🐝 Getting Bees Into Your Hives

The cheapest colony you will ever own is one that moved in by itself. Across most of Africa this is not a lucky accident, it is the normal way apiaries are stocked, and it is the reason a beekeeper here can start a business with timber and labour and no purchase of livestock at all.

Why does it work here? Because of the bees. African honey bees swarm frequently, they abscond readily, and feral colonies are abundant. That means there is a constant traffic of homeless bees looking for cavities. In Europe swarms are scarce and prized and a beekeeper waits years for one. In Africa the supply is renewed every season. High swarming propensity is usually written up as a defect of African bees. Turn it round: it is your free colony supply. A region whose bees swarm heavily is a region where you can stock an apiary without ever buying a colony.

The evidence is in the occupancy figures, and you should know them before you spend money on hives. In Kakamega and Kirinyaga in Kenya, occupancy of hives set out was 40 to 70 percent. In Kitui, Kenya in 2005, 30 to 75 percent. In Gedeo in southern Ethiopia, Zander frame hives 52.6 percent, KTBH 59.5 percent, traditional 48.7 percent, with about half of all hives standing empty. Kenyan extension regards 80 percent, sixteen hives out of the twenty in production, as a good target.

Teach yourself those numbers honestly. A beekeeper who buys twenty hives and expects twenty colonies will be disappointed and probably in debt. Plan on roughly half your hives being occupied in the first year, aim at 80 percent over time, and treat empty hives as a normal cost of the business rather than a personal failure.

Now how to bait, and here you must be careful about what is actually known.

Set the bait hive before the swarming season, not during it. This is the first and biggest error. A hive put out in the middle of the season misses most of it. And the season is intensely local: swarming was observed in July in Kirinyaga and in November in Kakamega, both in Kenya. There is no national swarming season anywhere. Ask beekeepers who have worked your district for decades, and then record your own dates every year until you have your own answer.

Make the hive clean, dry, and smelling of bees. Rubbing the inside with beeswax or old comb is standard practice. Be aware that the effectiveness of specific lures is unverified in the reference, so treat it as good practice rather than proven science.

Nasonov-based lures, of which lemongrass oil is the common proxy, work on the orientation pheromone that scout bees fan at a chosen entrance. Again unverified: no dosage or efficacy figure was retrieved. If you use lemongrass oil, use a little, and keep records of whether baited and unbaited hives fill at different rates in your own apiary. That is a real experiment and it costs you nothing.

Now the important gap. The optimal height, volume and entrance size of a bait hive were not retrieved. The classic research on swarm nest-site preference was not obtained and is European and North American in any case. So this course does not tell you forty litres, five metres high, fifteen square centimetres of entrance. Do not take those numbers from anywhere else and treat them as African. What you can do instead is use an ordinary hive of your standard type, at your standard hanging height of 1 m, and let your own occupancy records over three seasons tell you whether higher or lower does better on your site.

Shade it and leave it alone. This is the rule people break most. A bait hive checked weekly is a bait hive that will not be occupied. Scout bees are assessing a cavity over days. Human scent, disturbance and an opened lid reset that assessment. Set the hive, shade it, walk away, and look at it from a distance. You will know a hive is occupied by watching the entrance from ten metres, and you never need to open it to find out.

A practical checklist for one bait hive. Clean and dry inside. Bars at 32 to 34 mm with wax starter guides. Inside rubbed with beeswax or old comb. Hung 1 m up on greased wire, tied securely. Shaded over the hottest hours. Entrance to the morning sun. Out of casual view. Set out before the season. Numbered and written in your inventory. Then left alone.

Sometimes the bees do not come to you and you go to them. A swarm hanging in a bush or clustered under a branch is a free colony, and catching it is a skill worth having. It is also, with African bees, a job to be done with respect and full protective equipment.

First, decide whether to bother. The sourced Kenyan rule is blunt and useful: do not waste time with very small swarms, smaller than a person's head. Why? Because a small swarm probably has a poor queen, or too few bees to build comb before the flow ends. Comb building is expensive in bees and in honey. A cluster the size of a fist will spend the season getting nowhere, may abscond, and will occupy a hive that a good swarm could have used. Hold your fist and your head up next to the cluster and be honest about it.

Second, choose your time. Defensive behaviour varies with time of day and with season. Work at dusk or after dark where local practice supports it. Two reasons: the bees are less inclined to fly, and all the foragers are home so you get the whole colony rather than half of it. Never approach a swarm on a hot still afternoon if you can wait until evening.

Third, protect yourself properly. Full suit, veil, gloves, sealed ankles, sealed wrists. A veil alone, which is adequate for a gentle European colony, is not adequate here. Have your smoker lit and full before you start, with enough fuel to last, because running out of smoke halfway through is a safety failure. Do not work alone if you can avoid it.

Fourth, the catch itself. A swarm hanging on a branch is caught by getting a container under it and bringing the bees down in one movement, either by cutting the branch or by a single sharp shake or brush. One decisive movement is better than several timid ones. The bees fall as a mass, and the mass includes the queen if you have judged it right. Cover the container, leave a way in for the flying bees, and set it in the shade near the site so the stragglers can join.

Fifth, hive them. Put them into the prepared hive, with bars in place at 32 to 34 mm and wax guides on the bars. Rubbing the inside with beeswax or old comb makes it smell right. Then apply the sourced test: after hiving, wait about 20 minutes. If the bees return to the original site, try again. That is the source's own instruction, and the meaning is simple: you missed the queen. Bees go where the queen is. If they are streaming back to the branch, she is on the branch, and you must repeat the catch.

If the bees stay, fan at the new entrance and walk in, you have her.

Sixth, and this is the rule people skip. A caught swarm is of unknown health status. You do not know what colony it came from or what it carried. Do not put a caught swarm onto old comb from a colony that died of unknown causes. American foulbrood spores survive seventy or more years in equipment. Seventy years. That is not a typing error and it is not a European problem you can ignore. A single frame of old comb from a hive that died mysteriously can carry a permanent infection into a hive you then reuse for decades.

So the biosecurity rules for a caught swarm: hive it on clean bars with wax starter guides, not on old comb of unknown origin. If you must reuse comb, use comb only from a colony you know was healthy and which you saw was healthy. Burn or bury comb from a colony that died and which you cannot explain. Keep a note of which hive each caught swarm went into and where it was caught, because if disease appears later you will want that trail.

Seventh, aftercare, which is Lesson 6 in full. In short: shade it, leave it alone, and give it as many undisturbed days as you can. A newly hived swarm has no comb, no brood, no stores and no reason to stay. It has not committed to your hive. Every disturbance in the first days is an invitation to leave, and absconding by a freshly caught swarm is extremely common. The single most useful thing you can do after hiving a swarm is nothing at all.

A split, or division, is making two colonies from one. It is the only way to increase colony numbers that is entirely under your own control, and it is also your only selection tool: you decide which colony gets propagated.

The whole thing rests on one fact of bee biology. A queen and a worker come from identical fertilised eggs. The difference is entirely diet during the larval stage: a larva fed royal jelly throughout becomes a queen, one switched to worker food becomes a worker. So a colony that has eggs or young worker larvae and no queen can raise itself a new queen from an ordinary larva. That is the mechanism behind every split and every queen-rearing technique there is.

The structural method:

1. Choose a strong colony that has eggs and young larvae. Strong matters. Splitting a weak colony gives you two weak colonies and often no colonies at all.
2. Divide brood, stores and the adhering bees between the parent hive and a new hive.
3. One half gets the queen. The other half must have eggs or larvae young enough to raise one.
4. The queenless half then takes 16 days to produce a virgin queen, then mating flights, then laying. Budget several weeks with no new brood in that half.

Work out what that queenless period really costs, because people underestimate it badly. A queen takes 16 days from egg to emergence. Then she must fly and mate. The exact interval from emergence to first laying was not retrieved and is commonly given as about a week in the trade, which is unverified here, so this course will not put a number on it. But you can reason about the consequence with numbers that are sourced. A worker takes 21 days from egg to adult. So from the day you split, the queenless half will have no new adult bees emerging from its new queen's eggs for something over five weeks at the very best, and meanwhile its existing adults are dying on the 5 to 7 week worker lifespan clock. That is why a split made from a weak colony collapses, and why you must give the queenless half enough brood and enough bees to carry it through.

One useful detail from bee behaviour. Foraging is the last and most dangerous job a worker does, so foragers are the oldest bees. Bees that cling hardest to open brood are the young nurses; bees that fly off first are foragers. That means a split made with brood comb and its clinging bees is a split rich in nurse bees, which are exactly what a new colony needs: they feed larvae, build comb and stay put.

Now the timing, and this is the sourced rule that makes or breaks the economics. Avoid making divisions during the honey season because it will reduce the amount of honey produced. Split before the build-up, harvest after it. The logic connects to the calendar: whatever you want the colony to do at the flow, you must cause six to eight weeks earlier, because it takes about six weeks from egg to adult foraging bee. Split during the flow and you halve two colonies at the exact moment both should be storing.

So the sequence across the year is: split at the start of the build-up, let both halves grow through the build-up, and take the crop at the end of the flow from both.

Be honest about what is not known. The minimum number of bars of brood for a viable split, the minimum bee mass, and success rates for African bee splits were all not retrieved. There is no published African figure. So this course gives you no minimum, and you should distrust anyone who gives you one confidently. What you do instead is record your own: for every split, write down how many bars of brood and stores went to each half, the date, which half had the queen, and whether both halves were still alive and laying at eight weeks. Twenty splits of records will give you your own minimum, and it will be right for your bees and your forage.

And remember why splitting is also selection. You cannot control mating: queens mate on the wing with drones from every colony in the area, feral and managed, so buying a gentle queen does not give you a gentle apiary because her daughters mate locally. The only selection tool a small-scale beekeeper has is at the colony level. Split from your calmest, most productive, least absconding-prone colonies. Requeen or move the worst. It works slowly, and only if you keep records.

Buying colonies is the third route to stocking an apiary, and in most of Africa it should be your last resort, not your first. Baiting is cheaper and the bees are local. But there are good reasons to buy: you are starting outside a swarming season, you want a specific known-good colony from a beekeeper you trust, or your own bait hives are simply not filling. Do it, but do it under rules.

Rule one: buy only what you can inspect. This is the rule that eliminates most of the market at a stroke. A colony sold in a sealed log hive cannot be checked for disease, cannot be checked for a queen, cannot be checked for brood pattern, and cannot be checked for pest load. You are buying an unopened box on someone's word. If a seller will not let you open the hive and lift comb, walk away. The price does not matter, because there is no price at which an uninspectable colony is a good buy.

What you are looking for when you do inspect, in order:

1. Is it queenright? The best evidence is eggs, which prove a laying queen within the last three days. You do not need to see the queen.
2. Is the brood pattern solid? Scattered, spotty brood suggests queen failure or brood disease.
3. Is there disease? Sunken, dark, greasy, perforated cappings are the American foulbrood warning. Do the ropiness test.
4. Are there stores? A colony with no stores in a dearth will abscond or starve, and it will do it in your apiary, not the seller's.
5. Are there pests? Small hive beetles running from the light, wax moth webbing, ants.
6. Are there laying workers? Multiple eggs per cell, eggs on the cell walls, all-drone brood in worker cells. That is a colony that has been queenless a long time and it is not a colony, it is a box of doomed bees.

Rule two: inspect for brood disease before purchase, and take it seriously. AFB is a permanent contamination of everything it touches, with spores surviving seventy or more years in equipment. If you buy an AFB colony you have not bought a colony, you have bought a contamination of your apiary and your hive timber that will outlive you.

Rule three: buy locally. Local bees are adapted to local forage and local disease. Transported bees abscond. And there is a wider reason: your local bees are already a population selected by their environment, while a bee brought from elsewhere is a bee whose whole management history is wrong for where you are putting it.

Rule four: do not import bees or queens across borders. This is how Varroa, small hive beetle and Tropilaelaps spread between countries and continents. Movement of bees is a regulator matter in most countries and is often licensed or prohibited. Ask your national agriculture or livestock authority before moving bees between districts, let alone between countries, and be aware that in some places there are internal movement controls too. South Africa, for example, restricts movement of bees between the Cape honey bee zone and the scutellata zone because of the laying-worker parasitism problem, and the current rules must be obtained from the national Department of Agriculture. This course gives no boundary and no rule, because they change and they differ.

Now price. No sourced price for a colony anywhere in Africa was obtained in this pass. This course therefore gives you no figure at all, and anyone who quotes you a continental or national colony price is guessing.

What you do instead is value it yourself, from what it saves you. A bought colony saves you the cost of an empty hive standing unoccupied and the season you would have waited. So work it out this way:

1. What did your hive cost you, from your three local quotations?
2. What is your realistic annual yield from an occupied hive, in kilograms, using your own records or a planning range of roughly 10 to 20 kg of strained honey?
3. What is honey worth per kilogram in your district this month, from your own market enquiry?
4. Multiply yield by price to get one year's gross from that colony.
5. Ask yourself what fraction of one year's gross you are willing to pay to have bees now instead of possibly next season.

That calculation gives you a ceiling, and a ceiling is what you need in a negotiation. Go in with a number you worked out, not a number you were told. And ask the seller one more question that costs nothing: how many hives do you have, and how many stood empty last year? Their occupancy rate tells you a great deal about whether their bees are worth having.

The European beekeeping year is organised by temperature, because the colony's year is bounded by winter. In most of sub-Saharan Africa the limiting factor is not cold but water, and the colony's year is bounded by dearth. So you replace spring, summer, autumn and winter with rains, flowering, flow and dearth. That is not a metaphor. The retrieved African floral-calendar research organises the year by honey-flow seasons, not by months.

The four phases, and what acquiring a colony means in each.

Phase one, rains and vegetative growth. Little nectar, because rain washes nectar away and confines the bees. Colonies are consuming stores. Pollen may be plentiful. This is the phase to repair equipment and set out bait hives for the coming swarm season. It is a poor time to hive a colony that has to build comb from nothing.

Phase two, flowering and build-up. Nectar and pollen rise, the queen lays hard, and the population climbs on the 21-day lag between an egg and an adult. This is when you make splits, add space and requeen. It is also the right time to acquire a colony, whether by bait, catch, split or purchase.

Phase three, the main flow. The colony stores surplus above the brood nest. Do not split. Do not disturb. Add space ahead of need. A colony acquired now spends the flow building comb instead of storing honey.

Phase four, dearth. Nectar stops, the colony contracts, it may cannibalise brood, it may abscond. Robbing and pest pressure peak. Harvest at the end of the flow before dearth bites. A colony acquired in dearth is a colony you will have to feed, and it may leave anyway.

So the rule is this. Acquire colonies at the start of a build-up period, as the rains break and flowering begins, not during the dearth and not during the main flow.

The reasoning is arithmetic, and you should be able to reconstruct it. A new colony must build comb, rear brood, and turn eggs into foragers before it can store any surplus. That takes at least the 21-day brood cycle plus the further weeks a young worker spends on in-hive work before she becomes a forager. So a colony hived on the first day of the flow will spend the flow building, not storing, and you will harvest nothing from it.

That leads directly to the single most useful planning number in the whole course. The Kenyan feeding guidance is to start six to eight weeks before the date of flowering, because it takes six weeks from egg to adult foraging bee. Read the general principle out of it: whatever you want the colony to do at the flow, you must cause six to eight weeks earlier.

Apply it to acquisition. If your main flow starts in, say, the second week of a given month, then count back six to eight weeks. That is your target date to have bees in the hive. Not the week before the flow. Six to eight weeks before.

Work one through.

1. Your local main flow starts at the beginning of month M.
2. Six to eight weeks back is roughly the middle of month M minus two.
3. So your colonies need to be in and settled by the middle of M minus two.
4. Bait hives, which need to be out before swarms move, therefore go out earlier still.
5. Splits, which are made at the start of build-up, also fall around that window.

And the warning that goes with feeding. If you feed to build up, feed early and stop well before harvest. Sugar syrup fed during a flow or shortly before harvest adulterates the crop. The international honey standard requires that nothing be added to honey, and a sucrose test above the standard's limit will catch it. Feed to prevent starvation and to stimulate build-up, never with supers on and never in the run-up to harvest. The Kenyan practice mix is two parts sugar to one part water.

Finally, the thing this course cannot give you: your own calendar. There is no African calendar, there are thousands of local ones. In one Ethiopian zone alone, the major honey season was February to March for 59.4 percent of respondents in mid-altitude areas but October to December in the highland district of the same zone. Read that twice. Two districts in the same zone, opposite honey seasons. Any course that prints harvest in month X is teaching a falsehood somewhere. Build your own: list every plant the bees work within 3 km, record the month each flowers over at least two years, mark the major flow, the minor flows and the dearth, then work backwards six to eight weeks to fix your build-up, feeding and acquisition dates.

A colony that has just moved in has not committed to you. It has no comb, no brood, no stores, and no investment in the box. Absconding is the single largest cause of colony loss in African apiaries, and the first weeks are when it is most likely. Everything you do in this period should be judged against one question: does this make the bees more likely to stay, or less?

Start with the disturbance rule, because it is the one that most new beekeepers break. With African bees, every inspection has a cost. A European manual's instruction to inspect every seven to ten days is a recipe for absconding here. Excessive or rough interference by the beekeeper is a recognised trigger. So the discipline is: inspect only when you have a question the inspection will answer, and then inspect fast and get out.

What you can do instead, at zero cost and zero disturbance, is read the outside of the hive. External observation costs nothing and disturbs nothing, and in a defensive-bee context it is worth more than it is in Europe. Stand ten metres away and watch. What to read:

• Traffic at the entrance. Steady coming and going means a working colony.
• Pollen coming in. Bees arriving with coloured loads on their legs means there is brood to feed. This is the single best no-open sign that a queen is laying.
• Guard behaviour at the entrance.
• Dead bees or crawling bees outside, which is a warning sign.
• Smell.
• Weight when hefted gently from the back, which tells you about stores.

Do this every visit and write it down. Six weeks of entrance notes will tell you more than two rushed inspections.

Now the timeline of what is actually happening inside, using the sourced biology.

In the first days the bees build comb. They have nothing else and nothing can happen until they do. Comb building is expensive in honey and in bees, which is why a small swarm struggles and why the head-sized rule matters.

Once there is comb, the queen lays. An egg takes 3 days to hatch. A worker takes 21 days from egg to adult. So no new adult bee from the queen's laying in your hive appears before day 21 at the very earliest, and realistically later. Then those new adults spend weeks on in-hive work before they forage, which is why the whole cycle from egg to adult foraging bee runs to about six weeks.

Put that together and the eight-week picture becomes clear. For the first three weeks the colony is shrinking in adult numbers, because its founding bees are dying on the 5 to 7 week worker lifespan clock and nothing is emerging yet. From about week three, new bees start appearing and the population turns. By week six the first of them are foraging. Population change equals the queen's laying rate minus the adult death rate, with a 21-day lag between the two. A colony's strength today was decided three weeks ago.

That lag explains something that frightens new beekeepers unnecessarily: a new colony often looks weaker at three weeks than on the day it arrived. That is normal arithmetic, not failure.

Your one inspection. Somewhere in the first eight weeks you should open the hive once, with a written question. The best question is: is the comb running straight along the bars, and is she laying? Both are answerable in a couple of minutes. Smoke the entrance with about 8 to 10 puffs and wait before opening. Then work the checklist in order and close up.

1. Is the colony queenright? Eggs are the proof, and they mean a queen was laying within the last three days. You do not need to see her.
2. Is the brood pattern solid? Scattered brood suggests queen failure or disease.
3. Any disease? Sunken, dark, greasy, perforated cappings are the AFB warning.
4. Are there stores? A colony with no stores in a dearth will abscond or starve.
5. Is there space? No space during a flow means swarming or nectar in the brood nest.
6. Any queen cells? Along the bottom edge means swarm preparation; on the face means supersedure or emergency.
7. Any pests? Small hive beetles running from the light, wax moth webbing, ants. Small hive beetle can cause colonies to abscond entirely.
8. Laying workers? Multiple eggs per cell, eggs on cell walls, all-drone brood in worker cells.

And while the lid is off, do the one job that pays for the whole inspection: check that combs are running along the bars, not across them. A young white comb that has started off the centre line can be gently pushed back. A month-old comb full of brood cannot. Catching cross-comb in week two is the difference between a manageable hive and an expensive log hive.

Then close up, walk away, and leave them alone. If the colony has stores, comb on the line, and eggs, you have done your job. The rest is the bees'.