Sunday, April 30, 2023

Getting to know our customers - David - Flow Hive

 Flow hive for starters

When we were first contacted by David end of April 2021 and asked to supply a NUC to a new Flow Hive customers, also being new to bees, I had a bad feeling about supplying the bees going right into winter time.


(Quickwings recommend wearing your bee suit for all types of hive manipulations at all times)

David never had bees before, and I had suggested to hold of until spring, but I think David would not want to wait as the bee-fever took him and pushed him ahead as he had spent the last few weeks assembling the hive and flow frames and was eager to push on.
Now, generally people who start out with beekeeping, are often better off when buying bees going into spring or even wait until spring had sprung already for a good portion as the reason for that is, that when beginner mistakes are made its more forgiving and a bad situation can recover itself during spring, not so in winter.

We went out to David's place and discussed the different options on where to place the hive and went through all his required gear and made sure he was equipped with what he needed.

Then came the big day of the delivery and we had installed the 4+1 Frame NUC into his brood box. Winter was just about to get colder, and we had advised David to do a complimentary feeding strategy of 1:1 sugar water to beef up the hives honey store as it was already fairly late in the season.




During the following spring the NUC nicely developed the bottom brood box into 8 full depth frames slowly running out of space and we decided to place the brand new shiny flow hive super on top.

I personally was new to Flow Hives as within QuickWings we do not operate the Flow Supers as such, and this became a reverse learning experience rather for me too than just for David.

As the bottom box was starting to explode, and we added the flow super, we noticed that bees where not attempting to fill the above supers, and started wontering why. In order to troubleshoot we had added 2x standard Full Dept frames smack bang in the middle of the flow super to see if we could draw the bees into the super.
To our surprise they did, and however only concentrated on the traditional frames.
I then had asked David to coat the flow frames with melted bees wax to see if that where to make any difference and to our surprise that was all that was needed and a few weeks later his flow frames started to fill up nicely.

With his flow super being filled at rapid rate, he started harvesting some nice backyard honey and this seems to now bee the recurring theme of him checking his hive and regularly need to drain the "tank" to make room for some more beautiful backyard honey! 

 
 
  


The recent new problem David and his family have discovered is not having enough empty jars to fill in the liquid gold as they seem to strugle with bottling it all. David is soon at the stage where the 5 liter bunnings bucket or 15 liter buckets is a better option of storage by the looks. David and family for sure however don't run out of people enjoying their sweet backyard treat for sure! Also it makes for great presents.


And what started with one of our 4+1 frame Nucleus colonies, developed into quite a thriving backyard producing bee hive. Its quite a big mob being seen on those next set of pictures and David has all the confidence of not being stung while harvesting quite relaxed at the back of it. Even said we would probably recommend suiting up for any hive work regardless, David seems to do just fine as he is, what a credit to our gentle bee genetics that is!


 



David is about to be featured in a Customer Testimonial / Youtube interview, so stay tuned to hear about his story and his bee hive.

Shifting bees the easy way - using red LED lights!

 Using red LED lights to shift bees at night

Bees don't see red light, well that's how the theory generally goes. If bees are close to red light sources, they still may end up in the lights, however they have to be fairly close, meaning less than 1 meter in our experience.

  



We have conducted quite some testing with different lights in order to come up with the right gear to be mounted on cars, trucks and trailers. First we started off with hand held red led light torches as shown on the initial pictures and they work great. However for shifting bigger loads of bees, a little hand torch is not exactly the ideal tool.

During our search for products we found 230V / 50W red LED lights on ebay, some of which last longer, and others just last a few weeks. We are guessing it really depends on the batch number of those lights on how long they may last. If used indoors for sheds and other loading areas, probably put an easy fix in place to replace them easily if the eBay lights fail.

The 3rd set of lights had been ordered from ultra-vision.com.au and come in a 25W and 45W strength, of which we had mounted 25W lights on the sides and two 45W lights facing the rear, making sure we have sufficient light on our trailer surface.
Basically we are using the Prado as the light beacon for loading and offloading the trailer as well as other vehicles in its reach. 

The red lights have heavily assisted our operation and during shifting bee hives at night, helping to avoid us getting massive amounts of stings by picking up things with a pile of bees on them or underneath without seeing them. Also strapping hives seems to be a lot less painful now as we can see every moving bee without them seeing us.

The other big noticeable impact the red lights also have is to avoid damage and injuries, such as tripping over stuff in the dark, or hitting things with cars, trucks, and loaders, while not needing to be worried that bees start flying. They have been working great for us within our operation.


Initial torch we had used, found on ebay:


Those hand torches are handy but for very limited use.
Usually found as "hunting red lights" online.

Product info:



eBay 50W lights:

Range around 11-16$ AUD, some last longer, others just last a few days. We would recommend using them with a mounted power plug, and try to avoid installing them into fixed installations, as they fail to fast and often.




Product info:


!!!! A word of Caution   !!!!

Notice the burn marks on the right pictures below!

Those lights do work, however we found that about 10-20% of those lights tend to blow up quite on first use, so please be careful not to touch it while switching it on for the first time, or probably avoid using them. But the do work, when they work!









New ATOM lights arrived:

We just recently picked up some red ATOM LED flood lights from ultra-vision.com.au, we had added 25W lights to the sides, and have placed 2x 50W lights to the rear of the car, illuminating the trailer and or second trailing vehicle at the back. We will update the the blog shortly on how those new lights have performed.

 











Product info:

However you will have to ask for the RED LED light version of those otherwise you will receive white lights.




Lets look at the test environment / area during sunlight

This should serve as a reference point in regards to distance to hives and trees as the cameras generally have difficulties under red light..

 

Time to check the red LED flood lights now:

Cameras generally don't necessarily work very well at night or with red light hence the pictures are fairly blurred, but I have created a below Youtube video as it shows a better picture of how well one can see.

 
 
 
 


Working with RED LED lights has made quite a difference for us!
Alternatively one could try the "stick-man costume" however I could imagine the bees crawling up to those lights being a bit interSTING, regardless the stick-man is a pretty funky suit and you are probably better off busting a few moves NOT being around your bees!



Stay safe! And good luck shifting your bees!


Trailers and backing into places in dark bush locations under red light:

A recent addition to this post was to found when we had left over paint and decided to brighten up our trailer to make it more visible in the mirrors. Initially thought to help out during day light, however compare on what happens under RED LIGHT! Your olive green or gray trailer backing into position under break lights or typically RED light while working with bees, are very hard to see. The white markings on the other hand even stick out very brightly visible under red light.
Just imagine backing into position in the bush on a dark and or even rainy night, that's when you start appreciating those white markings instantly!

Picture using white light:

 

Picture using red flood lights / work lights:


Notice the white markings on contrary of the olive green paint job of the trailer, on how they stick out under red light, as most other colors using red flood lights usually yield dark colors, barely visible during dark nights while reversing and observing the action through mirrors!

Stay safe and happy beekeeping!


How to avoid wax moth damage - using drone comb as honey supers

 Lets just start with the benefits of using drone comb within your honey supers:


- Drone comb stores more honey per frame!
- No storage requirements, avoid bees getting to them, that's all there is to it really.
- Frames can be extracted at higher speeds and empty way faster!
- Less honey stuck in frames after extracting!
- No pollen is being stored in drone comb frames!
- No pollen stored in drone comb = no wax moth damage of those super frames!
- Bees seem to be very keen to draw out drone comb.

This requires that you avoid getting brood in those frames!

The assumption is that you use a queen excluder to avoid any drones / pupa off being raised within the comb, hence with absence of pollen being stored in drone comb in the honey super and no brood being raised giving the wax moth literally close to no food at all to thrive on. You will still notice minimal wax moth damage, and wax moth will starve to death prior causing significant damage to your frames.


I've never seen a beekeeper appreciate the wax moth's work:

Most beekeepers really seem to have a dislike for wax moth, that is probably a fair statement in "general". Below you can see wax moth damage on a brood frame on a died out colony.


Most beekeepers have issues storing their honey supers over the winter period, just to find them destroyed by wax moth, if no special treatment had been done to them. And by treatment I mean either having frozen the comb for 24h and then sealed up so wax moth can't enter the comb anymore. Alternatively one can cover them in wood ash and or spray them with BT, which I would not recommend, however I have seen applications of this in the past.

The easiest way to store a few frames is to build a bee tight space out in the open with a roof, and hang up your frames out in the draft nicely spaced, which will probably do for most amateur beekeepers, as you most likely only hold a few boxes worth of frames over winter.


 

However when you are semi-commercial or running as large scale commercial beekeeper, storing a few 1000+ frames in a special setup is probably not a viable option due to all the labor involved.
Hence a lot of commercial beekeepers lock up their honey supers in either sea containers or other air tight structures and gas them, essentially killing all wax moth and developing larva, while keeping the frames in the air tight space for a few days, then maintain keeping them locked up, until being re-used again. However, please note that prior entering the air-tight container to air out the enclosed space for at least a few days to ensure it is safe to enter and all gases have cleared out of the space.

Easy potential solution:

We are using drone comb with a cell diameter of 7.2mm. We had to adopt a color code in order to better operationally differentiate between regular 4.9mm worker bee comb (white top bars) and the larger 7.2mm drone comb size (red top bars) in the field.


However if you either don't want to gas all your frames, and or don't want to do all this effort, then I would recommend using drone comb in your honey supers and using queen bee excluders!

Basically you just have to ensure the queen never lays an egg into those drone comb frames and they will never be destroyed by wax moth. Its fairly simple to say, if no bee ever developed in a comb, then the wax moth will rather have a hard time trying to develop. We noticed during Redgum flows, which yield very massive pollen flows, that we never seen a single drone comb cell filled with pollen, not a single time!

Hence the absence of pollen and layers of previous developing bees cause the wax moth larva to starve to death, prior causing any real damage to the drawn drone comb frames.

We now simply just store the boxes in our shed, with no additional effort required once the bees previously cleaned out the supers. And in spring we take them out just as new!


This is how we store our drone comb supers. Absolutely no super storage requirements what so ever. Just pop them in the shed, forget about them for a few month, and take them back out. That's it!


Zero wax moth treatment required!!


I have not read that too often before, someone claiming to have practically no wax moth damage! Below you can see how the frames look like after 2-3 month of being in the shed as stored above. On the left you can see the single frame which had suffered a tiny fraction of wax moth damage, and this frame has been by far the worst of all of them!


Mice however like to find a nice warm and dry spot to set up their camp, so you will have to put up some mouse bait to avoid having rather mouse damage than wax moth damage!

The operational catch to the solution:

There is a catch however, for starters, many beekeepers probably have not adopted this style of management yet. And second, in high numbers of boxes and frames, there is the issue of pulling either capped brood or capped honey frames over the excluders too. As the commercial beekeeper you will always have to bring additional foundations or sticky frames for standard brood size with you to fill up, what ever frame you had to move over the excluder, as you should not place some of the drone combs under your excluder to avoid having millions of drones chomping through your honey, and having your previously clean drone comb "contaminated" by a larva, and therefore now being susceptible to wax moth damage.

As you can see, when you grow in size, this is not perfect, but the benefits can't be ignored too!

Happy beekeeping!