Keith Fletcher on Queen Castles for Making Nucs

This is the beginning of my ninth year keeping bees.  There's always something new to learn.  The highlight of the GBA conference this weekend was listening to Keith Fletcher, Master Beekeeper from Alabama, talk about his splits and queens.

Keith began in a lovely way, sharing with us his library of favorite bee books.  Many I did not know, but I will be looking for them:
R.O.B. Manley:  Honey Farming
Michael Palmer's book - I think Living with Bees (not available on Amazon)
Vince Cook: Queen Rearing
Vernon Vickery:  The Honey Bee  (also not available on Amazon)

He obviously loves the bees and a visit to his Facebook page told me that he is into chickens and other back to the farm approaches.

First he went over the basics:
Why make splits?

• To increase your hive numbers
• To have a "spare parts" hive (like we did at Chastain last summer and probably will this one as well)
• To discourage swarming
• To raise queens
• To build fresh comb

The easiest way to split is to take the queen and frames to go with her.  The original hive will not swarm and will go to work requeening.

He had an adorable set of frames he had made to demonstrate what he puts in the nuc box when he makes a split:

He discussed removing the original queen on a frame from a strong hive and putting her in a queen castle, as I mentioned above.  You could also take a frame of swarm cells and do the same thing.  This would not be as effective in swarm prevention as removing the frame with the queen on it since she would have left with a swarm. 

The queen castle is a box designed to hold several 2 frame nucs - with different entrances for each (one on each side of the box).  This way you can have several nucs developing in the box at the same time. He uses a "queen castle" from Brushy Mountain to make his nuc starts.  This reminded me of Billy Davis' "quiet box" and I was so excited about the idea.  So I came home and discovered to my great pleasure that Brushy Mountain makes a "queen castle" for medium frames - Whooo Hoooo! 

I ordered it this morning and will be so happy when it arrives.  I always have such great expectations of me as a beekeeper as spring approaches but maybe this will indeed be the year!  And thank you, Keith, for a new inspiration.

I have about five - six hives that will survive the winter.  One is in my backyard and was enthusiastically flying today.  There is one hive at Sebastian's that we have to move if it survives but I'm not betting on that.  There are two hives at Stonehurst Place and two at Tom's house.  

In addition to the hopeful/possible survivors, I have ordered four nucs from Buster's Bees (two medium and two in deeps).  I am buying a medium nuc from Mountain Sweet Honey, and Jarrett's Apiary is giving me a nuc so I can try out their bees.  These six hives will need homes.

I will put one of Buster's hives at Morningside garden and possibly keep a nuc up there to be a source of "spare parts."  I'm going to put two of these hives in my backyard where right now I only have one live hive.  I'll put the other hive at Chastain and then I have one hive without a resting place, but surely I will find one!  My friend Tracy has mentioned he wants me to put a hive in his yard and he doesn't live too far from me, so maybe that will be its destination.

Suppliers of Spring Bees

Since a lot of you readers are nearby, I thought I'd share some of the suppliers  that we recommend to the participants in our short course this Saturday:

Buster’s Bees

Buster Lane

3910 Champagne Dr.  Jonesboro, GA 30236

bustersbees@yahoo.com  

www.bustersbees.com

770-389-0721

Honey Pond Farm  

Jennifer Berry

www.honeypondfarm.com

jennifer@honeypondfarm.com

706-247-2575

5 frame nucs

Jarrett Apiaries
Slade Jarrett
1903 Hwy 198
Baldwin, GA 30511
706-677-2854
www.jarrettbees.com
Jarrett@jarrettbees.com
still has nucs available

Jerry Wallace

826 Courtenay Dr. NE, Atlanta, GA 30306

JerWallace77@gmail.com

 404-402-9308 

will have 50 nucs to sell

Mountain Sweet Honey Company

Ray and Julie Civitts

Toccoa, GA

706-886-1322

ray@mountainsweethoney.com

has 150 nucs available 3^rd week of April

http://mountainsweethoney.com/

Rossman Apiaries, Inc.

P O Box 909  
Moultrie, GA 31777-0909

www.gabees.com/pkg_bees.htm

rossmanbees@windstream.net  

229-985-7200

There are a few others but they have very limited resources or already have a waiting list.

Billy Davis' Quiet Box

Billy Davis respects his bees, his "critters," as he calls them.  I learn so much from him every time I hear him speak.  The first time I heard him was at EAS in Boone, NC.  From him I learned about the reason to use hive drapes and have used them ever since.  We employ hive drapes in our inspections at Chastain Conservancy and the bees are so much calmer.  We light the smoker and rarely use it.

 Billy Davis spoke to the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers last night about his nuc sustainability program in Round Hill, Virginia. Billy said that a beginner can learn more from raising bees in a nuc than any other way.  He said something like, "Anyone can find a queen in a five frame nuc!"  He also emphasized the importance of taking notes and said people in his apiary have to prove they can take notes before they can manipulate any hives.

Billy has been keeping bees since he was a kid - over 50 years.  He stressed the importance of having a mentor as well as the importance of using nucs.  He does not like the idea of buying a commercial nuc but rather creating a nuc from your own splits.  A nuc is

• a great learning tool, 
• a generator of drawn comb, 
• a generator of honey, 
• a source of brood queens.  
• Splitting colonies into nucs is a way to increase your apiary.  
• Nucs are also a way to practice swarm control.  If you take the queen and enough bees to support her, the colony thinks they have swarmed and you have stopped the swarm.

Billy's approach is that we need to help the bees survive by promoting hygienic queens and raising local queens.  He has an extensive program in Virginia in which he runs nucs and raises queens.  He went through his methods for the nuc program in explicit detail, more complicated than I can repeat here, but essentially he is making nucs over and over; overwintering the nucs; culling out queens who are not certifiable breeder queens.  And then he does it all over again.

He railed against artificial insemination and said that it had ruined many aspects of farming - breeding cattle, breeding hogs, breeding all kinds of animals.  He thinks the bees should raise their own queens.  He selects for hygienic queens by systematically killing capped larvae and seeing if the bees remove it within 24 hours.  If so, he uses that queen as a breeder.  As a result he does no varroa treatment and said the most number of mites he has seen this year is THREE.

He is a wood-working guy (in his non-bee life, he works at Home Depot) and makes his own equipment so that he can keep these nucs on a common base.  He has entrances on opposite sides and faces his nucs so that the prevailing winds are not blowing toward the entrance.  You might notice that he uses all medium equipment - no deeps or shallows for him.

He keeps a robber screen and an entrance reducer on every hive.  I was interested in his robber screen - not complicated like mine, but rather a simple screened wire, looks like #8 hardware cloth or maybe a little smaller.  He says it needs to extend 4 inches on either side of the entry to be effective.  He simply staple-guns it to the hive body and the landing.  It's folded into a squared edged to create a tunnel to the entry hole.  Boy, I plan to do this on every hive after my terrible robbery at two different great hives last year.

We have used hive drapes at Chastain Conservancy since I heard him speak about them at EAS.  Now I'd like to try the other item he uses during an inspection: his "Quiet Box."  The Quiet Box is the green box in the photo below.

Billy said that anyone in his apiary who took out a frame and leaned it against the hive would be in big trouble with him.   In our inspections, we typically use a frame rack that may or may not be under the hive drape.  It is his contention (and he's obviously right) that being out in the sun like that is very disturbing to the bees.  

I often find a clump of bees on the outside wall of the hive box when I remove the frame from the rack to return it to the hive.  They left the frame and crowd together on the hive box, probably trying to get into protected space where it isn't very light.

Instead of this disruption, Billy uses a quiet box - the green box in the photo.  It is equipped with a built-in hive drape.  He puts the first frame removed from the hive into this box where there are a couple of other frames.  If the frame is alone in the box, he might also put in the frame on which he finds the queen.  These frames remain in the "Quiet Box" until he is finished with his inspection and then he returns them.

If he chooses not to return them to the hive, with those two frames, he has the beginning of a nuc.  He just needs to add frames of honey and pollen, capped brood and bees.

We could easily take an empty nuc box to our inspections at Chastain (and at my private hives) and use that as the "Quiet Box."  I am anxious to try this and see how we do with it.  Our first inspection there is on the 23rd, so I'll let you know how it works for us.

Billy feeds all of his bees sugar syrup all the time.  He says that they will quit taking the syrup when there is nectar available.  He uses the rapid feeder from Bee Works in Canada that I also use.

He likes this feeder because it is inside the hive and because the bees are protected from drowning when using it.

Billy employes nematodes to control the SHB.  He says the first year you need to do three applications (Julia and I only did one the year we did the nematodes) and thereafter you need to do two applications.  I need to get back in touch with SE Insectaries and order some more to do that again.

At the end of this wonderful talk, Billy was surrounded by members of the Metro Atlanta Club who wanted to ask him questions and thank him for all the information.  I went up afterward to thank him personally and had such a lovely surprise.  He looked at me and said, "I'm so glad you came.  I was hoping you would be here.  I do go to visit your web site sometime, you know!"  I was bowled over and honored - who knew that he even knew who I was?