Tim Eastham

Plant O Gram is in Dr. Phillips.

My advice:

1. You have already done the first great thing - create a simple link to the cards. Permies.com/cards is easy to remember.
2. On the permies.com/cards site, bring the Amazon link to the top of the page and make it obvious. It is a great deal, especially with prime. Bring it to the top, with the price and a thumbnail if possible. Make it very obvious at the top to find. That way, anyone driven to your site can buy it before they read all the other stuff if they want to.
3. Think of a survival/permie topic that you can break into 4 or 5 five minute segments of audio (like 5 points of rendering human waste harmless, 4 points of building a hugelculture, etc.). Record the 4 or 5 segments and at the end of each pitch your cards and use the permies.com/cards link or the amazon link.
4. Ask Jack to play the multi-segment series daily on his show over a week. It will only take up 5 minutes of his show, but would give you daily exposure. Give a little, get a little hopefully.
5. You might also follow that up with posting to some survival forums a link to the series so that they can listen to it as well.

Tim

John Wolfram wrote:

Tim Eastham wrote:Sunhives are unfortunately illegal to use as a beehive in the United States. All hives are required to have moveable frames for the gov't to inspect the brood chamber.

Why would the inside bars not count as moveable frames?

I stand corrected. I have never seen one with moveable frames before. Very cool. Those probably wouldn't work in FL or TX. We have issues enough in certain areas with comb collapse of the standard TBH depth.

My inspector hates me enough with a TBH. He would probably go ballistic with one of these.

Do you split hives during swarm season to stop swarming in some hives?

I have had a TBH for a year now. I caught a swarm a year ago and this is the time of the year for swarming. I could create another second hive if I wanted to with a split of my existing hive. Some research I did suggests that letting them swarm may actually help them break pest cycles.

Do you normally do any splits or do you let all the hives swarm? If you let them swarm, do you have failures of the hive left behind because they are weakened by the swarm?

I don't really need 2 hives but I would like to maintain the one I have. A swarming would give me a new queen, which I believe would keep my hive vitality strong but I am concerned it could also spell the end for the hive if the hive beetle population rises too highly during the break in brood that happens during the transition of royalty.

We have lots of hive beetle issues in FL. They only cause an issue, though, when the hives are weak. Otherwise, the bees dispatch them or imprison them.

Thanks,
Tim Eastham
Mountain Tranquility Farm
Clermont, FL

Sunhives are unfortunately illegal to use as a beehive in the United States. All hives are required to have moveable frames for the gov't to inspect the brood chamber.

Does anyone else still hear them in your head after you have been in the hive?

I swear I still hear them for at least 10 minutes or so even after I have gone in the house.

I also can tell a honeybee from any other insect when they are flying around, even when I can't actually see the insect making the sound.

The curling can be stopped by straightening two comb and putting a new bar between the straight ones. They will maintain their bee space and draw the new one straight. Keep doing this checkerboard technique and continuing to move out the follower boards until the hive is built out. Anytime you harvest a comb for honey, place the bar between two comb instead of on the end.

Any time you want to harvest old brood comb to reduce chemical load, move it on the backside of the honey wall and return in a week after they have hatched out the babies. Then, harvest the old comb and place a new bar between two bars with comb.

Swarm Traps and Bait Hives book
https://www.createspace.com/3631331

He has a youtube channel with great info too.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCndWYkPK3h04-69TmN_ZcNw

It is over a year later, but I will chime in on this thread. I chose TBH because I wanted the bees to have the experience that I consider most bee like. When it comes to TBH, you will be removing a lot more wax than a conventional hive. Here are the reasons why I think this is not only OK but beneficial:

1. Bees step all over the comb. Each comb probably receives hundreds of thousands of tiny bee footsteps on it each day. Some of those bees just returned from foraging for water, pollen, or nectar. This will cause a buildup of whatever the bees encounter in the wild. In an ideal permaculture world, this would be fine. But in our world of chemicals, they will be accumulating chemicals on the comb. Slicing off the comb and making them rebuild it reboots this. Every other part of the hive is non-continual. Queens, workers, and drones die and are replaced. Honey is consumed. The only chemical weak link in my opinion is the wax.

2. In nature, when the hive is attacked by a mammal, they will take the comb. So, if I want the honey, I believe I should take the comb too.

3. I think the cost to the hive is negligible, especially compared to a modernly managed conventional hive. The only reason why they reuse the comb is to shorten the cycle to fill them back up with honey. The only reason why they want that situation is so they will be able to harvest more honey. When you take into account all the honey that will be taken under this technique, I would be hard pressed to think that the economics of the hive are any different than taking the comb.

4. Causing them to rebuild comb gives them the opportunity to change the comb size to fit any changes in the hive. Whether it be genetic changes caused by a queen change or environmental response, allowing them to rebuild the comb makes sure the hive is designed in the best way for their current surrounding, genetics, and environment.

Tim
Mountain Tranquility Farm
Clermont, FL

I love gardening in FL. Stating extreme weather cases like hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, etc. are just that - extreme cases. We have had no hurricanes since then. I lived through the 3 hurricanes and yes it sucked. Florida may be considered in drought but drought is a factor to indicate a deviation from a normal. There is no normal in climate. It is always changing. Central Florida, where I live, gets 50" of rain on average per year. Fifty inches! That is not moderate rain - it is excessive! I love it! Tampa suffers because the system in Tampa is designed to water lawns based upon what they expect to get from rain, not what they actually get.

Our list of what we can't grow is so small and our list of what we can grow exceeds most other places in the United States. We can garden year round and most of the time don't need to preserve food unless we just want to be eating those loquats, grapes, or pears in off season times. We have conventional greens in the winter/spring and tropical greens at other times of the year. We get 2 season for annual veggies and wouldn't want to grow tomatoes in the summer anyway because the cilantro bolts then

Most of our legume trees don't have nasty thorns, but they are considered invasive by the people that make us sad.

And we have tons of lakes to fish and wild pigs to hunt too.