The smallest swarm I have ever caught! It’s going to be interesting to see if I can build this colony up and the overwinter them.
#teenytinyswarm2019
Category Archives: Apiaries
Traps set!
Thirty plus trap hives all waxed up and set.
With an unusual ten-day golden week coming up, it’s looking like I’ll be camping at the apiary catching swarms.
And it starts…
With the warm winter, I expected spring to arrive early.
Sakura trees are budded and ready to explode, but will boom later than last year and this years predicted forecast.
Queen cells are already built in the stronger hives and drone brood looks good…
Trap boxes are waxed up and counting down the days.
Counting down the days.
Catching swarms, Camping out!
Golden Week 2018 consisted of me camping out, catching swarms and playing with my
Kicked Out!
Last year around April the owner of the land my Ayuya apiary lives on decided to kick me off her land. What sucks sorry disappoints me the most is the time I lost developing the apiary, money aside I probably lost close to 1,000 hours of work over three years and only got to harvest one hive.
In 2016 I was lucky enough to overwinter six hives which were due to be harvested the early summer of 2017, But because I was kicked out I needed to move them to a new apiary. Sadly three of the hives did not take to the new area, and two were stolen, yes stolen – seriously! – from the new location.
CLEANING UP! What a BITCH! The job of cleaning up that is, not the land owner 🙂
Man I am lucky to have a fellow beekeeper friend who has a excavator.
All complete!
- Loss of money around JPY400,000 (USD 3,600)
- Loss of time 1,000 hours
- Loss of hives 5!
- Lesson learnt – PRICELESS
Trap hives set, pheromones a fly
Catch a spring swarm generally the only way to increase your Japanese honey bee colonies . Hive splitting, requeening are just something you just really won’t hear Japanese beeks talking about.
For the past four
traps this year and see how they work.
Spring is in the air
I think this is the first spring that I have been this ready, ready for the wild Japanese honey bees to swarm.
I have enough hives built for seventy new colonies, seventy… Have I gone crazy? …. Maybe! I also have enough traps for those seventy and enough places to place the those traps.
Golden week for me is going to be a busy one and I have set a goal of 30 new hives this year.
Now please, nice spring weather please.
Building boxes, boxes, boxes
This year I plan to go big, I let last year slip by and I am not going to let that happen again.
Catching swarms won’t really start until the middle of April, so I right now I am building boxes and weathering them. I still have a hundred odd boxes to make so my time is limited.
Shed update
Hatada eventually should become my biggest apiary hosting around 100 hives, in the area of the shed hopefully a potential 40 hives so I need to keep tools and hives on hand so I can rock up to the apiaries empty handed and take care of business.
Empty handed? Really? Lazy much?
I really want to cycle there some weekends and it’s a good 70 km round trip if I do a loop. Also I never know if I am going to be cycling, motorbiking or driving the Awaji sports car, aka kei-truck.
But the main thing I want to keep up there is a weed-eater. In the photos below you’ll notice some yellow flowers, those flowers are sadly an invasive species are pulling them out has became tiresome, so a little fossil fuel power is needed.
the Hatada honey shed
With tremendous help from the Hatada Sea, Mountain and Forest Project I started my first honey bee shed. Once finished I won’t need to take my tools each time to the apiary. Hopefully, we can are done by February, Not to keen on putting the roof on though.
