Brood Factories, Michael Palmer - a NY Bee Wellness webinar
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 ก.ค. 2024
- @NYBeeWellness;
0:00, Start;
0:06, Brood Factories;
8:49, Strengthening Cell Builders;
10:45,Begin making nucleus colonies;
41:44, Requeening with push-in cages;
46:53, What about varroa?;
48:54, Feeding for winter;
57:38, Summation;
1:00:56, Questions;
1:17:22,Randy's question;
1:20:35, end;
"In 1998, when I first attempted to begin wintering nucleus colonies, my main concern…from where do I get the bees and brood? That first year was easy. I had an apiary of thirteen colonies that needed to be moved. In July I broke down those colonies into forty nucleus colonies, buying in the necessary queens from a California breeder. All forty nuclei came through our Vermont winter. Was I convinced? Absolutely.
Then came the second year. What was I to do? I could harvest brood and bees from my stronger production colonies, as I had always done before when making early season splits. That path forward meant removing all the full supers, harvesting a few frames of brood and bees, and replacing those heavy supers back on the hives. Ugh, more lifting than I wanted to do. I decided, rather than lifting all that weight, I would just sacrifice my non-productive colonies, and use the bees and brood they had.
While this technique served my purpose for a few years, it meant sacrificing production colonies. Some years, I didn’t have enough non-productive production colonies and was forced to harvest the necessary resources from my honey producers.
When wintering nuclei, there are always some that have wintered poorly and aren’t available for use or sales. For the first few years, I allowed these to build up until mid-summer, sacrificing them at that point for help in creating my nucleus colonies for another year. This created other issues. Remember these were little colonies that had problems. An abundance of chalkbrood slowed some down and made their brood unusable. Some had such poor queens that they never did build up much of a brood nest. All this reduced the number of nuclei I could take into the winter. Then came one of those eureka moments. Why not keep some of my best overwintered nucleus colonies and use them as my source for brood and bees.
In 2011 I did just that, and this new technique changed my apiary management forever. That year, I held back fifty nucleus colonies for use in this new project. First, I harvested bees and brood from them to set up thirty-five queen cell producing colonies. Each received two combs of honey and seven combs of emerging brood. Once I had the queens available…the queen cells had been installed in mating nuclei…I was able to create 330 nucleus colonies. What a game changer. All these nuclei and queens were created from the resources of other nucleus colonies, maintained solely for this purpose. Hence, the term "Brood Factory".
Today, some ten years later, I have more than a hundred of these “Brood Factories”. They have become the foundation of my sustainable apiary just as the wintering nucleus colonies have become the building blocks. My presentation will highlight setup, use, and management of brood factories."
Mike's presentations just get better and better.
this is so good, was listening to older Palmer speak with a lot of ecco sound, and then i found this new. Perfect. thank you
Smart man
Great summary, you really helped clarify the complete process. Thank you
So much wisdom in here!
A wonderful presentation! Thanks so much. Very easy to understand, even for me. Hope this can help me with my requeening.
Thank you master for sharing. I am going to try this in June. I have a nice linden flow coming up.
I am using follower boards next to the outside frame in my double nuc colonies and have no issues with "bur comb" and it spares me a little more room when I need to pull frames out of a box.
This is cool .I've been trying to find out how to get the brood numbers up early in the year for pollinating early .
Good