Using Apideas, Basterfield

£25.00

Using Apideas

How to set up and Manage Apideas for Mating Honey bee Queens

Daniel Basterfield

£25.00

Taxes included.

Advanced Beekeeping Courses (1st ed. 2023)

Softback & Hardback / 253 Pages

ISBN 978-1-7391790-1-4 / 978-1-7391790-0-7

Queen raising is one of the most rewarding aspects of beekeeping, allowing beekeepers to propagate the desirable characteristics of their best colonies throughout their apiaries.

Father and son commercial beekeepers Ken and Dan Basterfield, both holders of the National Diploma in Beekeeping, have been using Apideas to raise their own queens for forty years. Here they present the tips and techniques that have evolved with their working practices.

This book is for anyone who would like to use Apidea (or similar) mini polystyrene mating nucs to produce mated queens. Whether you are thinking of ten or a hundred Apideas, the principles and practices covered here will scale up accordingly.

Introduction
1. Photographs
2. Measurements
Getting Ready
1. Three phases
2. The queen raising pipeline
  1. Planning work around ripe queen cells
  2. Caging ripe queen cells for flexibility
3. Assembling the hive parts
4. Assembling and waxing frames
  1. Queen cells and frame orientation
5. Entrance slider
6. Feeders and feed
7. Carrying mini-nucs
8. Stands and tables
9. A mini-nuc toolkit
10. Filling cup
11. Record keeping
  1. Written records
  2. Numbering mini-nucs
  3. Visual markers and push pins
Establishment
1. Pre-flight checks
2. Filling with bees
  1. Collecting workers
  2. Distribution of workers into mini-nucs
  3. Turning mini-nucs the right way up
  4. More selective collection of workers
3. Queen cell introduction
  1. Candling queen cells
4. Storing in the dark
5. Putting Apideas out at dusk
6. Checking for queen emergence
Management
1. Timing of inspections
2. Inspecting Apideas
  1. Lifting propolised frames
3. Feeding
4. Handling queens
  1. Picking a queen out of an Apidea
  2. Queen introduction cages
  3. Caging queens with workers
  4. Holding caged queens for short periods
  5. Queen re-introduction
5. Recycle or close down?
Recycling
1. Approach
  1. Queenless periods
  2. Broodright vs. queenright
  3. Emergency queen cells
2. Managing population size
  1. Brood balancing
  2. Bolstering by exchange
  3. Bolstering with adult bees
  4. Bolstering with emerging brood
Closing Down
1. Equipment and preparation
2. The unite
3. Follow-up
Reading Apideas
1. Good population size
2. Population too small
3. Failed queen cell emergence
4. Entrance activity
5. Good combs
6. Erratic first laying
7. Constrained laying pattern
8. Laying workers
9. Queens with deformed wing virus (DWV)
10. Disease
11. Starvation
Advanced Techniques
1. 3-frame to 5-frame
2. Second brood box
3. Upper feeder
4. Entrance queen includer
5. Drawing Apidea combs in full-size colonies
  1. Frames of empty drawn comb
  2. Frames of brood
  3. Frames of stores
6. Over-wintering Apideas
7. Temperature monitoring
Disease and Pests
1. Hygiene
2. Dealing with disease
3. Varroa
4. Chalkbrood
5. Nosema
6. Wasps
7. Badgers
8. Mice
9. Waxmoth
10. Woodpeckers
Maintenance
1. Cleaning Apideas
2. Repairs
  1. Frame repairs
  2. Polystyrene repairs
  3. Clear plastic repairs
  4. Red plastic repairs
3. Painting
  1. Paint colours
4. Spare parts
5. Storage
Clones & Imitators
1. Earlier and later pattern Apideas
2. Rütli or MiniApi
3. Api'Deus Holz
4. Swienty Swi-Bine
5. The white copy
6. The green copy
7. Mini BiVo
Resources
1. Simple grafting calculator
2. In/out cards
3. Apidea inspection record sheets
  1. Using the record sheets
4. Establishment checklists
Closing thoughts

• Index

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Using Apideas, Basterfield

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