Beekeeping Activities - Test Videos

Starting the smoker.

Beekeeping maintenance activity.

Top Bar Beehive Maintenance - Cleaning the Area

This is a typical sight when we arrive at the apiary for our routine maintenance visit. This TBH is occupied by our 6th colony. Leaves are all over the place.

This is the environment after the cleaning. No more leaves underneath the TBH and also on the roof.

Close up photo of the TBH underneath. No ants ;)

Water container to prevent ants are also in good shape.

How to install a TBH?

Step 1

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Choose a spot where you can easily clean and shady. Look out for the presence of those ants. Clean the spot as shown in the photo below.

Step 2

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Place your TBH nicely.

Step 3

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Install the water container to prevent ants climbing the legs. Install the roof to ensure the TBH is kept dry from the rain.

That's it.

This was 1 of 2 TBH we installed last week 19/2/2012. How to catch new colony soon.

Top Bar Beehive Maintenance

This is the refurbished TBH. I managed to clean and chase away the ants.

I also added the legs to make it easier to install and maintain in the near future.

I hope I can bring it to the apiary the soonest and redeploy it.

Top Bar Beehive Maintenance

TBH is not maintenance free. We need to look after them. Example, a TBH being occupied by ants needs to be cleaned up. One of the extreme cases, we need to refurbish the TBH.

This is one example.

This TBH was cleaned and relocated recently. Unfortunately, upon our visit on 11/2/2012, it is occupied by ants again :(

I too the opportunity to refurbish the TBH. I need to clean it from the ants and also fix the legs for this TBH. Previously, we use a "table top" to place the TBH. I hope I can squeeze a bit of time this coming days and reinstall it next weekend.

Installing new Top Bar Beehive

One of our targets this year is to build more TBH to catch more swamp. Simple maths, the more TBH we have, the more chances we will catch the swamps.

I have been trying to find time to build more TBH. Over the weekends, I managed to build 2 new TBH. We were able to install them on 11/2/2012.

These are the new TBH. The spots where I placed them were once occupied by older TBH. I probably will relocate them soon should we are unable to catch any swamp.

The red water containers are filled with water. This is to prevent ants from climbing up the legs and occupy the TBH. Not an efficient way to prevent ants but better than using any chemical to poison the ants.
The roof is necessary to ensure the TBH is covered from the rain. A dry TBH increase the chance to catch the swamp. We once lost a new colony because we failed to put the roof after the occupied an empty TBH. From then on, we ensure we have the roof for all installed TBH.

Building a Top Bar Beehive

It is not that difficult to build a TBH. I normally used scrapped and used woods to build it.

I need about 1 hour to finish building a TBH including the legs. I sometime build a table top instead of the legs for the TBH.

You should go ahead and try to build one. You may have difficulties in the beginning. Once you have built 1, the rest will be easier.

Remember, there is no right or wrong in building a TBH. Just follow the standard design that you download from the Internet.

You may have to adjust the measurement but do not take this as a barrier to build your tbh.

Cheers.

How to handle ants attack in beekeeping.

Ants are invading our TBH and causing problems. Empty TBH will not be occupied once ants are in these TBH. Ants are nuisance in occupied TBH.

We spent a lot of time cleaning up our TBH to ensure they are free from ants.

We used various techniques to remove these ants. Most of the time we used the smoker and smoked them out.

We also used water container and put water around the legs of the TBH.

We tried to avoid using chemical to fight this ants. We have found ants poison and we have no choice to try it soon. We only spray the poison on the legs of the TBH. Hope this will turn out ok.

Haniz cleaning up the Langstroth using his smoker.

An abandon TBH because of ants attack. Need to refurbish this TBH soon.

Cheers.

A visit to a bee farm.

One of the things we want to do with this beekeeping activities is to show the kids these bees up close and personal. We want them to understand that these bees are harmless and to teach them a bit of how to handle the lovely insects.

We also want them to learn that honey is good for their health and it tastes great. The visit will also give them the opportunity to see the honey while it is taken fresh from the honeycombs.

This is a story about a friend who has had hands on experience with the benefits of the honey. I gave them a bit of honey sometime in September last year. He has a 12 years old daughter who has a history of asthma problems. He started giving the daughter the honey hoping that the asthma problem will be relieved. And it did.

Since the honey was too little, he went out and bought another bottle of honey. Unfortunately, the daughter did not like the purchased honey and insisted her father to get more from us.

During the new year holiday, I was preparing to go to the farm and received a call from this friend. He told me about the daughter and wanted to get more honey from our farm. We always welcome our friends to join the activities. And so, he came with his wife and their 10 years old son.

As usual, we will show them the bees inside the TBH. We also encourage them to come near the box to prove to them that these bees are harmless.

These are the bees from our 8th colony. The colony was captured in September 2011. We can clearly see a new honeycomb (white color) and several honeycombs with broods. Unfortunately, there was not much of honey inside this colony.

We continued to open and investigate other TBH and found one with some honey. This is the 5th colony captured. I think we captured this colony sometime in Q1 2011. We proceed to clean up the TBH and harvest some honey. Our friend got what he came for :).

The joy of tasting fresh honey for the first time.

A brave boy holding honeycomb and the bees. And he was wearing short sleeve shirt!!

Fresh honey from the farm. Hope all will be good.

Cheers.

How to handle honeybees?

Thank you for visiting this blog. We hope you are in cheerful mode to digest what we have to offer in this post.

For some strange reason we, normally, are afraid of the bees. We are worried that they will swarm and sting us. We are worried about the pain and some even go to the extent that the bees are able to kill us. Probably this is true but so far I have not encountered such fatal accident in the area where I live, at least.

This blog is not about all these horrified stories. We aim to educate you guys that bees are harmful and can be handled easily with proper tools and technique.

An expert came to our apiary last year and gave us crashed course about beekeeping and how to handle the bees. Lesster runs a beekeeping training centre in Uganda. He hailed from Singapore and has been living in Uganday since 2001 training people there about beekeeping. You can checkout his website http://ugandahoney.wordpress.com. We are also featured in one of his postings.

Lesster did not wear any protective clothing while handling the bees! Look at this photo.

Lesster handling Apis Ceranas with bare hands and exposed face.

What’s the secret?

I can tell you that Lesster did not use any magic concoction! He has the technique and tool on how to go about doing this.

Rule number 1: move slowly when you are near the bees or a hive. The bees will ignore you if you move slowly around or near them. A sudden or wild movement will trigger them to “investigate” you. These investigators are the “guard bees”. They will determine whether to attck or to ignore you, the intruder.

Rule number 2: use smoke to pacify them. Smoke indicates there is a fire around the area. It is in their DNA that upon getting signal of fire, they will suck the honey and get ready to fly off. They collected their prized assets in case they have to fly off somewhere else and have to build new hives.

Once they have sucked enough honey, they will be full and they will calm down. They will not fly away since the hive is not really on fire. Combined with slow movement and them being calm down, we can now start opening the beehive and look at them closely. We can not only start our inspection but also we can harvest the honey.

Beekeeping equipment: Smoker

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Lesster was showing us how to start the smoker correctly. We used dry leaves and rotten woods found abundantly in the apiary.

Lesster was looking at another colony of bees. This was new then, our 6th colony. The visit was in September 2010.

We hope you guys got the picture already. Bees are not harmful. We can handle them easily with proper technique and tools.

I am still a newbie. I would rather have my protective clothing on when I handle the bees on the apiary.

Have a great day folks.

Cheers.

First Inspection and Harvest

According to the information on the image, the date of the first harvest was 8th January 2010. In a way, a month after we spotted the top bar beehive (tbh) was occupied, we managed to taste our very own honey.

TBH housing our first colony.

As of today (17/1/2012), the colony is still occupying the tbh.

As this time, we knew nothing about inspection and harvesting. We decided to take a look and see what happen. We do not have proper smoker and only clad in our DIY beekeeping suits!

Yours truly. My niece commented in my FB page that I looked like an astronaut!

Haniz. The beekeeping veil was made by his wife.

We were also without any "smoker". An equipment that allows us to smoke and "calm" the bees. Therefore, we settled to smoke the bees by using the eggs casings. Somehow, it did not catch fire but emitted smoke smoothly for quite a while.

First glimpse of the first colony.

This was the first glimpse of the bees from the TBH. At this time we did not know much about TBH design. Later we were told that the top bars should be about 32mm in width to ensure each bar holds only one honeycomb. In our case, the honeycombs were spread over a few bars. This is what they called "cross combs". It will make inspection and harvest a bit tricky and difficult. Anyway, at this time, both of us were so excited seeing the bees, the honeycombs and also the honey!

Honeycombs and bees.

This was the first real look at the honeycombs. The bees moved away after being smoked and left the honeycombs exposed. You can see un-capped honey and also broods on the bottom part of the honeycombs. Our knowledge at this point of time were ZERO about beekeeping, bees, honeycombs, honey and the whole works! We were just so excited with what were in front of us.

Welcome 2012

Hello everyone, happy new year. I guess it is still not too late to wish happy new year.

I take the opportunity to start blogging about our beekeeping adventure with the coming our our new calendar year 2012.

We hope we can give something to you from our adventure.

Briefly, we started this beekeeping activities way back in August 2010. I started building several beehives and only managed to install the boxes on my friend startfruits orchard in October 2010.

Our first colony occupied the beehive in December 2010!

Our first taste of our very own honey was in February 2011.

And the rest, as they said, is history.

:)