this nucs ) i would call them old nucs, because of old queens), so as you make old nuks, you also have your helper get other boxes ready. so, the way i would do it is: i would open 1st hive and start looking for the queen first. once you find her, i would place her in a box that already has 1 x1gal feeder and 2 foundation freames. once you placed the queen there, i would add the 2 frames of honey, with enough bees, even if you have to shake some bees in there. ( i am sugesting 2 frames of honey, because this hive, with one frame of bees, will only consume very litle honey until it builds up, and that will be by fall. ) you can also do 2 frames of brood with old queen and 1 frame of honey. your choise. then once this is done, pull all frames together and staple or use a small nail behind the last frame in the hive ( keep in min you only have 1 feeder, 2 brood, 1 food and 2 foundation, that is 6 frames in a 10 frame box, or 8 frame , whatever you use.) this will keep the frames from mouving in the hive and killing your queen in transport. 
now you have a bunch of frames and you need to make nucs. i woul use the principle of 2 frames of capped brood, 1 eggs /larvae and 2 feed for my next nucs. that means you take out of the remaining hive these frames, and always make sure you have enough bees to cover the brood. if there is no bee on the food frames, you do not care, but make sure that overall the bees can cover the brood frames. so let's say from hive no 1 you took: 2 frames of brood and 1 feed for old queen, and you made old nuc. now you took 2 brood, 1 egg and 2 feed for new nuc 1. and you have left 5 feed, and 2 egg/larvae and 1 capped brood. well, use that to build your next hive. use 1 egg, 1 capped brood and 2 feed, with the bees that go with them, and put that in new nuc box 2. ( you have left 3 honey and i egg, keep the bees on the egg, and you can shake the bees from the honey off into one of the ones you made or wait for the next hive). 
now you are missing 1 frame of capped brood for new nuc 2. repeat step 1. open new hive, find old queen, give her a new house, get what you need and make new nuc 2, then 3 and 4, and keep going. do not worry about mixing the bees, they will be fine. just make sure to leave the weakest of the 2 nucs in place of the hive you worked on. that way they will collect all the bees that are out there and get some workforce untill the 2 frames of capped brood you had gave it, hatches. 

this sounds complicated but, it is very effective. once you get into the work mode, and you understand mentally what you need to do, it works like a charm. you can expect a good 85% acceptance rate, and let's say that with your 30 hives and 50 nucs, you can make about 150 in total, that would probably give you 125 -130 that will work for sure. all the old queens, if they do not get killed in the process should work. if you do this now, i can guarantee that in july , early july, you could make up some more , just this time, make them strong. you do not need to winter in 2 deeps, so you can make your late splits 1 single, and they will be fine as long as you give them enought feed.

for years i used to run this commercial operation, and we would make about 1800-2400 nucs starting 1 of april. of course the method we used was little more complex, since we grafted our own and introduced week old queen cells, and it would take me some time to explain the system, but, for you, i belive you can get up in the 400 hives range ( provided you have the financing for it) using this method in 2 years. 
now, my dad always said, you will not make money if you don't make honey, and you don't make honey if you are making nucs. if you will try to make honey it will take you a long time to become commercial, because making nuks and making honey, especially early on, will take up all your time and it will not give you the strong colonies you need to work with.

in my case, if my 8 splits i made work, i will split again in july, and have 32 hives. i am not looking for honey, since i do not need this revenue to live or invest in my hives. nex spring i will double my 32 hive ( or whatever is left after winter). i lost 2 out of 10 this year, becaus of a friend's help ( well ment help , but still killed my 2 queens). so if i loose 5 this winter, i will have in theory 27, that i will doble before my spring flow. i will probably have 60 hives comming next summer, and i hope to have enough money to buy 60 more boxes so i can split those in july. that way if i get out of winter, in jan 2017 with 100 hives, i will make a bank loan and buy enough material for 500 hives, and i will use the method i just spoke about to polulate as many of those 500 boxes as i can. with this in mind, unless almond farmers decide to pull out all the orchards, i will have a full semi for almond polination in 2018, and will finally be on my own 2 feet. 

why am i not on my own already you ask, if i am so good at this? it is not drugs, or any of that. i did not accepted my old man's help ( i am 4th gen beekeeper, and my dad still lives  so he can keep all that gear for himself) and i also wanted to do other things in live. i was able to experiment on other beekeeper's money , with all kinds of hive models, loading options, medications, nuc making methods, etc etc... and all that experience costed me $0. now i know what not to do, and where not to step, without having to experiment on my own $, and my own bee hives, and i am not saying i will not make mistakes, because i will ( just check my spelling  ) but i will make less. 

i hope this helps a little bit, at least to give you a different perspective on things. one more thing to complete the picture. in beekeeping, LESS IS BEST. the less you work them , the best, the least things you have to do to them, the best. the less they have to travel , the best. and another thing, and old queen , should be a dead queen. you want to make money with this, think about changing queend every other year, and you will do fine in the long run. if you do not already make your own queens, you should. setting up some nuc boxes for queen rearing inthe back yard is nothing, and you can work on them all the time you are home. i have one in my yard, and i am working on 26 queens now 

oh and another thing, once you check that your new queens are laying, give them some siroup ,and let them work, and frames as they need them, and let them grow. 

i hope this helped, and i went on to big of a bend, let me know, i'll thake the post down.
Radu 



Cristian said:


> Hello , people . This year is a ane that will mark for me the step from hobbyor small operation to a commercial one . For the moment i have a plan for 5 years to have o direction on how to do things to achive tho get to a commercial level . This year I am starting from 30 productin hives also I will buy another 50 - 6 frames nucs and make 20 ( 4 frame nuc from my hives ) , so a total of 70 nucs that I hope to winter in a two story 4 frame boxes ( two two boxes nuc side by side ) . After the first winter I want to take 20 8 frames OW nucs to put in a 20 frames hive ( 10 + 10 ) to be as production hives . My concern is that I have fairly early flows like rape on 15 April and my spring chek is 1 March . Is a posibility that those 8 frame nucs will build up in spring up to 10 frame double boxes hive is i feed earlier . Here I can feed them from 1 February constantly with protein patties and then to swap them in the bigger equipment like the PH on 1 March or even earlier . Could they have time to build up to a two story 10 frame boxes until the forst flow ( rape ) or even on the second and most important flow of the year , black locust from 15 May .
> In case that they don't have the time to build up so big I could get frames of brood and bees from other 50 nucs that will serve for this purpose of brood factory . After this big step of building up the OW nucs as production hives could the rest of those 50 nuc to be splitted and make 200 nucs in total in this year ( the ratio will be 1 to 3 ) . The nucs will be maked with 2 frames of brood , one with food and a empty one until 1-15 July . Could a nuc like this that is being feed patties and syrup to build up so to be OW succesfully ?
> This is my plan for every year . Make nucs fron unproductive and other OW nucs and swap them in spring in big production hive boxes to make honey with them and repeat the proces . For this year i should have
> 30 PH , 70 4+4FN , 20 mating nucs if possible and for 2016 50 PH , 200 4+4FN , 80 MN ( like MP has ) .
> Would be it realistic a plan like this ? .


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## crocodilu911 (Apr 17, 2015)

another thing you could do is, use the bees you make this year, next year for a honey crop, and then split them good again. one of my friend does that. his main honey crop is also rape, so he does that and then splits the hives and sets them out in hay fields, that way yhey build up for next year. he send them to the almonds, get s payd on that , then sells those ones over in california, and does it all over again. minimum work, and he is always fishing and hunting. 



Cristian said:


> In my case a hive with two 10 frame boxes full of bees at 1 March should take supers at 1 April . I don't have all the frames in the second brood box , just 6-8 fames because I don't have enough bees in the bxes to fill them so i pull out fames in fall so the bees will cover all the frames that remain in the upper box .
> I don't have a clue about how fast they will build up in late winter or early spring . I hope that a nuc that have 8 frames ( 4 down and 4 up ) could build up until 15 April on two boxes and then to take suppers . In spring I give them from 1 February protein patties ( 10 patties / 1 pund each ) and then i come with syrup and soia flour until first flow is starting . I will se hw they will build up in this spring .


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## Cristian (Jul 28, 2014)

Man ...this was like a book for me . Nice to have so many details . 

Radu : 

To resume my conditions . 

Flows :

Canola/Rape - from 20 April - 15 May 
Black locust - from 25 May - 5 June 
Tillia/alfalfa - from 20 June - 10 July 
Sunflower - 15 July - 15 August 

The honey average production per years if it would be 40 kg I will be pleased ( excluding nucs or other things ) .

The flows can give nectar to bees or could not , being compromised by the weather and other factors , so nothing here is sure ...just the espenditure it is . 

Now I have 25 production hives . I want to buy 50 nucs ( 2F of honey and 5F of brood ) between 15 June and 1 July . 
From those 50 buyed 7F nucs I hope to make another 20 ( 2F brood and bees , 1F of honey , 1F comb , 2F of shaken bees , mated queen and then foundation or comb depending on what I will have ) so this 70 nucs will stay in a configuration like 4F + 4F drom which I wabt to take bes and honey ( 3 nucs from a OW nuc and 10-20 kg of honey ) .


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## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

I just wonder is it more expensive to buy the 50 nucs or
to make your own nucs from the 25 production hives and don't
harvest the honey this season. Save all the honey for your nuc
making expansion. Depending on the flow an early nuc can produce some good honey too. 
Over here there is a Fall flow so the nucs I made in the summer time will collect the honey to go into the winter. 
Not sure if there is a Fall flow for you.


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## Cristian (Jul 28, 2014)

Yes , it is more expensive to buy the nucs than making my own . 
Here the price of a 7F nuc is 55 $ . The price of a production hive is 90-110 $ ( double deep brood box ) . My honey price is 3-3,5 $ / kg ( 1,6 $ / lbs ) if I sell it in large quantity like I do now . The average production for a priduction colony is 35-40 kg . 

This season hope to have going to winter 70 ( 8F nucs ) , 25-30 production hives ( double deep brood box ),
20 mating nucs like MP have and having through the season 30 ( 3F nucs ) that will stay 3/box and use them when requeening a hive or having problems in apiary but if this isn't happen they will be supered to make honey ( how much will be i don't now ) . 
If this year will be a succesfull the next year all the nucs that will be used to make help increasing the number of the production hive will be made in 6F nuc boxes ( 3 of this nucs will be sticked toghether ) and be supered all the three with common supers ) and in next spring shoved in big 10F boxes and complete with drawn frames . 

My goal with the 8F ( 4F + 4F ) nucs is to support my apiary increase ( brood , bees , queens and some honey to support theyr cost ) , with the 12F ( 6F + 6F ) nucs will be to make from them next year a production hive by transfering in big boxes in spring but from them if it will be maked on time ( before the black locust blooms ) like 1-15 May with a cell and 2F of brood , one empty and one with food plus some shaken bees ( 2F ) this will be making honey at Sunflower or even at alfalfa plus wintering stores and drawed frames for they needs . 

From 15 August there is no more flow , sometimes from 1 August . 
To resume my goal is to have the 8F nucs to make other nucs and harvesting brood and bees for my need , to make 12F nucs to make some honey in late summer and to be a production hive next spring an d to make honey with the production hives . About mating nucs that will be tricky this year because I don't have any drawn or brood frames for the and the 3F nucs will stay as cover when bad things happen ( small problems cause if I need a 8F nucs I will use that ) .

Here the first clesing flight is from 1-15 February and the first flow after 2,5-3 month's but the spring really comes from 1-15 March ( pollen is coming from outside in decent quantity ) but after 1 April start blooming the orchards and the nectar and pollen from them help bees to build up for the first major flow . This sometimes is not happening if the weather is not cooperating .

If anybody have ideas about my apiary gowth in my conditions is helping me .


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