Sunday, January 29, 2012

How to handle ants attack in beekeeping.

Ants are invading our TBH and causing problems. Empty TBH will not be occupied once ants are in these TBH. Ants are nuisance in occupied TBH.

We spent a lot of time cleaning up our TBH to ensure they are free from ants.

We used various techniques to remove these ants. Most of the time we used the smoker and smoked them out.

We also used water container and put water around the legs of the TBH.

We tried to avoid using chemical to fight this ants. We have found ants poison and we have no choice to try it soon. We only spray the poison on the legs of the TBH. Hope this will turn out ok.


Haniz cleaning up the Langstroth using his smoker.


An abandon TBH because of ants attack. Need to refurbish this TBH soon.

Cheers.


Friday, January 27, 2012

A visit to a bee farm.

One of the things we want to do with this beekeeping activities is to show the kids these bees up close and personal. We want them to understand that these bees are harmless and to teach them a bit of how to handle the lovely insects.

We also want them to learn that honey is good for their health and it tastes great. The visit will also give them the opportunity to see the honey while it is taken fresh from the honeycombs.

This is a story about a friend who has had hands on experience with the benefits of the honey. I gave them a bit of honey sometime in September last year. He has a 12 years old daughter who has a history of asthma problems. He started giving the daughter the honey hoping that the asthma problem will be relieved. And it did.

Since the honey was too little, he went out and bought another bottle of honey. Unfortunately, the daughter did not like the purchased honey and insisted her father to get more from us.

During the new year holiday, I was preparing to go to the farm and received a call from this friend. He told me about the daughter and wanted to get more honey from our farm. We always welcome our friends to join the activities. And so, he came with his wife and their 10 years old son.

As usual, we will show them the bees inside the TBH. We also encourage them to come near the box to prove to them that these bees are harmless.

These are the bees from our 8th colony. The colony was captured in September 2011. We can clearly see a new honeycomb (white color) and several honeycombs with broods. Unfortunately, there was not much of honey inside this colony.

We continued to open and investigate other TBH and found one with some honey. This is the 5th colony captured. I think we captured this colony sometime in Q1 2011. We proceed to clean up the TBH and harvest some honey. Our friend got what he came for :).

The joy of tasting fresh honey for the first time.

A brave boy holding honeycomb and the bees. And he was wearing short sleeve shirt!!

Fresh honey from the farm. Hope all will be good.

Cheers.

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

How to handle honeybees?

Thank you for visiting this blog. We hope you are in cheerful mode to digest what we have to offer in this post.


For some strange reason we, normally, are afraid of the bees. We are worried that they will swarm and sting us. We are worried about the pain and some even go to the extent that the bees are able to kill us. Probably this is true but so far I have not encountered such fatal accident in the area where I live, at least.


This blog is not about all these horrified stories. We aim to educate you guys that bees are harmful and can be handled easily with proper tools and technique.


An expert came to our apiary last year and gave us crashed course about beekeeping and how to handle the bees. Lesster runs a beekeeping training centre in Uganda. He hailed from Singapore and has been living in Uganday since 2001 training people there about beekeeping. You can checkout his website http://ugandahoney.wordpress.com. We are also featured in one of his postings.


Lesster did not wear any protective clothing while handling the bees! Look at this photo.


Lesster handling Apis Ceranas with bare hands and exposed face.


What’s the secret?


I can tell you that Lesster did not use any magic concoction! He has the technique and tool on how to go about doing this.


Rule number 1: move slowly when you are near the bees or a hive. The bees will ignore you if you move slowly around or near them. A sudden or wild movement will trigger them to “investigate” you. These investigators are the “guard bees”. They will determine whether to attck or to ignore you, the intruder.


Rule number 2: use smoke to pacify them. Smoke indicates there is a fire around the area. It is in their DNA that upon getting signal of fire, they will suck the honey and get ready to fly off. They collected their prized assets in case they have to fly off somewhere else and have to build new hives.


Once they have sucked enough honey, they will be full and they will calm down. They will not fly away since the hive is not really on fire. Combined with slow movement and them being calm down, we can now start opening the beehive and look at them closely. We can not only start our inspection but also we can harvest the honey.


Beekeeping equipment: Smoker


.

Lesster was showing us how to start the smoker correctly. We used dry leaves and rotten woods found abundantly in the apiary.


Lesster was looking at another colony of bees. This was new then, our 6th colony. The visit was in September 2010.


We hope you guys got the picture already. Bees are not harmful. We can handle them easily with proper technique and tools.


I am still a newbie. I would rather have my protective clothing on when I handle the bees on the apiary.


Have a great day folks.


Cheers.


Tuesday, January 17, 2012

First Inspection and Harvest


According to the information on the image, the date of the first harvest was 8th January 2010. In a way, a month after we spotted the top bar beehive (tbh) was occupied, we managed to taste our very own honey.

TBH housing our first colony.
As of today (17/1/2012), the colony is still occupying the tbh.

As this time, we knew nothing about inspection and harvesting. We decided to take a look and see what happen. We do not have proper smoker and only clad in our DIY beekeeping suits!

Yours truly. My niece commented in my FB page that I looked like an astronaut!

Haniz. The beekeeping veil was made by his wife.

We were also without any "smoker". An equipment that allows us to smoke and "calm" the bees. Therefore, we settled to smoke the bees by using the eggs casings. Somehow, it did not catch fire but emitted smoke smoothly for quite a while.

First glimpse of the first colony.

This was the first glimpse of the bees from the TBH. At this time we did not know much about TBH design. Later we were told that the top bars should be about 32mm in width to ensure each bar holds only one honeycomb. In our case, the honeycombs were spread over a few bars. This is what they called "cross combs". It will make inspection and harvest a bit tricky and difficult. Anyway, at this time, both of us were so excited seeing the bees, the honeycombs and also the honey!

Honeycombs and bees.

This was the first real look at the honeycombs. The bees moved away after being smoked and left the honeycombs exposed. You can see un-capped honey and also broods on the bottom part of the honeycombs. Our knowledge at this point of time were ZERO about beekeeping, bees, honeycombs, honey and the whole works! We were just so excited with what were in front of us.





Monday, January 16, 2012

Welcome 2012

Hello everyone, happy new year. I guess it is still not too late to wish happy new year.

I take the opportunity to start blogging about our beekeeping adventure with the coming our our new calendar year 2012.

We hope we can give something to you from our adventure.

Briefly, we started this beekeeping activities way back in August 2010. I started building several beehives and only managed to install the boxes on my friend startfruits orchard in October 2010.

Our first colony occupied the beehive in December 2010!

Our first taste of our very own honey was in February 2011.

And the rest, as they said, is history.

:)