Everyone loves pictures and we do too!
Jason's hive:
We even got an action picture of Jason transferring the NUC into his flow hive.
QuickWings pty ltd is based in Western Australia and focuses on creating quality bee hive / nucleus colonies. This blog will feature key information around beekeeping and documents the path from a backyard beekeeper to a specialized commercial beekeeping enterprise. Come and follow us along. QuickWings offers knowledge and technologies involved in all of topics of Beekeeping while being a distributor of quality NUC/Nucleus colonies in Perth WA.
Feeding bees while feeding ourselves - backyard wickingbeds:
This blog post is not directly a post about bees, rather it is a post about how we can support bees in our own backyards while producing heaps of veggies and feeding ourselves while using the least amount of water to produce crops.
The setup shown features float valves, optical levels, dedicated filling / drainpipes and more, giving you options of hand filling as well as more automated float valve / irrigation-controlled options so you can go on leave without needing to have someone remember to top up the wicking beds for you!
Before we get going in showing you our construction, here is an excellent study about wickenbeds worth pointing out:
Study about wicking materials and water holding and wicking characteristics:
https://www.roogulli.com/wicking-beds
Building our version of wickingbeds step by step:
OK, this is the final product of our wickingbed, and our Paulownia tree coming along nicely as an initial test.
This blog post features an Essay discovered in an old book called the "DER SCHWEIZERISCHE BIENENVATER" given to us, the original copy in German following the English translation and scanned documents.
The essay by Hugo Flury, based on a lecture by Hans-Joachim Rau, explores the historical and medicinal significance of honey. It emphasizes honey's diverse composition, including natural invert sugar and a rich array of minerals, vitamins, and organic acids. The essay highlights honey's potential in diabetes management, its positive effects on heart health, and various traditional applications, ranging from a honey cure to wound treatments and skincare.
While this blog post is not technically directly related to beekeeping we intend to keep it here for "our reference", in our defence however the heating and or cooling out of those experiments and applications may be used to either help cool down or heat up hives in winter and we will ensure to keep you updated on the beekeeping application side for sure too.
This is a post about a few experiments we are running in Gingin Western Australia.
We are generating our own data surrounding the storage of heat in black IBC and other means, in order to potentially utilize the heating and or cooling effect of some of the experiments conducted and or combining some ideas. All data is attached to the blog post, so it can be used for the wider "scientific" audience. It seems its hard to get real life data online these days, hence we are uploading our data freely available here for people to use and study.
The temperature probe we had been using for all experiments is the following found at JayCar: USB Temperature/Humidity Datalogger with LCD | Jaycar Electronics
Sensor being placed in a little bottle, and tied to the stone pulling it to the ground and making it float about half way in the IBC submerged by water.
Temp Data Graph:
The rise and fall of thermal energy within an IBC on a fairly warm day (16.10.2023):
Will this be the holy grail in beekeeping and making it a bit more fire safe?
We have just recently picked up an APISOLIS, and luckily it just came in time. One of our bee sites which we have not visited in some time had quite a bit of growth and we did not have a whipper snipper and rake with us to clear it. It would have been way to dangerous to inspect the bees using a real smoker as the grass was knee high and was as dry hay can be, and the slightest ember dropped on the floor would have started a grass fire for sure. Hence the APISOLIS came just in time to save the day.
We tested the APISOLIS on around 36-40 hives that day, full strength production colonies.
Luckily our hives are not too bad in temper and we can get away using the APISOLIS.
However, we would probably say that most bee hives which have not specifically been bread to be of fairly calm and healthy producers would probably not get away with an APISOLIS and would need a traditional smoker.
When running NUCs / Nucleus Colonies the APSOLIS is a great tool, ready to go right away and sufficient smoke to direct the bees from the frames.
Overseas in colder climates lots of beekeepers use bee houses and or similar structures to house the bees, and for beekeeping within a structure the APISOLIS would be a great fit.
APISOLIS fluid
The fluid has a nice calming fragrance not just for the bees, its also way better to have this in the car with the suit. We're still testing on how many inspections and hives can be inspected by one bottle, however the pricing model is fairly steep and it would be great if APISOLIS could once payed for their investment and development bring down pricing to something reasonable.
We had been playing around with multiple different tweaks and setups, follow us along and see what tends to work best for us.
Toolbox inside painted black:
We had one of the Bunnings tool boxes left over and played around to see if we could easily and passively be able to process burr-comb and other old brown comb without the need for electricity or utilizing gas. Basically doing it on the cheap and letting time do its thing rather than us needing the doing, basically every so often filling up those crates with comb and getting a nearly finished product without much doing. However running the unit with black paint on the inside this did not exactly perform very well in the Perth Western Australian winter going into spring time as we had hoped it may (August-September, early October). Even said the weather was not great, we had hoped to get the box warm enough to sustain the bees wax melting point at around 62-64C Celsius long enough to get it to melt away.
The intent of this blog post is to give you an overview into all sorts of methods on how people tend to handle bees. We have tested most of what we show on the blog, if not we will call it out.
Let us know how you handle your bees, let us know what we are missing!
Traditional smokers:
There is nothing like a traditional bee smoker when it comes to beekeeping! Very reliable and works with all sorts of hive sizes, from tiny swarms, NUCs and even large production colonies or pallets worth of colonies.
Bee-Z-Smoker:
We had tried the Bee-Z-Smoker which operates on batteries and heats up a metal wire, which is intended to smolder wood shavings as smoker fuel. If I remember correctly the battery did not last very long, its powered by rather heavy batteries, unsure if they are lithium or not, but they felt heavy. It does work, a few seconds after pushing both buttons it generates cool smoke. Its not super thick smoke, but plenty to work the bees.
Sugar Water:
In europe many beekeepers rely on spraying the bees with sugar water to enforce them to clean themselves and are taken out of the "action" as such. I'm not sure how one moves bees out the way using sugar water mist as I would imagine that sugar water is mainly used in combination with swarms, but I might be wrong. I myself do not use Sugar Water in our operation.
Essential oils and water misters:
We had just recently tested using essential oils and water mist spray.
Tea trea oil:
Bees seem uncoordinated in defending, still upset but not sitting on your sleeves stinging you to death.
Spearmint oil:
Spearmint had been said to be beneficial while one should stay away from lemon or banana scented essential oils, however we are still waiting for our supply to arrive and will update the blog once tests have been conducted.