There are a few first principles in bee-keeping which ought to be as familiar to the Apiarian as the letters of his alphabet :Rev. Langstroth's Axioms of Bee-Keeping.
1st. Bees gorged with honey never volunteer an attack.
2nd. Bees may always be made peaceable by inducing them to accept liquid sweets.
3rd. Bees, when frightened by smoke or by drumming on their hives, fill themselves with honey and lose all disposition to sting, unless they are hurt.
4th. Bees dislike any quick movements about their hives, especially any motion which jars their combs.
5th. Bees dislike the offensive odor of sweaty animals, and will not endure impure air from human lungs.
6th. The bee-keeper will ordinarily derive all his profits from stocks, strong and healthy, in early Spring.
7th. In districts where forage is abundant only for a short period, the largest yield of honey will be secured by a very moderate increase of stocks.
8th. A moderate increase of colonies in any one season, will, in the long run, prove to be the easiest, safest, and cheapest mode of managing bees.
9th. Queenless colonies, unless supplied with a queen, will inevitably dwindle away, or be destroyed by the bee-moth, or by robber-bees.
10th. The formation of new colonies should ordinarily be confined to the season when bees are accumulating honey ; and if this, or any other operation must be performed, when forage is scarce, the greatest precautions should be used to prevent robbing.
The essence of all profitable bee-keeping is contained in Oettl’s Golden Rule : KEEP YOUR STOCKS STRONG. If you cannot succeed in doing this, the more money you invest in bees, the heavier your losses ; while, if your stocks are strong, you will show that you are a bee-master, as well as a bee-keeper, and may safely calculate on generous returns from your industrious subjects.
Friday, January 20, 2006
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3 comments:
I can more or less attest to the truth of all these from personal experience, though my gongfu was never great enough to make me a bee-master. The good Reverend's hive design has lost some of its ubiquity of late, however. Replaceable frames have the advantage of maximizing honey production during the peak seasons, by allowing the bees to refill old combs rather than manufacturing new ones; nevertheless the process of secreting wax has healthful effects on the bees, which can help them stave off the scourge of tracheal mites that has devastated the apiary industry. Moreover, the market for beeswax has increased somewhat of late, for use in premium cosmetics, candles and whatnot. For these reasons, an apiarist friend of mine has shifted all his colonies into "Kenya-style," trough-shaped hives. These hives are so named because they are common in Africa, the continent with more beekeeping than any other.
Useful information, which I shall put to use. I had wondered also if the smaller size of "Africanized" bees had effected any changes in the Rev. L. L. L.'s design. Do you know, offhand?
I believe that the crossbred Africanized bees are not terribly different in size or appearance from European strains, and though they continue to contribute their genetic material to tropical and subtropical domestic colonies in the Americas, even their characteristic agressive behavior is thereby increasingly diluted. I don't believe, therefore, that Langstroth's innovative determination of the ideal spacing for bee habitations has been rendered inapplicable. I don't know whether the same is true in Africa, where the pure native strains are, as you say, much smaller. If one were to use a Langstroth-pattern hive there, I can imagine it might be desirable to alter his spacing (I believe it's 3/8 of an inch). On the other hand, the primary purpose of having this minimum gap is to make the hive easier to warm in the winter, which would be somewhat moot since the African bees are incapable of living in temperate climes anyhow.
My understanding of the African preference for trapezoidal troughs over supers is twofold: First, as I alluded, the primary cash crop of African apiarists is not honey but wax. Accordingly, there is no need for elaborate frames to preserve the combs and keep them in a shape from which their honey may be centrifugally extracted--a bar with a strip of lath to make the combs easier to remove will suffice. Second, as mere perusal of the prices in a beekeping-supply catalogue will show, Langstroth hives are tricky to produce (requiring many uniform interlocking units), and would be more so with he comparatively low level of automation in most sub-Saharan countries. Furthermore, I have heard that bees somehow take more naturally to the trough shape, perhaps because it more closely resembles a natural bole or snag.
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