Legamin
Loving the herd life
GREAT Information! Thanks for weighing in! As a newbie I appreciate the honest and the practical. I have talked to local beekeepers anxious to sell their wares (and bees) that swear to me that they ‘NEVER treat for veroa mite AND have all NATURAL ORGANIC bees, queens and honey!’….and yet the majority of those who say they started out refusing to treat…simply lost ALL of their bees the first Winter and started again….with treatment! The beauty of Oxalic Acid treatment, while it is not a panacea, is that it is ALL NATURAL! Oxalic Acid is found (extracted from) vegetable matter! Most foods grown in your garden contain a safe amount of it! You CAN have ‘Organic Bees & Honey’ while using Oxalic Acid! (Follow FDA guidelines….or not if you actually want to get ahead of the mites).
Recommended dose is 1 gram (I’ve heard 1/4, 1/2, 1 and 2 teaspoons equals 1 gram)…USE A SCALE! However the University of Florida’s bee keeping program, treating over 2000 hives, observed that the most effective dose per treatment was 4 grams…(so if you are a regulated professional…just keep following the regulations….(?) )
I absolutely agree with NOT, NEVER, ABSOLUTELY AVOIDING used wood wares. First it is cheapest and easiest to make your own boxes and frames if you have the tools and time. Bust secondly…DISEASES…nuff said…a well covered subject.
I am looking forward to grafting, marking anew placing my own queens…guess I should wait until I get my bees first?
Most of my neighbor farmers are willing to warn me before they use pesticide and they are willing to use non-vaporous spraying using low level applications (within 6” of the ground) to keep the pesticides from traveling. This isn’t perfect because bees don’t follow the fence line…but I have had some rewarding conversations with my neighbors who are willing to try new things! To my advantage, I live in a fairly poor farming community and with Bidenomics, most local farmers have been inflationed out of buying pesticides or scheduling application this year. They are going to try, at my suggestion, different types of fertilizers that are all organic and less likely to promote disease or the ‘usual suspects’ in pests. One such fertilizer is human waste that is pumped from septic tanks, sun baked and sterilized, cycled through a natural ‘cooling’ process and then ground up to powder and used on the fields in a direct application. It saves them tens of thousands of dollars and has reduced their intended use of pesticides this year to ZERO. But these are alfalfa fields…not almonds or corn or cotton….there are crops that are so resistant to normal methods of killing pests that the only avenue left to these farmers is crazy strong poison…in that case you should negotiate with other farmers to put your bees on their property during the off-flow season…when most pesticides are sprayed.
I wish I knew more. I am desperately gathering info and working with neighbors and other local beekeepers and hoping my bees make it through their first Winter.
WOW! More great info. Can’t say I would ever be tempted to buy someone else’s failed bee program or wood wares. I’ve been learning a lot over the past few months. One of the BIG lessons is that most Newbies (that’s me included) all seem to start out with the idea that a ‘sustainable, organic, all natural, untreated, bee colony will be our salvation from ‘the man’ who sells all these crazy treatment options. Thankfully, what I have ALSO learned at precisely the same time from people who have had ALL of their colonies die and had to go buy new bees, is that there is a lot of hard work and veroa mite treatment that MUST BE DONE if you want to keep bees. So I’m willing to bend to my (not often enough listened to) humble nature and accept that I have to put in the work.
After buying hives I have come to the conclusion that my finish carpentry shop and antique furniture restoration shop can MAKE all of my future hives to the same precise dimensions with all the same features of the ‘professional’ hives…for about 1/6 of the cost. I am going to try out some top bar horizontal hives to see how these work but I’m not abandoning the Langstroth design….there’s probably a reason that they have become the industry standard….
The best I can do for quarantine is a friend’s property about 4 miles away….hoping that’s enough. You just can’t trust ‘anybody’ with your hives so you have to do with what is available. Theft is a HUGE problem since Meth and Fentanyl came on the scene. (My carpentry shop lost $105,000 in tools and materials in one night after a truck and trailer simply pulled in and emptied everything except the sawdust out of the shop) People living in shacks in the forest coming down to the rural community and ransacking anything not nailed down. Security is a booming business out here….as are guns and ammo.
Thanks again for all your wisdom backed with experience. I’m looking forward to getting some (experience) of my own.
Over the years I have never been bothered by bee sting but in the last 6 years I got stung by some Nutcase Crazy Psycho Wasps that have taken up residence on my farm and over the last two years have become VERY allergic to bee and wasp sting. So the advice to buy a GOOD bee suit is great advice! I plan to wear ‘sweats’ underneath to protect from any penetration. I’m okay with hot…it’s the cold I’m not as crazy about. I’ll just keep my epi-pens in the extra pocket that I sewed on!
Well, looky there! I got long-winded!
God Bless!
And i still have to haul about 10 garden-carts full of wood-chips to surpress the grass between the beds…
