Start Here – Hack My Hive
This site is dedicated to helping first time and novice Beekeepers make honey! So start here and learn how I hacked my hive!
Hi! I’m Perry the “Ugly Beekeeper”. Why ugly? Because I don’t do things the normal way, the accepted way, the way bee keepers have always done it. That makes some folks not like me and it can get ugly. But why would I?
First year failure
Your story might be like mine. I decided to get into bee keeping to help the bees and maybe get a little honey out of the deal. So, I read all the books. After searching the web and reading forum post about getting started with bee keeping, I followed all the information. I purchased two nucs and two 10 frame hives. I babied them all the first spring, summer, and fall. Knowing that according to common wisdom you don’t get any honey the first year. The reward is in the second year. Then winter came and both hives died. I had nothing to show for all my trouble. No bees, no honey, just wooden boxes full of hive beetles. 🙁
Second year failure
I tried again the next year, but this time after more reading. This time I bought a package of bees and a swarm trap. By pure dumb luck, I caught a swarm and was back to having two hives to baby by early summer. I feed sugar syrup like I was Willy Wonka. The swarm hive died over the winter and the package hive limped into spring. While other more experienced bee keepers were talking about their first spring harvest of the year, I was still feeding my one bee hive to keep it alive.
Back to the web I went, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong, it had to be me right?? It went from wanting to help the bees and maybe to get some honey to come hell or high water I AM GOING TO GET HONEY!
Ah-ha moment
As I read I came to realize that the old saying among bee keepers “You can get bees or you can get honey” was only partially true. First of all this only applies to year two among traditional bee keepers where they are discussing splitting a hive to make bees or leaving it intake to make honey. It was that distinction that was my ah-ha moment. What you need to get honey is MORE bees.
More bees = More Honey
I began to read and study with a new eye towards how can I get MORE bees faster so number one I can get honey, but then it morphed into get more honey faster. One thing that came to my attention was the use of multiple queen hives. They were mostly being used to provide resources for other hives (brood, comb, etc) or as queen rearing hives. Some folks were adding common honey supers to these hives which caught my interest. Makes sense two queens laying means twice as many bees to collect honey.
Then it happened I found a site on how to make a four queen hive out of a standard box (future post on this coming soon). Again it was focused on creating resources (queens, comb, brood) for traditional hives. But what I saw was a bee making factory and therefore a honey making factory! This began my journey into hive hacking to make more honey faster! This blog will chronicle the journey, so join along and comment with your thoughts and hacks! Contact The Ugly Bee Keeper with specific questions!
What we are not!
If you do a search of hive hacking you will find the focus of most sites is all about adding technology to the hive. They use temperature and humidity sensors to track what is going on with the hive. That is NOT this site. Who knows, maybe one day I will discuss these things. Honestly, they don’t directly lead to more bees or more honey, so it wont be anytime soon. 🙂
BUT FIRST!!
I in no way want to discount all the valuable things I learned from my studies of bee keeping before I started hacking hives. In order to properly follow the rest of what I discuss you need a basic understanding of bee keeping. How to identify a queen, what is a nuc or package, when and how to feed a hive, etc.
I want to point you to a good resource. In full disclosure this is an affiliate link and I will get a small payment if you purchase from this link. But you need a good foundation to start with before you venture into the crazy stuff.
While you can spend weeks and months looking on the internet at free stuff, for a small investment you can have it all in one place delivered in an easy to understand format. Plus it has a money back guarantee, so what do you have to loose?
Click on the image below, check it out, and lets get started hacking our hives!
