What? I’ve kept bees for years, and this is ridiculous. If you want to make a diy hive that mimics bees natural nests, check out top bar hives. Don’t build them using pallets, which are often treated with insecticides to avoid spreading pests via shipping routes. Only opening your hives to harvest is irresponsible, because in order to care for your bees and avoid spreading diseases to neighboring hives you need to be monitoring for things like varroa mites. This whole article is full of “yikes.”
If you’re interested in keeping bees, search for a local bee guild. They exist all over the place and are usually very welcoming to new folks, with a wealth of actually useful advice and resources.
> Only opening your hives to harvest is irresponsible.
Inspecting brood comb is also required by law in some places. Here in New Zealand you are required at least one inspection per year of all the brood comb, looking for American foul brood.
Disease inspection and treatment is part of good been keeping. Done right it is disruptive but mostly beneficial to the hive.
This is easily proven - feral and unmaintained colonies die, usually within the season.
The guide seems to have been written a while back by someone from Argentina. Is it possible that the concerns you raise here are geography/time dependent? E.g. maybe Argentina doesn't have much of a parasite problem, or that when the guide was written a few decades ago pallets weren't treated with insecticides.
(the author seems to have a following and be somewhat respected otherwise, so I'm curious)
Does anybody know whether and how well top bar hives work for Asiatic honey bee (Apia cerana)? Does it require modifications/adjustments versus a design for Apis mellifera? I live in Hong Kong and have long been pondering setting up a hive.
Do people keep A. cerana in Hong Kong in a domesticated fashion? The impression I had was that they were much less attractive than A. mellifera because their hives are much smaller, they swarm more easily, and they produce less honey. Also, since you can purchase strains of A. mellifera that have been bred for good temperament, I wonder how A. cerana compares in that department.
In Japan, A. mellifera is not viable because susumebachi (sparrow wasps -- insanely huge) invade the hive and they can't protect against it. Local honey costs about $20 a lb here as a result.
They don't necessarily get in. They hang around the entrance. European honey bees try to attack them one by one and there isn't enough poison to take it down. The asiatic honey bee attacks all at once and actually smothers it. All the action happens outside the hive.
I think there are people who keep A. cerana here, as it seems to be the only native, domesticated honey bee species around here. I have seen lots of bee hive boxes on western side of the Kam Shan Country Park, though they are definitely not top-bar.
My understanding is that A. mellifera is not native to South-East Asia. In fact, there's no recorded observation of A. mellifera in Hong Kong on iNaturalist. So I wouldn't want to import them, lest it results in an ecological catastrophe.
"This hive can be armed with the wood that everyone has on hand, such as pallet wood, or pallets, as they are called"
Be very careful should you choose to do this. Some pallets are chemically treated to kill invasive species like pine beetles. This treatment could be toxic to both the bees directly and to you indirectly via the honey.
As someone who has known about Perrone and his hives for a few years and has tried to follow his plans and directions, there is a key piece of information missing from most of his literature. The bees that Perrone has are Africanized and therefore way more aggressive and industrious. For those of us with standard European honey bees, the cavity sizes are just too large.
It would be interesting to see if foundation, the thin hexagonal structure which is used to encourage the bees to build out honeycomb frames in a regular way thereby aiding extraction, could be replaced with a laser printed sheet of paper with the hexagonal structure just printed on it.
What is the minimum viable prompting bees need to build nice regular frames of honeycomb?
Bees don’t need prompting to build regular hexagons, they do that on their own. Pre-drawn frames are useful for getting them to build flat combs, that can be removed and replaced in the hive without damage.
It's pre-printed with a hexagonal pattern to try to control the size of the cells the bees will make. Basically, the bee will grow to roughly the size of the cell it's grown in, and the size of the cell also controls if the queen lays a worker or a drone.
Pre-printed wax cells tend to be larger than those that bees would make on their own, on the theory that larger bees can collect more honey. They are also printed small enough that the queen will lay workers instead of drones in those cells, increasing the worker population, and reducing the drone population.
Both of those practices have been called into question recently, as it appears that the larger cells provide more room for varoa mites, and that allowing your bees to regress to their natural size may increase mite resistance. Note: small cell beekeeping does not replace monitoring your mite levels and treating for mites!
Similarly, it's starting to appear that drones have a more complex role in the hive than previously thought, and that artificially reducing their population might not by ideal.
To add to this - giving them foundation encourages comb the correct size for workers. Let them do their own and you get more drone comb, and more drones.
I already purchase my hives as pieces of wood that I have to assemble, glue/nail together, paint, etc and I know that the measurements for things like the bee space are correct so the bees won't gum it up. Always neat to see these DIY projects, but I feel like pre-cut is about as much as I trust my ability to measure and construct precisely.
Flow hive is a cool idea, but its expensive, and a lot of people bought it because they thought it automated beekeeping whilst in reality the majority of the work in keeping a hive is maintenance, inspections, etc.
I did not own hives myself, but I did help my grandfather maintain his. This flow hive reeks of marketing and bullshit.
I do not see how this would be so much more beneficial to bees, you would still have to perform inspection. Harvesting the honey is, IMO, not that disturbing to bees and replacing wax combs with plastic? Yeesh!
Maybe someone more in the know can comment on this, but this just looks very bad to me.
If you’re interested in keeping bees, search for a local bee guild. They exist all over the place and are usually very welcoming to new folks, with a wealth of actually useful advice and resources.