I was telling my friend that i was going to get into bee keeping. He told me that an older man had put several hives on his farm, but that this man had died, and the hives had been unattended for several years. He went on to say that he saw a swarm of bees that were buzzing around the old hive boxes last year. So he and I went over the the old hives and checked them out. There are 10 hives total, all of them consisting of 2 deeps with an inner and out cover. The boxes are in poor shape and are starting to rot as the bottoms are separating in the seams. The first 9 boxes were empty but the frames seemed to be in good shape in most cases. The last hive had bees in it. It was very cold on this day, and when we took the inner cover off, I saw a ball of bees. They weren't agressive at all. I put the cover back on and returned a day later. The weather was much nicer and the bees were very active. I feed the bees some sugar water and have continued to feed them approximately every 5 days.
My question is what would you guys do with these bees? I feel like I should move the bees out of the rotten hive bodies, into a new box. I'm wondering if I should split the hive and if I should wait until the weather straightens out up here as it is still freezing a night. Give me some ideas, let me know.
Thank You Leechmann
A man who finds a silver coin and stoops to pick it up is richer than the man who won't bend his back.
I would start buying or making enough equipment to house all the hives in and them begin reclamating them.
Yes, you should soon start trying to move to new equipment. It may be a challenge with rotten frames, they probably have everything glued togather really bad.
Because you may not be able to remove frames anymore, I might suggest actually getting them into just one of the old boxes, and then put a new box on top, and then when the queen moves up into the new box then get an excluder on so that all of the brood hatches out of the bottom box and you can remove it at that point.
But if you can move the frames without ripping the combs apart, then that would be the best and disregard the previous paragraph and just move them if they need it.
As far as splitting them...depends on their strength. If they are strong and you can move the frames, go for it.
Rick
Well I did it. I went and opened up the hive.. I found a couple of frames of honey left. I also noticed the bees were staying in one corner of the hive, kind of concentrated on three frams in the corner. I separated the frames and placed them in the new deep box. I was very excited when I found the queen, she looked healthy and was moving about. I didn't notice any eggs or larve, but I have to say I was more concerned to get them into the new box. I then feed them a pro patti and some sugar water. I'll have to check in a few days to see if she started laying eggs. Maybe its to early for her to lay eggs, like I said, it's still freezing at night here. I moved the new hive back to my house. Now I just sit and watch my new bees.
Can't go wrong with free. :-D
Nice find.
...JP