We had a successful inspection today. I caught this very short video of a frame of drone brood. It's rather cute with all the new drones emerging from their cells. I've never seen so many all emerging in the same area at the same time.
Saturday, 22 May 2021
Friday, 7 May 2021
More swarm control
We had a good inspection again this week and performed a number of manipulations to our hives, mainly to continue our work to reduce the chance of swarming.
Watch the video below (under 5 minutes), where you can find out about swarm control, different types of brood, drones and how bees carry pollen.
Watch the video below (under 5 minutes), where you can find out about swarm control, different types of brood, drones and how bees carry pollen.
Queen with her workers
We caught this lovely photo of one of our queens. Notice how all the workers around her are facing towards her to attend to her every need.
She has a blue mark on her head (a bit worn off now), which tells us that she was born in 2020.
Thursday, 22 April 2021
First split of 2021
We did our second inspection of 2021 this morning, and already some of the bees are preparing for swarming. Hive 1 had two queen cells, one sealed and the other still open.
You can see the sealed one in the photo below.
Hive reproduction
Swarming is the bees' way of creating more colonies. The queen and half of the bees leave the hive and go to find a new home. Meanwhile the original hive nurtures a new queen from one of the queen cells left behind before the original queen left.
It's hard to discourage bees from swarming once they get it into their heads. You can squash any queen cells you find (but you'd better find ALL of them!). You can give the bees more space. Sometimes this works.
But once they start making queen cells it is usually best to do for them artificially what they want to do in nature, ie split the colony into two.
Nucleus method
There are a number of methods of splitting hives that have been developed by beekeepers over the years. Some are highly complex. Some require you to return every few days for a couple of weeks.
The simplest method (and the one I can get my head around) is the "nucleus method". A nucleus is a small colony (usually of 3-6 frames). All this method involves is taking the original queen out of the hive and putting her in a nucleus box, along with two frames of brood, a frame of stores and plenty of nurse bees from the original colony.
This is doing a kind of swarm, artificially, before the bees do it themselves and end up in a tree. The queen leaves the hive with half of the bees. The remaining hive detects that she has gone and raises a new queen. It's simple. It has its limitations, but last year it worked well for us. So I expect that is what we'll be doing again this year to a number of our hives.
Of course this does mean you can potentially double your number of hives. If this is an issue (and it probably will be for us - we do not have unlimited space or time!) you can "unite" the two colonies back again after the swarming season is over, keeping just one of the queens (probably the younger one).
You can see the sealed one in the photo below.
Hive reproduction
Swarming is the bees' way of creating more colonies. The queen and half of the bees leave the hive and go to find a new home. Meanwhile the original hive nurtures a new queen from one of the queen cells left behind before the original queen left.
It's hard to discourage bees from swarming once they get it into their heads. You can squash any queen cells you find (but you'd better find ALL of them!). You can give the bees more space. Sometimes this works.
But once they start making queen cells it is usually best to do for them artificially what they want to do in nature, ie split the colony into two.
Nucleus method
There are a number of methods of splitting hives that have been developed by beekeepers over the years. Some are highly complex. Some require you to return every few days for a couple of weeks.
The simplest method (and the one I can get my head around) is the "nucleus method". A nucleus is a small colony (usually of 3-6 frames). All this method involves is taking the original queen out of the hive and putting her in a nucleus box, along with two frames of brood, a frame of stores and plenty of nurse bees from the original colony.
This is doing a kind of swarm, artificially, before the bees do it themselves and end up in a tree. The queen leaves the hive with half of the bees. The remaining hive detects that she has gone and raises a new queen. It's simple. It has its limitations, but last year it worked well for us. So I expect that is what we'll be doing again this year to a number of our hives.
Of course this does mean you can potentially double your number of hives. If this is an issue (and it probably will be for us - we do not have unlimited space or time!) you can "unite" the two colonies back again after the swarming season is over, keeping just one of the queens (probably the younger one).
Wednesday, 21 April 2021
First inspection of 2021
We visited the apiary last week to say hello to the bees for the first time in 2021.
We're delighted to report fantastic news: all five hives are alive, growing and have a healthy laying queen.
This is brilliant news. March is a dangerous time for honeybees, because if it is cold and spring starts late then they can run out of food and starve. It's rather sad to think that they get most of the way through the winter and then run out of food just at the end. But of course that's when it is going to run out isn't it? You don't run out of petrol just after you left home.
Alive and healthy
But in the case of our hives all of them are alive and building up. We found eggs and brood in all five, and we even saw the queen in hives 1 and 3.
Moving supers over
During winter we put the "supers" (which are the smaller boxes that bees store honey in) underneath the bigger brood box. This lifts up the brood nest which is where bees generally like to be in winter.
Once spring arrives we turn it all around again, and move the supers on top of the brood boxes. We also put a queen excluder between the two so that the queen stays in the lower brood box and the supers above are just used for honey storage.
So we did all that last week. Unfortunately in three of our colonies we did not see the queen, so we cannot be absolutely sure that she is in the lower box. This means we'll have to be super-attentive in future inspections to make sure she is where we want her to be.
What's next?
This is an important time of year for bees. They are building up in numbers and of course they are also thinking about reproduction. Honey bee colonies reproduce by swarming, which is when half of the bees, plus the queen, leave the hive and go and find a new home. For the beekeeper this is bad news because they lose half of their bees! It really sets a colony back, so we do as much as we can to discourage it. So in future inspections we'll be looking for signs of swarming and taking steps to (hopefully) prevent it. It doesn't always work of course - the bees' desire to reproduce is pretty strong! More on that in future posts.
We're delighted to report fantastic news: all five hives are alive, growing and have a healthy laying queen.
This is brilliant news. March is a dangerous time for honeybees, because if it is cold and spring starts late then they can run out of food and starve. It's rather sad to think that they get most of the way through the winter and then run out of food just at the end. But of course that's when it is going to run out isn't it? You don't run out of petrol just after you left home.
Alive and healthy
But in the case of our hives all of them are alive and building up. We found eggs and brood in all five, and we even saw the queen in hives 1 and 3.
Moving supers over
During winter we put the "supers" (which are the smaller boxes that bees store honey in) underneath the bigger brood box. This lifts up the brood nest which is where bees generally like to be in winter.
Once spring arrives we turn it all around again, and move the supers on top of the brood boxes. We also put a queen excluder between the two so that the queen stays in the lower brood box and the supers above are just used for honey storage.
So we did all that last week. Unfortunately in three of our colonies we did not see the queen, so we cannot be absolutely sure that she is in the lower box. This means we'll have to be super-attentive in future inspections to make sure she is where we want her to be.
What's next?
This is an important time of year for bees. They are building up in numbers and of course they are also thinking about reproduction. Honey bee colonies reproduce by swarming, which is when half of the bees, plus the queen, leave the hive and go and find a new home. For the beekeeper this is bad news because they lose half of their bees! It really sets a colony back, so we do as much as we can to discourage it. So in future inspections we'll be looking for signs of swarming and taking steps to (hopefully) prevent it. It doesn't always work of course - the bees' desire to reproduce is pretty strong! More on that in future posts.
Friday, 26 February 2021
Early season apiary tidy up
Our apiary always needs a bit of a tidy up after winter. It gets a lot of leaves behind the hives and weeds growing under them.
So yesterday we cleared all the leaves up and pruned back a lot of the foliage at the edge of the site.
We also checked the hives to see that they were all still alive. We’re pleased to say that all five hives are alive and four of them were actively flying because it was a nice day (for February!).
We’ve made sure each hive still has some food, just in case the weather turns bad again. The end of winter is a common time for hives to die from starvation, because obviously that is when the food stores run out!
We won’t start opening the hives and performing inspections until mid March at the earliest. We’ll be looking for a nice warm spring day so we can check that the queen is OK and laying well. After that, in April, the beekeeping season will start in earnest.
Here are the “before” and “after” photos.
Before
After
Thursday, 7 January 2021
Winter varroa treatment
We don’t open the hives between October and March. It’s too cold during that time and the bees are huddled together in a cluster to share warmth and wait for spring, a bit like penguins in Antarctica. There is however one exception, and that is to give the bees their winter medicine to kill varroa mites.
Why do we open the bees during a freezing cold day in winter? Why can’t they have the medicine in summer? Well the varroa mites’ favourite place to live is inside sealed brood cells, feeding off the developing bee larvae. If we apply the medicine when there is a lot of brood, most of the mites will avoid it by being sealed away. So we aim for a time when there is little or no brood in the hive. This is generally around Christmas.
So on Wednesday we headed to the apiary on a very cold, but glorious morning. The medicine is mixed with sugar syrup and trickled onto the bees with a syringe. With two of you, we can lift the lid, trickle the syrup and have the lid down again in about 20 seconds. We also took the opportunity to give the bees a couple of kilos of fondant sugar (exactly the same stuff that is used to ice cakes). This should hopefully keep them going during the cold months until the first flowers come out in spring.
I was pleased to see that five out of six of our hives had a living cluster of bees right under the crown board. I’m not sure about the sixth one. They may be OK. I did see a few bees come up when we lifted the lid, so the cluster may just have been further down, out of sight.
So now the bees are closed up again and we won’t visit them again until March. Partly because of the winter, and partly because of the pandemic lockdown. Keep safe everyone.
Thursday, 1 October 2020
Autumn Update
Since our last update we have been:
We removed the honey from the hives and extracted it at the very end of August. We took off 56 frames, which made 167 jars of honey. This compares to 162 jars last year. Everyone that has tasted the honey has said how good it is. It has a rich flavour, is not too sweet, and has a pleasant spicy aftertaste.
As soon as the honey was taken off we put treatment into all our hives to reduce the numbers of varroa mites. These parasites can greatly reduce the strength of a colony, and are considered to be a major contributor to winter colony losses. Our hives had reasonably low levels of varroa, but it is recommended to treat anyway to be sure the bees go into winter as strong as possible.
To prepare the bees for winter we have been making sure they have enough stored food. We left quite a lot of honey on the hives this year and only extracted the surplus. But to be doubly sure we have also been feeding the hives with sugar syrup to ensure they have as much as possible going into winter. Starvation is another major reason for winter losses.
Finally, we’ve been very pleased to have the help of our trainee beekeeper throughout this season. She responded to our request for someone interested in training as a new beekeeper. She started in June and has helped with every inspection since then. She now has her own beesuit and has developed from a novice to a very confident beekeeper. Beekeeping is a tricky thing to get into because you really need to work with other beekeepers to “learn by doing”. She’s managed to do that extremely well, and we hope she has enjoyed being involved and everything she has learnt
We currently have six hives at our apiary. We will do one final inspection before winter, in three weeks time. After that the bees will be in bed until spring.
- Looking after the bees through the summer nectar flow
- Extracting honey
- Treating for varroa mites
- Preparing the bees for winter
- Training our new beekeeper
We removed the honey from the hives and extracted it at the very end of August. We took off 56 frames, which made 167 jars of honey. This compares to 162 jars last year. Everyone that has tasted the honey has said how good it is. It has a rich flavour, is not too sweet, and has a pleasant spicy aftertaste.
As soon as the honey was taken off we put treatment into all our hives to reduce the numbers of varroa mites. These parasites can greatly reduce the strength of a colony, and are considered to be a major contributor to winter colony losses. Our hives had reasonably low levels of varroa, but it is recommended to treat anyway to be sure the bees go into winter as strong as possible.
To prepare the bees for winter we have been making sure they have enough stored food. We left quite a lot of honey on the hives this year and only extracted the surplus. But to be doubly sure we have also been feeding the hives with sugar syrup to ensure they have as much as possible going into winter. Starvation is another major reason for winter losses.
Finally, we’ve been very pleased to have the help of our trainee beekeeper throughout this season. She responded to our request for someone interested in training as a new beekeeper. She started in June and has helped with every inspection since then. She now has her own beesuit and has developed from a novice to a very confident beekeeper. Beekeeping is a tricky thing to get into because you really need to work with other beekeepers to “learn by doing”. She’s managed to do that extremely well, and we hope she has enjoyed being involved and everything she has learnt
We currently have six hives at our apiary. We will do one final inspection before winter, in three weeks time. After that the bees will be in bed until spring.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)