# Bees every year?



## beeware10 (Jul 25, 2010)

no Its not that bad. there are many soft chemicals today to help control mites. If you start out treatment free it is much harder. get some experence before trying it. follow good books and join a local club if possible. hang around some experenced beekeeper is your best education. good luck


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## twgreen3 (Aug 22, 2008)

Well I hope that after getting enough strong hives I will be self sustaining by making my own splits. I think the average loss is 30% with some as high as 50%. If I loose half my hive but can split the other halft then I shoudn't have to buy any. I know this is an ideal situation but that is my theory. Either way I don't think it is all that bad.


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## David LaFerney (Jan 14, 2009)

It's like any other livestock - sometimes they die. If you have enough stock you can raise some more - before you really need them if you don't want to miss out on a season of production. 

If you only want to keep one or two hives there is a bigger chance that you will have to buy more bees if anything happens. When it happens.


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## spunky (Nov 14, 2006)

Start with a local nuc ; that way you get some drawn comb and bees aclimated to your area. Try and build it up and split it with a queen from another race/strain of bees than the orginal nuc. I wish I had done that 6 yrs ago when I started out . Not having any good ,chemical free drawn comb puts new beeks at a big disadvantage


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## Bsweet (Apr 9, 2010)

Not that hard at all but not so simple that a caveman could do it. As was said bees are like livestock and sometimes they die no matter what you do. Weather and managment play a huge deal keeping bees alive. Some keepers are trying new things to see what works for them and as a new keeper EVERYTHING is new and when something dosn't work you end up with empty bee boxs. When you have empty boxes you have a choice, split what you have to fill those boxes or get more bees. And then there are those of us that are hooked and just have to have more:ws: Jim


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## Vance G (Jan 6, 2011)

That is a sound observation and people who make a choice and say they are going to go "treatment free" and or "let nature take its course" are excellent customers for packages and nucs usually every other year. That is how long it takes the mites to kill most of the untreated bees. That said, you do not need to use the so called hard treatments. There are lots of different plans and methods to allow you to keep the bees without blindly buying every chemical advertized. But you definately have to make a plan and do what is called integrated pest management that uses a number of practices that are all designed to make life shorter for the mites or more agressive treatments with naturally occuring chemicals that require more training and knowledge. But you CAN"T just do nothing. Would you say to the neighbor, "I thought my horse had plenty to eat but it starved." There are too many easy ways to know if your bees need fed. OR treated.


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## indypartridge (Nov 18, 2004)

beeware10 said:


> no Its not that bad. ... follow good books and join a local club if possible. hang around some experenced beekeeper is your best education. good luck


Keeping bees is harder than having a dog or cat, but far more addicting. Joining a club and tapping into the experience of other beekeepers is a great way to avoid many of the pitfalls. The West Central club is probably the closest to you:
http://www.in.gov/dnr/entomolo/files/ep-beekeeper_assoc.pdf

Also, the State Beekeeping association has a beginner's class in a couple weeks in Anderson:
http://www.hoosierbuzz.com/

And, since you're in Lafayette, pencil June 23rd on your calendar. The State Association will be meeting at the Purdue bee yards for their summer meeting. That's always a fun meeting.


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## psfred (Jul 16, 2011)

I know several people who started beekeeping in the last few years and have given up due to loss of bees every year. I have an advantage for mose people because my Grandpa keep bees for 40 something years, and my mother helped him quite a bit, and hence I'm more aware than most people that keeping bees is somewhat more than putting a colony in a hive and waiting for honey to appear.

I've heard too many stories of "they don't look too good, I'll wait and see what happens" and they die, of course -- just like every other form of livestock bees require care and feeding to do well in the totally artificial environment we "keep" them in. Funny that every beekeeping book I've looked at harps on the need to feed them and inspect them and what to look for, and still many people say "I'll just let them live naturally". Naturally the vast majority of new hives from swarms die, just like unmanaged hives!

As to the number of hives to start with, I suggest at least two. I started with one, and my brother has maintained one for a few years at a friends and then moved them home, and has had trouble getting a second hive started. I suspect that was due to entrance feeding a subsequent robbing out combined with two terrible years for beekeeping (no rain from early June to November, for instance).

Last year I got involved with my brother's hives, and discovered that he had lost his queen, as I suspect he did the year before, in a new package. Not sure why, as mine was doing fine from the same shipment, but with the queen gone his hive was heading downhill pretty fast. His established hive was in the process of superceding (or swarming, hard to tell when we looked) and so we had the opportunity to take a frame of brood with a queen cell on it and put it in the new hive. A few days later, the cell was opened and a couple weeks later eggs appeared, and the hive did OK. I think we may have moved another frame of brood and eggs in there during that time as well, to keep the number of bees up. 

Without another hive handy, it's likely he would have lost that hive, even with a purchased queen due to loss of foragers. It's not that much more work to have two hives, and you have exactly half the chance of loosing all your hives when something goes wrong.

Peter


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## Stormrider51 (Sep 1, 2011)

There's not a lot I can add to what the others have said except to offer reassurance. I started with a somewhat stressed colony that had not been given much attention due to the beekeeper being in poor health and finally dying. I got them during one of the worse summers on record here in central Texas. We brought them home at midnight and the temperatures were still in the mid-90s. I had to start feeding from Day 1. And yet these girls did well. In fact, they did well enough that I was able to split the colony last week. I have the advantage of living in an area that almost never sees snow. Heck, we have hardly had any winter at all. I'm sure beekeepers "up North" do lose more bees than I have. But even then they don't have to replace bees every year. It all depends on the condition of the colony and how much food they have stored when cold weather hits. Here's another couple of thoughts from one beginner to another.

When you do a hive inspection, look at individual bees not the mass of bees on a frame. In the beginning I had the tendency to go "Wow, that's a lot of bees and they are all moving around and doing things so they must be okay". By focusing on individual bees you can see things like mites attached to them. Count the number of mites you see on a frame. This will tell you when it's time to treat. Look into cells and try to see eggs and larvae. What percentage of honey frames are filled and capped? Learn to see, not just look. It took me a while to learn this.

When I started I couldn't wait to do inspections. I'd count the days and do an inspection every week. Sometimes more often than that to be honest. After all, they were fascinating and I wanted to be sure they were okay. The truth was that the too-frequent smokings and inspections weren't doing them any favors. I was using a hive top feeder and did need to check to see if it needed refilling but that required nothing more than removing the top cover for a few seconds. It didn't take long to learn that the feeder needed replenishment about every seven days. Doing a refill only took about 3 minutes and there was no need for smoke. I finally fell into a rhythm of doing a hive check every second time I refilled the feeder. This meant a check every two weeks. I removed the feeder in early December when the girls had almost stopped taking syrup. They had eight of ten frames in the upper deep filled and seemed to be doing fine. I didn't open the hive again until last week. The hive was literally brimming with bees.

Take care and have fun. One of the best moves I made was taking a beginning beekeeping course from Round Rock Honey. It was money well spent because I've been able to ask question ever since when I wasn't sure about something.

Storm


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## Rusty67 (Mar 9, 2010)

I think it is more difficult to keep bees than a lot of beginners think it will be. But it is doable. With good management you can go years without buying bees again, but sometimes nature conspires against you (or so it seems) and you end up buying some packages. Don't worry about it at this point, but continue to read and build a management plan that fits you.


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## jadell (Jun 19, 2011)

indypartridge said:


> Keeping bees is harder than having a dog or cat, but far more addicting.


My three dogs are way harder than bees. They get fed twice a day, the waterer gets filled every day, and they need to be worked every day. The bees don't require nearly all that attention! Just sayin'...


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

Odd that half the newbies are worried about ending up with too many hives and the other half are worried that they all die. Partly you need to think in terms of the natural ebb and flow of population and swarming. You can't expect to replace your own losses if you never overwinter more hives than you need. Some will die. If you only have one hive and it dies, you have to start over. If you overwinter four and two of them die, you still have bees. If you overwinter four and all four survive, you can always combine right as the flow starts and get more honey and less hives. The point is to try to have more than you want and adjust back as you need rather than barely enough and then you have no resources to recover. Bee colonies reproduce. If you don't use that to your advantage you will be buying packages often.

As to the feeding issue. I am amazed how many people think it's natural to let them starve and call it survival of the fittest. Bees starving is very seldom their fault. They are natural hoarders and will stock as much food as they can find away for hard times. Then we steal their hoarded food and the fall flow fails and we expect them to survive on nothing? Or we do a split and they have nothing and there is a drought. What are they supposed to build a colony with? Now I am all for managing them in a way that minimized the need to feed them, but if you are going to refuse to feed your bees, you will lose them, probably sooner, rather than later.


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## Daniel Y (Sep 12, 2011)

I think that part of the doomed to failure appearance of this group is just that, an appearance. The problems and stories of failure etc tend to get consolidated here. So the problems appear magnified. Keeping bees is not as simple as putting a swarm in a hive and walking away. But it is doable. Bad things can and will happen but I don't think it is a situation of guaranteed failure.


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## Saltybee (Feb 9, 2012)

You are already half way to success. You are here and you are thinking about the right and wrong way to do bees. If you can make it to a club, do it. If you can't, find a hive and just walk up to the keeper. Most will have an opinion or ten and are happy to share. Good ones have heavy hives and someone to lift is always welcome. Double your experience with another's hive.

I hate to say it but even my failures have been fun.


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## Mike Gillmore (Feb 25, 2006)

Lots of good advice here. Bees are very tough creatures and can withstand quite a bit of abuse from mother nature and beekeepers, and still survive. I don't have scientific data to back this up, but I would guess that a very high percentage of the hive losses you are reading about can be traced back to Varroa Mites. 

They are often underestimated and can absolutely decimate an otherwise healthy colony of bees and take them down rather quickly. I would suggest that you make it a priority to read up on Varroa Mites and have an IPM program ready to go on day 1. It doesn't necessarily have to be a chemical treatment, but have a proven program in mind that fits into your schedule. We beekeepers can fumble around in the boxes and sometimes set the bees back making mistakes while going through the learning curve, but as I said, they are tough and can deal with it. But let the mites get out of control, and they are toast.


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## Vance G (Jan 6, 2011)

Only as an example. When I was a beginner, I had read everything available which in the mid seventies was a lot less than now. I started out with a dozen colonies because I had a plan to make a living raising bees. It was in a period of brutal winters and the scientists almost universally said we were heading into an ice age:<} That is a real hoot isn't it. I struggled to winter bees but learned how. I bought 25 packages that came from Louisiana half of most dead in the mail and ran 35 the second year. I bought 100 nucs and ran 125 the third year. I wintered well finally And split my survivors and with the 50 nucs I had coming made it to 250 and the next year made it to a few over 300 by splitting, as many as I could run with a full time job. I did this when Jimmy Carter had arranged for me to pay 16 1/2% interest on ag money. I was waiting to finish another year of military service and then was heading south to go to a thousand! I would have borrowed money to do it and I would have done it just as the varroa mite wiped out most of the young guys starting at the same time in my northern ND location. It may have been just as well that life made me sell out. Now 27 years later I bought six and have 12 wintering well. No, the bees can keep a hard school, but I know you don't have to buy bees every year. That said, it is definately easier to recover from losses, the more colonies you have.


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## rweakley (Jul 2, 2004)

I am approaching year 10 0f having bees and I haven't bought bees since probably year 2. I split and I go and get the occasional swarm, but you don't have to buy new bees every year. I am foundationless and only treat with OA every couple years (pretty much if I see dWV). I also never requeen, I leave that up to the bees. I don't buy queens very often, but if I do I'll put them in a queenless split so I get to keep both genetic lines, what I had and the new stuff. 99 times out of 100 (not that I have than many hives) if I lose a hive it is in the Fall and I choose to lose it by combining. I use double deeps, normally anything above that is mine and anything in the deeps is their's to keep (I have been known to steal a frame or 2 out of top deep, but no more than that). I lost bees in the begining because I messed with them too much, everytime you go into a hive (pulling frames) there is a possiblity of rolling or smashing the queen, no matter how careful you are. So I will pop the lid more than a full inspection these days. More times than not, if I pull frames as soon as I see eggs I am done. I learned quickly that having multiple hives was better, because then I could spread my curiousity among many hives and not just popping into one hive 3 times a day. LOL


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## Buzzsaw2012 (Feb 1, 2012)

Very interesting read , keep going .
It is giving me hope !!

Lee


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## David LaFerney (Jan 14, 2009)

Rod - I think you've discovered the secret sauce (one flavor of it anyway) - good nutrition, low stress, pragmatic use of the safest effective treatment when needed. Not a gimmick in sight.


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## Solomon Parker (Dec 21, 2002)

rweakley said:


> More times than not, if I pull frames as soon as I see eggs I am done. I learned quickly that having multiple hives was better, because then I could spread my curiousity among many hives and not just popping into one hive 3 times a day.


You certainly have something there. Many a newbee could gain some wisdom.


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## geebob (Apr 4, 2011)

Crazy8,

Lots of great advice so far. I don't have much to add, but maybe this will help.

Look on your first year's bees as your test subjects. There is a pretty good chance that they won't survive until next year, so this is your chance to learn all you can about bees from them. Want to practice finding the queen? Do it. Want to switch frames from one hive to another? Do it.

Will you kill bees? Yes, gobs of them. You'll smash them between boxes, knock them into syrup, burn them with your smoker, and invent all kinds of different ways to do them in.

Try your best to keep them alive, but realize that your first year is going to be full of mistakes. Don't let the fear of mistakes keep you from learning.

Best of luck,
JeffG


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