Still waiting for my package

[amandrea]

Just how hard will my bees have to work? How much wax will they have to produce? 16 pounds of honey to produce ten drwn frames of wax, 32 pounds of honey to fill two deeps with wax? Another 100 pounds of honey to make it through the winter? That is a lot between now and the first frost. Can it be done?

[Kirk-o]

Well kido you will have to wait and see.The sooner you get them the better,You might have to feed them in the fall to get them what they need to get through the winter.It seems like the bee delivery is getting latter every year.
Kirko

[amandrea]

I figure they will have to do a little over a pound a day.

[pdmattox]

I wouldn't worry, like Kirko said you may have to feed later in the fall if their stores are not enough for winter.

[buzzbee]

My bees last year did more production on the golden rod in autumn than they did all spring and summer!

[amandrea]

There is plenty of golden rod around here but in the few years that I have been looking I've never seen anyone on it. There is a cain type plant with thousands of tiny white blooms growing all along the east side of the creek that is always covered by every type of buzzing insect. After the Army corp of Eng. tore up I made an effort to redistribute the seed.

[Michael Bush]

From Beeswax Production, Harvesting, Processing and Products, Coggshall and Morse pg 41

    "A pound (0.4536 kg.) of beeswax, when made into comb, will hold 22 pounds (10 kg.) of honey. In an unsupported comb the stress on the topmost cells is the greatest; a comb one foot (30 cm.) deep supports 1320 times its own weight in honey."

From Beeswax Production, Harvesting, Processing and Products, Coggshall and Morse pg 35
    "Their degree of efficiency in wax production, that is how many pounds of honey or sugar syrup are required to produce one pound of wax, is not clear. It is difficult to demonstrate this experimentally because so many variables exist."

http://www.bushfarms.com/beesharvest.htm

Yes it's possible.

[buzzbee]

That cane plant could be bamboo or knotweed.Good source in late august through September here if your near a creek or river. Going to utilize it this year myself by moving my hives there!
http://www.ecy.wa.gov/programs/wq/plants/weeds/aqua015.html

[johnnybigfish]

As I noticed stuff about sugar syrup I had to ask...When do I stop feeding it to the bees? I got the bees in April. They have been gathering pollen and sucking down the syrup. My wife says that the sugar syrup can go bad quickly as she used the same mixture in labs to grow bacterias and things like that. I have forests of Mesquite fixing to flower and thought that maybe THATS when I remove the top feeder.
If I can get some info posting here.(Is THIS whats called posting by the way?) I can get a lot of questions answered.Thanks!
your friend
john michonski

[pdmattox]

Welcome  johnnybigfish, Yes you are posting.  As far as when to feed or stop feeding.  You should only feed a package long enough for them to draw comb and have a little band of surplus over the brood area and never feed during a flow or when you have supers on for honey. I read about mesqite being a good honey producer.  Good luck.