BEEKEEPING
Plan the work, then work the plan
Here we are sitting around our garden table in the shade of our magnificent Eucalyptus melliodora tree. New buds are developing for the October honey flow, which over the years has never failed us. Pen and paper in hand, we are planning the seasons ahead, from catch boxes to new swarms to the final three supers on each hive, 40 kg of honey per hive from 50 hives by end of March 2018, ie,
How an organised beekeeper tracks his swarms, catch boxes, hives and apiaries, and keeps in touch with farmers and landowners, by the Eastern Highveld Beekeepers Association
two tons of honey. Our target is to replace the 50 hives lost over the past year due to failing queens, vandalism, fires and poor swarms that just did not develop from the previous year ' s catching. This manoeuvre will bring our complement of working swarms back to 300 in the field. All catch boxes must be ready for placing by mid-April. They must have been cleaned out of possible wax moth infestation, spider webs, old dry combs, and each frame, of the 500 involved, to have been cleaned and scraped, the wires tensioned where required, and a 20mm strip of foundation wax fitted into the groove of the top bars of the frames. Damaged boxes must have been repaired, lost boxes due to fires replaced, and all leaky holes repaired and closed up to facilitate the eventual moving of the catch boxes to their apiary sites. By the end of April the siting of the catch boxes must be completed. The area targeted for our plan is the Magaliesberg, Brits, Mooinooi, Broederstroom and Pelindaba areas, 150 km from home base. We will have visited farmers, institutions and maplotters to scatter our catch boxes over as wide an area as possible, say eight sites of six boxes per site. ByMay1wemusthave placed all boxes and clearly have recorded each site, the owner ' s details, and a brief sketch of the access to the boxes. The next step is to research the areas for our bees to have access to aloes, citrus, eucalyptus, mangoes, avocados and natural bush, and the flowering times of each. We will rendezvous the caught swarms into five apiaries of ten hives in the areas that we had selected best for our target. We may have to move the apiaries to suit the flows in order that we obtain eucalyptus honey to conclude the season by the end of November in these areas. The December dearth period
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