Ok I'll kick it off.

Simo · **Posted:** Mon Mar 11, 2013 11:31 am

Peasants wrote:

We have recently bought a hive kit from Guilfoyles, and currently putting it together. Italian bees are on order.....we are looking forward to adding bees to the menagerie!!

How did the bee keeping go Peasents?

What sort of hives do Guilfoyles sell, don't suppose they sell the Warre hive do they?

Burnsy - Which if any bee keeping forums do you recommend?

Does any one know if you can buy Warre hives in WA?

A you might have guessed I think Bees is going to be my next hobby

Still learning for the moment, just read Warre's book and i like the way it lends itself to natural bee keeping and low maintinance beekeeping but there is still time for you beekeepers to convince me other wise.

Burnsy · **Posted:** Mon Mar 11, 2013 5:09 pm

Mate I started with a topbar hive and playing around on one of the alternative beekeeping forums. After a while I realised the regular hives are better for harvesting and can still be done similar to topbars with no foundation. I now use WSP sized hives from Guilfoils with no foundation (the full size hives are to heavy when full). I just cut the full comb out of the frames and crush and strain it. As my father and I only have three hives between us this works fine and means we don't need an expensive extractor. Whe I get time I will be moving my topbar colony into a WSP box.

I have not been on the forums since I started out and just used them to do a bit of reading about swarm collection as I did not want to buy nucleus hives. If you start with a swarm you can get a hive up and running for less than $50. I got my smoker and a jacket from ebay and just wear overalls with the jacket. Dad bought three or four nucleus hives and lost them all. My advice, buy a couple of boxes and frames from guilfoils, make up a base and top and put an advert in gumtree from Sept onwards saying you will collect hanging swarms (from trees) at no cost. I collected three this year and seem to have got one hive out of them, the others shot through. Dad has been doing a bit of reading and is currently looking into the possibility of splitting our strongest hive when the season is right.

We bought a 20 litre bucket and tap setup from guilfoils for the last harvest for ease but prior to that I had been crushing and straining my honey using kitchen gear. That harvest which was one full WSP box netted 15 kilos of honey.

This is the forum, lots of good info on alternate beekeeping there
http://www.biobees.com/index.php

Simo · **Posted:** Mon Mar 11, 2013 5:32 pm

Thanks for the info mate might just go for the smaller bought hive then.

Out of interest how do you harvest the honey from a horizontal top bar like your original one?

From what I can gather the bees would put honey at the top of each comb and brood at the bottom so to harvest you would be destroying some of the brood, is this how it works or do the central combs end up with just honey after the brood has hatched and you expand outwards?

Burnsy · **Posted:** Mon Mar 11, 2013 5:46 pm

You are correct and this is why I am moving away from it. Although it is nice to have the alternative hive at the end of the day I want honey and to harvest you have to sacrifice brood which I don't like to do.

I am pretty sure you can manage standard hives using Warre system and from what I have read this can help with reducing swarming. The WSP hives are pretty similar in size to the Warre. I have a heap of woodworking gear and worked out I could not make the boxes cheaper than I could buy them flatpacked from guilfoyes. I buy everything dismantled and put it together myself. I did put a 1 inch strip of wax in the top groove to ensure they started building nice and straight with the combs but more recently I have not worried about it. Especially if I already have full frames each side of an empty one.

To date it seems when you have strong colony you can pretty much manage it how you like. I occasionally split my brood box out into the uppers so that when they hatch they get filled with honey and I can harvest the frame. This apparently helps with reducing swarming as it puts new empty frames into the brood box for them to build on and refill.

Burnsy · **Posted:** Mon Mar 11, 2013 5:49 pm

I also put a queen excluder in a month or so before I plan to harvest (you just need to make sure the queen is below it) and use a clearance board I made placed a day before harvest between the box I am going to harvest and the rest. Harvesting is much easier when there are only a dozen bees in the box instead of a few thousand.

Simo · **Posted:** Mon Mar 11, 2013 8:10 pm

Thanks once again for sharing your experiences :thumb:

Looks like I might be making a trip to Guilfoyles soon then.

Peasants · **Posted:** Mon Mar 11, 2013 9:33 pm

Hi Simo, the bees are doing well and we have learnt heaps. Like Burnsy it is good value to buy the flat packs from Guilfoyles- we bought the ten frame standard super they sell. We figured we would harvest a frame or two at a time rather than a whole super so the weight wouldn't be an issue. Like Burnsy we also bought the 20 litre bucket with tap set up, and will just drain the honey from one frame at a time. The bees are capping the frames in the super, so shouldn't be long before we can harvest.
Unlike Burnsy though we do use wax foundation, but it is still early days for our bee experience!
Can highly recommend it, it is certainly fascinating.
Guilfoyles are great too with their advice, but they often sell out of their products quickly so plan ahead!

rmcpb · **Posted:** Mon Mar 18, 2013 4:11 pm

Odd you were having trouble with too much brood in your honey frames. In my long hives the brood nest is up the end near the entrance and the frames further away are all honey. I move them through by inserting a new frame near the entrance and move them along like that . To help prevent swarming I break up the brood during the swarm season by inserting new frames direct and make sure there are empty honey frames at the end. I never harvest the brood frames but take a frme or two every now and then when I want it from the back of the hive.

Cheers
Rob.

Burnsy · **Posted:** Tue Mar 19, 2013 12:17 am

rmcpb wrote:

Odd you were having trouble with too much brood in your honey frames. In my long hives the brood nest is up the end near the entrance and the frames further away are all honey. I move them through by inserting a new frame near the entrance and move them along like that . To help prevent swarming I break up the brood during the swarm season by inserting new frames direct and make sure there are empty honey frames at the end. I never harvest the brood frames but take a frme or two every now and then when I want it from the back of the hive.

Cheers
Rob.

Rob, welcome aboard, good to have another topbar beekeeper to share experiences with.

I am by no means an expert and in the most part my experience has been fairly similar with the majority of brood confined to around 5 frames at one end. However I am yet to get a full frame with no brood at all in it and I don't like harvesting any brood. Maybe I just have a wandering queen?

I have just come to the conclusion that using natural techniques such as no foundation and crush and strain within a standard langstroth type hive is easier for us to manage and harvest than our topbar. This is especially the case when I can use a clearance board before harvesting as I have developed more severe reactions to stings than I started with and minimising bee disturbance works to help reduce my chance of further stings.

rmcpb · **Posted:** Tue Mar 19, 2013 9:45 am

Maybe some queens do like to wander, mine may just be a lazy lot and stay pretty much on half a dozen frames. Even the langs in the bush seem to keep a tight broodnest. I spend more time splitting it up to stop swarming in the warm weather than anything else.

We run langs in the bee yards out in the bush because we can just leave them for a while without much attention but in my backyard we have long hives with frames. Much the same management as a TBH but a bit more support which we found useful in the hotter months. Other than that its natural methods and no foundation for us.

Working well :thumb:

so far.

Cheers
Rob.

Lord Viykor · **Posted:** Sat Apr 13, 2013 8:44 pm

My bees have been busy, since I got my first hive about 18 months ago I've taken 115kg of honey from it. My second hive was set up from a captured swarm last August and I just took 22kg from it.

Peasants · **Posted:** Mon Apr 15, 2013 9:40 am

That is great! I must try weighing our next frame......

rmcpb · **Posted:** Thu May 02, 2013 3:22 pm

Bit late to do it but we finally got to remove some honey from the bush hives in the past couple of weeks. Took about 60 litres out of four hives which leaves them with the bottom brood box and one super of honey for the winter.

Burnsy · **Posted:** Thu May 02, 2013 6:37 pm

Nice quiet bees you must have there Rob. Mine would smash my hands if I robbed then sans gloves.

Peasants · **Posted:** Thu May 02, 2013 7:13 pm

Looks good!
We have been wondering what to do for winter- we have a brood box and two supers- not sure whether to reduce it to one super or in Perth's mild winters is it ok to just leave it all? I read that there should be at least eight frames of honey to sustain them over winter, and we would easily have that.

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