If anyone knows me, they know that my wife is the one who does the planning. I just show up and do whatever has been planned. I have learnt that it is always best to follow a plan, not for any reason other than the tantrum that follows if a plan doesn't pan out. They do say every relationship has laid back person, and one less so.
I am however, less laid back about my bees. I want things to go right. Therefore, a plan is essential. With my main goals for the season being to expand the number of hives that I have as well as producing some honey. With 10 hives that had new queens last season, I hope that these should not give me to much trouble when it comes to swarm management, unless I make a rookie mistake!
As long as we have a good spring, with a little summer rain and areas of arable crops (OSR & Field Beans) surrounding my apiaries, I hope to have a good yield, but there is the worry of producing far more than I can sell. Being new to beekeeping and in an area with a lot of other beekeepers, breaking into the market has been tough. But I guess I should worry about this when I have it in buckets.
This season I have made the decision to have a go at Ross rounds and English sections to give me a different line of produce, as I work towards the goal of building my own ''brand''. This should give some variety in the products I can offer and hopefully this can only help with my sales. With several bee keepers in the village and living at the far end, the option to sell honey at the gate is not really there for me. But maybe cut comb will fill a gap in the market. There are so many things that I never even thought of when I started that I feel now need answers to. I know I need to do more when it comes to selling the honey, but this is still a hobby, at what point though does it no longer stay as a hobby? For this year it stays a hobby!
Keeping those feet on the floor
There is still the question of how many hives do I expand to. The simple answer to that is how many can I look after properly. Having got the bug for bee keeping the dream and aspiration of having hundreds of hives soon became a goal, then I came back to reality! With a full time job, a house to finish and a daughter to spend time with, my first goal is to keep the my bee keeping at a level where I am still at home enough and is manageable with my level of experience.
Utilise the sales for getting what you need
My second goal is simple. DON'T open any emails from bee suppliers that mention anything about sales! Not that I have purchased anything I don't need, yet. But boy are they tempting and with the normal ploy of spend X and get free shipping.... well it would appear I'm a sucker for sales ploys. Just the other day I bought some dummy boards just to top the bill up to the required amount. I normally make these myself from offcut wood I get from work for free. What a sucker! My advice is know what you want and get it in the sales, then stop looking.
With 13 hives to come through winter (fingers crossed), my plan was 10 for production and 3 for making splits/producing bees and brood. The plan was not to buy in any nucs this season, but use a couple of my hives for splits. However, shortly after starting writing blogs for BMH, I had the idea of writing a blog that followed alongside BMH's 'my first nucleus' series but from a novices point of view. With that in mind, I ordered a nuc!
Forward thinking
When I actually sat down to come up with my plan the sensible part of my brain managed to get first in line. I need to think 2 seasons ahead, not as much for how many hives I will be running but how much extra equipment I will require to run those hives. Lets say I get through this season and finish up with 30 hives, that would leave me next season with at the least 13 hives that would definitely need swarm control, splits or demaree. That's 13 more brood boxes, 143 frames and foundation just to manage swarm control. The point I am trying to make is rapid growth is fine but do the maths. Can you afford to expand that quickly and have the time to correctly look after what you have? So goal 3 is to think forward and do my best to think a couple of years forward.
Hygiene
As I have mentioned in a previous blog, there were things that I needed to address at the end of last season, one being hygiene. Now that I will be growing in hive numbers along with a new apiary, I need to be better with all round hygiene. From cleaning my hive tool to gloves and my suit. I will be taking the system that BMH has used with buckets of pre mixed cleaner for my hive tools. I use marigolds as gloves so I am going to look for a disposable glove to go over the top that I can change as I go. Goal 4 be clean, be healthy!
Keeping better records
Record keeping....errr, I need to get so much better at this, so in an effort to help I have down loaded a piece of software onto an old iPhone. I went with some software called Beeplus. It came at a cost but not a great deal. So far I have only had a play with it, setting up my hives and apiaries. I have an old phone that I have installed it on so I'm not too worried about propolis getting on the screen.
This said having spoken to a few other beekeepers, I think I will continue with the original plan of laminated hive records and then updating the software in the evening. With various future goals with the bees and the need to be able to look back at how different queens are performing, record keeping will become so important going forward.
All of this to one side, the biggest thing that I never want to change is the love for keeping bees. If I expand to a point were it becomes not enjoyable then I will scale back straight away! Beekeeping has become part of my life so quickly, but its not the learning of a new skill and all the challenges that the bees throw at you, its the simple fact that when I'm off at an out apiary, in the Suffolk countryside all of life slips from my mind, as yet I have not found a better way to destress!
