How to keep ants away from beehives? Practical control methods shared
Honeybees are very cute little insects, busy all day darting among flowers collecting nectar - they really are hardworking little bees! As the breeding industry heats up, more and more people are keeping bees, so how do you raise bees, and what should you pay attention to?
How to keep ants away from beehives?
1. If you find ants getting into the bees, the beekeeper should first look for ant nests near the hive, and once found, destroy them. You can drive several deep holes about 60 cm deep into the ground with wooden stakes at the ant nest, then pour kerosene into them, and finally fill the holes with soil - this completely eliminates the ants.
2. After finding an ant nest, you can also dig it open with a shovel, then sprinkle some quicklime on it, and spray a diluted sodium sulfite solution - this also helps eliminate the ants.
3. While destroying the ant nests, the beekeeper must also take necessary measures with the hive itself. You can raise all four corners of the hive with wooden blocks, then coat the raised wooden blocks with tung oil or asphalt, so that when the ants smell it, they will no longer enter the hive.
4. Using the insecticide Mieyiling is also an important way to help prevent ants in honeybees. This insecticide is not harmful to bees but can kill ants quickly. People can dilute the insecticide and spray it on the ants' travel routes and on their bodies, which quickly eliminates the ants.
How to raise bees artificially
Artificial queen rearing is a specialized technique in bee breeding. Its purpose is to raise a certain number of queen bees in a planned way each year, to organize new colonies or to replace aging, injured or crippled queens. When doing this, you must first select bees from disease-free strong colonies to form a nursing colony, also called a queen-rearing colony (a colony responsible for nursing queen larvae and capping the queen cells). At the same time, select larvae 1 day old and transfer them into queen cell cups (larva grafting). The nurse bees then instinctively feed them royal jelly, nursing them as queens. Nursing colonies are divided into two types: colonies with a queen and colonies without a queen. When rearing large numbers of queens, the grafted queen-rearing frame (a comb frame for rearing queens) can be placed in a queenless nursing colony for nursing, and after 1-2 days it is transferred to a queenright nursing colony to continue nursing; when rearing a small number of queens, a queenright nursing colony can be used, placing the grafted queen-rearing frame in the supers between the pupa combs and honey combs until the queens emerge, from which selections are made to replace old queens.
Artificial colony division is a method of increasing the number of colonies to expand reproduction. The best time to divide is when the colony has developed to more than 10 frames of bees, about 1 month before the main honey flow begins. The method is to take several frames of pupa combs with bees and 1-2 frames of honey and pollen combs from a strong colony, place them in a new hive box, then add 1 new queen that has already laid eggs or a mature queen cell, then move it away from the original site and keep it closed in a dark, cool room for 2-3 days to prevent the bees from flying back to the original hive, thus forming a new colony.
Royal jelly production is a technique that uses the principle of artificial queen rearing to induce bees to secrete royal jelly to feed queen larvae, and harvests it at the right time. It is usually carried out in late spring and early summer, when the average temperature reaches above 20°C and there is a certain nectar and pollen source outside, in strong colonies (7-9 frames of bees). First, use a queen excluder to divide the hive into an egg-laying area and a royal jelly production area. Confine the queen in the egg-laying area, while worker bees can enter the royal jelly production area. Then place the royal jelly production frame (a comb frame for producing royal jelly) into the royal jelly production area. Each frame has 3-5 queen cell bars (bars with queen foundation attached), and each queen cell bar has 20-30 queen cell cups (queen foundation) attached, and into each queen cell cup is grafted 1 larva less than 1 day old. The worker bees then instinctively secrete royal jelly to feed the larvae. After about 60-72 hours, harvest the royal jelly once. Fresh royal jelly is best stored at a temperature of -18 to 4°C.
As people's living standards continue to rise, humans pay more and more attention to the health benefits of natural foods. Bee products such as propolis, royal jelly, bee pollen, honey and bee pupae come directly from nature and are truly natural health foods. The effects of bee products in resisting and inhibiting bacteria, regenerating cells, strengthening immunity, regulating nerves, eliminating fatigue, and improving blood circulation and respiratory function are gradually being recognized by people, and these bee products that people can see and touch are only a few hundredths of the benefits that bee pollination brings to nature.
Taboos in beekeeping
Avoid two queens in the same colony. In actual beekeeping practice, apart from a very small number of beekeeping hobbyists who like to try "two queens in the same colony," those who truly keep bees as a profession never play this pointless game. Two queens in the same colony is not, as some people casually claim, fast-breeding and capable of maintaining a large colony; on the contrary, it has more disadvantages than advantages:
1. Different queen pheromones are hard to make compatible (even for sister queens), causing the worker bees in the colony to become restless (not knowing which way to turn), and nursing and foraging become sluggish.
2. After a period of stability (about two weeks), the worker bees gradually become cold toward the weaker queen and let her slowly decline and die.
3. The Chinese honeybee (Apis cerana) has a strong swarming tendency (generally swarming after just a few combs). A good queen has enough capacity to maintain egg-laying ability for more than 10 combs, so two queens in the same colony has little meaning.
What are the benefits of beekeeping?
Honeybees are one of the groups of insects beneficial to humans, usually widely referring to the bee species used for production: the western honeybee (Apis mellifera) and the Chinese honeybee (Apis cerana). They pollinate crops, fruit trees, vegetables, forage grass, oil-tea crops and medicinal plants, and yields can increase several times up to 20 times. Honey is a commonly used tonic, praised as "milk for the elderly"; bee pollen is hailed as a "miniature nutrition storehouse"; royal jelly is even more of a premium nutritional product, not only strengthening the body and prolonging life, but also treating chronic diseases such as neurasthenia, anemia and gastric ulcers; bee venom is effective for rheumatism, neuritis and more; beeswax and propolis are both raw materials for light industry.
No doubt everyone knows, without the editor having to say it, that bees can produce large amounts of honey, and honey is an excellent product for beauty care and health, and nowadays most households keep a bottle of it! Indeed, honey has particularly high nutritional value as a food, and at the same time it has made the beekeeping industry more and more popular.