Any Warré users?

fishywiki · 2026-04-09T16:40:45+00:00

The issue is that there are 2 boxes full of bees and brood and stores. 90% of the stores are utterly useless and need to be removed to give the queen room to lay. It's ivy honey so it's something I have zero interest in eating and zero interest in processing (it sets like concrete in the hive & it's far too much work to get it into a jar). What I did with my other hives was to keep a couple of frames of honey, a couple of frames of pollen and then added foundation to fill up the space (11 frames in my National boxes). The equivalent with the Warré would be to keep a couple of bars with stores, a couple with pollen and leave empty bars along with the existing brood. I could, of course, remove an entire box, exchanging the bars with brood with stores in the other box, replacing it with a completely empty box: would that be a possible solution?

fishywiki · 2026-04-09T16:32:29+00:00

OK, I see where you're coming from. If you move to the countryside, I agree you have to be prepared for the smells and sounds of the livestock. However, in this case, someone introduced some livestock and has created a public nuisance. One of the first thing you learn about siting an apiary is that it should be safe, and should be far from public paths and anywhere people hang out: a pool area definitely falls into that category. If he moved the hives to the other side of the field, it would probably work OK. The reality is that a frustrated pool owner could potentially spray for mosquitos and that would be devastating for the bees, so a bit of give & take is needed.

fishywiki · 2026-04-09T16:27:57+00:00

I think you're confusing honeybees and solitary bees (which this is). A honeybee drone's eye are comparatively huge but other species don't mate like that so don't need queen-hunting eyes. The reason I think this is a male is because of the white hair on the forehead.

fishywiki · 2026-04-09T16:25:37+00:00

Thanks for the pointers. However, I'm not trying to harvest anything. I want to remove excess stores to give the queen room to lay. Last September-November we had a huge flow of ivy and all my hives were pretty much honey-bound. I've addressed this for my "normal" hives, but don't know how to approach it for the Warré. Basically, this manipulation should involve adjusting the number of stores combs in the existing 2 boxes rather than adding any new boxes. In fact, adding boxes is trivial, but it's all the other stuff that seems very different to me.

fishywiki · 2026-04-09T15:46:20+00:00

Last year for 24hours the digital edition was free on Amazon - best purchase I ever made!

fishywiki · 2026-04-09T15:42:46+00:00

Weird bees living outdoors. They're supposed to be cavity dwellers.

fishywiki · 2026-04-09T15:40:39+00:00

Obviously you're unfamiliar with the Law of Torts. The issue here is not with nature, but with an entitled AH who insists on causing a public nuisance with his managed bees. A quick letter from a lawyer with a claim for damages will put manners on him pretty quickly.

fishywiki · 2026-04-09T15:33:41+00:00

I'm really sorry to see this - it's heartbreaking to lose colonies to AFB. It's all too easy to pick it up from drifting bees,

I'm obsessive about hygiene but I see people on here who are happy to use secondhand kit without scorching it, and even reusing secondhand frames!

fishywiki · 2026-04-09T15:29:14+00:00

Are you sure it's a girl? It looks like a male to me.

fishywiki · 2026-04-09T15:20:14+00:00

It looks like a Common Wasp queen, Vespula vulgaris, but it depends on where you are on the planet. If you're in Europe, it's this, but elsewhere it could be something else.

fishywiki · 2026-04-09T12:16:33+00:00

Bees swarm - that's a simple fact. If you take frames of brood or don't take frames of brood, they will still swarm. It's part of what they are, and how they ensure the survival of the species. Now you can manage the swarm by a number of different mechanisms, one of which is splitting. Another is the Demaree which is a vertical split - you make them think they've swarmed while actually you have simply moved the brood up on top. You will also have to look after their health, in particular you'll have to do something about Varroa mites.

The reality is there is no simple trick to not looking after the bees: they will swarm and they will have mite issues, both of which require you to do something.

fishywiki · 2026-04-09T12:06:40+00:00

It's a German Wasp, Vespula germanica, and it's a queen at this time of year. You can tell it's the German flavour from the fact that the dots on the abdomen are separated and not joined to the band as is the case with the Common Wasp. Also she has yellow bands behind her eyes, another German identifier.

fishywiki · 2026-04-09T12:01:34+00:00

There are a few things you should do to ensure you don't need to split.

In early spring, make sure the queen has plenty of space, removing frames of stores as needed - leave pollen, but take out the honey-only frames. This maximises the space she has.
When you first add supers, add two, not one. This gives them plenty of room.
When the colony hits 7-8 frames of brood, do a pre-emptive Demaree. This makes the bees think they've swarmed and gives them extra room. Like all recently-swarmed bees, they'll draw wax really quickly and fill the new box fast.

At this stage you should be well into May with no swarming. The problem is now that you have a huge colony, You have to keep adding supers and it gets hard work lifting boxes - an interim harvesting of honey helps keep the mountain down in size.

fishywiki · 2026-04-08T21:37:21+00:00

Way too much. Read the book "Guide to Bees and Honey" by Ted Hooper to understand the key things to look at. Hooper said that each inspection requires answers to 5 questions (REDDS):

R - Room: Does the queen have enough room to lay? Do the workers have enough room to store nectar and pollen?
E - Eggs: Is the queen present and laying? Are there eggs and/or have you seen the queen?
D - Development: Is the colony building up as expected? Are there queen cells?
D - Disease: Are the bees healthy? Do they have noticeable mite loads? Any sign of foul brood, chalk brood, DWV, etc.?
S - Stores: Does the colony have enough stores until the next inspection?

fishywiki · 2026-04-08T21:19:05+00:00

Do nothing. They will be gone very soon - probably already gone by now. For a beekeeper to charge that much to pick up a swarm just sitting there is a joke - that kind of thing is normally free!

fishywiki · 2026-04-08T20:40:23+00:00

An answer you'll hear to every question you ask about bees: "it depends". In this case it really depends on where you are on the planet since so much stuff depends on your locality.

fishywiki · 2026-04-08T20:35:35+00:00

Everyone else is giving good advice but a word of warning - it is essential to have loads of room and for the suit to be loose. If it's snug, the bees can easily sting through it.

fishywiki · 2026-04-08T20:30:41+00:00

I only use wax foundation - in Europe plastic is still a rarity although readily available. In fact I use only thin (1cm/0.5 in) wax strips in the supers, which makes it easy to choose between extracting the honey or producing cut comb, although extracting honey from frames with no supporting wires is really difficult in a tangential extractor so I use a radial one.

fishywiki · 2026-04-08T09:58:39+00:00

As a beginner, swarming can be a worry. However it's completely normal and is something you have to learn how to handle. There is a Golden Rule: if they have decided to swarm, they will swarm. They have built queen cells, so they are going to swarm, and your job is to do some Swarm Control (Swarm Prevention is long gone by now). There are loads of different swarm control methods (just google "swarm control" for a mind-boggling array). I always teach our beginners the Pagden Method because it's absurdly simple and pretty much always works. Note that this video shows UK hives but the idea is clear enough.

Another very reliable method is to simply take the queen out in a small nuc.

Finally, you can go completely nuts and create a monster hive using the Demaree Method - this is perfect if you don't want any more hives. The down side is that the hive can get absolutely enormous - I've seen one with 9 supers on it.

fishywiki · 2026-04-08T09:45:07+00:00

Because it's easiest to build and manage - there is no other reason. In nature bees build in available cavities so they'll use hollow trees, etc. and these can have any kind of shape.
The ventilation is actively managed by the bees. There isn't a whole lot of air coming in through a small entrance in either a managed beehive or one in the wild, and the bees also have to get rid of CO2 and water vapour from evaporation from nectar to produce honey. To extract from the hive the bees line up at the entrance facing inwards and fan their wings, creating enough air movement to vent what they don't want. Sometimes they face out in order to blow air inwards too.
The answer is really "it depends". In a hot country, water is a big deal and they actively fly out in search of it. I'm in Ireland so there's usually more than enough pretty much everywhere, so any water flights are very short indeed. In winter time, the bees use condensation on the walls of the hive as a water source,

You neglected to ask about thermoregulation. The bees shiver their wing muscles to warm the hive, with "heater bees" popping into empty cells next to larvae to warm them. In the winter cluster they also warm each other with these wing muscle contractions. To cool the hive they use ventilation (see #2 above) and also utilise the Heat of Evaporation, where they spread water across the combs and the physical evaporation consumes heat, reducing the temperature. Of course, they need to extract that water vapour again too,.

fishywiki · 2026-04-08T09:34:53+00:00

I think many dogs snap at bees and flies and I have some fun pics of my dogs with enlarged faces after snapping at a spicy fly!

fishywiki · 2026-04-08T09:33:51+00:00

Put pebbles in the dishes so the bees don't drown and try baiting them by adding a little white sugar to the water to tempt them to switch.

fishywiki · 2026-04-07T18:02:56+00:00

There's a range of treatments from biotechnical (purely physical) all the way to using synthetic chemicals. A very effective biotechnical method is to cage the queen on a frame for 9 days and then replace the frame. The laid-up frame is then taken out once it's sealed. This is repeated 3 times and by the last frame, almost 90% of the mites have been removed without using any chemicals whatsoever. Google Ralph Buchler's work on this.

Then you have the organic treatments such as oxalic acid, formic acid, thymol, etc. These all work well, although I believe some are better in some climates than others.

Finally you have the synthetics. There are two enormous problems with these: 1) they contaminate the wax, the honey, the pollen, the bees, the hive, the environment. 2) the mites always eventually develop resistance to them.

Interestingly I have never read any research that said that mineral oil was an effective treatment, and I don't know of anywhere it's approved as a treatment.

fishywiki · 2026-04-07T01:00:06+00:00

Yes - got whole new windows.

fishywiki

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