BEE MANAGEMENT

BEE MANAGEMENT

Monitoring the beehives

• Make sure the queen is actively working
• This helps to determines the time for harvesting
• It helps in inspecting the beehive if there are attacks by wild animals and insects
• Helps to control bee migration by checking availability of water and food
• Helps the farmer to clean the inside of the beehives.

Factors that leads to bee migration / transfer

• Scarcity of bee foods
• People; making noise and or damaging the beehives
• Fire, wild honey feeders like honey badger, ants and rodents
• Lack of adequate space inside the beehive
• Presence of another queen in the beehive
• Poor bee management skills.

Signs of possibility of bee migration

• Presence of another queen
• Large number of bees in beehive
• Bees being outside for too long
• Few workers actively working
• Scarcity of bee foods and water.

Do the following to avoid be migration.

• Make sure there is only one queen in the beehive
• Harvest all matured honey
• Separate the bees into two groups
• Cut / reduce the wings of the queen
• Monitor the beehives in appropriate time.

Ways to reduce bee migration

• Apiary to have good vegetate cover
• Monitoring beehives frequently
• Giving extra food and water in times of water and food shortage
• Fire protection.