Feeding and management of honeybee cages

The feeding and management of cage bees includes the feeding mode of cage bees, the conditions of production and breeding, the construction of cages, the preparation of feed, the cultivation of queen bees, the production of cage bees, the work of cage installation, the transportation of cage bees, and the feeding techniques of cage bees. Cage bees are colonies sold (or transported) in a gauze cage with only bees and queen bees, without a hive, spleen or hive. The caged bees sold in honeybee breeding farms in developed countries in Europe and the United States are calculated according to the weight of bees (pounds), so they used to be called pound bees. Bee breeding farms and royal farms are mostly located in the south where there are spring honey sources, and they are mainly sold to the north from March to May. Cage bees are raised in the north, mostly for a beekeeping season (about half a year), and kill the bees after collecting honey in autumn. This not only saves the feed honey of the colony overwintering, increases the per unit yield of the colony, but also saves half a year of manual management. There are rich sources of honey powder in spring in southern China, such as rape, purple yunying, broad bean and so on. the climate is warm, which is beneficial to the reproduction of bee colony, so it is an ideal place to produce cage wasp. The northern group has a long overwintering time, high feed consumption and high overwintering mortality of honeybees. however, the main nectar plants are rich in summer, such as raising cage bees, which is conducive to the high yield of bee products. 1. Feeding methods of cage bees there are the following ways to raise cage bees: 1. For northern apiculture farms to buy cage bees from the south in spring and enter the hive to raise them to produce honey, royal jelly, bee pollen and other products. When there is no honey source in autumn, the bee colony can be killed and the honeybee pupae can be obtained. After cleaning and disinfecting the beehive, hive spleen and beekeeping utensils, store them properly and set aside. This feeding method can save about 20 kg of hibernation feed honey, increase the output of honey, and save the work of colony management for half a year. 2. Using cage bees to strengthen the weak colony and kingless colony overwintering in the north, due to poor feed, poor management and other reasons, after overwintering, the colony is so weakened that it is difficult to survive independently, or the queen bee has been lost, so that cage bees can be combined with them. so that they can be put into production when the honey season comes. 3. The bee farms that promote improved varieties and sell cage bees must ensure the quality, and they must be bees with high yield of honey and royal jelly, mainly young bees, and bees are healthy and free from diseases and insect pests. The bee breeding grounds in the south popularize the high-yield varieties of honey and royal jelly or the selected disease-resistant insect bees in the form of cage bees. 4. auxiliary strong group long-distance transportation in the hot season, the bee colony is easy to die from boredom in the long-distance transportation of 3 ~ 7 days. If the method of opening the nest door to transport bees is adopted, some bees will be lost, the colony will be weakened, and the safety of station operation will be affected. Before starting to transport the bee colony, you can divide part of the bees from the strong colony, release a king platform, load and transport, and after arriving at the destination, remove the virgin queen and merge with the original colony. This can not only ensure the safety of long-distance transportation of bees, but also prevent bees from flying out. 5. Pollination of crops using cage wasps to pollinate plants is an effective measure to increase production. 6. North-South cooperation the beekeeping farms in the south and the north cooperate with each other or jointly engage in cage bee breeding is an ideal way. This can reduce the loss of bees overwintering in the north and summer in the south and the consumption of honey, and save labor expenses in the non-production period. 2. conditions for producing and raising cage bees in addition to setting up sites in places rich in honey plants, honeybee farms need to master the breeding techniques of improved species of honeybees, constantly select bee species with high yield and disease resistance, master artificial king breeding techniques, cultivate a large number of high-quality queen bees in time, and master the rapid reproduction technology of the colony, so that the colony can develop and grow as soon as possible, so as to supply and supply cage bees earlier and more. The place where cage bees are raised also needs to have more than one main nectar plant and rich auxiliary nectar sources. Since cage bees are colonies without hives and spleen, beehives, spleen, nest frames and feeds (sugar, honey and pollen or pollen substitutes) must be prepared in advance. Before buying cage bees, it is necessary to master the transportation, box-passing and feeding techniques of cage bees. The structure of a beehive A beehive that carries bees, usually made of wooden boards nailed into four rectangular frames and nailed with lead yarn on both sides. The length is not more than 440mm and the height is not more than 240mm. It can be placed in a standard beehive to facilitate the operation of the hive. The upper and lower sides and the left and right sides of the beehive are nailed with a thick plank of 10mm and 12mm, with a round hole about 100mm in diameter in the middle of the roof for the feed can or feed cover, as well as the entrance to the bee. If you use liquid feed such as honey, install the feed tank here; when using solid feed such as sugar refining, install the feed cover here. The feed cover is made of 8-inch 10-mesh lead yarn with a diameter of 95 mm and a height of 100 mm. The cover has an outer edge of 15 mm and 20 mm. The size of the beehive depends on how many bees are loaded. The honeybee cage with 1.5 kilograms of bees has an outer size of 440 mm long, 240 mm high and 160 mm wide. For each increase or decrease of 0.5 kg of bees, the length and height of the cage remain the same, and the width increases or decreases by 20 mm. Then nail the lead yarn on the front and back sides of the four frames, and the lead yarn should be crimped and nailed tightly so that the bees can not get out. Saw a 10mm saw seam on one side of the round hole in the roof, with a small nail next to it. Here the queen bee cage is fixed and mailed with lead wire. The cylindrical beehive is made of corrugated paper or fibreboard. It is 350 mm long and 400 mm long, with a large caliber of 200 mm and a small caliber of 180 mm. A Z-shaped lead wire net is installed in the tube, and the feed jar and queen bee cage are tied in the middle of it, so that the bees can cling to the lead wire yarn. Lead wire gauze and plastic tube plugs consisting of several 25mm wide ventilation fins are installed at both ends of the beehive to prevent bees from flying out and poor ventilation. Fourth, the preparation of feed air cage wasps use solid feed, railways or trucks use liquid feed. The main results are as follows: 1. The feed of sugar-refining cage wasps during transportation is the same as that used by mailing queen bees. The softness and water content of sugar refining should be suitable, and it is suitable not to dry and hard at 15 ℃ and not to flow at 37 ℃. Prepare with high quality granulated sugar and honey. Ordinary powdered white sugar contains a small amount of alum, red raw sugar contains many impurities, so it is not suitable for sugar refining, let alone honey with rust or bacteria. (1) heating method: 2 parts of high-quality white sugar and 1 part of water, heating and stirring to completely dissolve the sugar and filter with double-layer gauze. Heat 1 part of honey to 60 ℃ and filter. Heat the clean syrup to 112 ℃, mix well with the honey, continue to heat and keep stirring until the fire is removed at 118 ℃, heat to about 70 ℃, and continue stirring until the sugar ball becomes milky. The prepared refined sugar is packed in a container, sealed and stored in a cool, dry place. (2) Grinding method: grind high-quality white granulated sugar into fine powder, sift through 80mm 100 mesh, then grind and sieve the coarse powder until all become fine powder. First take 70% powdered sugar, put it on the board or thick glass board, add 25% honey (the honey is heated and filtered), and then knead it back and forth, just like noodles, gradually adding the remaining powdered sugar until it is kneaded into a white sugar ball, not soft, hard, not sticky, and placed without deformation. The ratio of powdered sugar to honey is about 4: 1. 1.5 kg cage wasps consume an average of about 100 grams of solid feed per day during transportation, usually adding 500 grams of refined sugar per cage. If individual colonies run out of feed during transportation, they can be added at any time. Converted sugar can be used instead of honey to make refined sugar. The method of converting sugar is as follows: 1 kg of granulated sugar plus 800 ml of water, 3 g of tartaric acid, boiling for 30 minutes for 45 minutes. 2. Liquid feed uses trains, trucks and ships to transport cage bees, and the effect of using liquid feed is good. Put the honey in a glass bottle or tinplate, cover and drill 2 or 3 small holes, place the cover upside down in the round hole in the top of the beehive and fix it. When airlifting cage bees, liquid feed can not be used, because the air pressure changes greatly when the plane is flying, which is easy to make the honey flow out of the bottle. On the premise of ensuring the quality, the queen bee used by the cage bee shall make a plan in advance according to the required quantity and train according to the plan, so that the supply can be satisfied in time. To ensure that the queen bee is artificially bred in the same year or the age of not more than 6 months of spawning king, in line with the requirements of species, the queen bee has strong spawning ability, its offspring bee collection ability is strong, bee division is weak, and has strong resistance and disease resistance. In order to supply cage bees early in March, it is necessary to breed queen bees one month in advance and drones one and a half months in advance. At this time, due to the low temperature, few honey sources, and the colony has not yet entered a strong period of development, it is difficult to breed the king artificially, so it is necessary to cultivate a batch of queen bees in the autumn of the first year, store them and apply them in the supply of the first batch of cage bees. The caged wasps supplied in April and after use the queen bees bred in that year. The number of queen bees should be arranged in a planned way according to the number of cage bees provided. When cultivating queen bees, the number of transfer worms is about twice as large as the number of queen bees needed, because the acceptance rate of transfer worms is 80%-90%, the success rate of virgin mating is 50%-80%, and some of them will be eliminated after the queen lays eggs. 6. the production of cage bees should begin in the autumn of the previous year. In addition to cultivating a batch of queen bees, it is also necessary to thoroughly control mites and cultivate healthy overwintering bees to survive the winter. In the places where the winter temperature is relatively high and there are sources of honey and powder in the south, effective technical measures should be taken to promote and accelerate the development of bee colony. The suitable rapid breeding method of early spring bee colony is put forward according to the local climatic bee colony and honey source conditions, which can make the bee colony develop and strong as soon as possible. There is an existing method, which is to check the colony at the end of December or early January, understand and record the situation of the colony in detail, and classify the colonies with more than 3 frames of bees as large groups and those with less than 3 frames as small groups. Small groups form a Shuangwang group and adopt the management method of two groups in the same box, so that the potential of the two groups can be equal, or one strong and one weak. It is proposed that the empty spleen in the nest makes the bees dense, that is, for the first time, the single queen group of 3-4 frame wasps leave 2 spleen, put them in the center of the box, add partition boards and insulation materials (heat preservation frame or straw roll) on both sides, and cover the cloth with 20 sheets of papyrus to keep warm and absorb moisture. The beehive door is 10-15 mm wide, facing south or southwest, with the back against the wall; the beehives are separated by 10-15 cm; the bottom of the box is covered with 10 cm thick hay, and the gap between the box and the box is filled with thousands of grass; the box is covered with straw curtains and plastic film. Turn over the heat preservation material on a sunny day. The middle gate of the double king group should be very tight, and the two groups of bees can not communicate with each other in the box; the two groups on both sides of the gate leave 2 spleen, and the nest spleen is close to the gate and the outer partition, so that the bees are concentrated in a bee path between the two splenes. the heat preservation inside and outside the box is the same as above. Tightening the spleen began to feed the bees in the evening and fed enough within 3 days, so that each spleen had more than 500 grams of feed reserve. Add sulfonamides (0.2 tablets per box) or antibiotics (5000 units per box) to the syrup. In the future, we will be rewarded for feeding milk syrup every day. 500 grams of sugar and 250 grams of water heated to dissolve, and then add 250 grams of cow (sheep) milk and 1 gram of salt, warm before feeding. Reward feeding is uninterrupted. At first, small groups are fed 50 grams of milk syrup at a time, and then increase by 10% day by day. During the cold wave period, it can be fed once in the morning and evening. After 8 days, the spleen was added when there was a whole frame of spleen in the nest. Add the empty spleen to the center of the hive for the first time. The spleen was added to the outermost nest spleen for the second time after 4 days, that is, the side 2 position, and then the spleen was added to the side 2 position. At the same time, the spleen of the new cover is adjusted to the outside, and the spleen of the old cover is adjusted to the middle, where the queen bee can lay eggs after the new bee leaves the house. After adding spleen several times, the number of bees on each spleen decreased to about 70%, but the number of spleen increased, and this was the first time that it was "sparse". When the colony occupies 89 spleen, the addition of spleen is postponed, and the method of cutting open the honey chamber cover on the spleen and mobilizing the nest spleen is used to expand the spawning area of the queen bee. Due to the large number of bees coming out of the house, the number of bees increased, gradually reaching the proportion of the spleen (an average of 2000 bees per nest spleen), or more bees than the spleen (more than 2000 bees per spleen), reaching the second "dense". When the population potential develops to more than 9 frame bees, add the relay box, transfer to the relay box 1 honey spleen and 2 son spleen, and add 2 empty spleen, and the nest box also add 2 empty spleen. After this treatment, the bees on the nest and spleen became sparse again, that is, the second "sparse". But there are 6-8 spleen in the nest, new bees come out one after another, there are many young bees and strong feeding ability, at the same time, the temperature has risen, and the honey and powder sources have increased, which can further promote the queen bee to lay eggs and provide a large number of bees for cage bee breeding. According to the date of bees, prepare the utensils and feed in advance, and load the bees into the hive step by step. 1. The appliances used are bee cages, queen mail cages, feed covers or feed cans, platform scales, funnels, nails, iron yarns, nail hammers, pliers and so on. The diameter of the upper mouth is 30 cm, the diameter of the lower mouth is 10 cm, the length of the upper section is 55 cm, and the length of the lower section is 35 cm. It is made of galvanized iron sheet or plastic film. When loading a large number of cages, a king partition board is nailed under an empty relay box, and a funnel with the same size as the relay box is connected under the box, which can not only improve the efficiency of shaking bees, but also avoid loading queen bees and drones into beehives. 2. The loading time is in the honey period, which should be carried out before a large number of bees leave the nest to collect, so as to prevent the bees from losing too much weight when they arrive at the destination. When there is a lack of honey, it is easy to steal bees, and it is difficult to install the cage. the time of the cage should be arranged in the early morning or dusk when bees rarely fly. Once there is a bee theft, stop immediately and wait for the bees to be quiet before continuing. 3. The queen bee opens the iron yarn on the queen bee mail cage and installs the refined sugar in the feed room, which is covered with a plastic film to prevent the sugar from drying or melting, and then fix the iron yarn. Load the queen bee and 710 bees through the round hole in the side of the queen's cage, plug the entry and exit hole with cork or beeswax and weigh it. The queen bee cage is put into the cage from the round hole of the bee cage with lead wire, and the lead wire is stuck in the saw seam and fixed on the roof, so that the feed room is located below. 4. Shake the bee cage and put the bee cage on the platform scale, shake the bee, and the funnel is inserted on the bee cage. Open the hive, find the queen's nest spleen and put it aside; put forward the nest spleen with more young bees, shake the bees into the funnel, and then put the nest spleen back into the original box. Pick up the spleen and shake the bee in turn until the weight of the bee in the cage slightly exceeds the requirement, immediately pull out the funnel and cover the round hole. Most of the bees attached to the gauze cover, partition and edge spleen are older, so don't shake them into the cage. What's more, do not shake the bees into the plastic belt and weigh them before loading them into the beehive, because bees gather together in the plastic belt, and when the temperature is high, they will get hot and dehydrated for only a few minutes, resulting in a lot of casualties. When there is no honey source, do not mix several groups of bees into one cage, so as not to kill each other. 5. After adding feed to install a predetermined number of caged bees, sweep the bees attached to the outside of the hive, move them out of the hive, install the feed cover in a round hole, and fix it with a thumbnail or shoe nail every 3 to 4 centimeters. Then put a certain weight of sugar or liquid feed tank into the feed cover, and then nail the roof with a thin board to seal the top. Record the feed weight on the registration card. Put the packaged cage bees in the shade of trees or in a cool and ventilated room to keep the bees quiet. The transport of cage bees can be carried by truck, train or plane. Pay attention to the fixing of the beehive and the management on the way. 1. Fixing the bee cage in order to ventilate, dissipate heat and facilitate handling, every 3 to 4 cages are connected with 4 wooden strips or bamboo board nails. The screen window of each cage is opposite to the screen window, with a distance of 70 mm to 80 mm, and the wood strips are nailed to the upper and lower ends of the side wall of the bee cage. Two on one side. The length of the stick or bamboo board depends on the number and width of the beehive, with 30 millimeters growing at both ends. 2. manage truck or train transportation on the way, which takes a long time and must be escorted, take care of cage bees and contact related matters. The transportation time of the plane is short, so we can contact each other by telegram and someone can pick it up. When shipping or stopping on the way, stack the beehive neatly, align the gap, make the beehive keep the air unobstructed, and tie it with a rope to prevent each other from colliding. It is transported by jet, with cage bees in the front cabin and propeller planes in the rear cabin to reduce vibration. The train should be installed near the well-ventilated doors and windows in the box car. Escorts should bring noodle nets, nails, hammers, pliers and sugar feed with them to guide the loading, unloading and placement of cage bees along the way. Can not put the cage bees upside down, find problems and deal with them in a timely manner. In the course of transportation, feed water 2 or 3 times a day to check the feed consumption and replenish it in time. 9. The feeding technology of cage bees to raise cage bees should make a plan in advance, sign a purchase and sales contract with the cage bee production farm, order the required number of cage bees, and agree on the date of intercourse. When the cage bee colony is raised in the hive, it takes about 1 month to recover to the original number of bees, and it takes 2 months to develop strong. The date of mating bees should be determined according to the local climate and honey source. Caged wasps can be ideally transported when the earliest local nectar and powder plants bloom or half a month before flowering.