Let The Bees Enjoy The Honey

(Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/...rc_Georges_Brassens_@_Paris_(28822194695).jpg)


I am not in favour of destroying beehives that are seen in gardens. How much honey can anyone get from those beehives that the bees build.
Honey is an industry and those that manage that industry keep bees on a large scale. They have artificial beehives and those hives can be used many times over. Even individuals can have these hives. For more on this you can visit this link

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-02-...collect-honey-without-disturbing-hive/6222728

 

My neighbor gets 5 gal buckets out of the few he has

 

I'm not sure that I understand this post. Natural bee hives aren't in gardens. They are in hollow trees or in the walls of old buildings and such. A regular bee hive that a bee keeper uses is used over and over and the last thing that a bee keeper wants is to destroy a hive of bees.

Inside those boxes you have "frames" that are made to help the bees make their honey comb in neat orderly rows. Generally the bigger box on bottom is where the baby bees are made then the upper boxes become honey "warehouses. When you come to "rob" the hives you pull the tops off the upper boxes and the frames are pulled out. You take them to your extractor and using a hot knife you slice the tops and bottoms off the wax combs. The frames are then put in an extractor that spins and slings the honey out of the comb leaving the comb mostly intact. You can then return the frames to the hive making it easy for the bees to repair them and refill. The honey and wax from when you opened the ends of the comb are returned to the area of the hives and the bees will recover and reuse the honey and wax.

Every year when the hive gets big enough a new queen will be hatched and you can split the hive and put the old queen in the new box. Most, about 60% or more, of her workers will come to her leaving the old hive for the new queen to start all over. The hives will generally have a "queen keeper" door way that is too small for a queen to exit. That way you don't lose your hive when they split and swarm naturally. A full time keeper makes their own queens then divides the hive into two boxes. The old queen goes into a new box with half her workers while the new queen is left in the old hive with half the workers. The box is barred so those workers won't leave in search of their own queen. The new queen is safely installed in a "candy cage" so that the old worker bees won't kill her as an intruder. By the time they get her out of the cage she smalls right and they accept her.

While you are robbing the hives you are also cleaning them up and repairing them. Strangely the bees seem to understand this and as long as you are doing it right the bees are not all that disturbed. Mostly they are busy gathering back in the used wax and honey. I can see where that sort of self harvesting hive would be nice for a novice beekeeper with just a couple of hives but it wouldn't be all that great for a commercial business.

Robbing the bees keeps them busy and prevents them from trying to swarm as often. A bee keeper often has hundreds of hives that he moves several times a year. They get paid to put their hives in a field then when the bloom is done they gather the hives and move north to the next fields following spring north. By robbing the hives at each move the bees are motivated to work hard at the next field to refill the combs. Orchards and farms are very dependent on these bees to fertilize and set the fruit in their trees and plants. They can't keep that many bees there full time because there isn't enough blooms to feed that many hives all year. When winter comes the keeper goes home where he will feed the bees through the winter so they will be healthy and ready to go next spring.

The honey while very valuable is only the smallest part of what they do. Understand that all the fruit that you eat is there because of a bee that pollinated the plant as it went from one bloom to the next carrying the pollen from plant to plant. This is plant SEX and without the bees most fruit trees wouldn't be very fruitful. Before the Europeans came to America there were no honey bees here and at first a lot of their plants wouldn't work here.Indians soon started seeing the new little bugs and called them white man flies.

I'm a country boy and while we didn't keep bees as a business we did always have several hives for their honey and to make our gardens and fruit trees yield heavy sets.

 

A few years ago I was weeding a flower garden and disturbed an underground
nest of yellow jackets.
Bad news!
I ran for the house but took 49 stings at least.
That's how many welts my g-friend counted. No doubt some welts were
more than one sting.
Should have gone to the e.r. but toughed it out.
I was plenty sick for 3 days.
Later my doc told me I could now be hypersensitive and one more sting
could result in a bad reaction.
I don't know and don't want to find out.
A lady friend I knew was drinking a cola and swallowed a bee that stung her
several times on the way down.
ewwwwwwwwwww
Her throat swelled but she recovered o.k.
I didn't care for her that much anyway.
Turned out she was a lazy bum looking for a roost.
She didn't get one.
Had another like that and booted 'em both out.
The one I'm with now has a bigger home than I do and a house on the
water in Florida.
And makes more money than I do.
Not that those things are important.
This one is 75 and STILL works at her home based self made business.
I never said I was stupid.
Jaguar in the garage, house in Florida, 24 foot inboard in the driveway...........

I don't come cheap!
She doesn't mind my guns, archery, hunting, and has a 3 acre bass lake
behind her house.
I take real good care of this one.
" I gotta girl,
she's quite a girl,
I couldn't ask for more..........
she's deaf and dumb and over sexed and
OWNS A LIQUOR STORE!"

 

So I'm impressed with things.
Material things.
It just happens this one is a keeper way beyond her "things".
Loyal, understanding, accepting, treats my children, grand kids, like
her own.
A keeper.
I guess this comes from being DIRT poor as a kid.
My first "basket ball" was a pigs bladder blown up
and dried in the sun.
Poor.
I was 8 years old before I knew "honky boy" wasn't my name.
Raised in "da hood" don'cha'know.
Guess that's why I excelled at everything I did that I wanted to do.
When I was a cop and didn't make much money I worked every off duty
police job I could.
I often worked as a cop and TWO part time jobs.
Got disabled at 48, did 9 months in rehab, went to college, at 53
graduated with 2 degrees then retired again from General Motors.
Lazy or stupid I ain't.
It's all good.

 

If they were in the ground they were more likely hornets but that is about the same thing. I like bees and also have a bunch of trained guard red wasps that protect my property from other meaner type wasps but hornets and yellow jackets are just EVIL!!! You friend that swallowed the bug that stung her several times didn't swallow a bee. They sting once and are done. Their stinger is like a harpoon and once it is in they can't pull it out. What they do is rip themselves apart and die but the muscles that pump the velum in stay on the stinger and keep pumping. What your Doc told you is very true. I had an uncle that happened to and the next time he got nailed several years later he went into anaphylactic shock and nearly died when his throat swelled up and cut off his air. After that he always carried and epi-pen. You might check that out.

 

Ya know carrying an epi-pen is probably a darned good idea.
If I am now hypersensitive an epi-pen is cheap survival insurance.
My home is at least 15 minutes from an e.r. by ambulance.
More if I figure the time for the meat wagon to get to me then transport.

Just checked & price is outrageous.
$206.55 for two.

 

They are doing like all American Companies do now and just sticking it to you for all they can get. They used to be dirt cheap but they all got together and jacked the price up. Now it is a fancy automatic thing that does exactly what the old epinephrine in a hypodermic did for 10 times as much. If my throat is swelling closed I think that I could stab a regular hypodermic in my leg just fine for 10 bucks a pop. Nonetheless though if you ever needed one they are priceless...depending on what you value a life as I guess. Plan B is a friend doing a quick tracheotomy and sticking a pipe in your throat. Before epi-pens that was what we were taught to do. Now days most younger people don't carry a knife like older folks do. I'm not dressed if I don't have at least one knife on me. That has been part of me getting dressed for more than 50 years. Between epileptic and family members with wasp allergies and snakes all over the place that I liked to mess with I learned a lot of odd medical crud when I was real young. Without an epi-pen you might not make 15 minutes. When you can't breathe most people are gone or worse in about 7 minutes. I'd rather be dead than brain damaged and left with the mind of a stupid child. I have a friend like that.

I had another friend that got that level of allergic to poison oak and ivy. He was fighting a fire and evidently that place was almost nothing but poison ivy. It put him in the hospital and like you they were worried that even a normal exposure might do him in. They put him on some sort of allergy program because he made his living fighting fires and couldn't do it if he couldn't go out on brush fires. Let me tell you he looked like a lobster when he was in the hospital. It was like he had taken a bath in a liquid pure essence of poison ivy. It had even gotten in his respiratory system.

One of my daughters has a strong reaction to wasp stings. Now at that level but she swells up. To tell the truth wasps and bee stings don't bother me past that couple of second when they are nailing you. In order to minimize the problem I started training or rather breeding red wasps years ago to live around me and protect my property from other wasps. I basically will go up to and touch any wasp or nest that I see on my property. If they are aggressive they DIE. I go back out that night and burn the nest. If they are calm and friendly I protect them and let them raise a lot of little friendly wasps. It takes about 5 years but now I can walk up to a nest of MY wasps and put my finger on their nest and t hey will just walk up my arm not bothered a bit by my presence. They don't react to people at all and I make sure that the kids don't mess with them. If one gets in my house I catch him and take him back outside in my hand. Red Wasp, like honey bees are not naturally as aggressive as Hornets or yellow jackets but they are territorial and will keep other wasps away. When I used to rob hives I didn't ever wear anything special. Just a tight T shirt, rubber bands on the ankles of my pants and a stocking hat to keep them out of my hair and ears. I seldom got stung and when I did it was because one got trapped in some way and panicked. Bees like wasps can be bred for gentleness. Ours were the blond Italian bees and they are generally nicer than the darker Spanish bees much less the so called killer bees.

 

My grandfather kept bees and they didn't bother him at all.
He didn't disturb them either.
The bee's got the bee hive home and gramps got the honey.
Symbiotic relationship.
If I get a couple bee hives, and I want too, I'd be carrying an epi just in case.

 

I have no idea where this thread is going or what it's about apart from beekeeping. I am actually a beekeeper and having read all the replies to date I think that all the comments so far are great, very well informed but comming at a complex subject from so many angles that I still don't see where the whole thread is going. Are members for keeping bees in hives or against? Are they for collecting honey or not...... The subject is much bigger and more complicated than can be discussed in this way even though Texdanm's description of a moveable frame hive is absolutely perfect.
If you want to learn about keeping bees the best way is to find a mentor locally to teach you hands on.

Btw; I don't rob my bees as such, I always leave at least one super of honey for them to over winter but I still get plenty for myself.

 

Most people don't know much about bees or bee keeping. Like anything that you don't know anything about you end up with a lot of misinformation and a lot of people don't understand the value of bees outside of their honey production. This thread has mostly ended up as an informational thread. If you read the initial post you can see that this is someone that didn't understand that robing a bee hive does not destroy the hive at all. So from there we have just discussed in a rather low level the art of bee keeping. I have had several close friends that were big time bee keepers with hundreds of hives and my family always had two or three hives for our gardens and the honey so I have a little bit of limited experience. We left a lot of honey during the winter and also sometimes fed them if the winter was especially tough.

There is no real point; we are mostly just chatting.

 

I get very pedantic about bees, even though there are no absolute right or wrong beekeeping methods. I guess that is what makes it such a huge and complicated subject.
The most successful hive that I've ever seen lived in a friends porch and he just used to cut away a little honeycomb whenever he needed it. Who am I to say what is right or wrong when it's the bees that are doing the work....
I accept that I take away some of the stores but never so much that I need to feed them sugar. You can really taste the difference in honey from bees that are fed sugar and those that collect nectar and I prefer selling top end produce at a premium.

 

Again, it's a complicated subject because of the variety of pollinators, the degree of their specialisation to plant species and their geographic spread. Since I live in an area where there is no arable farming at all my bees are not subject to neonicatinoid poisoning.
Many Developing nations are in the same position, beekeeping in Africa is a growth industry, same in South America. The specific British native species are however already becoming extinct.

 

I like bees BUT was raised with a farm-boy point of view. Domestic bees are like any other livestock and are used and harvested for the benefit of the farm and farmer. I feed the chickens and rabbits and also killed and ate them. The same was true of the cattle and the hog and any other livestock. You rob the bees and they produce more. In that production they are also pollinating more blooms.

Making food and stuff to feed people isn't always a pretty thing. Dairies don't waste milk on unwanted calves. Baby roosters are not long for the world and bull calves don't stay bulls for long. The bees like all the other livestock are NOT pets. You keep an emotional distance from things that you are going to kill or rob. People have gotten too far from the roots of their meals these days and don't grasp the reality that is kept out of their sight.

I went to a place in Florida that sells honey. They would give you a tiny little spoon and let you sample all the different flavors of honey. It was amazing the difference in the taste of the honey made from different flows.