Australian Bee-Vacuum / Bee Hoover made from Bunnings Vacuum - How To

Taking a hoover you buy from bunnings and turning it into your Bee-Vacuum, here is how:

We bought this hoover here from bunnings to have a play and see how we could turn it into a bee vac as easy as possible. The following steps will show you our design and how we got there:

Ozito 1250W 12L Stainless Wet And Dry Vacuum - Bunnings Australia

FROM THIS:

TO THIS:

Not that this looks flash, but it seems to work

1. Remove the bottom plastic piece of the hoover and mark the middle of the vacuum, to prepare to drill the whole into it.

 

2: Close / cover the whole drilled with metallic mosquito wire and glue it as flat as you can.
Use temporary aid such as gaffa tape to secure it in place, and liquid nails from bunnings does a great job and drying fairly fast.

 

3.Close up all ports of the vacuum's outside. This is not to prevent bees escaping the bee vacuum, rather to avoid anything crawling into the vacuum while you are working around the bees or not having vacuum in use for a while in a shed full of bees. This step is not necessarily mandatory, but i thought it probably be wise to close it off. 

4.Get yourself a 30 litre bucket and drill a whole centered in the middle. Use the aluminum hoover bucket to guide you to get the proper alignment.

Same deal here again, drill the whole and stick a bit of metal flyscreen or mosquito netting underneath the lid. use liquid nails or similar and keep in place with sticky tape!

Sticky tape solutions! love them!!

 

 

5. Next, drill a whole for the suction hose into the bucket and improve the structural integrity of the hose.Take what ever piece fits the bill and glue it as a support of the hose conector.

   

6.Now drill a few 2-3mm holes into the bucket in a small area, which is used to optimize suction and air flow. In case you experience your vacuum is sucking to hard, killing the bees expose more holes, if you need to increase suction, cover those holes with a sticky tape / cloth tape

7.Softening the landing area. This part ensures bees don't hit the hard bucket edge. This is still a bit experimental, so come back for updates to see if we modified this bit at a later date. Basically, get yourself a sponge, and either leave it in its plastic rapping or enclose the sponge in plastic, to avoid having bees get stuck on the surface. you literally just want them to have a softer landing in the bucket, that's all.

 

 

8. Now putting it all together, close the bucket, place the aluminium hoover bucket on top.
Ensure you close off the hoover suction hole with the custom made plug and strap the hoover down onto the bucket with the elastic hooks. Probably get new ones, as my old ones on those pictures are about to disintegrate into dust.

 

10. Please ensure that during operation you keep the suction hole blocked with the white custom made plug to allow the suction to happen via the bucket and being able to hose up the bees into the bucket. Open and close the little drilled holes by opening up or closing / covering the suction holes in the plastic bucket with the tape until the optimal airflow has been achieved.

11. Once you are done sucking up all the bees, switch off the hoover and quickly relocate the plug from the hoover down to the bucket to avoid any escape-bees!

Then seal and transport the bucket and relocate them to your desired location.

 

Happy Swarm season!

The joys of statistics: DPIRD Beekeeping statistics of Western Australia. Our head count, and in which suburb most beekeepers are operating.

Lets have a look at the exiting topic of statistics and registered beekeepers in Western Australia.

Lets start with the total registrations of beekeepers since 2005. The line remains fairly flat until into 2012 where there had been quite a significant growth and increase in yearly registrations. Keep in mind what you are looking at are the yearly additions to the already registered beekeepers.

When we look at the totals building up the graph looks a bit like this:

At the time of this writing (20.4.2023), there had been a total of 4877 registered beekeepers according to DPIRD in April 2023 in Perth Western Australia.

When we have a look at within which suburbs those beekeepers are based we can see the following:

When you further examine the top 25 zip codes out of above list then the following crystalizes below, indicating which zip code in WA holds most beekeepers.




ZIP CODE Registrations WA-6056 92 Midland area WA-6285 86 Margaret River Area WA-6230 86 Bunbury Area WA-6330 82 Albany Area WA-6333 81 Denmark Area WA-6111 81 Kelmscott, Roleystone, Camillo, Perth WA-6210 80 Mandurah Area WA-6084 80 Bullsbrook, Lower Chittering, Chittering, Avon Valley WA-6530 79 Geralton WA-6164 74 Success, Cockburn Central, Jandakot WA-6112 73 Armadale, Harrisdale WA-6069 69 Ellenbrook, Aveley, The Vines WA-6258 59 Manjimup WA-6450 56 Esperance WA-6163 54 Bibra Lake, Spearwood, Hamilton Hill WA-6055 54 Guildford WA-6239 52 Donnybrook WA-6233 50 Australind WA-6018 50 Karrinyup WA-6020 48 Sorrento WA-6065 47 Wanneroo WA-6083 46 Gidgegannup WA-6027 46 Joondalup WA-6010 46 Claremont

Now lets focus on when as in which month of the year beekeepers tend to sign up and register themselfs with DPIRD as there seems to be a recuring wave pattern visible:

And as it turns out, April seems to be the low point of all new beekeeper registrations followed by August when things start to kick off again for the year and then peaking into spring and summer followed by a drop of going into March again.

We will probably update this blog entry over the coming years every so often to reflect the updates since last posting, as its kind of interesting on what is happening in this space.

Happy number crunching and analysing!

How to easily keep track of your bees using Hive Brick Codes

Bee hive records using bricks - hive brick code cheat sheet

There are multiple reasons for you to keep track of what is happening within your bee hives, some just simply like to track things and have measurable information to later look up and compare.

Others may need to keep records for regulatory reasons such as when operating as a commercial beekeeper and shifting bees from site to site. As always in beekeeping there are 100 different ways to tackle on how you keep your records on your bees. Some people have a sensational memory, however most people probably probably struggle to recall what they had seen a few weeks or month ago, especially when you are dealing with a few hundred hives and different sites. Others may use Apps using their phones and tablets, but we find it that a sticky situation!

 

We utilize 2 different documentation systems. One system is applied to production sized colonies, while NUCs or Nucleus colonies / starter bee hives have additional more granular information recorded, and are a bit more fragile to deal with and need more details recorded.

For our more stationary production hives we had adopted using bricks to document and record the bee hive status.

 

Our life cycle start with an empty or dead out colony. The next step is the unknown status, this happens if we have not found clear indication of a laying queen or another expected result, and can be used to mark a hive that needs attention within a weeks time. This can happen after the mating setting had been set, and after 14 days we still do not see eggs, however the bees had started creating the circle and show indications of a virgin/mated queen present. In some cases its necessary to insert a queen cell, or we simply come across self raised queen cells which have their own tag / code. Assuming all goes well the queen turns into a laying queen and all is happy and well. Especially on approaching autumn and winter you may want to document how well fed your girls honey stores and or if they need supplementary beefing up and are low on feed.

In other cases you may experience the odd laying worker or drone layer. In some cases, especially when raising NUCs / starter hives you also may need to mark hives which need queen, to allow you to track and count how many queens to bring to the site. Other hive records / brick codes could include that the hive needs another super box on top during the next coming inspection round for example.

At present we have not adopted painting the individual brick sides with different colors, such as used when marking the age of the queen. The tricky thing with our code is we only have 4 sides of the brick and the queen age documentation would require a fifth side, of which we are obviously lacking a side, or would have to decide not to raise queen in a certain year, not a very practical idea. You could however mark other informations using colors such as:

- Age of your queen
- Queen genetic line
- Hive used as breeder queen
- Hive used as graft starter hive
- Hive used as graft finisher colony
- Hive strength in regards on how many frames are used.
- Hive is unfriendly / aggressive in temper (do your fellow friends a favor and let them know)
- Hive needs a feed
- How much honey the hive produced
- MORE TO COME

Its really up to your own imagination to come up with what you need to have documented. 

In our case we use the bricks locally for decentralized hive records, while once done with the work, we use pen and paper to record the hive numbers and brick codes using site specific templates to gain centralized information about the apiary.

What can end up happening is, that the information about your operational status and hive strength ends up in your crews minds who have attended those particular sites. Assuming you have multiple crew members working at different sites, no one ends up having a full picture of what actually is happening within your beekeeping organization, unless you keep the centralized copies of the local brick status. The bricks allows for fast assessments of how much work is required onsite, and can help with resource planning.

It only takes a few minutes to walk past your hives at the end of the day and update your templates. Assuming you can come up with a marking system which can be easily scanned and automatically updates your spreadsheet / database then you could even further automate your apiary records.

As said there is multiple ways to skin a banana. Some people prefer notepads they keep with them at all times, others prefer their phone and tablet Apps to record their hive information, we however found phones and tablets a sticky situation in the field and have stayed away from them. Also, if the battery is out, your out, and if you happen to have left your charger at home, then it can involve a fair drive to go and pick it up in down under Australia.