Since people around here keep talking about acceleration into the upcoming collapse I think it is time to have a proper info-thread about means for survival once the acceleration was successful.
Infographics are nice to have. OC about the preparations we have done ourselves is preferred.
To be continued with OC.
This is for the people with their own property/garden. I've been into beekeeping for ~5 years by now as part of my preparations of becoming as self-dependant as possible.
Why bee-keeping?
Because while initial investment is fairly high, if done right you can get a good chunk of benefits out of it:
1. Bees help fertilising your plants
2. If you done it right, you can get 30-40kg / 66-88lbs of honey per healthy beehive. As a rule of thumb you can expect that you have one beehive for honeyproduction and one that is either too weak and needs a year to strengthen or that you need for breeding.
Needless to talk about the advantages of honey. Also it's a good substitute for sugar and when things crash it's a great product for trading purposes.
3. Once you got the hang of it, the workload is reasonably small for the payoff. But there is quite a lot of information to gather.
4. The bee-larves are eadible (albeit not tasty) and full of proteins. And the dead bees can be dried and used as winter-food for livestock such as chickens.
5. Bee-Keeping is as self-reliant as it gets after the initial investment. You don't need electricity, water, food. If handled properly the bees do it all themselves and you are essentially just a breeder.
Still interested? Then here is a quick, simplified tutorial. If you are interested in more detail, start reading a book that goes into detail of how bees do it in the wild when living in trees to understand how to copy their working mechanisms and one book about conventional, profitable beekeeping. The later I will not advice here, because for once we don't want formic acids and such in our beehive and secondly we will not have it available anymore at one point, either. But it helps getting an understanding of how the langstroth hives generally function.
Most importantly bees can exist in warmer and colder climates, on the mainland or close to water, in the flatlands or in the mountains. As long as there is an area around you with a reasonably healthy fauna and enough flowers, bushes and trees that offer enough nectar in a radius of around 5km/3miles. But this tutorial will be based on the middle-european climate. The way bees function is fairly similar no matter where they are, but there are small differences depending on the climate, especially in timings. Longer or shorter winter periods for example. Or having drier climate means bees spent more time collecting water which decreases your honey-yield.
What do you need?
Langstroth hives
-> It is easy to use, can even be built yourself and has certain size standards available. All have slight advantages and disadvantages, but it doesn't really matter as long as they are compatible and you handle the bees correctly. Per hive you need 1 bottom, 2 boxes, 1 lid and 1 grid to put inbetween the boxes so the queen can't go up into the honey room as she is too fat.
-> Additionally you want the bottom to be around ~15-30cm/6-12 inches above the ground. Higher isn't an issue for the bees, lower can be risky when it's wet or cold. You also want to use wooden oil or weather-protecting paint on the outside of the beeboxes to protect from the sun and weather. And ideally you have something to protect the beehive from getting wet to begin with such as a plastic or metal plate you put on top of the lid and is a few cm/inches over the edges.
-> You want to have the bee-opening reasonably small. About 1x10cm for healthy hives and 1x5cm for small and/or young hives so the bees can protect themselves against other hives, wasps and hornets while 1cm is too small for mices to enter. And you want to position the opening towards east, southeast or south, but never towards where the wind is usually blowing from.
-> If you have cold winters (everything beneath freezing temperatures), you want to have something to put around the boxes to help isolating against the cold. It's not necessary, but it increases the hives survival rates. Isolating blankets that don't get soaked for example.
-> Throughout the winter you want to keep the bees in one box, because for once it's easier to handle for you, secondly it's easier for the hive to keep themselves warm and thirdly it's better, because beehives need to shrink twice per year. Once during winter and once during swarming period which I will get to later. Furthermore keeping them small for durations of time forces the bees to clean their hive more often which helps against vermins and mites (specficially the Varroa mite).
-> You get honey by adding the grid and a second box on top during spring. The beequeen is too fat to get through the grid so only the worker bees will go into the upper box (=honeyroom) and thus only honey is stored up there.
Frames and Wax-Plates
-> You need a shitton of that.
-> Make sure the frames are compatible with your beeboxes
-> You can reuse the frames and wax as long as there is no mold on them or they start turning actual black from dirt. A healthy hive will clean them and rebuild potential damage on the honeycombs.
-> Never put empty frames in the lower box where the queen is. If you do, they will built them out naturally and often only put in drone-larves the first year. Drones are male bees and essentially parasites, because they have no purpose other than eating the stored food and waiting for a queen to shack. But you can put 2-3 empty frames into the honey room and the bees will build them from scratch with their own wax. Ideally don't put them next to each other, because else the bees might fuse them together.
- Always collect the leftover wax, even the dirty stuff. You can produce new wax-plates with it by heating it up until it's liquid and remove the dirt from the clean wax (there are different methods to that)
Tools you need (which I score based of importance)
-> Smoker - essentially its a simple means to create smoke that is portable and can be blown on bees. It helps forcing them to move towards a certain direction and to calm them somewhat down. 10/10
-> Any sort of leverage to get the lid or a box off of another box as the bees will glue them together with propolis. A slot screwdriver does the job, but ordering a specific tool for the beeboxes isn't wrong, either. 10/10
-> Protecting clothes are overrated I think. Bees are rarely aggressive, if handled properly. Its a nice-to-have, but just covering yourself with clothes without leaving an opening for bees to sting is good enough. 5/10
-> Honey-extrator. It makes removing the honey from the frames a lot easier, but its again a nice-to-have as there are methods to do without – but they are more timeconsuming. 6/10
-> A netted catcher in case one of your beehives does a natural swarm and hangs in the trees. It's definitely nice-to-have, because catching a swarm is quite a mess. But in the worst case you just let it fly off, if you have enough hives already. Plus we want to keep the bees in a way that they will not have a natural swarm to begin with. 3/10
-> Formic acid or similar. The aim should be to keep the bees without having to rely on acids. It does make beekeeping a little easier for beginners, though. 0,5/10
-> Marker and catcher for the beequeen. Sometimes you need to find the queen for various reasons. Marking them in earlier spring on the first warm days with a white dot can save a lot of time. But it's not a necessity to be able to keep bees. Nice to have. 4/10
-> Glasses for honey storage. 10/10
-> A wax-plates press to keep using the wax you catch. 9,5/10.
-> Waterspots for bees. Especially warm, dry summers can reduce your honey yield. So have several saucers filled with little stones in your area that you can fill with water so bees don't need to search for water as much.
The bee-keeping itself
Early spring
-> By now you should be able to see if your beehive survived the winter or not. Not much to do here. Just use the first proper warm days to open it, see if they have enough food left and ideally mark the queen.
-> Clean out the hives that didn't survive. Take out all frames that didn't have any mold. Store them somewhere dry so you can use the frames for young hives as food and as a starting point of combs. Get rid of all the mold.
End of April / 1st May
-> Add a honey-room on top for the healthy-sized hives.
-> The swarming time starts. In warmer climates it starts a little earlier, in colder climates a little later. Check your hives size. If it's big enough, they will eventually start wanting to swarm. You will see it once they start building queen-cells.
-> How to spot the cells? Worker bee cells are rather flat. Drones are kinda pointy and a little darker. Queen cells start round and will become oval as they grow.
-> Once you see a queen-cell, the hive wants to prepare for swarming - except when it is still a rather small hive which then means they might just want to replace their current queen. You gotta watch about weekly into the hive starting with late april to look for the queen cells.
-> If your hive wants to swarm wait until the first queen cell starts turning oval and has something inside. The bottom of the queen cell has an opening and you can look inside if there is a larve. If that's the case, take ALL of the closed up worker-bee spawn and queen-cell out (Dont pussy out. Take it all). Keep the living queen inside. You can keep the worker bees on the frames. That makes your beehive think "we are too small to swarm, so we better rebuilt". Don't worry about the mother-hive dying off - the worker bees will start feeding each other the food for the spawn which is rich in proteins. Thus they will survive longer until the queen had time to create new spawn.
-> With the taken out spawn you have 2 options. You either create new hive(s) for the ones that died away during winter or because you want more hives. Depending on how aggressive you want to breed you can do 1-4 new hives out of it. Keep in mind that the more aggressive you do it, the more you need to feed the new hives.
You could also eat the larves yourself or use it as bait for hunting birds or fishing. If you have chickens, put it inside your chicken house over night. Make sure to not leave it close to your beehives, though, as it can attract other beehives which maybe fuck over your weaker ones.
End of June / Summer Solstice
-> This is crucial, because at this point the bee-hive stops growing and starts preparing for winter. That has two implications. First you gotta check how much honey they have in their lower box and how big the hive is. If its about ~4 frames worth of bees and ~4 frames worth of honey you are good. If it's less, start observing until late July and if it still hasn't improved enough, add food. Food = ideally honey-frames from one of your other hives honey room. Or sugar-water (about 3:2) in an empty honey-room if absolutely necessary. We want to be self-sustaining, so sugar-water shouldn't be the choice.
-> Second implication is the Varrora mite. Until Summer Solstice it is no issue, because the hive grows faster than the Varrora. But once the growth stops naturally the mite can catch up. Easiest way to check for the Varrora is putting a plate underneath the bottom of the hive for a few days. There are specific plates for this, but a simple baking plate does it just as good. If you have almost no mites on there, you are good. If you have plenty, you gotta do something.
-> This is where conventional beekeepers will use any form of acid. But there is a simple way to get rid of most of the Varrora, because 80% of it is inside the spawn. You might already figured out what to do. Take out the entire spawn again. That's it.
-> With this spawn you have another option. If you have 20+ frames of spawn, you can just put them all into a new hive (can be up to 4-5 boxes full of spawn). No need for a queen-cell, either. Just make sure to get some workerbees along with the frame as the young ones never were outside and thus will stay inside and take care of the spawn while the older worker bees will just fly back. If you do that the bees will start raising a new queen cell (takes about a month) and build up a new hive.
→Once the spawn hatched, take out the frames that were hatched and reduce the boxes steadily.
→ Now comes the tricky part. The Varrora needs a little bit lower temperature (~3-4°C lower) than the bees themselves. Thus with the hatches the mites that hatched along will move down into the lowest box. Once you have a new queen that started to have 1-2 frames full of spawn, get rid of it completely. Most of the mite is stored in there. But you need to feed that new hive, because its too late for them to store enough winterfood at this point. They will be finished by end of July / start of August and thus not much nectar left that can be collected.
→Or you just get rid of the spawn right away. Your choice.
Early-Mid August'
-> Check on the food and amount of bees as stated before. If they are good, you dont need to do anything anymore until next year. If not, feed them for ~2 weeks.
Rest of the year
-> Nothing to do other than preparing for next year. Use the time to produce wax-plates and whatnot. Enjoy your honey. Occasionally look if there are a lot of dead bees infront of a hive, but don't open unless you are 100% sure the hive is dead. If a hive is, open it up and take out the honey and cleaning the box up can help prevent moist. About 75% survival rate is pretty decent.
FAQ
Aren't bees aggressive?
-> A healthy and well-handled hive isn't. I handle my bees without any protection clothes at all. Just be calm while doing it and dont make rash movements. That also means if your bees start becoming more aggressive, it's a warning signal something is off.
What about my neighbors?
-> Depends on your national laws. Several countries have bee-protection, many don't. Ideally you talk to your neighbors about your plans and offer them a pot or two of honey as a present each year. Also try to not have the beehives pointing directly towards your neighbors property and/or have it to close to the fence. Bees fly up at around 45° so you can make an estimation.
Why not let the bees build wild like in nature?
-> Bees can't build in corners. Having langstroth hives without frames will fuck them up and the hive will look like a LSD-trip. The frames essentially give them something to orient at. Keep in mind, in nature bees usually occupy holes in trees.
Can't I have bigger hives to get more honey out of it?
-> This is what conventional beekeepers do. They boast with having giant hives and whatnot. Then every few years most of their hives collapse and die away. Bees need two periods of healthy shrinking. Swarming time and winter. You would do well to stay with it and rather have more hives in numbers than in size. Furthermore having a smaller hive that is just on one box (+ one honeyroom) is easier to handle.
I will post more of my preparations later. Hope some guys will share theirs or valuable infographics.
You don’t get to hide innawoods faggot
Dehumanize yourself and face to bloodshed while taking out breeding populations
bump for interest. Bee keeping sounds pretty wholesome too.
Bees are smart and industrious. Honey is fucking awesome and I’m brewing some mead right now. We’re four weeks into the ferment right now
Damn OP, you're a fucking retard. Anyone looking to keep bees, don't listen to anything OP said. He's creating all sorts of problems, then trying to solve those problems by creating more problems. Download a copy of Beekeeping for All if you want to understand how to keep bees properly. If you don't want to read that much, jewgle for warre hive and do that. You should never use foundation, that's why you have varroa problems. Bees do better if you let them build naturally, and you're here telling people they are somehow incapable of it? The people's hive is the least work, requires the least equipment, is the most self-sufficient, and is the healthiest for the bees as it allows them to function naturally instead of trying to force them into building the wrong size comb in the wrong direction on pesticide laden wax or xenoestrogen containing plastic.
Don't get too cozy. I've been beekeeping for 2 years… the supposed 5 year veteran OP here knows far less than I do. Beekeeping is a great hobby but you have to constantly research and stay on top of your APM in order to not lose 100% of your bees.
I'm doing 4 Georgia packages, 1/4 based… had to re-queen 2. Also picking up 4 small-cell local "survivor" NUCs in a few weeks. Those are on 4.9 mm wax media vs. plastic 5/4 mm lolbert standard frames.
Build your own bee ethnostate. I know this will sound cringe… but the best bees are German bees. Swear to God. Smaller, but more hygienic and mite resistant. There are local German bee colonies that survived colony collapse, AFB, cold-starving in hard winters, etc. I plan to trap out and domesticate a large wild colony on my property, in addition to the packages and NUCs I'm experimenting with.
So I do appreciate the OC from OP, but you can accelerate it. I'm looking forward to queen-rearing, drone-rearing for genetics, NUCs going into winter for sustainability, etc. etc.
Not cringey that makes good sense overall
Some bees were visiting my dads and also my apple trees today
My dads trees are like twenty something years older than my trees but my kids will love my apple trees. My little mini orchard has two cherry two apple a plum and an apricot. They’re all doing pretty good this year so far
OP drops a novel on Intro to Beekeeping 101.
Oh, no shit, we've had a beekeeping expert in our midst this whole time and he clears it all up in a few short sentences by referring everyone to some book he heard about on reddit.
99% of the "prepper" content out there is absolute dogshit. It's at best useless larp, and more likely counter productive.
They think they're going to be carrying around a 70lb pack and living off the land and fighting off a gang of niggers alone with their AK, but don't bother to pack enough water to last a day and couldn't tell an edible plant from a poisonous one.
The best preps are being physically fit, financially independent and active in your community. This is 1000x more valuable than storing 10,000 rnds of ammo.
You should be able to walk at least a half marathon per day without issue. No blisters, no aches and pains the next day. It doesn't matter if you are 16 or 60, this is an absolute minimum.
You should have at least 3 months capital. If you're living paycheck to paycheck you're retarded. Have fun starving along with the EBT niggers.
You should have friends and neighbors who will happily come help you without question. At least one local cop and one local politician should be the kind of friend you invite to a BBQ.
Living off the land isn't possible. You probably won't even last as long as McCandless.
OP drops a pile of retarded shit based on commercial beekeeping, which is terrible for self-sufficiency. I referenced the same book that is referenced every single thread here you worthless newfag retard, and which is public domain.
This is how it will go down. There are some good fiction books about life after a collapse such as Lucifer's Hammer and One Second After. Communities will survive and loners will be easy prey. I no longer read fiction so other anons can probably name some better books
I can't sleep without my woobie, I have 5 of them.
Just ask what you want to know. And keep in mind pretty much every beekeeper says something different and thinks what they do is best for the bees. The two other guys here replying have shown that quite strongly. In the end success gets shown if you can handle bees without a collapse of your hives for several years. One or two years of mismanagement can be tanked by the hives - which is why often times people who do some stuff right, but also some mistakes have a collapse in a 3-4 years intervall.
The book gives a pretty decent starting point, but is also quite outdated.
Lower honey-yield. More demanding on the beekeeper and thus not to be recommended for beginners. More weight to lift. More effort to create new hives. Admittedly it's closer to the way bees work in a natural environment, though. But if that's your aim, you are better off with a bee gum. Else the advantages of it don't exactly outweight the disadvantages in handling. It's more for people who want to handle bees closer to their natural state and not for those who want to have a decent honey-yield.
Thanks captain obvious. Nowhere did I say otherwise. But I said letting them build freely altogether can cause a hell of a lot issues. I still recommended to have 2-3 frames in the honeyroom for free building.
Again, it's why I recommended having 2-3 frames for free building, not use acids and collect your own wax constantly. Thus you will reduce these issues quickly over a few years. But beginners have to start somewhere and there wax-plates are simply advantageous.
Because I tried to compromise the information as good as possible rather than writing several books of length it must mean I know little. Are you retarded or autistic? Or both?
Utopic thinking. The moment you have someone who is also beekeeping in a 5km radius, chances are your bees will at one point interbred with theirs. And unlike with humans, bee-breeds aren't too different other than their adaptation to the local environment.
Local bees adapted to the environment? Yes, the german bees are great, because Germany has one of the worst weathers for bees to handle. Pretty hot summers to sometimes really cold winters. Either or is way easier for bees to handle. But if you talk about Buckfast or Carnica, then you are full of shit.
Anyhow, hygiene and mite-resistance also has a lot to do with how you hold the bees. If you keep them in smaller hives you force them to clean more. If you try to keep some giant hives, then you will have to interfere way more.
Unnecessary. Rather go for a darwinistic approach of the whole hive.
Obviously you add commercial beekeeping to it, because you want to fucking yield honey. You could also keep the bee hives in the trees like it is still done in the Urals. Then the effort to harvest the honey and the yield (~5kg) is way lower. But hey, at least you didn't do commercial beekeeping.
You clearly are retarded, man. While I don't agree with a lot of stuff of commercial beekeeping such as the use of acids and killing the queen cells as a means to interrupt the swarming urge of hives, it doesn't mean that there are no benefits to it.
Now if you want to do your hobby-beekeeping and try to keep and breed bees as natural as possible, go ahead. But beekeeping as a means of self-sufficiency should be seeing bees also as a livestock. And there the aim is to find the right balance between as much honey-yield as possible without harming the inner mechanics of the beehive too much. Langstroth offers the best balance here, if the beekeeper handles the rest properly.
Depends on your environment and how much property you have available. But even if you can't sustain yourself to 100% off of it, your aim should be to be able to provide as much as possible on your own.
Else I agree with the connection to your neighborhood, friends, community. People living in urban areas will definitely have an edge.
Only if that capital is gold, silver or gemstones. The pace of inflation will certainly increase prior to the collapse.
Honey is the white man's money. It keeps forever and you can always make some cash by selling it at the side of the road. The Jew cannot corner the market. China tariffs will drive up the price.
Reciprocate the Chinese firewall. Reciprocate all such barriers, but China’s especially.
Bump
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She looks pretty, probably a virgin because she's white and saving herself for a white nationalist. I want to marry her and give her 2 super Aryan children.