Many beekeepers, especially beginners, are genuinely surprised that, no matter how hard they try, the amount of honey that can be obtained from a single hive per season is very modest, and bee families are weak and infertile. The secret is that in order to get really great honey productivity, bees need to migrate. All the intricacies of this process, including how to make a mobile apiary with your own hands, are described in this review.

Features of the nomad apiary

As you know, bees make honey from nectar and pollen of certain plants called honey plants. The most active collection of raw materials for future honey occurs during the period when honey plants bloom. However, this time usually passes quickly, and insects have to urgently look for a new place for "hunting", and not always such searches are quite successful. For this reason, the amount of honey that can be obtained from one hive always depends on the location of the apiary and the specific weather conditions prevailing in a given season.Since such uncertainty and poor predictability becomes a serious problem for anyone who considers the sale of honey as a serious source of constant income, there is a need to find ways to influence the indicators of honey productivity and, of course, try to increase them. This is precisely the solution to the nomad apiary.

For example, in the village of Krivonosovo, by the end of April, a medunica bloomed, and a month later this process was completely completed. At the same time, the beekeeper knows well that literally 20 km from this place, in the village of Krivoshapkino, there are vast meadows with dandelion blooming just in the second half of May. Moving in this way from one flowering honey plant to another, the beekeeper provides his "wards" with the opportunity to actively and, most importantly, continuously collect nectar for several months in a row.

Important! There are special calendars of flowering melliferous plants relevant to various regions. For example, in the middle lane of the European part of Russia, a well-organized wandering of bees allows you to start honey collection in mid-April and end in late July, and in Ukraine this period can even last from March to September inclusive.

Another reason for the high productivity of the nomad apiary is that the bees in this case are transported as close as possible to the place where the honey plants grow, which means they spend much less energy on the whole process of collecting nectar than is the case with stationary arrangement of hives. The bee, who did not have time to get tired, returns to the nest with a full bribe, while during a long flight the insect eats a significant part of its prey in order to maintain its own strength.

What is necessary for a successful nomad apiary?

Of course, in order for the apiary to be able to move over considerable distances, transport is first and foremost necessary. It is not necessary that it be a truck or a van. For a small number of hives, it is quite possible to limit yourself to a trailer. As with "settled" beekeeping, hives are needed for a mobile apiary. In principle, there are no special differences in the arrangement of stationary and mobile houses.But usually for transportation, more modern modular structures are used, consisting of interconnected homogeneous hive cells. The main advantage of such bee pavilions is compactness and stability during transportation. Thus, since there are no particular difficulties in organizing a nomad apiary, in general, even small farmers and private keepers successfully apply this method of beekeeping.

Important! It is estimated: in order for the nomad apiary to pay off, one hive must bring at least 5 kg of honey. For comparison: the average productivity of a stationary hive is about 2 kg of honey.

The subtleties of roaming bees

Nevertheless, the transportation of live cargo is always associated with some subtleties. First of all, it is necessary to take an interest in the state rules applicable in this territory that govern this process, otherwise, due to the lack of necessary documents, the carrier may be held liable and not only pay a large fine, but also lose his property.In addition, bees are very susceptible to stress and hard to tolerate transportation, so long shaking off-road can be detrimental to the family. On the other hand, parking for beehives cannot be organized near motorways with good coverage either: truly high-quality honey can only be obtained on ecologically clean plantations.

Correct setting of beehives

During a nomad, it is very important to be guided by several fundamental rules:

1. The distance between the parking lot and the nearest plantation on which melliferous plants grow should be minimal, but in any case can not be longer than 2 km.
2. On the way to the honey plant or in the immediate vicinity of the hive, there must be a source of water - a stream, lake or other body of water.
3. Before parking, you should make sure that other apiaries (nomadic or stationary) are located nearby and, if any, move away at least 3 km from the nearest “competitor”.
4. Regardless of whether the hives are removed from the platform or remain inside it, they must be placed in the shade and in a place protected from the wind.
5. If you intend to remove the beehives from the vehicle, you should make sure in advance that it is easy to drive to the place of their placement not only for unloading, but also for subsequent loading of the module onto the platform (for this it is important to make sure that there is no risk that after some time the driveway will be closed or blocked).

Did you know? In search of food, a bee is able to make a path of 8 km and then unmistakably find the way to the house, moving at a speed of about 0.5 km per minute.

Good spatial orientation and endurance of insects should not deceive the beekeeper. Firstly, after a long journey, the insect is completely exhausted, and its subsequent productivity is sharply reduced. Secondly, over long distances, bees can fly only in a well-known area, thoroughly studied by each of them “from youth” (the first flight of a young bee is always familiarization, made with the aim of “reconnaissance”). For a nomad apiary, it is crucial that the honey bees are in close proximity to the hive.

Reasons for Beekeepers to Create Mobile Homes

The main reason for creating nomadic apiaries is, of course, extending the period of honey collection and providing the bees with complete food, which on an ongoing basis is far from always within the reach of the insect when it is stationary (this distance is traditionally calculated as an area within a radius of 3 km from the hive) .

Sometimes, however, the transportation of bees from place to place is also determined by forced circumstances, such as, for example:

• the disagreement of the neighbors in the site on the proximity of the apiary, which can lead to serious conflicts;
• the presence of an allergy to bee venom in one of the members of the family that makes contact with bees truly dangerous;
• too high competition between beekeepers within the same site;
• the massive use of pesticides and other hazardous chemicals in fields or objects located within the hunting radius of bees, which not only negatively affects the quality of honey, but can also lead to the complete death of the family.

Did you know? Nomadic beekeeping was practiced in ancient Egypt. True, rafts were used as transport at that time, and the country's main waterway, the Nile River, served as a road.

Advantages and disadvantages of such hives

Everything that has already been said about mobile apiaries allows us to highlight both the advantages and disadvantages of such nomadic beekeeping.

• In particular, the undoubted advantages of the method include:
• very high rates of honey collection, including due to a significant increase in the period of active work of bees (compared with a stationary apiary, productivity can be ten times higher);
• the possibility of obtaining honey of different varieties, which also makes the business more efficient;
• a significant improvement in the strength of bee colonies, an increase in their fertility (honey made from pollen from the same plants is less nutritious for insects than mixed and multiflore);
• the absence of a direct dependence on weather conditions that impede honey collection from a particular honey plant in a specific period of time (the working area for bees can always be changed);
• the ability to influence the purity (monoflore or multiflore) and the quality (environmental friendliness) of the final product, correctly selecting honey plants in the process of moving.

Modules for mobile apiaries are easy to manufacture and maintain, stable, durable and compact.

• As for the downsides of nomadic stewardship, they are also obvious:
• incomparably higher production costs (the movement of bees after flowering honey plants requires a huge amount of time, effort and financial investment, while visiting hives on short visits once a week, as happens in stationary beekeeping, in this case it will not work);
• lack of comfortable conditions for the person accompanying the module (need to sleep in a car or in a tent, eat dry food, etc.);
• the need to draw up additional documents necessary for carrying out the transport of live cargo (the list of such documents and the severity of requirements depends on the country)
• stricter requirements for the strength and stability of hives, the risk of damage to the structure and injury to its inhabitants during transportation;
• difficulty in choosing parking places (private property, competing apiaries, protected areas, lack of access to a suitable site, etc.);
• the need for much deeper knowledge regarding the construction of hives (if necessary, urgent repair in the field), geolocation, plants suitable for collecting nectar and their flowering time, as well as other issues requiring instant response on the spot;
• the danger of losing part of the working individuals who were unable to navigate in an unfamiliar area and who died in search of a way home;
• the need to take measures to protect modules located in an open area;
• increased risk of poisoning bees and their honey produced by pesticides used in field cultivation (constantly moving, the beekeeper often does not have the opportunity to obtain reliable and relevant information about such events);
• wandering bees and mixing families - is typical for any modular hive, but when wandering is especially pronounced.

Important! In mobile apiaries, there are almost never weak families - all individuals are active, full-fledged and equally strong.

How to make a do-it-yourself apiary with your own hands?

Of course, a multi-case nomad module, having spent a small amount of time, can be purchased ready-made and then simply installed on any platform with a sliding row. However, a factory mobile apiary is expensive and does not always fit the transport available to the beekeeper.

On the other hand, using not so much effort and ingenuity, it is quite possible to make such a design with your own hands, making it optimal in terms of size, weight and other important parameters. The first and most important thing that you need to determine for yourself before starting work is the way to transport the future apiary.If you do not seriously consider the prospects of transporting bees by horses on makeshift carts, as they did in the old days, it is easiest to use a regular trailer, a car or even a tractor (for example, 2 PTS4) for this purpose. Practice shows that in this way, with the help of a passenger car, it is quite comfortable to transport hives and modules designed for one and a half dozen bee colonies and even more.

If the trailer is onboard, then the sides are sometimes removed for convenience, and on the platform, two guide rails are screwed to the wooden floor with the help of the sides. Having decided on the platform, you can begin to manufacture the module itself.

Did you know? Horse sweat acts on bees as an annoying factor, therefore, embittered insects released from a hive loaded with a filly will certainly attack an innocent animal and sting it violently. Our ancestors knew this feature well and always took the horse away before releasing the bees transported on it.

Given that the design should be mobile, the main criterion when choosing the main material for its production should be light weight. From this point of view, the best option is polystyrene foam. It is also not difficult to work with it, so many beekeepers prefer this particular option.

Tools and materials

To make a mobile module you will need:

• sheets of extruded white polystyrene foam (EPS) with a thickness of at least 30 mm (unlike conventional sheets, thanks to closed cells it is much stronger, absorbs moisture less, and, most importantly, has lower thermal conductivity, which will provide additional protection for bees from both winter cold and and from summer heat, which is especially dangerous during transportation);
• fiberboard (plywood) sheets or plywood;
• metal corners 45 × 45 mm;
• wooden beam 60 × 70 mm;
• galvanized iron or other weighting material for the manufacture of pallets;
• liquid nails or glue;
• self-tapping screws;
• front acrylic paint of different colors.

The tool kit includes only:

• sharp knife;
• roulette or regular ruler;
• level;
• a pencil or felt-tip pen for marking;
• sandpaper for processing the edges of polystyrene foam.

Important! The maximum weight of one polystyrene beehive is about 1.5 kg, and a dozen frames are easily placed in such a house. On a trailer to a car, you can install up to 30 full-fledged beehives.

Blueprints

The overall design of a mobile apiary may look something like this:

As can be seen from the figure, the beekeeper can place his workplace in the center (option “c”) or in front of the platform (option “a”). The top view (Figure “b”) shows the sequence of placement of the remaining parts of the apiary (from right to left): honey extractor, cutting table, seat, cabinet for storing tools and spare frames, modules with beehives, located in one or two tiers.

The hive itself can be made by following this drawing:

Apiary assembly

The sequence of steps in the manufacture of a hive for a nomad apiary:

1. Mark the necessary parts on the sheets of expanded polystyrene and fiberboard, not forgetting to leave tolerances for the seams on each side (minimum 5 mm).
2. Use a sharp knife to cut the workpiece.
3. Lapping blanks from fiberboard and expanded polystyrene.
4. Using sandpaper pasted on a sheet of plywood, sand the walls of the hive.
5. To make a frame of wooden beams with a width of 11 mm and a depth of 20 mm, install it on the back wall of the hive as folds (bezfaltsevy hives are not suitable for nomadic use).
6. Glue or fasten all the details of the house with liquid nails.
7. After waiting for the glue to dry, make a support for the frames from narrow strips of plywood.
8. Paint the exterior walls of the hive with acrylic facade paint.
9. From galvanized iron, make a pallet of the required size and install a beehive in it to shift the center of gravity to the lower part (this precaution will protect the module from overturning during transportation).

Important! Bees transported with open summer air stings are much less likely to sting than is the case when the exits from the hives are closed during transport.

How to load a beehive onto a trailer?

In order for the module from the hives to be transported, some preparatory work must be carried out with the trailer.

It is done like this:

1. Make a frame from wooden boards and install it on the platform (if the trailer is not onboard, but in the form of a booth, this design is not needed).
2. Using sheets of fiberboard or plywood, as well as metal corners and screws, attach shelves inside the frame to accommodate hives (in one or two tiers).
3. Using careful marking, cut openings in the walls or sides of the trailer that match the hive flats that will be placed on the platform.
4. In the center between the racks, a clear space should be provided for the passage.
5. Place the hives on shelves and securely fasten them so that the structure does not crumble during movement.

How to arrange hives

Hives should always be placed at the same distance from each other. The preferred option is the design of the module in one tier. Two-story structures are used by beekeepers forcibly, in order to save space, but higher piles are definitely unacceptable. The problem is that in nature, bees live in individual nests located separately from each other, and not in multi-housing pavilions.

Therefore, possessing the ability to easily navigate in space and find the way to the "house", the bee very often gets lost, seeing in front of itself a lot of identical identical looking birds and, arbitrarily choosing any of them, most likely falls into a strange family (in an ordinary apiary such a situation almost never arises, but for a modular, especially mobile, option, it is very characteristic).

Mixing families like this is considered a rather big problem for many reasons. So, after returning the bees with a bribe, the hives are filled unevenly - insects are piled up in the extreme ones, the central ones remain empty (this phenomenon is especially typical for adverse weather conditions, when insects driven by rain and wind hastily fly into the nearest nest on their way).

In addition, when conducting breeding work, experienced beekeepers always try to combine strong families with strong ones, and weak and weak ones, so in each family the condition of its members should always be approximately equal, while when mixing families this rule is violated. Finally, a bee doesn’t fly into its family regularly leads to the fact that the “uninvited guest” is faced with opposition from watchdog bees that do not let in an alien with an unfamiliar smell.As a result, a bee overwhelmed with a bribe sets up a fight, sometimes ending even with the death of one of the participants, but even without such serious losses, adversely affecting the overall performance of honey production. But if the uterus is mistaken, the consequences are even more deplorable: a certain death awaits the stray, and her orphaned family is also likely to die.

In a certain sense, hives can be prevented from painting in different colors, which is what beekeepers usually do, but still the best way to save families is to arrange houses so that they are strictly parallel to flower plantations, and not perpendicular and not upright.

Tips from experienced beekeepers

In order for a mobile apiary to become a truly profitable enterprise and justify all the inconveniences associated with its maintenance, experienced beekeepers recommend that you follow these rules:

1. You need to travel to a new place in such a way that the bees can fly to the "hunt" in the morning, as early as possible.
2. It is desirable that the road passes at night, in the evening or in the morning, in any case, it is necessary to exclude movement under the scorching sun, this can lead to significant weakening and even death of bees.
3. Before you start moving, you always need to very carefully check the reliability of the hives to the platform.
4. If possible, especially in cases where the movement is on country or poor-quality roads, it is advisable to pump honey from the hives before transporting, otherwise the risk of damage to honeycombs increases. If this is not possible, cushions, branches or other softening pads should be placed under the hives for additional cushioning.
5. Preferably, during transportation, the bees remain hungry, this prevents the occurrence of diarrhea and clogging the hives with excrement.
6. The distance between the parking lots should always be large enough so that after departure for the “hunt”, the bees do not return to the former location of the hive (for insurance, it is advisable to drive off at least 10 km). On the other hand, traveling too long and abruptly changing the environment can cause the family so much stress that honey production will cease altogether.
7. Oddly enough, it is better to transport bees with open air ducts, so they experience less stress and, in addition, ventilation is provided in the hive.
8. Under no circumstances should summers be kept closed during stops or parking.

Nomadic beekeeping is a very troublesome and expensive business, but nevertheless, only in this way can high honey production rates be achieved. It is possible to make a mobile apiary without much effort using your own hands, using light and inexpensive materials, after which, having at your disposal a regular passenger car with a trailer, the apiary will be able to move the hives to the places of active flowering of honey plants and thus significantly increase the period of active honey collection, and the quality of the final product.