There are many ways of managing bees. Every experienced beekeeper seems to have his/her own slant of what is best to achieve and do all the different tasks of beekeeping. Most of us, through trials and errors, arrive at a management style and philosophy that suit our personality and time availability. This could take a few years but in the meanwhile it is still a fun adventure. You never really lose. You always learn something and often from your mistakes. The followings are some practices that I have learned over the years that I think are appropriate and reasonable. Hopefully they can help for your journey in the fascinating world of beekeeping.

WHAT SIZE EQUIPMENT SHOULD I USE?

That depends on whether you already have a mix of equipment or if you’re starting brand new as a beekeeper. For the sake of cost, use what you already have on hand.

BOXES
This is what works best for me:

• A 5 deep frame nuc over a 5 deep frame nuc; you put two of these units together (touching, side by side). You put a queen excluder on top and follow with a medium honey super.
  The advantages are the weight. I move a lot of hives between yards and lifting these 5 frame nucs is a lot easier than these 10 frame boxes.
  Another advantage is that on average this type of set up seems to produce more honey than two separate hives on their own. The two queens share one honey box; the bees don’t seem to mind mingling between the two boxes and the honey yield is better.

Another set up that I like (because I ended up with quite a few medium 10 frame boxes) is to use two medium 10 frame boxes for brood nest then add a queen excluder and then add your honey supers on top.

The advantages are that you only need one size equipment for both brood and honey collecting. That is BIG. The boxes are also lighter than your standard 10 deep frame boxes. Additionally, the queen (from my observations) seems to lay more brood in the two brood boxes than one typical 10 deep frame box.
Lastly, we also use regular deep 10 frame boxes (again, because I tried everything). It is very popular now to operate single brood management box using a 10 deep frame box follow by a queen excluder and then adding honey supers on top. For the longest time, it was believed that you needed two boxes for brood rearing before supering for honey. Now, a lot of commercial beekeepers have moved to single brood management. You need less equipment and the honey yield seems just as good. Of course, the honey supers could be medium size or deep size (to keep all equipment the same size).
A variation on this theme is to use two brood boxes during the month of June with honey super on top if there is a flow then at the end of June you remove the top box of brood (making sure the queen stays in the bottom box along with a minimum of 4 frames of capped brood) to make a split or mating nucs with the remaining brood from that second brood box. You can then introduce a mated queen to the split (or nucs) or let the new colony raise their own queen. Your apiary is now more sustainable.
By leaving enough brood in the bottom box, the hive is sufficiently populous to provide a honey crop and is now operated as a single brood management. A single brood box is a lot easier to move, to inspect for anomalies, to find the queen etc.
FRAMES
We use plastic foundations but prefer the wood frames over the “one piece” plastic frame/foundation.
The “one piece” frames are certainly the easiest to use since there is no assembly required. I just like the feel of the wood frames better (I think the bees prefer them too) and I believe they are stronger than the “one piece” and less prone to twisting. However, if you’re not equipped with the space or workshop to do the assembly work then a plastic frame/foundation is just fine.
An alternative is to get wax foundation (with wood frame).The bees prefer that over plastic foundation but there are drawbacks to wax foundation. The assembly is even more involved than what I just described above; it is time consuming and from what I understand the quality of the wax sold is questionable (there is too much chemical buildups in the wax from the rendering process).
To help the bees get an easier start, I roll my own melted wax onto the sheets of plastic foundation. I get a faster “drawing of the comb” this way.

VARROA MITES

Apparently, beekeeping used to be quite simple in the old days meaning up to the late 1980’s when the varroa mites got introduced to North America. The mites were originally from Asia where they live pretty much as just a minor nuisance for the Apis Cerenae bees that are predominant in that part of the world. The mites and the bees co-evolve together without causing damage. However, once here, the same mites were devastating to our own Apis Mellifera bees which were not equipped to deal with its behavior. As a result, beekeeping practices, which had hardly changed in 160 years, had to start changing to adapt to the new threat otherwise the beekeeper would simply lose his/hers colonies.
The thing is, one cannot see the mites on the body of the bees (unless it’s a very major infestation in which case it is too late for that colony). The mites hide in the creases of the bees’ body and furthermore the majority of the mites are found not on the bodies of the bees but under the cappings where the new bees are pupating.
So, for experienced or new beekeepers dealing with varroa mites is a major challenge and is now part of doing beekeeping. The question is not, if you have mites, it is how many do you have?
So, what to do? A quick tour of Google and YouTube and one can be easily overwhelmed by the amount of info and strategies. You see everything from full endorsement of the latest chemical wonder to advocating “natural beekeeping” with its own strategies that seems at times dubious and not very effective in reducing mite loads.
Treatment-free beekeeping sound very appealing for many of us, however, I have found that there are two types of “treatment-free ” beekeepers:
— The beekeeper who does nothing about mites and other diseases because in his mind it is not natural to manipulate hives for that purpose. They usually end up losing most of their colonies.
— The beekeeper who adopts several cultural and IPM (integrated pest management) strategies without using any chemical whatsoever. That is possible but require a lot of discipline and more work and time. Some of these strategies are discussed here. In our operation, we adopt a mix of both — non-chemical strategies plus the use of “soft chemicals”. We never use synthetic “hard chemicals”.

A lot of commercial beekeepers (mostly for reasons of time and labor) favor the chemical path. Put a chemical strip in your hive two or three times a year and “voila”, you took take of your bees. The most commonly used one is Amitraz (Apivar). It has been very effective for quite a few years now but research is showing that the mites are starting to become resistant to it. This has been the story of those “hard synthetic chemicals” ever since they were developed from the very beginning of the mites appearing on the scene. They work great for a while and then they stop being effective so now you need to find another chemical.
Additionally, for many of us, there is an uneasiness about using something so unnatural in our hives. One major problem is that the “hard chemical” strips leave residues in the wax which acts like a big sponge inside the hive. Basically, the queen lays eggs in chemically compromised cells. Is that a problem? Some say “yes” some say “no”. Also, if honey is left in the hive at the time of application, you could find traces of those chemicals in your honey. Not great!
ALTERNATIVES

Many beekeepers have adopted the “soft chemicals” to fight the mites. Here, we are talking about mostly formic acid, oxalic acid and thymol.
They have proven themselves to be highly effective and so far, without the mites showing resistance to them. They are, however, usually more labor intensive and at times, less reliable (like being temperature dependent and potential damage to queens).
Nevertheless, these are the products that we have been using in our operation along with other cultural and management strategies which are explained below.

SCREEN BOTTOM BOARDS

When they first appeared on the scene (screen bottom boards did not exist before varroa) screen bottom boards were touted as a fantastic way to reduce your mite counts. It turned out that they help a little bit but not enough to prevent the mites from doing their damage (some of the mites would naturally fall from the body of the bees every day and would go through the screened board; if the bottom board were solid, the fallen mites could climb back on other bees).
There is one big advantage of screen bottom boards though; is that it allows you to measure your mite levels by counting how many fell through the mesh and then onto a sticky kind of board inserted below the screen.
It turns out that if you want to be effective at fighting the mites, you first have to be able to assess your level of infestation. You have to count mites. It’s very simple! If you want to be a beekeeper, you have to learn to count mites.

COUNTING MITES

There are a few ways to count mites. There is the “powder sugar shake”, the “alcohol wash shake”, the ” Dawn soap detergent shake” and the screen bottom board. The first three require special perforated cups and some advanced beekeeping skills in handling the bees for the count. I strongly encourage you, in time, to learn how to perform a mite count using one of these wash/shake.
The screen bottom board with a sticky board below it is much easier although not as precise as the other methods. You just remove the sticky boards from under the hive and count your mites. What does the count tell you? It depends on time of the year (see table below).
Mites should be counted several times during the beekeeping season. It is nearly impossible to determine an infestation level using a screen bottom board (coming up with a percentage of infestation like we can with the other methods). Nevertheless, they do give you some indications and can alert you to act. You can buy “sticky boards”, but you can easily make your own from stiff paper, cardboard or other material. I use coroplast (sign board), it cleans easily and is reusable. You just spread a thin layer of grease or oil (vegetable) or Vaseline onto the board (I use mineral oil).The oil prevents the mites from moving around and get stuck. You should ideally leave the board under the hive for 3 days and then divide your total number of mites by 3 to determine your daily mite load.

MAY JUNE JULY AUGUST SEPTEMBER
2-3 3-6 4-11 7-18 17-33

So, in May if you find more than 2 or 3 mites per day on your sticky board you should theoretically treat your hive. From research done, early treatments seem to yield big results later on as the mites don’t have a chance to grow exponentially throughout the summer.

The following chart shows infestation level for treatments at different times of the year when using the “wash/shake” methods.

Colony phase Acceptable
Further control not needed Caution
Control may be needed Danger
Control promptly
Population
increase <1% <2-3% >3%
Peak population <2% <3-5% >5%
Population decrease <2% <2-3% >3%

3% level of infestation seems to be the number to go by in deciding if one should treat or not in late summer.
If controls are warranted we use formic acid or oxalic depending on the situation. There are lots of videos on YouTube showing you how to use these products.
Another thing we learned the hard way, is to do a mite count after your treatment. Sometimes, the treatment did not work very effectively and because you did not do another count to confirm the result, you end up losing your hive.
Most beekeepers don’t count mites so they end up treating all of their hives prophelacticly (or they don’t treat any of them and then lose many). Obviously, not treating when you should is a formula for disaster but treating when you don’t need to is also not very good. For one thing, it prevents you from finding out which one of your colonies may have a natural resistance to mites (it is estimated that perhaps 2 to 5 % of existing colonies have a natural resistance to mites and don’t need treatments). If you raise your own queens, these are the colonies you breed from.

NON-CHEMICAL WAYS

Ideally, you want to avoid using any chemical at all and maybe someday we will have access to queens and bees bred for mite resistance (scientists are working on it) until then, we use what’s available to us.

1- Drone frame trapping

Varroa prefers to mate inside drone cells (instead of worker cells). The drone has a 24 day gestation period as opposed to 21 days for worker bees; the three extra days give the mites more time to reproduce with more offsprings. If you just have a few hives, this is a good method. However, your timing has to be really good or you may find yourself raising mites instead of fighting them. You have to be disciplined to use that method. It works great in Spring and early Summer but not after that (because there is little drawing of combs in late Summer).
Check Google and YouTube for ways of using those frames. Again, counting mites will tell you if you need to add a chemical treatment to this method.

2 -Moving capped brood

This is a method I really like in the Spring. This is how it goes:
In late April, early May — you evaluate the strength of your hives (strong, medium, weak – less than 2 frames of bees–).( A first assessment of strength should be done in late March early April). You go in your first strong/medium hive and remove all the capped brood from it and transfer it to a “weak hive”. You repeat that manipulation with your second hive; you give all capped brood to another weak hive or to the same one that has already received some from your first hive.
SCENARIO
You have 5 hives coming out of winter. In late April, you know that one is strong, two are medium strength and two are weak (hives coming out of winter are never all the same). Now, you take all the capped brood from that one strong hive and all the capped brood from the two medium strength hives and you distribute them between the two weak hives. When you transfer the frames of capped brood you also leave about half the bees attached to the frames (you shake half the bees in the hive before moving it to the new weak hive). So now, what have you done!!!
You’ve dramatically boosted the weak hives by adding all this extra brood and bees but you also removed the bulk of the mites from the strong and medium strength hives. Remember! The bulk of the mites is in the capped brood (some say 80%). So, if you took all the capped brood from the hive … what do you leave behind? You leave behind a frame that has open brood. You have to leave some brood behind. Quite often, the frame that has open brood also has some capped brood on it and that’s OK. If there is no frame with open brood, you then leave the smallest frame of capped brood in the hive. Those strong/medium strength hives will quickly rebuild this time of the year and with much less mites in them.
According to research, if you can hammer your mites early in the season, you are in a much better position come late summer in your fight to control the infestation.
Now, what about the two weak hives that are now monster hives. Yes! You will have to treat those but you are effectively treating two hives instead of potentially five hives and treatments are not cheap.
We use Formic Pro for this purpose. It is the only product that kills mites under the capping (as well as the phoretic ones — the ones on the bees). As just explained, the strong and medium hives will rebuild quickly; they have been purged of most of their mites but here you could decide to treat for the phoretic mites (the ones on the bees’ bodies). You don’t have to but sometimes we do it anyway but for that purpose we use oxalic acid; it’s cheap and effective. This mops up the last remaining mites.

WEAK HIVE

What is a weak hive? There are two kinds:
1) The hive is weak because it has a low population of bees (seen often coming out of winter); however, the colony is healthy and shows a small but nice brood pattern. These are the hives you could boost with extra frames of brood as explained above.

2) The hive is weak because it has some problems. It usually has a low population of bees but also may be diseased or has queen issues. These units should not be boosted with extra brood/bees as this may just turn a small problem into a bigger one.

3 ) Brood breaks
This is another method for reducing the mite load in your hive. Because we raise queens and make nucs we are forced to use that method anyway. Mites need bee brood because of their reproductive biology. Without bee brood they cannot reproduce and then die within a few days (except in winter it seems). When you make a “split”, some of the mites stay in the original hive and some will end up in the new “split” part. So, already, you have reduce the mite load in the original hive.
You create a brood break by preventing the queen from laying. This can be achieved in a few ways. You can cage the queen, leaving her in the same hive. We like this method. We use it on our production hives (that usually have last year’s queen) and early splits (May/June nucs with this year’s queens). This method requires more advanced skills as one has to grab the queen and put her in a cage. Most newcomers to the trade would hesitate to do that.
You can also make a “split”, whereby the new part (the split) has brood but no queen (although some splits can be made with no brood). The split can raise its own queen or can receive a queen cell, either way, it will take several days (and weeks sometimes) before the new queen starts to lay. In the meantime, whatever capped brood the hive may have had, it will by now, be emerged (approximately 2 weeks). There are no larvae for the mites to infest. What you have left with are phoretic mites; they can be ignored if you feel that infestation is under control or you can zap them with oxalic acid. Again, a very cheap and effective method. Making splits with bought laying queens would not work as a brood break since that introduced queen would start laying pretty much right away negating the desired effect.

INCREASING YOUR NUMBER OF COLONIES

Perhaps you want more colonies. Maybe you lost some over the winter and want to make up for the loss or you just want to increase your capacity for honey production.
Commercial beekeepers try not to buy bees every year to make up for winter losses. A lot of them raise their own queens and then split their overwintered hives in the Spring. This, however, requires the skill of grafting larvae of the right age in order to raise queens. This is beyond the scope of most backyard beekeepers. Still, there is something you can do even if you only have 2 or 3 hives.

RAISING YOUR OWN QUEENS

For the longest time, I and most beekeepers, were told that letting bees raise their own queen under the emergency impulse (when a hive accidently loses its queen, the bees will start the process of creating a new queen) would produce inferior queens and therefore should not be used. That is until a recent study proved that axiom wrong (Testing Darwinian honey bee breeding protocol). This method is great but you’re limited by the number of colonies that you already have. In other words, if you have two hives; you can only increase to four hives (each existing hive can produce only one more colony).

SCENARIO

You come out of winter with 2 live colonies of medium strength (maybe you lost some in the winter or not). You would like to add two more hives for this year. This is what you do — when dandelions are in bloom (early May) . Make sure the hives have built up nicely; bees pretty much wall to wall and several frames of brood.

1) move hive #1 to another spot in the yard
2) in its place, where the original was, you put a new empty hive.
3) you add to this new box (on original spot):
1 frame of open brood with bees attached, from the hive#1 that you moved to a new spot.
4) you add also a frame of honey with bees attached from the same #1 hive.
5) this new hive now has 2 frames — one with open larvae and hopefully eggs and one with honey/nectar. Add 2 or 3 more empty frames (drawn or foundation or mix)
6) feed sugar/syrup (one to one). Close the hive and that’s it! Feeding is optional. If there is a flow, it is not necessary.

They call that a “run-away split”. The bees will raise their own queen using material from the open larvae frame that you put in there. This colony will greatly benefit from the field force that will return to the original location. To improve on your success, you should, hopefully, use a frame of fairly new wax (where the larvae is located). Dark, old frame (more than 3 years old) don’t seem to work as well to create good queens. Learn to recognize “eggs” on the frame (not always easy). When transferring the frame of open larvae, see if there are eggs as well. If you see them, it’s a sign that you probably have larvae of the right age (1 to 2 day old) that will make the best queens.
Also, too many bees can be counter productive. What you should have in this new hive in the equivalent of 2 deep frames completely covered with bees. When transferring the two above mentioned frames if they are not fully covered with bees, you should shake some extra bees from other frames. You don’t want too many bees but you don’t want too fee either.
Of course, when transferring frames and bees, one should be careful not to transfer the original queen. The queen should stay in the new location.
Repeat this operation for hive#2.
After about 12 days a new queen will emerge and give or take 10 more days, she will start laying. Four weeks after that, that hive is ready to store honey for you if there is still a nectar flow happening or it is ready again to be split to make one more new colony.
This is part of “sustainable” beekeeping. According to the study mentioned above, these queens are just as good a quality than the professionally, conventionally raised queens but you have to follow the guidelines above.
If you don’t own nuc size boxes (usually 5 frame boxes), you can use full 10 frame boxes and put a divider inside ( a board or better, a piece of rigid insulation, for warmth, cut to size). Bees seem to do better when the size of the cavity matches the number of bees.