Fr. TADEUSZ CIBOROWSKI
How to breed bees to produce a lot of honey
23 figures in the text
Edition IL. Price PLN 1.
PUBLISHED BY THE AUTHOR MAIN STORE AT THE "UNITAS" BOOKSTORE IN ŁOMŻA 1937
Fr. TADEUSZ CIBOROWSKI
How to breed bees to produce a lot of honey
23 figures in the text
2nd edition Price PLN 1.
PUBLISHED BY THE AUTHOR MAIN STORE AT THE "UNITAS" BOOKSTORE IN ŁOMŻA 1937
All rights reserved.
Printed with the fonts of the Diocesan Printing House in Łomża - Okrzei 13.
PREFACE
In works dealing with beekeeping we usually find, in a more or less abbreviated form, the entire science of beekeeping. We become acquainted with nature, the life and habits of bees, and then move on to practical activities. The theoretical part of the full work gives us the confirmed results of scientific research on bees, the practical part teaches the application of the principles discovered by science in apiary life and (according to science) solves the difficulties encountered in apiaries. Taken together, it allows the beekeeper to have a broader horizon, understand all seemingly very difficult and incomprehensible situations, and manage the apiary for the mutual benefit of the bees and the beekeeper.
It is understandable that covering the topic in its entirety cannot be reduced to the volume of a small brochure. Generally speaking, a book requires more space and must be a more extensive work in two or more volumes. A larger work requires more time from the reader to study it, but not everyone has the time and inclination to do so, and even if both of them could find it, they would not always be able to grasp and master all the material and organize all the learning. Many readers would like to learn easily, quickly and cheaply. Hence, there are many works that are inaccessible to the general public.
In order to make the science of beekeeping more accessible to the reader and easier to master, I am publishing this brochure with a clearly defined goal: to teach how to breed bees to obtain large amounts of honey. Of course, extensive works have the same and not different purpose. Textbooks do not treat learning for its own sake and every well-written textbook teaches how to extract honey from an apiary - this booklet aims to find the shortest route to this goal. Therefore, I omit extraneous messages and information, I choose and recommend activities that lead directly to the intended intentions. Regardless of these assumptions, when arranging the book, I tried to replace the mos in some cases with a more extensive work and serve as a shortened manual, while also being, as it were, a notebook of beekeeping activities.
I am pleased to say that public interest in beekeeping is increasing year by year. It is difficult to enumerate the reasons for the growing beekeeping movement at this point, despite many tactless moves that resulted in the dissolution of the previously useful primate and semi-primate beekeeping organizations. One of the main tests of the growth of beekeeping is the increasingly developing interest in this side, but no less beneficial auxiliary branch of the rural farm, and, as a result, a further increase in reading on beekeeping topics.
I hope that this book in a fresh design and a new edition, written in an accessible and short way, will reach people's ears, will teach you about this and that, will correct, at least some, erroneous opinions about bees and encourage you to learn more about the most useful insect on the planet. world.
Author.
Mały Płock March 18, 1937
CHAPTER 1.
ORGANIZATIONAL TIPS.
Introductory news. I am going to explain some beekeeping expressions in order to avoid repetition in the following content. A swarm is an organized group of bees that can live and develop independently. The swarm has one queen, several or more thousand workers and, in the summer, a number of drones. The hive is the home of bees. The swarm settled and managed in the hive is called a stump. Bees build combs from wax produced by their wax glands. A certain number of combs, located in the immediate vicinity of the outlet, serve the bees constantly in winter and summer: they hibernate on these combs, tied together in a cluster, and in these combs they raise their young; this set of combs is called a nest. During the period of very strong growth of the trunks, in the second half of spring and in summer, the nest expands significantly and then the rest of the combs located outside the nest are covered by bees.
The patches are composed of six side cells, mounted on a central wax wall, which we call the node. The knot in the center of the patch serves as a kind of scaffolding for the cells that rest on it and have a bottom. The comb cells face both sides of the comb and are arranged horizontally, slightly obliquely upwards. They serve as vessels for honey and pollen, and the young generation is raised in these cells. We distinguish two cell sizes: the smaller ones, with a cross-section of 5 mm, can serve as cradles for caterpillars, from which worker bees emerge after undergoing insect transformation: the depth of these cells is about 12 mm: the larger cells, with a cross-section of 7 mm and a depth of 14 mm, are used for rearing drone caterpillars. Normal bee comb, also called working bee comb, is 24 mm thick, and drone comb is 28 mm thick. In hives there are also combs with deeper, overbuilt cells, such combs are called storage combs. The storage comb cannot be reddened by the mother, so it is only used for honey storage. The bees build their combs in parallel, leaving a space of 12 mm between them, which together with the 24 mm thick honeycomb makes 36 mm. The storage comb has a normal thickness of 38 mm, so its thickness and spacing in the hive is a total of 50 mm,
Queens are raised in much larger cells, built on the edges or in the gaps of the combs, with the openings pointing downwards - these cells, called queen cells, are not used to store honey, so they are only cradles. Queen cells are not comb cells and do not belong to its components; they appear in the trunks in summer when bees are preparing for swarming.
In frame hives, both storage and normal combs are built into movable frames. Sometimes in beekeeping language the words patch and frame are used one after the other, although both words in the strict sense mean different things.
Bees (in a trunk or in a swarm) are called flies, a trunk with a lot of flies is called a strong trunk, a weak trunk has a relatively small number of bees. Bee insects that undergo insect transformations in their cells are called brood.
Frame hives contain 12 to 18 (or more) so-called nest frames, these frames are suspended on their arms in the lower, i.e. nest, part of the hive. In the summer, we place an extension (also called a warehouse) above the nest frames. The part of the hive where the super is located is called the head. (See Figure 18).
The most common in our country are Warsaw and Ciesielski hives - these are domestic hives, and among the foreign types, Dadant-Blatt hives, i.e. American hives, simply called Dadan hives. Domestic hives have narrow-high frames, so they belong to the types of stands, the American hive has low-wide frames, so we call it a deckchair. I consider the Warsaw hive to be the best housing for bees in our country.
The benefits of bees. Bees are the most useful creatures. Of the group of insects that are usually harmful to humans, only the bee, next to the silkworm, is a beneficial insect, but the one-sided benefit from the silkworm cannot be compared to the benefits from bees. Everyone knows that we get wax and honey from bees, but not everyone knows that, apart from other smaller benefits and benefits not noticed by the general public, the most important is the service they provide to flowers by pollinating them. Without damaging the flowers completely, the bees collect food from them in the form of pollen and nectar. They convert nectar into honey in the hive. As they hover over flowers, bees transfer pollen from the flower stamens to the stigmas, helping the flowers fertilize and resulting in higher yields of crops' fruit and grain.
Diligence. Bees are the most hard-working insects. The work of individual bees in a given trunk is equally strenuous and therefore equally efficient. Bees do not excel in work or rest, and this work is continuous throughout their active lives. The strongest work is in the hives in spring and summer. The activity of bees is often limited due to defects in the structure of a given trunk or insufficient numbers. A trunk with organic defects never grows strong, but a healthy trunk with a good mother comes out of winter strong enough to be able to develop properly for the summer period on its own.
Strong teams. Only a strong trunk can provide the bee with appropriate working conditions, only strong trunks can properly fulfill their tasks. There are two tasks of bees - namely, the preservation and reproduction of the species: 1) to preserve the species, they take care of everything related to maintaining life and arranging the home: they collect more food, build combs, raise them by feeding and warming the young, and then seal the gaps in the hive, defend supplies and the entire family against pests and attackers, and finally they maintain the warmth inside the withers necessary for the team at a given time of year. 2) Bees multiply, raising young from eggs laid by the mother, and then entire teams divide into separate, independent, organized groups, i.e. swarms. A swarm of bees is the strongest organization in the world - there is no similar organization anywhere where a certain number of mature individuals are mentioned. Among insects, we find similar relations in ants, wasps, bumblebees, hornets, but there is no swarm in the concept of beekeeping: there the mother gives rise to a group, which she initially raises herself - here we see a ready-made team of bees, formed during the swarming period, recognizing their mother for the points of gravity and for the soul of the entire group. There we see the independence of a mother condemned to work and only personal struggle, here we see a mother surrounded by a very large entourage who can and want to cooperate with her,
A swarm of bees resembles a living organism. Just as a living organism is composed of interdependent and cooperative cells, so a swarm is composed of individual bees which, only when taken together, constitute a unit - as it were, one whole in which individual individuals fulfill the roles assigned to them by their natural drive. Just as a part of an organism detached from its whole is unable to live and develop on its own, so a bee, or a certain number of bees, are unable to fulfill their tasks when they are separated from the swarm and left to themselves. A living organism weakens (and suffers) when damaged - a swarm that loses worker bees also weakens (but does not suffer like an animal that feels pain). The weakening of the swarm, like the weakening of the animal, causes a delay in the development of the entire organism; greater weakness, lasting longer, may result in the death of the swarm as well as the animal. Yes, a swarm has superiority over a living organism: bees are separate "cells" of their organization, highly intelligent and enterprising cells. Due to the fact that bees can move independently, the swarm can take any shape, depending on the circumstances. Owing to the prudence and enterprise of bees, a swarm can be much more efficient and more lively in its manifestations than any other organism. The more developed an organism is, the more easily it can protect itself from internal and external enemies and perform the work assigned to it by nature, the more the swarm is developed - the stronger the trunk, the easier it will fulfill its tasks.
An animal raised on a farm must receive maintenance and production feed. The first one maintains the life of the animal, and the second one produces surplus energy, which the breeder uses in the form of work of an ox and horse, milk yield of a cow, goat or sheep, or egg production of poultry. It is similar with bees, except that it is not the surplus of feed that produces the surplus of energy, but the surplus of the numerical strength of the trunk - the ready living energy becomes truly productive. The surplus strength of the trunk-organism produces a surplus in honey, which goes to the beekeeper's advantage.
Bees raise themselves, they are generally not fed by the breeder, although the surplus food collected by them is the purpose of bee breeding. For efficient production of trunks, what is needed is not food, which generates energy, but ready energy in the form of surplus numerical strength of the trunks. Only from this moment does the trunk become productive when the number of bees exceeds the "living" limit in it.
I will explain this statement in terms of the conditions prevailing in the hive. The bee family living in the hive consists of a brooding queen, brood, young bees and flight bees. After emerging from the cradle cell, a young, newly born bee stays in the hive for two weeks: during this time it works in the "home* and matures for further work outside the hive - it is a young fly. After its second flight, which takes place on the 14th day after the birth of an educated bee, it goes into the field and brings food for the entire trunk. A bee at work lives for no more than five weeks, so a fly leaving the field lives for three weeks. We can assume with some precision that the trunk that has developed normally so far has two-fifths of the young fly and three-fifths of the flying fly. |If we assume that the efficiency of one flying bee is covered by the consumption of one young bee (which feeds itself abundantly and feeds a pair or several pieces of brood), the effect of all treatments is that four fifths of the bees work on maintaining and growing the trunk, and only one fifth accumulates and produces. The beekeeper-breeder must ensure that the number of flies producing is as large as possible: that is, not one fifth, but at least two or more fifths of the productive forces. Only such a trunk can be profitable which will have six or seven-fifths of it, in which */, will support and strengthen life, and the rest, i.e. */; it abolished wrestling. It can be safely said that a trunk with as many flying flies as young ones will not be processed, which means that, instead of providing the beekeeper with profit, it will not even collect a sufficient amount of honey for itself. Weak trunks only bring losses.*)
A farmer who wants to bring a starved animal to productive efficiency must feed it for some time until the animal's body reaches equilibrium and then until it has a surplus of usable energy. This takes more or less time depending on the animal's state of neglect, but generally less time than achieving balance in the body-stem. It takes the bees five weeks to do this, and two weeks to gain a surplus of usable energy. The higher demands of bees on time and its span are explained by the fact that the organism-stem is much higher in its constitution than the organism-animal, and at the same time its vital activities are very limited by the seasons of the year, when the animal can take food and compensate for the losses incurred by breeding errors, in all seasons.
*) Let us use a note illuminating the matter from a different perspective, taken from Bartnik Wielkopolski No. 10 from 1930: "A trunk that is twice as strong can produce four times as much honey as the trunk taken for comparison. Accurate calculations according to Bienenpflege showed: a trunk with 20,000 fly flies collects 1/4 kilo of honey per day with an average harvest: another one, sending 40,000 into the field, gives 2 kilos under the same conditions, and a trunk that sends 50,000 flies gives 3 kilos. From this we can see why a strong trunk often produces twice the amount of honey as several weaker ones together.
The more precise the tool, the more skill it requires of the person using it, but it rewards the skill of using it a hundredfold, while if it is not used skillfully, it breaks down quickly and either loses its proper work efficiency or ceases to fulfill the task at all.
The swarm is a highly precise tool for collecting honey.
Reasons for low trunk productivity. An unfavorable result of honey harvesting always occurs when the bees fail to produce a sufficient number of workers in time for the harvest, or when a strong trunk dissipates its strength, wasting time for swarming. In addition to the indicated reasons, there are also other reasons for the insufficient strength of the trunks, such as diseases and pests that weaken or depopulate the trunks, lack of food to such an extent that the bees kill the brood by sucking them out on the eve of starvation, excessive weakness of the trunks in the spring after wintering and insufficient warm supply of the hives in the spring , absence or old age of the queen - these are the reasons why we observe bees' slackness in work and affect, to a greater or lesser extent, the delay or inhibition of the development of trunks.
For a beginner beekeeper who does not know the reasons for the bees' slowness, the most mysterious is the first reason: when he examines the trunk in the summer, he does not suspect its ailment; The trunk seems to be strong, but it is more flexible and redder than the other one, but there is not a drop of honey in it. Looking at the second trunk, much weaker to the eye, he sees less strength than in the first one, but to his surprise he finds honey, yes, a lot of honey, and he does not suspect that appearances are deceptive in both the first and second trunks. The second hive, apparently weaker, has an appropriate ratio of flying flies to young ones, and currently has a whole army of bees in the field, which are not in the hive (during the day), but are busy with work and bear without rest. The first trunk, seemingly fly, has the advantage of young bees - not flying ones - which sit and work in the hive, but even worse, here the flying bees sit with the young and help feed the brood instead of going to the field and laying eggs. Surprised, he asks if it is possible, if the bees in this hive have changed their nature and become lazy* Well, no! there is a deeper but logical cause of the ailment.
Honey-rich trunks increase in strength in spring, thanks to the warmth and fertility of the mother. In a sufficiently strong trunk, a large cluster of bees covers a significant number of combs and warms them, and the mother brood adds to all the cells cleaned and warmed by the bees. The trunk grows in strength gradually but steadily: the ratio of the fly to the young is as it should be. When the hive begins, the flying bees go in droves to the field and lay down, and the young ones convert nectar into honey, feed the brood and build combs. The situation is different in a trunk that is weak in spring and has not been strengthened by the weeder. A small cluster of bees does not have a sufficient number of combs, the queen cannot brood outside the cluster, so she does not exhaust the fertility to the proper extent - when she is young, she lays two eggs per cell, wasting their value (bees throw away unnecessary eggs) and time irreversibly passes. The trunk grows disproportionately slowly. This goes on until the end of May or later. Meanwhile, warmth comes, coming from outside the hive. (Bees have the property that they spread out wider, the warmer it is in the hive). Only then do the honey bees cover the appropriate number of combs and the mother can give vent to her urge and cover large areas of the combs.
So we see that a strong trunk develops by its own strength, a weak trunk waits for favorable external conditions, but unfortunately - these conditions come too late. Warmth normally comes at the end of May, and the main harvest begins in two weeks, meanwhile you have to wait five weeks for the first bees from the increased litter to be raised and fully mature.
Not only that: a larger number of nurse bees are needed for the brood, which arrives in too large numbers at this time. Young bees will not be able to handle all the brood, so the older flying bees must help, they stay in the hive and the less laborious ones go to the field. Last year's stock is quickly disappearing. Such a trunk, even if it has large amounts of honey in spring, will not have the reserve needed in case of longer rain. It can easily happen, indeed it often happens, that a weak trunk sucks out the brood from winter, saving itself from Death at the expense of the offspring, or the entire trunk, including the fly, dies just at the beginning of summer.
Sucking out the brood is a disaster for the trunk. Even if the fly survived due to improved conditions, it would not be able to resurrect the killed children. The trunk regresses in its development to the first days of April and must gain strength again, almost from the beginning. As a result, after the collection is finished, we will not find any honey there, and there will only be a small handful of bees.
We have described the worst possibility. The weak trunk from winter does not always survive catastrolysis or die in it. Favorable living conditions will allow the bees to withstand the temporary crisis so that they can survive all difficulties unscathed, but when there is a lack of adequate food, the beekeeper cannot expect honey. A trunk that is so delayed loses its development for at least three weeks, which is the best harvesting period, and it will do a lot if it can gather the necessary reserves for the winter.
From what we have said so far about the need for the strength of bees and the inconveniences resulting from their weakness, we come to the conclusion that if we want to have honey, indeed a lot of honey, we must try at all costs to ensure that in our apiary there are only strong trunks, abundantly supplied with food. . However, there should be no defective, diseased, poorly wintered or winter-damaged trunks in the apiary.
Strengthening. Inevitably, the question arises how we can achieve the above goal. We will talk about how to force the trunks and how to remove other problems in the next chapter. Now we will consider how to strengthen weak trunks after wintering.
If you have weak trunks in your apiary in the spring, you first need to consider whether there are any trunks that should not be strengthened. This category includes motherless trees, trunks that are heavily covered with bees, that is, their nests are stained with bee excrement, and finally, small clusters in which the bees do not cover three combs sufficiently. It cannot be said that absolutely all the calculated trunks need to be deleted, but small colonies, provided they have young fertile queens, can be strengthened by adding bees from orphaned or impregnated trunks. Permed or tiny rooks can be combined in two or more after removing the excess queens and intoxicating the bees. You can give a strong orphan a mother in a cage and add a few combs with brood, which we hang in the middle of the nest. We can use the queens we sell at home or sell them outside the apiary.
Dig. 1. Mother cage.
So the beekeeper should try to lose as few trunks as possible in the spring, so that all the remaining ones can regain strength in time. On the one hand, we must remember that overwintered bees represent a certain capital, so we should leave them as much as possible, but only if we have a larger number of strong trunks from which we can feed the weak ones without weakening the strong ones too much.
It is necessary to strengthen the trunks and equalize their strength in spring, from April to mid-May. Subsequent treatments may not be effective, because the actual purpose of strengthening is to regulate the internal relations of the trunk so that it can prepare the worker for the right time, i.e. for the beginning of the trunk. We already know that it takes five weeks for bees to grow and mature, but normally it takes a week or two more.
Deleting stumps. The beekeeper has the least trouble with connecting trunks orphaned in winter. He simply pours the orphan bees into the trunk containing the queen (the latter must first be frightened with smoke so that they do not cut off the sapling). A hive after a deleted queenless beetle must be immediately collected from its former flight site to avoid the bees from wandering around. This treatment is best performed in the evening. The sprinkled bees should have time to get used to the new conditions at night and smell the scent of their new family.
When removing trunks that have queens, even the weakest ones, a new difficulty arises: the bees do not forget the old circumstances, even though they find themselves in a new family, but return to their former place of flight. The only way to avoid difficulties is to intoxicate the bees with puffball or saltpetre smoke. To intoxicate one trunk until the bees lose consciousness (which is necessary so that they can forget everything and not remember everything after waking up), you need five grams of saltpeter soaked in a cloth and dried, or a piece of dried puffball the size of a walnut. The prescribed amount of intoxicating material must be burned on coals (covered with a wire mesh to prevent bees from falling into the embers) in the hive under a nest sealed against smoke escape. The best time to intoxicate bees is when they are all gathered in the hive. In order to prevent bees from escaping from the smoke, the openings should be covered with a sieve. We leave the trunk alone until there are no signs of life in it, then we immediately dismantle the nest and move the bees: you have to hurry, because the bees start to wake up after 15 minutes, then they have to be at the place of their new flight. Intoxication does not harm the bees at all, but care should be taken so that they do not suffocate after being intoxicated by lying in a thick layer. We give the trunk strengthened in this way two clouds of smoke to temporarily weaken the bees' vigilance and even out the smells.
Dig. 2. Outlet flaps for frame hives, used to narrow or screen the outlets.
This is the only way in beekeeping practice that we can transfer a fly from a trunk that has a queen in the same apiary to another hive to another place of flight. Without intoxication, this procedure can be performed by exchanging flying bees between apiaries located three kilometers apart in a straight line.
Relocating tree trunks. Taking advantage of the bees' attachment to their place of flight, we can strengthen the trunks by moving the weaker one with the stronger one. The advantage is that the flying fly of a strong trunk will strengthen the weak trunk replaced in its place, and at the same time, the strong trunk put in place of the weak one will receive the flying fly of the weak one. A strong tree will not lose much because it is organized inside and will soon make up for the losses, while a weak trunk will gain a lot because it will start to grow stronger in a natural way. The difficulty is that the bees can shear; To avoid losses, odors should be compensated by placing a small piece of cam or a clove of garlic in both hives the evening before. The condition for the success of the operation is that the adjustment should be made just before noon on a warm, sunny day with enough light. The idea is to have as many bees in the field as possible when the tree trunks are moved.
Feeding the brood. A good way to strengthen weak trunks is to add brood. If, while dismantling a strong trunk, we notice bees breaking out of the cells on a comb, we know that it is suitable for strengthening a weaker one, as long as the latter is not so weak that it would catch the cold of the brood given to it and be unable to embrace and dodge it. Typically, such a patch is administered with a fly on it. It is best to take a comb with mature brood at a time when there are a lot of bees in the field, in order to disturb the flying bees as little as possible, which will not only return to their old place of flight, but may also stage a robbery attack on the reinforced trunk or cut down the queen, especially if there are too many of them. Just in case, you should limit your departures for a few days (or less, depending on the need) to facilitate defense.
It is better to take a comb with mature brood from the center of the nest, because there are most young bees there, but be careful not to carry the queen with the comb, which would be beheaded in a foreign colony.
There are also other ways of strengthening tree trunks, and the ones I have listed can be used individually or, depending on the circumstances, combined. However, before starting work, you need to think everything through in advance so that the work is done purposefully and efficiently. Care should be taken not to weaken the trunks too much, not to do it too late before harvesting, and to guard against robbery during work and to prevent bees from mowing down in the meantime.
How to choose the desired characteristics of bees. We encounter a certain difficulty here, namely: not every trunk can be brought to the required strength, but it swarms unnecessarily, dividing the strength and wasting time and energy. Well, contrary to the erroneous beliefs of home-grown beekeepers, you should select bees that are not very prone to swarming. Then it is necessary to place the hives with their mouths not facing south, as many people do, but facing north or north-east, which will enable the bees to expel warm air from the hive by flapping their wings and drive in cooler air. A hive whose outlet wall is hot from the sun will be too hot for the bees, because even hotter air flows in to replace the hot air that was expelled.
There are more and less hard-working trunks, and therefore their efficiency is different, and in individual trunks there are larger and smaller bees. A beekeeper who wants to have a lot of honey chooses the most hard-working swarms from the most efficient trunks that have the largest bees.
The choice is not as difficult to make as it may seem. Anyone who does not know bees and cannot distinguish their value by eye, without having a larger apiary at home, should observe the stumps of a neighbor's: he will soon learn to distinguish the desired features of bees by their diligence, which can be observed from the outside. A friendly neighbor will help you determine your opinion, giving you an impartial opinion about your employees and allowing you to see for yourself the value of the teams based on the results of their work. When we find such a trunk in a neighbor's apiary, we can ask to grow a queen (or several queens) from this trunk. If a neighbor does not want to bother with breeding queens, we can ask for a comb with uncovered brood, from which we will grow as many queens as we need in our apiary. We know from beekeeping science that each egg laid on a worker bee can produce a mother if the caterpillar is raised in a queen cell. Beekeepers can grow several hundred queens from one comb of uncovered brood, place the undamaged eggs in the beginnings of artificial queen cells and feed them to good, strong orphaned trunks. Not all of us can engage in mass production of queens, as this requires great skill and experience, but everyone can orphan a strong trunk, take all the combs with uncovered brood from it and insert a comb obtained from a neighbor with uncovered brood of the desired value into the center of the nest. . Strong bees will establish several or more rescue queen cells on this comb, which will eventually lead to several queens. The easiest way to achieve the desired result is to leave only one queen cell for the bees on the eighth day after feeding the brood, and place the rest (not damaged ones) in frames one at a time and create a separate swarm for each queen cell. You just need to remember that artificial swarms can only be made on covered nurseries, not damaged, not exposed to cold or exposed to sunlight, and finally, the nursery should not be shaken or turned upside down. In these cases, the bees may not accept the queen cell.
It must be admitted that such reforms are quite expensive, not because the brood is expensive, but because the described breeding of queens disturbs the apiary during the period of preparing the trunks for harvesting, which ultimately reduces the honey efficiency of the apiary for the current season. The easiest way to obtain trunks with the most desirable characteristics of bees is to replace the queen in the spring. The simplest, but not always the easiest. Sometimes it is difficult to buy a mother when she is most needed, sometimes the price scares us and discourages us from buying it.
The most expensive thing in the apiary is rushing. Too quick reforms, even if they achieve the goal in the long run, will not always pay off today - so I advise you to slowly introduce improvements to improve the value of our bees, especially since in general they are not that bad.
Excessive and inappropriate desire to improve the efficiency of the apiary may weaken the trunks rather than contribute to their greater efficiency.
What breed of bees should I keep? The breed of bees plays an important role. More than one beginner beekeeper is convinced by ardent adulterers and, encouraged by advertising of foreign breeds, imports some foreign bees. Well, our first rule: we will breed domestic bees. They are the most resistant to our harsh climate, the most accustomed to our living conditions, they occupy the combs the most compactly, protecting the brood from colds, and themselves from shedding during the hard winter: they work best in spring, gaining strength before the summer harvest, and finally limit their activity in autumn liveliness at the right time. Hence, our domestic bees will be relatively the strongest and, having greater ability to adapt in our country, the healthiest.
Which hives should I farm in? Many beekeepers still "keep" bees in hives that cannot be disassembled, such as logs and baskets. When managing such hives, the beekeeper cannot think about increasing the efficiency of the stumps. It is true that even advanced beekeepers use improved baskets with pins in the bottom - holes into which extensions with movable frames can be placed. Most often, they do it to save money, to reduce the initial outlay on the apiary, so they treat it as a transitional period. Everyone who keeps bees knows well that they can expect larger amounts of honey only in frame hives with removable nests.
Our home-grown beekeepers admit that they can only get honey from boxes; although they have no idea what a frame hive with a removable nest really is and they don't know how to save the combs without destroying the honey when taking them. We do not need to explain the reasons for this belief of theirs, we only state their correct belief.
How to keep bees. 2
We know that they put bees into boxes purchased at a bargain price and allow the bees to build and manage as they like. We build boxes - frame hives - according to the established type, or by purchasing ready-made hives, we look for hives that meet our requirements: when we fill such swarms, we dictate our will to the bees. First of all, we will force them to build patches strictly in frames.
Detachable sockets. If the bees listen to us, we immediately come to the dismantling of the nests. "This fact gives us unequivocal influence on the internal affairs of the trunks, because from now on we can freely direct the bees' work for their and our good.
The disassembly of the nests means that we can remove the combs built into the frames from the hive inhabited by bees without damaging them. This invention of great importance, acquired for beekeeping by the most famous beekeepers, should be used skillfully and never abused. Improper use of tree trunk demountability can easily lead to great damage, as is the case with other inventions which, when used incorrectly, cause greater damage the more useful they are by nature. So let's not abuse, but let's skillfully use this epoch-making invention in beekeeping.
If you want to use an invention, you first need to know what it is, and then be able to implement it and carry it out in all details. When applied to bees in demountable hives, we already know what disassembly is, and when it comes to bees, we should be able to manage them in accordance with the laws to which they are subject. Before we start giving orders, let's get to know the conditions in which they are able to fulfill the order - let's comply with the natural requirements of bees and remove all obstacles standing in the way of carrying out our orders:
1. We already know that each bee comb is separated from the adjacent comb by a 12 mm wide inter-comb passage, and the comb itself is 24 mm thick, so the total thickness of the comb together with the inter-comb passage is 30 mm. We must maintain the natural thickness of the comb in frame hives. Our nest frame will be no less than 36 mm thick, with the top and side slats being 24 mm wide, and the spacing nails separating the frame from the frame by 12 mm.
Our nest frames do not touch the sides of the upper bars, which is still the case in non-top hives - in our hives, the bees can freely pass between the upper bars.
The passages are used for communication with the super, which stands above the nest only during the summer peak and the highest development of the trunks, i.e. from the beginning of June to mid-August, for a maximum of two and a half months. At other times of the year, the nest is covered with homemade cloth, on which a board called a wooden cushion is placed. This circumstance forces the beekeeper to be vigilant against excessive cooling of the nest from the headrest after removing the top: during the month until the autumn brood emerges, when supplying the trunks for the winter with protection from frost, and finally in spring during the period of bee growth. Heat escapes fastest through the gaps above the socket, so you should constantly ensure the tightness of the ceiling to avoid heat loss and prevent drafts. Moreover, the ceiling should be thick enough to protect against frost and, consequently, moisture settling and condensation over the bees during the winter.
The sides of the nest are surrounded by valves - boards reaching to the bottom of the hive, suspended on arms, just like frames are suspended. The valves and cushions precisely separate the inhabited part from the rest of the unoccupied space in the hive, so that the bees cannot escape through the gaps. The tightness of the boundaries protects the nest from heat loss and the bees from getting lost.
The top frames are thicker than the nest frames because they are intended for storage combs, and the latter, as the word suggests, for storing honey. When these combs reach the appropriate thickness, bee babies will not be raised because the queen cannot reach the bottom of the cells that are too deep with her abdomen, so she cannot brood there. The upper bars of the top frames touch each other and are 50 mm wide, so the slices placed in these frames are 50 mm thick, including the inter-patch transition. The side and bottom bars of the extension frames do not touch each other. The super frames do not stand on the upper bars of the nest frames, but hang in the super, creating a 6 mm high gap between the said bars, which serves as a passage for bees from the nest to the super. The difference in the thickness of the nest and extension frames causes them to overlap, so a distance is needed for the bees to reach all the frames without obstacles; it cannot be narrower than 5 mm, because it would be covered with plasters by the bees, and it cannot be wider than 7 mm, because the bees would cover it with slices. The bees can point out any inaccuracies in the spacing between the frames and the relationship between the frames, as well as between the walls of the hive and the frames, by sticking them together with putty or building them up. Puttying frames makes it difficult to work quietly in the hive, and pulling the slices prevents dry work - in both cases, the work encounters obstacles and takes the beekeeper more time.
When the super is in use, the cloth is removed from the nest, and the upper beams of the super frames serve as the ceiling, covering the bees and separating the built-up interior of the hive from the attic.
2. Both nest and storage patches are mounted in the very center of the frames. To achieve this, you need: A. In each frame, paste the beginning from which the bees will draw the comb, B. The beginning should stretch continuously across the entire internal width of the frame and touch its side bars with its ends. C. It is glued exactly with the center of the wax in the middle of the upper bar of the frame. D. It must be firmly attached so that it does not break under the weight of the bees.
Beginnings. The beginnings are pieces of dried bee or artificial knots a few or a few centimeters wide. A section of the snake is placed in the very center of the bottom of the upper bar, and wax from the burning candle is dripped along the contact point of the section with the bar on both sides. The pieces of working dried herb are dipped in melted wax, and then, without delay, they are placed, hitting the very center of the bar with the center of the wax and applying even, moderate pressure until the wax hardens.
To melt the wax, you can prepare a suitable shallow trough made of ordinary sheet metal, equipped with a wooden handle. The length of the tray for Warsaw frames is 25 cm and the width is 8 cm. It can also be used for Ciesielski frames. For frames from American hives, the trough should be longer.
A piece of dried herb can be dipped in wax if it is reddened several times. New dried herb melts in warm wax, especially the cell walls, and the pieces cannot be glued so strongly in the frame, so fresh dried herb can be glued after touching them to a hot stovetop.
When using dried herbs, either in the form of scraps for starters or pieces to assemble whole combs, you should pay close attention to their natural position, i.e. place them as they were built in the hive, with the upper side up. Otherwise, the treatments would miss the target: as we know, the cells in the comb are not built completely horizontally, but turned slightly upwards, if we placed them the other way around, we would cause honey to leak out, which would force the bees to build up the cells beyond the appropriate size, and thus stick the combs together .
Dig. 3. A frame with pieces of dried herb arranged, connected on both sides with a wire before being placed in the hive.
Dig. 4. A patch made of dried pieces, finished by bees.
3. The frames with the beginnings should be hung (or placed) in the hive strictly vertically, and the hive should also be set strictly horizontally using a plumb line or spirit level. The last warning is justified by the fact that the bees, when pulling the combs, hang vertically in the chains, so the comb hangs vertically. If we incorrectly align the frame with the beginning, the patch will miss the side bars of the frame. The more defective the frame is, the greater the error. The condition for dismantling the nest is to make the bees build the combs tightly into the frames.
When to start. The beekeeper limits the bees in their desires that do not lead to the goals he sets, just as a gardener cleanses fruit trees of unnecessary branches and wolves. Bees' desires include breeding excessive numbers of drones. Each stump of our apiary, left to itself, will grow so many drones. that there could be enough of them for two apiaries, even if the apiary was run only for swarms.
The presence of drone combs in the hive causes the breeding of drones, the lack of drone combs limits their number to the smallest limits. We know from practice that in spring the bees start building drone combs again, and the queen immediately broods them. Therefore, we conclude that in spring we should not start trees in trunks that are used for honey, not for swarms. This rule applies throughout the summer until the trunks receive young mothers.
We can breed them without fear of incurring labor as soon as the mothers are regenerated, from the moment they become fertilized and begin to lay eggs. We can also give birth to established trunks and newly established swarms in mid-summer, even if the latter have old mothers. It should be remembered that this year's natural swarms with old mothers, set at the beginning, start drone construction only after three weeks, and swarms with young mothers after four weeks, counting in both cases from the date of their setting.
Spare patches. From the above we can see that in order to prevent the breeding of drones, we must give the trunks combs prepared only with bee work in the spring and have enough of them to gradually fill the entire hives, and in the summer we will make sure that the bees do not build combs under the frames, and the pulled ones will be removed every few days to prevent the drone caterpillars from hatching.
Dig. 3. Kocióbka - a tool for sweeping hives.
Removing the work under the frames can be done through the top valve of the hive, without dismantling the nests, using a beekeeping knife and a beekeeper's knife, provided that the work is freshly removed. It would be more difficult with older patches.
Providing ready-made combs with dried bees to the trunks at the right time accelerates the development of bees in spring; so they can gain considerable strength in the future, because they get ready-made cradles for future workers. These combs later serve as vessels for honey.
Drone combs can also be used to store honey, provided that we do not allow the mother to turn them red. This is possible, but quite difficult in an economy with extensions. Until recently, a grid called a baffle plate was used for this purpose, but it is now falling into disuse as it is too tiring for bees forced to squeeze through narrow gaps.
There are various ways to obtain an adequate supply of honeycombs. Some people quite neatly stack pieces of dried bees, others remove the stumps with old queens in the fall and store the saved combs for spring use, and others use an artificial knot.
Artificial snake. Artificial wax, called by some artificial wax or simply snake, is a thin plate of natural wax with bee cell buds artificially squeezed out on both sides. It is easy to guess that these boards serve as the matrix of the patches. The bees willingly accept the knot, pull out the cell walls from the beginnings, build up the rest with their own wax, and this is how an artificial bee comb is created. The strong trunk can finish two sheets of knots in a day in summer.
The knot sheets can be attached to nest frames on wires, and the latter are fused into the knots using appropriate tools.
Dig. 6. Fusing the artificial knot into the frame with a Voiblet knurl.
Fixing the knots. The wax sheets are cut shorter and slightly narrower than the inside of the frame to avoid warping as the wax expands in the heat of the hive. Short sheets of knots are fastened to frames without wires. This happens in extension frames or even nest frames, when we do not fill the latter completely, but provide them with longer beginnings. The entire sheets of rope are inserted into the nest frames on three wires stretched from top to bottom at such intervals that they divide the frame lengthwise into four parts, the middle two of which are larger and the side ones smaller. For this purpose, the upper and lower beams are pierced with an awl, making sure that the holes are located in the very center of the frame, and each pair of holes is opposite each other. The wire is threaded through the holes as if sewing in one sequence straight from one hole to the other, starting from one of the side holes and sewing to the inside of the frame. After threading the wires and pulling them tight, we have a frame ready to accept the artificial cord. The ends of the wire are hooked and wrapped around the nearest nails.
Dig. 7. Nowiński's flask.
Dig. 8. Four-comb honey extractor.
Place the sheet of knots into the frame, interlacing the wires so that two wires are on one side of the knot and the middle one is on the other. We place the frame on a slightly moistened board, slightly cut to the dimensions of the frame's interior, and then we embed it using a heated Wuabl (Voiblet) knurl (Fig. 6) or a Nowiński flask. The tool should be heated in a non-smoking flame to a temperature that will not burn your hand. First, we fuse in the middle wire, then turn it over and attach the next two wires. When lifting the frame, we do not lift it straight up, but move it slightly lengthwise to overcome the resistance of the wax, which partially sticks to the board. When the hose is pressed with a tool, it bends something - it is straightened with the tool that we use to pull lightly (carefully so as not to cut the knot) on the opposite side of the wire.
The wire used to attach the knots should be galvanized, thin, such as is used to make artificial flowers. The hose, wire and knurl can be purchased in beekeeping stores, the Nowiński flask can be made at home. (Figure 7).
We give the frames, equipped with an artificial hose, to the bees immediately, or at the latest the next day. Longer storage of the hose in this condition causes it to warp and fall out. You don't need to insert the hose slices into the very center of the socket, nor should you put too many of them - at most two slices at a time. To protect the hose from slipping, you can tap the upper edge of the hose to the frame bar. Artificial honey not made by bees is not given to newly settled swarms.
Dig. 9. Uncapping and cutting the cap with a beekeeping knife.
Dig. 10. Gauze mesh, protecting the face from bee attacks.
Honey extractor. It is understandable that a beekeeper who devotes a lot of effort and expense to obtaining spare working combs will not destroy them when taking honey, but will try to get a machine to shake the honey without damaging the combs. (Figure 8). A honey extractor is the machine without which a progressive apiary farm is unthinkable. The operation of the honey extractor is based on the use of centrifugal force. The combs placed in the honey extractor's winch, rotated quickly, remove honey from the side facing outside in the winch. After inverting the patches and spinning them similarly, they are emptied and can be used for further use. It is best to learn about the structure of a honey extractor and how to extract honey from a neighbor or a beekeeping shop.
Sealed honey cannot be removed from the combs without first sealing it, which is cut off with a beekeeping knife. (Figure 9).
Dig. 11. Bingham's vacuum cleaner.
Dig. 12. Root chisel and chisel operations.
Beekeeping tools and equipment. All activities requiring opening the hives would expose the beekeeper to bee attacks if he were not protected from stings with a net. (Figure 10). It is placed on the brim of the hat, it must be unfastened using a hoop made of thicker wire and hanging with its own weight below the chin, or it can be sewn in another way, as long as it sufficiently protects the head and face. The mesh, which shakes due to gusts of wind, is harmful to the eyes and does not provide sufficient protection against bees, as they come close to the face. The ends of the net are placed under buttoned outer clothing. The material for the mesh should be black as it absorbs light, white mesh irritates the eyes and reduces the power of vision. Those more sensitive to stings use a sleeve to protect their hands. Woolen gloves are not suitable for the apiary, as they irritate the bees and do not protect the hands properly: the best ones are home-made from thin linen with one finger, with long sleeves, overlapping the sleeves and tied close to the elbows with ribbons threaded to the hems. A bee can actually sting through thin cloth, but the sting is not that painful, and the bee does not lose its stinger - when the beekeeper lifts the cloth with the bee, the bee will fly away, placated.
The vacuum cleaner (Fig. 11) is an indispensable tool in the apiary. It should be convenient to use, namely it should hold the heat and be constructed in such a way that the smoke can be directed to the appropriate place. Currently, the most commonly used are Bingham vacuum cleaners, which allow the beekeeper to work without a helper and risk the wrath of the bees. The best smoke is from a rotten tree, called rotten wood. Loose dust is inconvenient because it clogs the holes in the vacuum cleaner.
A brush is used to sweep the tree trunks (Rye. 5 on page 22). Feathers from the wings of large birds are used to sweep bees from combs.
Dig. 13. Feeder with a cork for serving meals. A metal tube pushed through a plug rests with its obliquely cut external end against the bottom of a shallow channel. The liquid flows out as it is taken up by the bees, and stops flowing when the oblique opening of the tube is closed.
Dłutko Ruta (Root) is an invaluable beekeeping tool. It is used for opening glued frames and cleaning walls and beams made of wax or putty. The chisel is made of a flat piece of steel, one end is like a blunt chisel and the other is like a wide hook and is bent 5 mm. (Figure 12). The chisel is placed on the edge of the hive when it is not needed temporarily, with its bent end down; this prevents the bees from being crushed and allows for quicker capture if necessary.
Other equipment, such as a transporter, a bee scoop, a queen cage (Fig. 1), and a swarm bag, are also needed in the apiary in various circumstances, but since they are not needed for every activity, I limit myself to mentioning them.
Dig. 14. Müller's feeder.
Feeders belong rather to the inventory of hives. There are many feeder systems, they are either troughs placed in the upper part of the frames (Fig. 15) and serve only to feed the bees, or boxes that cover the entire nests. The latter are much larger and are used both for feeding and fueling. These are overhead feeders, placed in the headrest instead of the ceiling, more convenient than others. Being in direct contact with a cluster of bees, they are easier to defend against attacks by foreign bees, they can be left in the hives for a day after night feeding without fear of attack, and they are even less bothersome to the beekeeper.
Regardless, some beekeepers use bottom feeders, placed under the frames at the bottom of the hives.
Dig. 15. Miiller's feeder in cross-section, serves both to supply honey or syrup as well as sate, so it is used to feed and nourish the bees.
Miiller's top feeder covers the entire nest and serves as a pillow for several days without harming the trunk. It can be filled several times. It corresponds to this task because, in addition to the listed facilities, food is poured using a funnel through a hole made in the upper latch - board D (Fig. 15), plugged with a cork, without removing it from the nest. Direct contact with bees is avoided and there is no vacuum cleaner or net. (Figures 14 and 15).
CHAPTER II.
WHEN AND HOW SHOULD THE TRUNK GET STRENGTH.
The main peak for us falls approximately from mid-June and lasts until the second half of July. During this time, the trunks should gain adequate strength and balance between the young and flying flies. To this end, during the spring period, the PSZ zelerz will stick to the following guidelines:
1. The overwintered trunk will be strong enough;
2. He should have a young mother, preferably last year's mother;
3. He must be adequately supplied with food;
4. It will grow in the warmth of a stocked hive;
5. He will not be disturbed by unnecessary dismantling of the nest;
6. The nest will not be too spacious;
7. The mother should have a place to lay eggs;
8. The hive will be protected from leaks and pests;
9. The apiary site will be convenient for the development of trunks and finally;
10. During the harvest break in spring, the trunk will be forcibly fed.
Ten conditions must be met to obtain honey.
1. The strength of trunks in spring depends primarily on good wintering. The trunk, which was strong enough in winter, so it covers 7-8 frames of Warsaw, given sufficient conditions, comes out slightly weaker in spring, namely the bees cover 5 black combs. The reason for the weakening of the trunks is the loss of older bees, worn out in the autumn of last year*). A trunk with four patches in spring is considered sufficient, a trunk with fewer patches is considered weak. Weaker groups require special care from the beekeeper throughout the spring period, primarily gradual strengthening at the expense of the strongest trunks, so that all of them can gain adequate strength before the beginning of the summer harvest. We should not exaggerate when measuring strength: only trunks that are too strong are suitable for capturing it in early spring, which is only to their benefit, as they would be too eager to work and lose a significant part of the fly during the spring rain and cold. Normally strong trunks can only lose some strength in a warm spring. A weak trunk, not strengthened in spring, will not gain strength on its own in time.
*) There are also other reasons causing the collapse of individual bees or entire trunks, which we can call the general term: poor wintering conditions.
Strengthening the trunks is achieved either by feeding brood, adding young bees, inserting frames with brood together with the infested fly, or by moving a stronger trunk with a weaker one. We talked about the ways of performing these activities above.
2. Honey bees should have a mother. It is not worth saving the trunks orphaned in winter, but they need to be combined with weaker ones that have queens, and some of the bees can be placed on one trunk and the rest on the other trunk as needed. Saving the orphans in spring is generally possible by administering bee brood, provided that the first drones needed to fertilize the young mother are expected soon in the apiary: however, it will never be profitable where large honey harvests are involved.
The mother should be young. The trunk from which the swarm emerged last year has last year's young mother. The trunk with the embedded swarm or any of the further swarms has such a mother. The older the queen is, the longer the trunk remains without a swarm and the beekeeper does not renew the queens himself. Three-year-old queens are found in stumps with embedded last year's primiparous plants, which emerged from hives fused two years ago. It is not difficult to know, by keeping notes, the age of the mother in a given trunk. It is not necessarily necessary to see the mother to check whether she is in the hive. The presence of brood in spring reassures us of its presence, and dense brood found in abundance indicates its goodness.
The three-year-old mother broods much less, the four-year-old brood is not enough and the trunk does not gain strength in time, especially since this year it is changing the mother itself and has a break in brooding. It is possible to keep a mother for at most three years, but this is not advisable, because the older one is unreliable during the winter and breeds humped brood, which means that between the working brood there are drones in the working cells, protruding above the surface of the comb. Sometimes the trunk replaces the queen without the knowledge or help of the beekeeper, which happens relatively rarely in carefully supervised apiaries and should not happen in our case. The fact of a recent queen change, soon after the change, is recognized by the beekeeper from the remains of the rescue queen cells, and later, he guesses from the appearance of the brood.
Sometimes you can find shot brood in the hives: there are quite often empty cells between the brood, and broods can be seen right next to each other in different stages of development. These symptoms may indicate old age or a sickly disposition of the mother, but most often they indicate a plague in the hive (broodbrood).
3. Food: We do not find areas in Poland that have a constant, high demand throughout spring and summer. The spring flowers of our vegetation are of some benefit to bees, but honey arrives in the hives generally in negligible quantities, so it serves the bees not so much as food, but as an incentive to grow the trunks, keeping the bees in full life. A small but constant amount of water, alongside the increasing heat, provides good conditions for bees in our climate.
However, the spring crops are too small to be stored and used as solid food, so they are only natural feeding. Therefore, all trunks should have a sufficient supply of food in spring, left over from last season. Bees that raise brood at an accelerated pace use at least two kilograms of honey per month from their old reserves, so at the time of the second spring inspection, which is carried out in the first days or mid-April, they should have no less than 5 kilograms of honey remaining from the winter.
The beekeeper should replenish the missing amount of supplies without delay, which can be done either by providing honeycombs (overwintered indoors) or by feeding liquid honey (patoka) in large portions. The bottom feeders are placed at night and taken away in the morning to avoid bees from other hives attacking (robbery). If there is no honey, you can feed with syrup: the syrup is pure sugar dissolved in water: three glasses of water per kilo of sugar, boiled and simmered, then after cooling it can be fed to the bees. The syrup can be stored for a longer period of time without harm, but you should be aware that if kept longer, it begins to crystallize and the growing crystals may burst the vessel in which it is stored. Honey or syrup is given to the trunks in such an amount that everything can be carried to the nest during the night, or it can also be administered directly into the combs using an appropriate pump (spray).
Hungry bees suck out the brood, thus destroying their offspring. A trunk that has sucked out the brood but is saved by the beekeeper before it dies is lost to the rest of the current season.
4. Nests warmly wrapped. After spring inspections, nests cannot be left without litter, in the form of mats to protect against cold. Heat in hives is needed more in spring than in winter. In the warmth of the hive, the cluster of bees expands, covering more combs. This circumstance increases the mother's cells and the trunk raises the young at an accelerated pace, which is exactly what we want. A beekeeper who removes pillows and mats in spring delays the growth of tree trunks and becomes like a wealthy spendthrift who would burn bread in his ovens not with wood. Bees produce heat in the hives by consuming honey - the colder it is, the more honey they will consume, but they will not grow strong enough and the beekeeper will suffer a double loss.
Therefore, not only should mats and pillows be left, but after each, even the smallest, activity in the hive, all the smallest gaps should be closed. Heat protection in hives should be most careful in early spring to mid-May, after which you can pay less attention to it; but the mats will be removed only as the nest expands, when they begin to interfere with adding frames.
5. Do not disassemble the sockets unnecessarily. Bees develop best and feel best at any time of the year when they are provided with proper peace and quiet. The greatest concern - the inappropriate use of the nest disassembly causes almost disorganization of bee life. A beekeeper, forced by necessity, should work in the hive skillfully, carefully and quickly, so as to cause as little damage as possible.
Dismantling a nest involves inspecting all the combs containing brood. Putting the valve aside and removing one or two frames is not disassembling the nest, adding a frame to enlarge the nest is also not disassembling it. Even more so, the removal of freshly cut combs under the frames using a beekeeping knife and a swab cannot be called undressing, if we do not remove the combs during this activity. Some beekeepers wrongly call opening the gable doors, opening the roof, sweeping the hive, or other minor activities at the hives "dismantling the hives".
All the listed small activities cause bees anxiety. Such anxiety in late autumn or winter is always harmful to bees - it does not cause much harm in early autumn, but is beneficial during the active period of bees in spring and summer; it is not harmful even if you have to use smoke to tame the persistence of bees. It's one thing to dismantle the entire nest! Then the beekeeper, working in the hive, is not able to do it without damage, even if he works very carefully and skillfully, so he avoids dismantling the nests and uses this action when necessary.
A beekeeper should not be too curious and restless.
You need to dismantle the nests during the following activities: 1, during the second spring inspection, 2, removing the queen cells at the beginning of summer in order to prevent swarming, 3, searching for old queens in order to replace them, 4, arranging the autumn nest and 5, winter nest. Deleting nurseries and searching for queens does not take place in all stumps every year, but only in some of them when necessary, so strictly speaking, it is necessary to dismantle all stumps in the apiary three times a year. This rule does not exclude exceptional cases and urgent circumstances: in every rule there are exceptions, here too they are permissible, often indicated, in which the disassembly of the trunks confirms the importance of the invention.
In spring, we have two trunk inspections in the entire apiary. The first inspection is on the day of the spring flight, during which we sweep the tree trunks and make sure that the bees have a sufficient supply of food. This may be the most important activity in the apiary, but it is not strictly speaking dismantling the nests. If, after removing the valve, we see a certain amount of honey on the first comb, we do not remove any frame. Only in some trunks, which show some anxiety after the flight, do we look further to make sure of the existence of the mother after the brood.
How to breed bees 3
The purpose of the second spring inspection is to create conditions for the normal development of bees in spring. This inspection is carried out at a temperature of 159% C, when the beekeeper in the apiary can wear light clothes without feeling cold.
The individual steps of the second inspection are as follows: sweeping the bees again, checking and calculating the supplies, determining the goodness of the queen, adjusting the size of the nest to the strength of the bees, cleaning the frames and walls in the hive, and finally covering the nest well. During the inspection, the trunks to be removed or strengthened should be marked and classified according to their strength.
We will continue to sweep the trunks weekly throughout the spring and add combs as the bees become stronger.
6. Socket size. We already know that the trunks are quite weak in spring, even if they have wintered well. The trunk in which the bees settle in black for five frames in March after the flight is considered good. Meanwhile, in June this trunk will have 16 or 18 patches. Bees multiply quickly if the conditions are favorable, especially when the beekeeper takes care of their well-being and tries to make them grow as quickly as possible.
We know that the trunks went to winter in 7 or 8 patches. We hear that in spring they are weaker and plant not eight, but five. Careless people leave all eight in the nest in spring, better beekeepers take it easy - they take all the unnecessary combs from the hives and leave only the necessary ones. In spring, until mid-May, the trunks grow best only when they are a bit tight. Bees in our hives should cover all combs in black throughout spring and summer. The emptiness in the hive retards the development of the bees, while the moderate crowding typical for each season accelerates their growth.
The beekeeper should not be upset that he has to add about 12 frames in a relatively short time to fill the hive before the harvest. Everything has its time. At the beginning of June, when the heat comes, it will be necessary to add four frames at once to prevent the bees from hatching, at the beginning of May one is enough. If we deliver four frames by mid-May, that's already a lot, normal tree trunks can only receive three or even two and that's enough for them. It should be noted that the trunks develop slower when we add an artificial tube to them than when we give them ready-made wax patches.
These five or six combs with a dense mass of bees after the March flight are the bees' nest. Next to the brood there are combs filled with pollen, carried by bees on their legs: these combs constitute the boundaries of the nest, but they still belong to the nest. On both sides, apart from the combs filled with pollen, there may be the same bee combs as those, in beekeeping language they are called nest combs (or frames), but they do not constitute a nest, although at any moment they may be reddened by the mother and then they will enter its nest. composition. The nest expands as the trunks grow and, if the mother is fertile, it may consist of 12 red patches, bordered on both sides with border patches covered with pollen.
Typically, the center of the socket is in the center of the outlet; if the outlet is placed in the center of the hive, the center comb of the hive will be the center of the nest. The position of the socket depends on the position of the outlet.
The combs located outside the nest are used to store honey brought from the field, so in autumn we find the largest amount of it in them, while in the combs belonging to the nest there is much less of it. In the case of top farming, it often happens that the combs in the nest have so little honey that they are not suitable for the winter. Most often, winter nests are built from combs that were previously outside the nest, and the combs that previously constituted the nest are taken from the hives after the brood emerges, the honey is shaken out and kept as spares.
7. A place to red. The period of bee development lasts throughout spring and summer until the bees completely stop beeping. The beekeeper should make sure that during the period of the bees' growth, the queen does not run out of space for brooding, even for a moment, for this purpose he provides either spare dried herbs or an artificial hose, thus expanding the nest. It does not enlarge the interior of the hive, but the size of the nest. The first possibility would be if he placed the patches just behind the valve. We know that the comb covered with bee bread constitutes the border of the nest, so we add combs to the nest, which means that we insert a fresh frame between the comb containing brood and the comb containing pollen. The greatest vigilance in ensuring that there is not enough space for brooding should be maintained during the period when bees are prone to swarming, i.e. starting from the onset of greater warmth in the second half of May.
In spring, the trunk grows, but although there is no honey, care should be taken to add combs. From mid-June, when the main harvest begins, you also need to be careful not to accumulate too much honey in the nest. If the super is given at the right time, there is usually no need to worry about it, but overfilling the nest with honey often happens in trunks that are lagging in development, when the super should be given late, i.e. already in the harvest period. In addition, too much honey may accumulate in the nest, even if the super was placed at the right time, in extremely honey-bearing years.
8. Protection of trunks against moisture. Moisture is very harmful to bees because it takes away heat, destroys mold in the combs and predisposes the bees to contagious diseases. Moisture is equally harmful to bees in all seasons. The source of moisture in the hive is most often at the top - in the leaking roof. The smallest crack in a cracked board or a knot, or poor adjustment of the boards, sometimes difficult to notice, is the reason for moisture in the entire hive. A valve with glass left in the hive during the cold season is similarly harmful. (Fig. 16), which is also useful in the summer and spring period, as it facilitates frequent observations without harming the bees.
Dig. 16. Glazed Lewicki valve. Very useful equipment in the hive from the end of May to the cold August.
Pests. The most troublesome pests in hives are: fluke and bee lice, spiders and ants on and in hives, and in the apiary - frogs and insectivorous birds, especially swallows. There are many other more or less common pests known that attack either entire trunks or individual bees, from which the beekeeper should protect the apiary by sweeping, driving away or scaring them away. Due to lack of space, I will limit myself only to generally draw attention to the need to protect bees against pests. In a progressively run apiary, fluke can be the most harmful, so a few words about it.
When developed, the butterfly looks like a moth from the moth family. Its caterpillars hatch from eggs laid by the female in the garbage at the bottom of the hive or directly on the honeycombs. The butterflies feed on honey, and the foxes roll the combs, the older ones, i.e. those that have been reddened several times, covering them and connecting them with spiderweb galleries, as if with tubes in which they can move from comb to comb and are safe from bees' intervention. When the butterfly takes over the hive, it squeezes the cluster of bees more and more, the caterpillars creep under the brood from the center of the combs, make passages there, mortally injuring the brood, it smells too much and is disgusting to the bees, so that eventually the rightful owner is forced to leave the apartment. Bees escaping from the fluke (also from hunger and moisture) leave as a miserable swarm, usually at an inappropriate time for swarming, and most often die of hunger somewhere on a branch. In demountable hives, this last resort usually does not occur, because the beekeeper can remove whole or parts of mothballed combs, while this pest often attacks spare combs that have been stored for a longer part of the year.
In order to prevent the fluke from entering the hives, frames should be stored in tight, sulfurized containers with the combs placed there. If there is no such hiding place, you can hang the frames in airy and cool places, in attics or sheds, but these places should be protected from bees. Patches placed in attics should not touch each other. New combs that have never been reddened are best stored, but combs that have been reddened several times are worse stored without protection, so the beekeeper gives them in the spring first, making sure they are free from pests. Storage combs should not be reddened even once, as they are easily knocked off by the fluke when they are outside the hive for the longest time. Slices that have become mottled during storage should either be thoroughly cleaned of spiderwebs and caterpillars, or scraped and melted into wax.
9. Apiary site. The apiary should be located in a place that is most convenient for bees and convenient for the beekeeper. Taking care of the bees comes first, as long as the apiary can be properly supervised and cared for
The apiary cannot be placed on wet, damp and cold ground, it should be placed in a place protected from the prevailing western and northern winds, but it cannot be heavily shaded. Part shade is the most beneficial for bees as it protects the hives from getting too hot in the sun. It grows best in a fruit garden, lined with fruit bushes that protect against drafts. The apiary should be located in a quiet place, but not "on the stove", because the apparent warmth lures the bees into the field, and the cold loses them on the way.
10. Fueling. Bees only develop properly when they have a constant, even small, supply of bees in spring. After the fruit trees bloom, there is a dead season for apiaries: it falls during the rowan flowering period. In areas where there are no acacias (local locust trees) in larger clusters that would shorten or fill the starvation period, it lasts over three weeks. At this time, the trunks most often die of hunger if they do not have the necessary reserves: and those that have food lose energy, the mother slows down or stops growing, and the trunk does not raise the young as much as we need. Feeding the bees, filling this time, prevents sluggishness and, by giving the illusion of excitement, excites the queen to red. Feeding cannot replace reserves, but they must be in sufficient quantity, calculated and added at the right time. It doesn't hurt to give hungry trunks the right amount of food not only in April, but you should feed them whenever you notice a lack of sufficient food. Feeding a hungry stump will only hasten its demise.
The fueling material is not honey or syrup, but a third part of honey or syrup mixed with boiled warm water. This kind of "filling" is called triple. You can even give one part of honey to three parts of water, then you will be satisfied four times. The filling is served warm at night, in the amount of half, or at most one glass, poured into feeders placed in frames under the upper bar. (Figure 13). If you don't have them, you can feed them in feeders placed at the bottom of the hive, or directly on plates, but then you have to take them away the next morning for fear of an attack. In order to protect the bees from drowning in the lower feeders, appropriate rafts should be prepared or short chaff should be sprinkled, preferably from straw bends that spring further from under the chopper. Feeder with cork or Miillera do not require rafts or chaff.
You can only give satie on a sunny day, otherwise the bees, excited by the apparent excitement, would die in the rain. Stoking can take two weeks or longer. It should be fed every second or third day. You can start fertilizing even earlier than five weeks before harvesting in the field, depending on your need or desire, but do not fertilize earlier than when the currants are blooming. If left for longer than two days, it will pickle, so it is best to serve it on the same day, as it is fermented and smells of yeast and is highly harmful to bees.
CHAPTER III.
HOW TO CARE FOR BEES DURING HARVESTING.
The beekeeper's most important task during this period is to keep the bees in constant working order. So He will remove all obstacles and provide all help to encourage them and force them to work. For this purpose, the beekeeper:
1. Prevents bees from swarming;
2. Takes honey from the supers at the right time;
3. Watches over the work and removes the causes of bee lodging;
4. Refrain from using grating sheets;
5. It will not take up precious time of the bees;
6. It will provide pastures for the bees.
Let's briefly go through all the points similar to the previous chapter.
1. Preventing swarming. Enlarging the nest in spring is intended to help the bees provide cradles for the brood, and the beekeeper does everything to benefit the worker. The second parallel purpose of this activity is to prevent the worker from mating during the time allotted for work and not to dissipate his forces on the creation of small settlements that need help, that is, further, self-imposed expenditures not covered by the plan. Crowded conditions in the nest, along with heat in the hive, are the causes of bees swarming. Only the considerable strength of the trunk, without being too tight, gives hope for a large honey harvest.
Extension. We can further enlarge the nest by adding an extension, which, while fulfilling its initial purpose of enlarging the interior of the hive, also serves as a honey storage facility throughout the main time. The bee's drive to deposit the greatest abundance of honey over the nest is used here. Bees lay further amounts of honey on both sides of the nest, and when there is no space here either, they lay it under the brood at the bottom, naturally when this part of the combs is not too small. Sometimes the brood reaches to the very bottom, then the bees carry honey to the nest, filling only the cells left by the young ones. The mother, having nowhere to breed, prepares a swarm with the bees, and finally part of the team looks for a new settlement: a number of bees together with the mother create a swarm and leave the built-up residence, leaving all the wealth to the remaining bees and future mothers. raised in a nursery.
Fig 17. The addition was given just in time. The UI is filled with combs and all combs are covered by bees.
Thwarting the swarm. Sometimes it happens that the main harvest begins before the top is added, then the described process takes place much faster. When the brood occupies almost the entire 12 middle combs, there is little space left on the rest of the combs for honey. It may happen that the supers are administered during the period of preparation of the trunk for swarming, i.e. when the bees set up queen cells and the queen broods them. In the meantime, even such a significant enlargement of the apartment as adding an extension will not help, the trunk will not give up its intentions and will produce a swarm at the right time. A beekeeper would be unpleasantly surprised by the profession, indeed he often loses a very strong swarm, being sure of the peace in the apiary and not keeping an eye on it: so anticipating similar opportunities, he examines the trunks to remove the queen cells. This operation is necessary for a few or several trunks, but it can be discontinued if no reddened nurse cells can be noticed in any of them. For greater certainty, the stumps that raise some concerns about swarming are checked, which is confirmed by the different behavior of the bees, whether in movement before departure, insufficient work progress, or finally in holes in the fabric covering the nest.
Some stumps in the apiary are delayed in their development, reaching strength not in the first days of June (when supers are normally given), but only in mid- or after mid-June, that is, after the main harvest. When giving tops to late trunks, it is necessary to look through all of them in search of nurseries.
If we find reddened queen cells in a hive and one of them is already covered, we assume that the stem has started swarming. Deleting the nurseries will not achieve the goal, because the trunk will grow today or tomorrow despite our efforts: so we use a different procedure: we leave one covered nursery undamaged, we delete the rest of the nurseries and take away the queen. If there are several indoor queen cells in the hive, we cut out the (superfluous) ones without damaging them and we can use them by raising queens in small groups, which, when fertilized, will be used to replace them when renewing the old ones. After the queen is taken away and only one queen cell is left, the bees establish rescue queen cells and could swarm anyway. To prevent this from happening, you need to listen to the mothers' singing on the evenings of the sixth and seventh day after the mother is taken away. The singing of the mothers will assure us of the intended swarm on the ninth day. However, we will not break the silence: the trunks should be examined to remove the nurseries. In case there are any, let's take this opportunity to look at the nursery left by S$ days ago. It will then be empty, which can be seen by the hole in the lower end. The hole at the bottom of the nursery also assures us that the trunk has a mother.
In this way, by preventing the trunk from swarming, we also renewed the mother. Now this trunk cannot swarm until after three weeks, but it usually does not think about swarming until a young fly from the young mother's litter appears, so it can only redden the queen cells after 35 days have passed since the old queen has been taken away and they could swarm in another 9 days, i.e. after 42 days of the young mother's litter, but then there will be no time for swarming after the cessation of breeding.
When viewing frames, we constantly delete not only the reddened queen cells, but also all the beginnings of the queen cells. Since the last inspection, a stump can become swarming on the tenth day, so if in any given year the bees were particularly eager to swarm, the stump would need to be inspected every ninth day. Bees that are too swarming should be subject to similar inspections. Inspecting tree trunks is a tedious job that takes up a lot of precious time of the beekeeper and the beekeepers, so it should be avoided as much as possible, and as for the need to undertake this activity and the time when it is to be done, the beekeeper should weigh the circumstances and always prefer the lesser evil to the greater.
When inspecting the trunks, the beekeeper should not be tempted to take the combs from under the super: and if he needs to remove some of them filled with honey, he should always remember that the collection may end today, which often happens when there are longer rains or northerly winds. . It is necessary to take them out when we are afraid of not having enough space for the mother to brood, so when we give the supers to the latecomers after the start of the harvest, or in individual trunks after giving the supers for other reasons. Under no circumstances should you take reddened combs for honey extraction.
Swarm. It remains to answer the question of what to do if, despite efforts to stop the swarm, a swarm has emerged. When a beekeeper running an apiary for honey sees swarming bees, let him know that he has lost 15 kilos of honey - this is how much time and energy the bees waste on preparing for swarming and the production itself in conditions of high demand. But we must advise: it is best to inspect the trunk from which the swarm came out after collecting the swarm, remove the queen cells, leaving one, and then take away the queen from the collected swarm: the bees will quickly return to the matrix, and the beekeeper will examine the trunk on the seventh day after the swarm to see if he has added any additional rescue queen cells, and If he finds any, he will delete them.
The buzzing of larger numbers of drones and the artificial crowding they cause in the hives encourage bees to swarm, so their breeding should be urgently limited, as these voracious idlers only care about the wedding. We already know how to achieve the above result, but if, despite our efforts, we find combs with drone brood, we cut larger areas of drone brood with a beekeeping knife and leave the cut pieces in the hives for the bees to drag out the corpses. A trunk with almost no drones or a negligible number of them can yield a harvest surplus of over 10 kg of honey.
2. Taking honey from the supers. Do not delay in taking honey from the supers. Only the lack of reserves in the heads of the hive gives the bees the illusion of a lack of honey in the entire trunk and forces them to try harder. When the beekeeper finds out that a certain number of frames in the super are covered with honey and sewn up, he takes them away without waiting to cover all of them. A patch sewn in *% of the surface can be taken away, but it should be left in a smaller area as the honey is not yet ripe and could turn sour. In place of the frames taken from the extension, spare ones with dried bee are inserted. Selected slices are emptied right into the honey extractor and given to the next trunks. With one spare extension with dried herbs, you can go through the entire apiary when two helpers work at the honey extractor at the same time: holding the empty combs in their hands.
When to take extensions. At the end of the season, you should not delay too much in removing the supers, especially in less honey-bearing years, for fear of problems with replenishing the reserves in the nests. It is best to take them away at the beginning of August, after the fear of swarming has subsided, and no later than right after the drones are driven away. After unscrewing the frames on the honey extractor for the last time, they should be given to the bees to dry, and then the combs should be emptied of any remaining honey deposited here and there in the cells. When finally removing the extensions, no attention is paid to the greater or lesser sewing of the patches, but they are removed without waiting for the sewing. At this time, the honey and the unstitched honey are ripe.
3. Supervise the work of bees. It often happens in hot summers that the bees become weaker in their work, climb out onto the front wall of the hive and as they arrive, they bind themselves with their chins under the exit bridges. This is bee lodging - practically speaking, loafing. For whatever reason this symptom occurs, be it too much heat in the hive or overcrowding, it is always to the detriment of the beekeeper. The bees are not to blame here, but the circumstances. It is the beekeeper's duty to remove the causes of evil, because the bees will either release the swarm in a few days or slowly get used to not doing anything. If this condition persists for a longer period of time, the socket may break due to the heat. The first step is to raise the roof and rest it on a pebble so that unnecessary heat can escape through the gap: then open the valve - the gable door, and finally shade the hive with mats. If this does not help, you need to take into account the forces that can be used to assemble swarms of compounds. Two or three frames are removed from the hive along with the infested fly. This amount of dried material is placed in place of the removed nest combs. When doing this, it is a good idea to blow a few clouds of smoke into the nest and wait a while without closing the hive so that the bees can flutter out the smoke along with the hot air. After these procedures, you need to drive the hanging bees into the hive, blowing smoke on them slowly and carefully, for fear of causing the bees to fall to the ground.
Little more attention needs to be paid to the bees in the holiday season than what is said here: but you should not lose sight of the apiary. Whether the beekeeper himself or someone from the household will visit the apiary several times a day, or better yet, decide on some quiet work to do near the hives and observe the apiary to see if any trunk is swarming (with an old queen, the swarm comes out between 10 a.m. and 16-4) whether there has been any extraordinary accident, e.g. an attack of bees on a domestic animal, or whether there is a larger pest in the apiary, and finally whether the benefit continues and to what extent. At the end of the swarm, the probability of swarming decreases, but there is a risk of depredation. Once you've finished picking, it's good to watch the drones rushing - the best trunks drive them away first. A few hours of attention at the right time will allow the beekeeper to more easily classify the tree trunks according to their activity. The trunk that drives drones has a mother.
4. Grating sheet. Today, beekeepers are using a grid system, leaving the queen free to breed throughout the hive. To avoid redness, an artificial snake is placed on the poisons. Reducing brood can be used without a trellis by taking the mother at the right time. The need for restrictions occurs in very poor years. This restriction is more radical than it was in the case of the grid, so it will only be implemented after half of the holiday period: approximately between the sixth and tenth of July. Taking the mother, apart from saving money, brings another benefit, namely it gives a good opportunity to renew the mother's mother.
5. Save bee time. | the beekeeper has no time to sell. When planning an action, one should consider whether it is really necessary. However, laziness has no say in this consideration - punctuality and dutifulness are indispensable advantages of a beekeeper.
When undertaking a more complex activity, he should come up with a plan in advance so that he does not have to spend time thinking about it when he is in the hive. Each activity should be performed at a time of day when the bees are least likely to waste time, i.e. at the end of the day, when they weaken from their busy flight, or in the morning. The latter is less worth recommending, because if there is any failure in the activity and the bees become irritated, they will attack throughout the day, learning their anger primarily on the beekeeper's skin and his surroundings. Complaints from neighbors or passers-by about our pupils are also unpleasant. The choice of the time of day for the activity must be left to the beekeeper's discretion, because he will choose the time differently in a larger apiary than in a small apiary, differently when he devotes the bees' time to their special interests or experiences, and still differently in a rainy year than in a sunny year.
When observing the flight of trunks, do not stand in the flight path.
When collecting honey or dismantling the nest, work quickly and efficiently, but without any visible haste that irritates the bees. There is no need to abuse smoke, but try not to let angry bees out of the hive.
6. Bee pastures. Bees feed on honey and pollen. The first one serves them instead of flour (carbohydrates, starch), the second one as protein food. Pollen is not the object of the beekeeper's desire, like honey, but when mixed with honey it spoils the taste. Bees feed on pollen in large quantities, so they look for this food on all flowers available to them. Bees, visiting flowers, bring crops to the farmer. They do not spoil flowers, as some people wrongly believe, but they are the greatest friends of people and flowers.
A farmer beekeeper should, to a certain extent, rotate crops to meet the needs of bees and sow plants that, in addition to being useful on the farm, also provide an abundant harvest of honey. Sowing tiny plots with herbs, even the most melliferous ones, can be considered a pleasant toy
When the harvest in the vicinity of your apiary ends, you can transport the trunks for later or delayed harvesting (buckwheat and heathland), choosing trunks with older, therefore stronger wax, and taking care to cover the trunks tightly with a sieve, but airy enough not to suffocate the bees.
CHAPTER IV.
WHICH HIVES CAN BREED BEES?
If you want to have a lot of honey, you need to control the bees and lead them according to nature - this is true: but it is also necessary to be able to enter the hive at any time and direct the bees' life course without any difficulties. Only frame hives are suitable for such management of bees, in which all the combs will be built into the frames and tightly attached to the frame bars. And again, throughout the entire apiary there will be frames of one size that can be used for all hives in the apiary.
The Warsaw hive is the best for our climate. In its original form, it was designed by our outstanding beekeeper, Kazimierz Lewicki (father), and then it underwent some minor external changes and is as we see it today. I described this UI in detail in the brochure titled: "Warsaw wooden and straw hive with supplies, ed. II". Those interested are referred to this brochure (price: PLN 1), in which readers will find the exact dimensions and method of building all the details of the hive and its inventory. I will only mention the most important details here.
Dimensions of the hive. The hive is built for the frame. We make a box with a width of 500 mm, a depth of 500 mm and a length of 750 mm. The side walls have a frame, carved along the entire length from the inside, 8 mm deep and 7 mm wide, so the beehive is 492 mm deep, counting from the frame. The frame serves as a bearing for the arms that protrude beyond the side beams of the frames. The box is made of 355 mm thick boards (half-tracks). The side walls are boarded with 12 mm thick boards, nailed to the ends of the gable boards protruding 62 mm from the outside of the box, and the ends of the gable boards are rebated to a depth of 12 mm; the edge of the frame covers the ends of the formwork. The gable walls are not boarded.*)
Dig. 18. Cross-section of a Warsaw beehive. A - nesting part, B - behind the head, C - internal walls, D - place to pour litter, the whole on the left side of the drawing is a form for vertical slats that are mounted in the middle of the rear wall and right next to the outlet of the front wall, E - upholstery , F - ceiling boards of the roof, G - support, I - extension, K - outlets (eyes), L - bottom, M - wall panels N strip covering the ceiling, O - connection of upholstery boards, PT - roof made of boards nailed to the front for upholstery ruberoid, etc., R = tongue connection method (feeder, tongue), S – bridges (saddles), Rg – socket frame, Rn – extension frame, a – place of spacing nails, b – lower nails of the frames. The numbers indicate the dimensions in millimeters. The hinges are located between MG The arrows between M and O on the left side of the drawing indicate where the hive opens.
The top of the hive is built up in such a way that it creates space for the R extension and protrudes above the upper edge of the box | at 80 mm. The superstructured part is called the headrest of the hive, and the box is called the -—— || part nesting hive. A two-eaves roof rests on the edges of the headrest, encompassing the beehive from the outside. (Figure 18).
Nest frame. In the nest part of the hive, frames are hung, 2400 mm wide on the outside, 435 mm high and 24 mm thick. The frames are alternately equipped with 12 mm high spacing nails.
Dig. 19. Details of assembling the frame. A. Full frame. B. Frame components. Dimensions in millimeters.
The upper bar of the frame is 264 mm long and has two holes drilled near the ends for the pins of the side bars. These holes, spaced 240 mm apart by their outer edges, are 12 mm from the ends of the bar. Both the upper bar and the side bars are 24 mm wide and S mm thick. The lower bar of the nest frame has a cross-section of 8X8 mm, its ends protrude slightly beyond the sides of the frame. The trabeculae is placed in the frames of the side trabeculae (Fig. 19(o)).
*) We build the hive box from walls connected with long-groove joints. The side walls of the box are connected to the gable walls with a fin joint. The ends of the gable boards are connected to the formwork of the sides of the hive using a box rebate joint. The cladding (boarding) boards are connected using a decorative method, with the boards being rebated from the bottom. The gable door of the hive, ribbed all the way around, is fastened with a recessed fin. Above the joint, the joints can be nailed to a cross-beam joint or finger-joined.
The upper bars of the socket and extension frames are connected to the side bars using a single round central dovetail (the upper ends of the side bars are dovetailed into the upper bars). The corner joints of the lower frame of the top frame are made of carbon fiber.
The ends of the side boards of the hive box opposite the gable door are finished with a half-fin, facing outside the box. The board is smooth on the inside.
According to the technical vocabulary of carpentry. See: Fr. Kuśmierski. Construction of wooden products. Vol. 1st Edition Cash registers named after Mianowskiego 1928.
How to breed bees 4
The nest frames do not touch each other with the upper bars, but are separated by spacing nails. On top of the frames hung in the hive there is a cloth, weighted with a wooden pillow. The upper beams and the canvas constitute the ceiling of the hive.
Extension. A bottomless box is placed in the headrest of the hive - a top, with the same width inside as the nest part of the hive, 252 mm. The height of the extension inside from the frame is 150 mm, and the deep frame is 16 mm, so the total height of the extension from the outside is 176 mm.
The external extension frame is 158 mm high, 240 mm wide, and 50 mm thick. There are no spacing nails, the upper trabeculae touch each other. The lower and side bars are 39 mm wide. All bars of the nest and extension frames are made of 8 mm thick strips, the width of the upper bars of the extension frames varies, depending on the need, and may range from 48 - 50 mm.
The extension frames do not stand directly on the nest, but hang at a height of 6 mm above the upper bars of the nest frames. This distance is achieved by nailing four 6 mm high pieces of wood to the hive, in places corresponding to the corners of the super.
The gap in the walls of the hive between the formwork and the wall is filled with dried moss, shives or chaff.
Wyłoty. The outlets are placed in the hive in the middle of the front wall, with the upper one at a height of 250 mm from the ceiling and the lower one coming from the bottom of the hive. Both outlets have the same dimensions: width 120 mm, height 9 mm. The canopy of the hive opens at the back, leaning over the outlets. UI is built without legs, it stands in the apiary on stools made of pegs driven into the ground, fastened on top with patches. The surface of the stool should be strictly level.
The nest in the hive stands in the center and is surrounded by gates - boards suspended on arms. The valves precisely separate the nest from the rest of the hive, so they reach the sides and the bottom. The valves can be easily moved in the hive, so they are slightly smaller than the interior of the hive, but not too much, as they should not let the bees outside the interior, inhabited by the entire family. For the winter, straw mats and a straw pillow are made to cover the nest. Straw mats are sewn at home in special workshops, as described in the brochure above.
CHAPTER V
NECESSARY KNOWLEDGE ABOUT BEES.
Swarm. Honey bees live in highly organized groups - swarms. A swarm consists of three different-sex bee individuals, including one female, the mother of all the bees in this group, several or more thousand uneducated females, worker bees, simply called workers, and finally a number of males, called drones.
Dig. 20. Queen, worker bee, drone.
Mother. The mother bee is unable to start a family on her own and cannot tolerate another queen in her vicinity, even if it is her own mother or daughter. The task of the mother in the swarm is to fertilize herself by connecting with a drone (which happens only once in her life) and then lay eggs. The mother does not perform any activities, she does not even feed herself, but is fed with milk by the workers. However, she can eat honey herself, but this food is insufficient for her, she does not eat pollen and does not produce milk.
The mother is raised in a cell, similar to an acorn, with the opening facing downwards. This cell is called the queen cell. Queen beds are natural and lifesaving. The natural nursery plant is sometimes placed on the edge of the comb or in a gap in the comb. In the event of the loss of a queen, workers rebuild some of their work cells, thus creating rescue queen cells and raising queens in them. The rescue nursery is sometimes built up in the center of the comb on a widened and extended working cell. In case of doubt, the natural nursery stock has as its base a round, horizontal cup turned downwards, and the ratup stock has a hexagonal bottom of the working cell in a vertical position on the central node of the comb. The egg laid on the mother in the queen cell is no different from the egg laid in the working cell. A female caterpillar can grow up to become a mother when raised in a queen cell, or a worker when raised in a bee cell, i.e. a worker cell. The difference is caused by the size of the cell, its location and the better food the bees use to feed the caterpillar in the colony.
Robotniea. The worker bee grows up in a small six-sided comb cell.
The adult worker bee feeds itself. By consuming honey and pollen, it produces milk (for which its appropriate glands are used), which it feeds its mother, drones and brood. The task of the worker is to bring food and resin to the hive. The resin is used to make bee putty, used to seal gaps in the hive. For food, the bees bring flower nectar (processed into honey), pollen, as well as water and manure, which are used directly, and the last one is the watered brood.
The duty and task of workers is to educate young people. Working in the hive, the worker bee performs all activities necessary to maintain the family, tidy up the combs and the nest. The combs are made of material produced by glands located on the abdominal half-rings of the workers' abdomen. The mother and drones do not produce wax.
The working bees of one trunk live together harmoniously, they take care of the mother and the drones, feeding them.
To defend its own life and that of its entire family, the worker bee has a stinger, hidden under the last ring of its abdomen when at rest. The bee usually leaves its stinger in the wound along with a venom sac, from which the venom oozes into the wound spontaneously.
To avoid greater swelling, remove the sting with a knife from the bottom - do not take the sting with your fingers from above, so as not to inject the venom contained in the sac into the wound. The mother also has a sting, she does not use this weapon against external enemies, but only against another mother. The drone has no sting.
Drone. The male bee will not undertake any work in the hive or outside the hive, he is rightly the proverbial idler. Regardless of this, however, it is needed in the hives to fertilize the young mother, with whom it mates in flight and dies at the moment of fusion. The side benefits of drones are as follows: they entertain the bees with their buzzing and keep the tree trunks alive. Drones are chased away by bees when they run out of bees in the field.
The age of the bees. The mother lives for three to five years, becomes weaker in the third year of life and then easily dies during the winter. A worker bee lives no longer than half a year, but only if it does not exhaust itself with work, e.g. during the winter, working hard, it lives no longer than five weeks. The lifespan of a drone is even shorter than that of a worker bee.
June. Bees are not born immediately in the form we see them, but undergo certain transformations typical of insects. On the third day, a white caterpillar is born from the egg laid by the mother, the caterpillar grows, changes its skin three times, then, covered with a lid, it is covered with a spider's web and turns into a pupa, which matures, gradually becoming darker in color, and finally sheds the last skin as an educated bee buries itself and comes out from under the lid. It matures in the warmth of the hive for three days and is then ready to fly*). These transformations are common to all individuals of the swarm, but the course of transformations of the mother, worker and drone differs in time and food. Complete maturation also varies greatly. To highlight these differences in general and to show their mutual relations, the table below can be used.
*) The ability to fly does not make a bee "flying" in the beekeeping concept. A young bee, three days old, is able to fly in a swarm, sticking to the cluster, but is not yet able to find itself outside the hive. The independence of a bee means that it is able to explore its home and bring products needed for the family to the hive; it gains these abilities on days 12-14 after breaking out from under the lid after flying twice. Hence, the full maturity of the worker begins on the 35th day, when it becomes a developed insect when it leaves the cell, after breaking out from under the lid, i.e. on the 21st day.
Uncovered eggs and caterpillars are called generally: uncovered brood, and the brood under the lids is called covered brood. We generally call bitten bees a fly.
Comparison table of transformations A fertile egg into a queen and a worker and an infertile egg into a drone remains in the cell for days
After hatching, the caterpillar receives milk
Then he gets a paste, i.e. a mixture of honey and pollen
He gets the lid
Under the lid, it transforms into a pupa and stays there for days, then emerges as a perfect insect
Able to fly after days
The mother is capable of fertilization and the worker is capable of making its first flight
The mother starts molting after a few days
The worker bee flies for the second time and flies to work (flying fly)
Mothers
(NO)
The mother is fully mature in 25 and 1/2 days
Workers
The worker is fully mature after 34 1/2 days
Drone
Complete ripeness after 26 1/2 days
From the table we can see that the mother undergoes changes and emerges from the hatch on the sixteenth day, the worker on the twenty-first day, and the drone on the twenty-fourth day after laying the egg, while the mother reaches full maturity and usefulness on the 26th day and the worker on the 35th day , and for the drone on the 27th.
*) I draw the reader's attention to this eyphra as it justifies the deadline for removing unnecessary nurseries on the 9th day after the cessation of redness in the trunk. Bees can establish a rescue nursery even on the last day before brood cover. However, they do not do this after covering it, so when the uncovered brood is not in the trunk, there is no fear of surprises.
Anyone who knows the table of transformations and maturation of trunk individuals inside out can easily understand the manifestations of bee life and manage the apiary well, managing or understanding the manifestations of life of individual bee units and entire trunks.
The dates given in the table are sufficiently precise under normal conditions, but they are subject to slight fluctuations, depending on the conditions prevailing in the hive and in nature. Highly favorable conditions accelerate the development of bee individuals slightly, and unfavorable ones. If the trunk is able to maintain a constant temperature in the nest without changes, the brood undergoes changes slightly faster, and the difference may reach up to one and a half days. If there is warmth and abundance in nature, young bees accelerate their first and second flights, so the complete maturity of the workers may come not on the 14th day, but on the twelfth, and in extremely favorable conditions even on the tenth day after emerging from under the lid. In unfavorable conditions, when the temperature fluctuates, the brood suffers the most and is delayed in breaking out of the cells for up to four days. In very bad conditions, the brood catches cold and then either does not come out at all, or after leaving the bees are crippled, their legs, tentacles and wings are poorly developed, so they are unable to fulfill their tasks. Older bees drive the crippled young bees out of the hive.
Swarm. The reason for starting preparations for the swarm is the tightness of the nest, encouraging the trunk to divide into two (or more) independent families. Then the bees set up queen cells and the mother broods them. Preparations end when the first queen cell is covered with a lid, then the swarm begins and lasts until the swarm leaves, after which the queens' singing stops. Queens sing when there are indoor queen cells in the hive, or there is more than one queen and strives to fight rivals to the death, but the workers interfere and prevent the meeting.
On the day of covering the first nursery, the trunk sends out the first scouts in search of a new settlement. Then, on the third day, a swarm of primroses emerges with the old mother almost without drones. On the sixth day after the birth of the firstborn, the singing of the mothers begins, then on the third day after the birth of the new mother, and on the ninth day after the firstborn comes out, the swarm of singers emerges. Starting from the second swarm, all swarms until the end of the swarm are singers because they emerge after the mothers sing, and all singer swarms have young mothers. There are sometimes primordial singers, but only when the swarm loses its queen and the bees intend to swarm with queens raised in rescue nurseries.
The best boy leaves on the ninth day after the first boy leaves. The next third swarm emerges on the third day after the third swarm. Fourth swarm the next day. The next swarms: five and six come out every day. Even a seven-year-old could accept this, but the increasingly weaker trunk is unable to defend the nurseries from its mother. When the mother cells are damaged by the mother, the trunk will no longer produce swarms.
CHAPTER VI.
PRACTICAL KNOWLEDGE ABOUT HANDLING BEES AND HONEY. HINTER.
Handling bees. Bees do not like anyone's presence in the immediate vicinity of their hives and attack anyone they suspect of bad intentions. They are most annoying when someone approaching the hive shows anxiety or fear. Shooting away bees does not work, but irritates them even more, encouraging bees to attack them in greater numbers.
During beekeeping work in the hive, they are most annoyed by shocks, blows, crushing or burning of bees in the dust, sudden and sharp movements at work, and finally, the attack of a few or several foreign bees on the open hive where the activity is carried out. They are similarly irritated by dismantling nests at too low a temperature: working in cold weather also contributes to unnecessary heat loss, which may lead to the brood catching cold and losing some of the workers' coagulation outside the hive. Some bees get into the cracks of clothes and sting wherever they can.
It is easiest to work with bees at a temperature of 18-20" (
Shaking out honey. The combs taken from the hives are not meant to be broken, but are emptied on the honey extractor by turning them on its wheel. Honey, flying out of the cells, flows down the wall of the barrel in which the honey extractor's winch is placed. Sewn patches cannot be emptied without opening the cells. A crooked knife is used to cut the covering from the combs: called a beekeeping knife. It is a double-edged knife with a straight blade, with a twice-curved transition from the blade to the handle; the kink facilitates even cutting of the seal. Only after cutting the skin are the combs placed in the honey extractor,
The honey extractor's wheel can only be turned strongly enough for older combs, as fresh earwax is easily damaged, so handle it with great care and do not remove all the honey from one side at once, but at some point turn the frames over to the other side, and after shaking them completely, turn them over again. once out the first page
To avoid tugging and jamming of the turnstile, slices of equal weight are placed in it opposite each other. The combs emptied of honey are put back into the hives for further use. After the harvest is finished, when these frames are no longer needed in the hive, they are put up again for the night to be dried by the bees.
Work should take place in a ventilated and dry room. If possible, honey should be protected from the intrusion of houseflies. After the collection is finished, the workshop and honey storage should be protected from bees. Handle honey carefully and do not spill it. We collect accidentally dropped pieces of combs or broken honey, or drops of honey, on a plate or in a feeder and give them to the hive in the evening. The washings are used to make wine or to make honey, and can also be given to the bees to take away at night, but in small amounts for fear of causing an undesirable resumption of brooding by the queen in the autumn.
Handling honey. The honey is drained from the lower spigot of the honey extractor through a strainer into the vessel provided. Wax crumbs and accidental impurities remain on the sieve. Honey is poured into very tight barrels, which cannot be sealed by soaking, because the honey will absorb water from the staves and leak through the cracks. For wholesale trade, 25 liter barrels are best, and for small trade, glass jars with a capacity of 550 or 500 grains each. You cannot use larger glass vessels, because the honey crumbles, increases its volume and bursts them. Enamel vessels are very good for storing honey at home, as they can hold up to 100 kilos of honey*) Tin boxes are also suitable for honey, but they must be varnished inside. Varnish for this purpose is made from beeswax dissolved in purified spirit. Denatured alcohol is not suitable for varnish on honey pots.
*) Larger enamel vessels cannot be transported because the damaged enamel contaminates the honey.
Well-collected honey, placed in containers tied with a rag and placed in a dry place, quickly loses excess moisture and curdles, i.e. crumbles. Well-crushed honey can be stored for more than a year. Honey into which any washings are poured will not crust, but will turn sour and spoil.
In the apiary, after the harvest is finished, we do not leave any combs, not even the smallest pieces of earwax - especially we cannot leave spilled honey there. We take away everything that could contribute to robbery from the apiary immediately after carrying out activities in each hive.
Wax. A progressive beekeeper should receive not only a lot of honey from the apiary, but also a lot of wax. A good beekeeper will be the one who, after the annual accounts, achieves a positive result, including in terms of income from the apiary. Unfortunately, after the introduction of artificial hoses, this need was neglected. However, it is important that apiaries produce wax in increasing quantities as beekeeping progresses.
I once heard the opinion that the invention of the artificial hose has become very harmful to the glory of God. This statement cannot be denied a certain truth in today's attitude of beekeepers, because since then, wax appears on the market less and less often, is more and more expensive and often staggered, hence we have less and less truly wax candles at Holy Mass.
Well, the beekeeper will not miss any opportunity to collect wax, he will take even the smallest crumb from the ground, he will not waste the stock, and during honey harvesting, he should not be afraid to cut the wax cells deeper, saving the central node. When giving replacement patches in spring, also cut the cells almost to knots. This will not be to the detriment of the bees, but to great benefit. Bees naturally sweat a lot of wax during the summer, sometimes they cover the entire hive with combs, sometimes only once. In the honey years, after cutting out combs in non-removable hives, they can cover the empty places twice, so the amount of wax can reach 1 kg or more from a strong trunk.
Cutting the cells will not only not harm the bees or reduce the honey yield, but it will encourage them to work even harder, bring them closer to the natural course of life, and most importantly, it will eliminate many inconveniences when cleaning dusty, sometimes moldy cells with crusted last year's bee bread or traces of perspiration, which are so unpleasant for bees.
So let's collect the wax and replace the ceresin trash on our oliars with it to gain God's blessing, which, as in other works, is also needed in the apiary!
Dig. 21. Bee nest in August, after removing unnecessary combs and leaving them suitable for wintering and reddened.
Preparation for winter. The bees, wintered in hiding places and lockstitches protected against pests, emerge from the winter very well. The more constant the temperature and calmness, the less honey the bees will consume and the cleaner and stronger they will emerge from winter. In dark winter hiding places for trunks (lockstitches), the heat should not fall below zero or exceed +8°C. In a compartment that is not dark enough, the heat cannot reach +6°C.
In our harsh climate, each trunk wintered on a tree, i.e. outdoors, should receive at least 14 kilograms of honey for the winter. For the winter, 7 or S frames are left on the trunks, completely covered with bee work. An extremely strong trunk can get 9 frames
The honey in the combs should be well arranged and evenly sewn, and the lower edge of the honey cover should be almost at the same level in all combs (Fig. 22). Therefore, the combs that are closest to the lower edge of the covering should be next to each other, because the bees form a cluster at one level, and it is compact so that they can keep warm more easily. It should be borne in mind that the hibernating bees cannot sit on the honey, but on the dried fruit under the honey, so poor nest arrangement forces them either to become smaller or to start overwintering on the honey. In both cases, the beekeeper loses, because the less compact wither consumes more honey unnecessarily, and the wither, maintaining one level, binds itself at the height of the shortest comb, sits on the honey for now, until the frosts empty the cells occupied by the wither, and leaves a certain amount of reserves under the wither. . In both the first and second cases, poor arrangement of the nest may cause the bees to collapse from hunger, because in the first case they are forced to eat more honey to generate more heat, and in the second case they leave, under the withers, sometimes significant food reserves, which they are unable to return to in time. winter period. In both cases, the bees could starve to death, having plenty of honey in the hive for the winter, but it was poorly stored. When arranging, remember that the bees in the hibernating cluster only move upwards, and when they consume the supplies placed above them, they die of hunger, even if the largest supplies are on other combs outside the cluster. Bees cannot cross the edges of the combs in frosty weather.
Honey for the winter should be sealed, otherwise it becomes poison for bees. The reason for this is the ability of honey to absorb moisture from the surrounding air at low temperatures, and the air surrounding the trunk of the wintering tree is +6 C. Honey, absorbing water, does not fit into the cells and leaks out, the bees have to lick it for fear of flooding. , so they eat excessively. Moreover, honey, diluted with water, begins to sour - to ferment, which means that yeast develops in it. Consuming fermented food causes diarrhea: bees clean themselves in the hive, splash each other, and when wet, they ossify and fall off. In beekeeping language this symptom is called embolism. The dead trunk comes out of winter very weakened, often orphaned.
The amount of honey contained in them determines whether the combs can be stored for winter or not. It is also important not to insert drone combs into the nests, which beekeepers who use an artificial honeycomb are less likely to be forced to do. However, if it happens that he does not have good working combs for setting up a winter nest, he will have to use drone combs: it is better to have the inconvenience of removing the drone combs in the spring than to find the bees in the hive dead, crumbling from hunger.
If, at the time of setting up winter nests, we have significant restrictions and high requirements as the season is too late, let's make sure in advance that we have a sufficient supply of honey made in combs. There is time for this, because the beekeeper makes the first design of the winter nest in mid-August during the first autumn inspection. Then he takes away the supers and removes the unnecessary combs, and the unnecessary ones are those in which there is either too much honey or insufficient amount. Then he leaves red combs in the hive, most often not rich enough in honey, from which he builds an autumn nest and combs suitable for leaving for the winter. (Figure 21). It is rare to find red patches suitable for overwintering under the top. The trunks that do not have a sufficient supply should be given large portions of honey at once in August, so that they will carry it not to the nests, but to the winter combs, which will happen if we give large portions without delay: later it would be more difficult, because the bees would not carry it to where we need it, but into the center of the autumn nest, in place of the freshly emptied brood cells: feeding would therefore be unsuccessful and the result would be that, despite all efforts, the trunk would not have a single frame suitable for the winter.
Dig. 22. Bee nest set up for winter. The explanation of the signs is consistent with Figures 21 and 22.
The second and last autumn inspection takes place when there are no more brood in the hives. Then it is not time to feed honey, because the bees are no longer able to make combs. Therefore, if there is no supply in September, you can only provide sugar syrup, as it is less sensitive to the effects of air humidity.
We consider combs in Warsaw frames suitable for a winter nest, as they have 30 pieces of honey sewn together without any gaps or wedges, counting from the top, so they can hold almost two kilograms of honey each. There is enough stock for the winter to last until a new harvest.
During the last inspection of the trunks, we take away the autumn nest and leave patches suitable for overwintering, from which we build a winter nest. The latter, covered with cloth, is placed with valves, then with mats and covered with a straw pillow or a bag filled with chaff, making sure that the litter adheres tightly to protect against drafts and unnecessary heat loss.
Dig. 23. UI equipped with chaff cushions for the winter.
Before the first frosts arrive, all preparations for wintering should be completed so that there is no need to look into the hives later, as this disturbs the bees, for whom peace is essential in winter. The beekeeper's care for the apiary now involves protecting the hives from being knocked over by strong autumn and winter winds, scaring away woodpeckers and tits, and clearing the snow from the outlets.
Good overwintering of bees is one of the conditions for the success of the apiary in the next season.
LIST OF ITEMS
PREFACE
CHAPTER I. Organizational tips
Introductory information 5. Benefits of bees 6. Diligence 7. Strong teams 7. Reasons for low productivity of trunks 10. Strengthening 12. Deleting trunks 13. Rearranging trunks (4. Feeding brood 14. How to select the desired characteristics of bees 15. What breed of bees to breed 1 In what hives to keep 17. Demountable nests 18. Beginnings 20. When to start 22. Spare combs 22. Artificial hose 23. Fixing the hoses 23. Honey extractor 25. Beekeeping tools and equipment 26. Vacuum cleaner 26. Feeders 27.
CHAPTER II. When and how the trunk should gain strength
1. Strong trunk 29. 2. Bees should have a mother 30. Young 30. 5. Food 31. 4. Nests warmly covered 5. Do not dismantle the nests unnecessarily 6. Size of the nest 34. 7. Place for brooding 35. 8. Protection trunks against moisture 3%. Pests 36. 9. Apiary site 37. 10. Feeding.
CHAPTER III. How to care for bees during hibernation
1. Preventing swarming 40. Super 40. Preventing swarming 41. Swarming 43. 2. Taking honey from supers 44. 5. Watching over the work of bees 44. 4. Grid sheet 45. 5. Saving bees' time 45. 6. Bee pastures 46 .
CHAPTER IV. In which hives to breed bees
CHAPTER V. Necessary information about bees
Swarm 51. Queen 51. Worker 52. Drone 43. Age of bees 5%. June 55. Comparison table of changes Swarm 55.
CHAPTER VI. Practical information about handling bees and honey. winter
Handling Bees Shaking Honey 57. Handling Honey 58. Wax 59. Preparation for Overwintering 60.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR:
Bees, or the science of bee life and nature, 124 drawings in the text. With a foreword by Dr. Jan Wilczyński, Professor at the University of Vilnius. Pages 167 and XIV, Vilnius, 1927. Recommended by the Ministry of Agriculture and State Properties for folk agricultural schools. Price PLN 7.
Here are some excerpts from the reviews:
"This is a highly valuable book as a collection of countless information about the life of bees, interesting for scientists, specialists and the general public alike. It is the only one of its kind in our literature. Carefully selected illustrations, most of them reproducing the author's own photographs, contribute greatly to the scientific value of the work, to the clarity of the lecture and to the appeal of the book even for non-beekeepers. Let us add that the clear and concise lecture contains very extensive content, and the deep love of beekeeping and bees imbues the book with a contagious warmth and considerable charm” (Słowo No. 256).
Dr. Jan Wilczyński, professor of biology at the University of Vilnius, notes in his foreword:
"Each chapter of the book bursts with a living fire of love, detailed knowledge of the subject, based on many years of work, abundant digital material, concise order of discussed issues, abundantly illustrated with original photos, - it raises the value of the work to the level of a thing - in Poland, at least so far, unique , which, apart from a specialist beekeeper, can and should be of interest to every naturalist and biologist.
Work in the Apiary 157 drawings in the text. P. 288i XVI. Price PLN 7.
Despite the double number of pages, this second book has the same price as "Bees". The main reason for such a low price was the greater number of printed copies, the desire to disseminate the basic information about practical, productive beekeeping work as widely as possible, and there is no doubt that for the economic development of Our Homeland it is necessary for the largest possible number of people with educated minds and awakened hearts to she took up exemplary beekeeping
Warsaw hive, its construction and equipment. 24 drawings in the text of 34 pages. . . . , price 35 cents.
This is a copy of the work entitled "Work in the Apiary" containing a description of the hive most adapted to our harsh climate. The Warsaw hive, which should be called a Polish hive, withstands criticism in the most unfavorable breeding conditions, is excellent and worth recommending for use in normal conditions. The brochure explains in an accessible way how to build a hive yourself and cheaply.
All these books are recommended for use in agricultural schools by the Ministry of Agriculture.
MAIN STORE AT KAZIMIERZ RUTSKI'S BOOKSTORE IN VILNIUS.