Monthly Archives: May 2014

CLOSEUP of Honeybee QUEEN EGGS and BEE LARVAE. Beekeeping 101

Take a closeup look at honey bee queen eggs and bee larvae. It is very important as a beekeeper to know what these bee eggs and larvae look like when doing a hive inspection in your apiary. If you can see these tiny eggs, it is usually a good indication that a healthy laying queen is present and is doing her job. A bee colony must have a healthy, fertile and productive queen bee to survive. However, it is often difficult to find the honey bee queen herself, and the presence of freshly laid eggs tells you she is there, and she is laying. 

For more advanced beekeepers, the density of the eggs, placement of them in the cell itself and more can provide further information about what the bees are up to. At times, there may be no queen at all, and a few honey bees will start laying unfertilised eggs themselves. Why is unknown, at least to the best of our knowledge. Please feel free to shed light ion comments below if you are better informed about this bee behavior. As the bees are not fertilized, only drones are produced, further expediting the demise of a dying colony. If this is the situation, there are certain steps a beekeeper must take, and very swiftly at that, if he/she is to save the colony. Certainly do not purchase and introduce a new queen at this stage, as the laying worker bees will most likely gang up on her and kill her. This is very interesting and may be a topic for another video in the future.

In the meantime, if you are a new visitor, feel welcome to look around our channel, share some our most interesting videos listed in our NEW PLAYLIST: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs_Q7S3Rxkk&list=PLfE6cWwwWKojZCV0R_tJwDpZn4VoKluho

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Have a fabulous day!

MahakoBees

Hi Everyone

In this video, we show you how to solve a relatively large problem in a simple way – beekeeping 101. Although this relates to beekeeping as we dispose of old timber frames, it also applies to anyone burning anything (reused old timber perhaps) that may contain staples, nails or screws within it.

Beekeepers often have old frames that are no longer usable for what ever reason. So long as they are timber or wooden, they are fine to use as fuel for fire. HOWEVER, what about the steel or magnetic metals like the staples, nails, screws, eyelets and wires? Don’t they end up in the ashes? YES, they do, which means you can’t use the ashes in your garden or compost. Watch this video as it explains a simple way to overcome this problem. STEP by STEP. It can save you money and reduce your chance of a serious wound or injury or even exposure to a serious tetanus infection. Using a simple yet effective solution we remove all these risks. Find or purchase a strong rare earth neodymium magnet, relatively strong (easily available on ebay for a few dollars), and mount it onto a non/magnetic aluminium, plastic or wooden rod. After a few trials, I found it best to place the rare earth magnet into a small plastic cap, which protects it from getting dirty or damaged, and it makes it much easier to remove the metallic debris. Really simple, fast and cheap to make, yet it saves lots of time and money as you can re-use your ashes in the garden.

Hope this helps some of you. If you like our videos, please subscribe, comment, Thumbs up or share. We really do appreciate your help in making our channel rank a little higher so more people can use our tips.

Have a fabulous day

MahakoBees

Slow motion video of Australian Mahakobees Honey Bees (Apis Meliffera) flying in and out a beehive in an apiary and the guard bees close up. This video shows the honey bees entering and leaving the beehive in slow motion. It is interesting to see the guard bees checking each bee as it enters the hive. We have entrance reducers in place to reduce the potential threat of hive beetles, wax moth, competitive robber bees, or yellow jacket wasps entering and causing damage to our bees. You can also see that some hives have a landing strip and some don’t. We are trialing different configurations to see which is best, but at this stage, it seems to make little difference to the honey production, hive health and strength or the general daily activities. If anything, the landing strip would seem to spread the guard bees a little more, and perhaps opening up the hive to larger threat of unwanted guests entering. We will see what the long term effect may be.

Hope you find our video interesting and we trust you will subscribe, comment or share our video if you find it useful.

We invite you to take a look around our MahakoBees channel.

Have a great day

MahakoBees

Dear Beekeeping enthusiasts,

This is a short video showing the propane blowtorch we use and how to replace the propane handheld blowtorch cartridge, canister or bottle. We use it to heat treat our beekeeping equipment, tools, frames, hives and anything that will not melt but needs to be treated against viruses, diseases or to kill off any Wax Moth eggs that may be hiding in the cracks and around the frame wires. It also covers the self igniting torch head and some costs of replacement. We have a few more videos we are putting together now and will upload in the next few days, so check back soon. Please click the thumbs up, comment, subscribe and share this video if you find it useful or helpful or think others may. We very much appreciate it.

Have a great day.

MahakoBees

Music composed, performed and provided by Groovey – Adam Kubát a Pavel Křivák. You can visit their website on: http://www.groovey.cz/

Also, a big thank you goes to Kevin McLeod for providing his royalty free music “Super Friendly”. We appreciate your kind contribution.

More usage information can be found throughout the web, but here is a brief summary from www.ehow.com.au I came across: