16/09/2013
Westport Bee keeping Association Improvers Beekeeping Course
Topics
- Beekeeping
- Acquiring Bees
- Local Association
- Understanding Swarming
- Its causes
- Signs of it about to happen
- How to deal with it before a swarm and after
- How to fix it when it’s gone wrong
Disease
- Problematic Ones
- Varroa
- Acarine
Dangerous one
- AFB American Foul Brood
- EFB European Foul Brood
Ignorable ones
- Chalk brood
- Ants
- Wasps, etc
- How to recognise
- Disease Inspections
- Treatments both legal and unregistered
Honey Handling
- Clearing your Hive
- Clearing Boards
- Timescale
- Transporting your Supers home
- Extracting
- Filtering
- Bottling
- Labelling
- Selling
- Regulations and Hygiene
- Cleaning extractor and Mead Making
Nuc
- Preparation and Why
- Understanding the Reasons
- Uses of Nucs throughout the Apiary
- Apiary control
- Swarm control
- Frame drawing
- Making Nucs for Sale
- Buying Nucs
- Travelling with Nucs and transporting same. Moving hives
- Proper strapping/Foaming
- Proper ventilation
- Adequate man power
Apiary Locations
- How to approach site owners
- Rates for rent
- Best Practice
- Amount of hives per location
- Height of hives
Preinspection Checks
- Site walkabout
- Entrance watch
- Ground watch i.e. acarine
Inspection techniques
- Finding the queen, Marking and Clipping
- Reasons for this
- Using the hive tool
- How to handle the frame
- How to handle the queen
- When to smoke/when not to
- Use of water spray
- Bait hives
- Makeup
- Lures
Queen Rearing
- Inducing queen rearing
- Relevant points i.e. food bees per min to cell etc
- Mating
- Nucs
- Apidea
- Hives
- Other
- Types of hives, making frames
- Framed national/ commercial
- Top bar, Kenyan, Rose, Peroni, etc
- Skep uses off
The Law
- Ownership of Bees/Equipment
- Ownership of Swarms
- Crime prevention
- Very public or very hidden
- Polystyrene vs. wood
- Good Practices
- No spilt comb
- No brace comb on ground etc
- Open Floors
- Shelter
- Smoker in car
- Smoker fuel
