If there is a bear within 5 miles, he will get your bees, sooner or later he will find them, and until you kill it he will be back. The tracks in the snow don't lie, a bear will spend hours trying to get to those bees.
I love those pics of the bee clusters! I really enjoy working with bees, the honey can be a mess to work with but few things are as satisfying as seeing your honey harvest bottled up on a shelf (or eating it on fresh warm buttered biscuits!) I don't have any bears here to speak of. We have an occasional one move through but I've not seen one in over a decade. Uncle about an hour south had a bear get two of his hives a few years ago.
Lol, no..not here in MO you can't. My Uncle called the warden and the warden told him it wasn't a bear that he was crazy, that there weren't any bears in this part of the state. Uncle said well I'm gonna be there at daylight in the morning and if it's back in the hives I'll shoot it. The warden was sitting in the gate next to the bees the next morning and said there were two bears they had been watching in the area, they tranquilized them and moved them that day and the beehives were never bothered again. The shelter will just make the hives last longer, the bees seal the cracks in the hive bodies with propolis (bee glue) but they still get a little water in the cracks and rot eventually. Keeping the majority of the water off will double the hive life expectancy. That is a very nice shelter BTW...I'll be using that design come spring!
Lol, uncle said well are those claw marks in the hive paint crazy too? What about the bear tracks? Warden said, "Mr. Eason, please don't shoot our bears, we'll take care of it". We always suspected they had been moved there originally but who knows, they claimed they migrated in but no one else in the area had seen them. My uncle got pics of them while they were tranquilized because he knew no one would believe it, lol. Unfortunately I don't have any pics and my uncle passed a couple months ago.
Its like a work bench, out of the weeds , rain and snow, plus it keeps the summer sun and thunder storms off them. If you build one remember the weight of those hives adds up quick. My post are made from locus logs I cut from my land and had them squared at 6 1/2 inches, Remember treated wood is toxic to insects, good luck, jim
Hey Jim and Covey, or anyone else that has done it ...any tips or tricks of the trade you wanna share with a beginning beekeeper?
Yeah, if you're ever trying to catch a swarm that's clustered in an overhead limb....don't slip and shake them all off on your head! Lol. Get a good vented bee suit, helmet and gloves...it gets to be a hot job in a full suit in summer. Also make sure you're not allergic to stings, you don't want to get all set up and in the middle of hiving your first colony and accidentally find yourself stung and going into anaphylactic shock. You may at some point get to where you don't wear a suit, personally...I've never gotten to a point that I could ignore a sting and especially in the face or head as the sting area swells up on me pretty badly. Once you figure out that a colony is all about the queen and get familiar with action reaction tendencies of the bees and queen, they are easy to manipulate. Get a good bee book and read read read. I started out with a lot of help from my uncle, dad and the book "Beekeeping for dummies" and a lot of research on the internet.
I never wore a hood or gloves until just last year when After a bad day, I had just had my knee replaced a couple weeks before when a friend called with a large swarm of bees leaving his barn had staged in a large white pine in his yard, being a friend he set up 3 tiers of scaffolding for me to climb and work from, well after trimming some limbs out of the way and setting up a box to put them in, the best of plans went to chit, the limb broke and the bees fell, landing on my head and shoulder, what happened next can not be explained with the words available in the English language, being unable to jump or other wise escape the some what malcontent bees I stood there making sounds not unlike what a small child or a puppy makes when she is in distress or very sharp pain, one must remember that opening ones mouth when you are in the company of 10 to 12 thousand bees only invites further discomfort to both, you and the bees, as by design the bees do die after stinging you but just once, you'll wish you did too, it only feels like they sting a lot more times ,but in fact, it is just once per bee, thank God. , you will find yourself seldom with out benyadrll.(sp) I now wear a full coat and gloves, you can too just call Leslie at Bee commerce and tell her < Jim told you she was the best. bee-commerce.com - Home
Bwahaha! I thought I was the only one that happened to, lol. Sorry it's not funny, I know. Glad you're okay though. At least I had my helmet and hood on, I can't say that my hands and shoulders and back fared all that well but I didn't get but maybe 30 stings out of the deal, coulda been worse. I did end up getting the bees in the hive, lol.
I don't really have any to post, sorry. Outside of trail cams, I'm not that much on taking pics and when I'm working with bees, I'm usually in a hurry to get done and move on to something else....which is why I cut down on how many I keep.
