Splitting bee hives

Splitting bee hives is necessary when you want to expand your apiary exponentially in a short space of one bee season! There are numerous honey bee splitting methods at the beekeeper's disposal.

We used 5-frame trap boxes to trap wild trekking honeybee colonies this season and then let them fill them so we could use the same colonies to split again. At one apiary site in Midrand, we trapped 7 wild honeybee colonies by providing them viable 5-frame boxes to move into.

After about 5 weeks they had completely outgrown their home and filled all 5 frames with brood comb. One box even started building bhurr comb on the side and entrance.

We used out chosen method of honeybee splitting and created another 5 new bee colonies from the 7 we have captured. We had almost doubled our apiary size in just 3 weeks! This process should be started as early as July in the Southern Hemisphere to take advantage of natural nectar flows with the major focus on the Aloes in July and then the Spring nectar flow in September.

This is the best time to create honeybee colonies by splitting. However, there is still opportunity to be successful during the remainder of the summer however you must ensure suitable supply of food and bees are provided to the new honeybee colony otherwise they will not suvive easily.

We have now reached 34 colonies in total combining the apiaries in Gauteng with those of the apiary in Mpumalanga. By planning to split again in July of 2011 we should generate at least double the colonies we have within 4 weeks of starting the process. If we graft the extra queen cells that get produced and plant them in separate trap boxes these will push our splitting numbers to 3 times our starting total.

In this way, we aim to go from 30 colonies (we assume a 10% loss over the wintering period - 4 in this case) to a minimum of 60 colonies but quite easily should reach 90 if we graft extra queen cells into empty trap boxes. This is not including our trapping of new wild colonies either.

By just utilising our existing bee stock we should push our numbers to a potential of 90 honeybee colonies by end September 2011. By trapping new wild colonies we should add additional new honey bee swarms of 1/3 of the trap boxes we place out in the field.

In 2010, we placed roughly 50 empty boxes in the field. We captured around 15 wild bee colonies in this season.

We will also be looking at queen rearing in addition to splitting established colonies. We will use 5 strong established colonies for this purpose. They will be fed sugar water 2 weeks prior to the exercise. We will prepare small queen bee rearing boxes to cope with the large quantity of bees we will need to support our new queen cells.

We will keep detailed records and accounts of the progress and procedure. If you want honey bee pollination or want to start a honey farming project contact us for more info.

Beekeeping update

We recently went to visit our apiary site in Mpumalanga, South Africa. A 3hour trip takes you into fantastic honey bee country with abundant bee plants.

We got a call from the farmer we work with on our major apiary site saying that all of the beehives we put out end of August were now full. Please bring some more!!

So, we did! We went up on Monday the 4th Oct to take another 10 catch boxes and set them out on Tuesday morning. After moving the bee hives we put up in August to shady areas on the farm the night was finished.

We put the empty catch boxes or nuc boxes out on Tuesday morning at 9h30 and left the farm site at 10h30. Excellent beekeeping job done!

Later that afternoon around 17h00 we get a call from the farmer askign if we arrived home alright. Affirmative. He then goes on to say that the bee catch box we put out by the house already had bees in it! Can't ask for more than that!!

That should mean we are on a count of 28 honeybee colonies. Our aim for the 2010 summer honey bee season is to have 70 - 100 colonies so we can leverage the established colonies in the Spring of 2011. The goal is to leverage the large colonies in 2011 so that we can make 5-10 times the number of bees from this small strong established apiary.

The UJU Honey goal is to manage 1000 bee hives in 3 years. We officially launched this project at the end of 2009. We started off with a small apiary of as few as 2 bee hives. Since then, we have visited numerous farms to assess them as viable permanent bee apiary sites. We prefer not to move our honeybee colonies. Our apiary site criteria is such that the colonies we place on the property should sustain the bees throughout the year as well as provide excess honey for UJU Honey to harvest.

The challenge for us is to find suitable apiary sites where the farmer or land owner agrees to our proposal of the apiary management project. To find enough food for 1000 hives requires a rough estimate of 1000 HA of good quality bee food.

If you are a farmer looking for a serious increase in your crop yield while at the same time enjoying permanent honey bee presence on your farm then we would like to discuss our Apiary Management Proposal with you.

Call us on 082 359 8787 now to set up an appointment.

More empty honeybee catch boxes please

We have a number of apiary sites and a major one is in Mpumalanga province, South Africa. The farmer we work with there called today to say we need to bring more empty honeybee catch boxes as the 10 empty ones we took up end of August 2010 are now full of bee colonies!

Our beehives are specially coated with bee attractant. We place our beehives in strategic places on the apiary site to ensure the best opportunity to attract a trekking honeybee swarm.

We are building our total apiary under management to 1000 bee hives within 3 years! The challenge is on. We now have 27 in total with this little beekeeping project so far.

Beekeeping is great! In other beekeeping projects we have over 6 years of experience and run beekeeping courses as well.

Apiary Management

We provide apiary management services in order to develop commercial honey farming capacity. How does this work?

As beekeepers we require suitable sustainable access to quality flora. It is not feasible for commercial beekeepers to own the land they want to farm bees on. If you already own the land and farm a bee friendly crop it would make sense to incorporate some sort of beekeeping project. That's where we come in.

We seek out farmers with good nectar crops that require increased cross pollination by honeybees. Farmers have the land and the crops in place. They benefit from increased pollination by UJU Honey Africa's bees while owning the actual bee hive. We manage the apiary site by catching bee colonies, developing the optimum apiary size in accordance with the farmer's land capacity and finally maintain the bee colonies for sustainable honey farming.

There are loads of crops that benefit from having increased presence of bees during their pollination cycle. Normally, the pollination period lasts about 21 days. Pollination service providers usually bring bees to the farmer and place them on the farm during this pollination period. The issue then is how many bee colonies are brought to the farm that are established strong swarms ready to pollinate...

We ensure that the apiary or bees are placed on the farm in such a way that they can be permanently left on the apiary site - the farm - and managed to be strong in time to pollinate the crop as effectively as possible.

We currently manage sites in Gauteng and Mpumalanga. The farmer owns the bee hives and we own the contents of the bee hive such as bees, honey, beeswax and propolis. It's a win-win situation.

Farmers get increased fruit set and improved crop yield for low capital investment and own the bee hive while we manage the bees and harvest honey with other by products.

If we can increase crop yield by 10% or so on your crop, what would that be worth to you? Contact us now for more info!