Autumn Update

Since our last update we have been:

• 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 have experienced a pretty good summer nectar flow which meant our bees made a reasonable amount of honey. 2020 has been a mixed year for beekeepers in the UK: some beekeepers have reported very low honey production and yet others have reported fair returns. So we consider ourselves quite lucky that our bees have been able to produce a crop for us about the same size as last year.

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.

 

Late season inspection video

Last week we filmed a short video of the inspection of one of our hives.

It’s not a full inspection so is fairly short (8 mins). We just wanted to check if the honey was coming in and also that the queen was OK and laying.

 

The blue dotted super frame

Two weeks ago we added some new empty super frames to the hives, and we decided to mark one of them so we could see how quickly it got “drawn” (honeycomb cells built) and filled with honey.

Last week there was not much change, but this week there was a significant change: the frame is now “drawn” and half full of nectar, as you can see from the photos below.

We think the Himalayan balsam nectar is now in full flow and the bees are making the most of it before the end of the honey season. We inspected all six hives today and not only were they all in good health, but the bees were also in a very good mood. No stinging, no aggression. They clearly like this weather.

 

Summer Pollen

This is a glorious photo of all the different colours of pollen coming into our hives at the moment.

I hunted around Google to find an identification chart, which allowed me to make the following guesses, given where we live and the time of year. (Note this is only a guess!)

Cream - Himalayan balsam

Blue Green - Rosebay Willow Herb

Pale Green - Meadowsweet

Orange - Buttercup

Yellow - Elder, dogwood, privet

Black - Poppy

C Programmers' Hive

Hive 3 has been a problem for us all season. If you look back at this post https://cpbees.blogspot.com/2020/05/apiary-update-spring-2020.html you'll see that early in the season we had a lot of problems with the queen disappearing, and then laying eggs in the super (which is supposed to be just honey). It took a lot of effort to sort out, and we never properly got on top of it.

 

Since then the hive had been hugely tricky to manage. As soon as the hive was opened they would be up in the air and flying around us. And they could be pretty grumpy. It wasn't helped by the fact that there were just masses and masses of bees. It was a huge hive and just too hard for us to manage every week. So something had to be done.

 

A recap

Back at the end of April we "split" hives 1 and 4 (again, refer back to the post above). This was to prevent swarming in those hives. This left us with two small "nucleus" colonies which housed the originals queens from hive 1 and 4. You can see these on the left of the photo below.

 

So what we decided to do in attempt to settle hive 3 was fairly drastic. We removed and destroyed the queen in hive 3 (she was the one who's genetics were producing grumpy bees). We then separated the brood boxes (and therefore all the frames and bees) and "united" each with the two nucleus colonies, so each was headed by the original queens from hives 1 and 4.

 

The overall result is that we have gone from four full size hives (one of which, hive 3, was huge) and two nucleus colonies, to five sensible sized hives and no nucs. The new hive was positioned to the left of hive 1, which gave us a slight issue with nomenclature. The C programmers amongst you will be pleased to know that we settled on "hive 0", so our hive naming has become zero-based. :-)

We inspected them again yesterday, and we were very pleased to see that both hives have united fine. And they seemed to have settled down too. Having said that, generally our bees were in a good mood yesterday. This is probably because the weather is lovely and there is plenty of nectar flowing. So hopefully we've got lots of honey coming in.

Collecting a swarm

I've only been beekeeping for two years and never properly seen a swarm, let alone collected one. But like many beekeepers I've watched a lot of YouTube videos so I was pretty familiar with the process.

My neighbour had had a feral colony in a hole in the large oak tree in his garden for a number of months and we'd been looking at it and discussing it throughout March. It was getting quite active. He asked me whether I thought it could swarm. I said that I thought it was possible but I didn't really know how likely it was.

Then one day in the middle of April my son called me into the garden because my neighbour’s garden was absolutely full of bees. The air was black with bees flying all over the place. I'd never seen anything like it. We watched them for maybe ten minutes and gradually the number of bees in the air decreased. We could see that they were gathering on a tree in the adjoining garden. After about twenty minutes there were no bees in the air and the swarm had completely gathered onto a branch in the tree. 

So I had to bluff a bit to my neighbour and give the impression that I was an expert on collecting swarms! My son and I got our bee suits on and headed into the neighbour’s garden to assess the situation.

We had to do quite a lot of pruning around the tree to remove brambles. After about twenty minutes we had good access to the tree and I was able to hold the box underneath the swarm whilst my son gave the tree a sharp shake. I'm pleased to say that it all worked exactly as I'd seen in the YouTube videos and the bees dropped into the box. I was able to put it on the grass on a sheet and wait for the rest of the bees to join the swarm. 

I was amazed how good natured the bees were. There were a hell of a lot of bees flying around us when we collected it but there was absolutely no aggression. To be honest they weren't bothered about us at all and they were just interested in having a great time together. 

We left it for about four hours and when we came back to it all the bees were in the box and there were no bees on the tree or in the air. Thank you YouTube! 

Later in the evening we carried the box round into our garden and shook the bees into a poly nucleus box and gave them 6 frames of foundation and some food. Since then they have been moved into a full size hive and are developing into a nice strong and good natured colony.

Here are some photos of the collection day.

Apiary update - Spring 2020

Whilst the human world is in lockdown, the bee world has been very busy taking advantage of a warm and dry spring. This post is to bring you up to date with the activities of our apiary.

March – winter survival checks

Back in March we did some very short inspections to confirm how the bees had fared over the winter. We were very pleased to find that all five colonies had survived the winter OK.

You might think this unsurprising, given the mild winter we had. But in fact colonies can often die as a result of mild and damp winters. They have more tendency to go out flying during mild winters, which of course is a waste of energy as there is unlikely to be any food available.

But despite the winter all our colonies survived OK and given the warm spring they got started with early foraging in mid March.

April – starting inspections

Because of the warm spring we needed to get started with inspections at the start of April – just as the world plunged into the weirdness that we have now become used to. I was initially concerned about how we would maintain social distancing, but fortunately my son Matt is a trained beekeeper so we were able to undertake the inspections together. I was even provided with a key worker letter in case our travel was questioned by police. Travel to tend livestock is permissible.

Drone Laying Queen

All was not entirely well within the hives however. The first issue we encountered was a drone laying queen in hive 2. This is not uncommon after winter. The queen starts to lay again in spring, but she has run out of stored semen from when she mated as a young queen. Without the ability to fertilise her eggs, all offspring end up male and the colony is doomed.

The solution is to replace the queen as quickly as possible. One of our colonies was a strong but small colony in a nucleus box (the small one on the left). So the old queen was removed and the colony united (combined) with the nucleus colony. This worked well and they are now a strong colony with a good queen.

Hunt the queen

Our next challenge was hive 3. For two or three inspections we were unable to find the queen. There was no sign of brood in the brood boxes either. Very bad news. To confirm that the colony has no queen, you “lend” the colony a frame of eggs from another colony. If the colony has no queen they will quickly build queen cells from the eggs to allow them to make a replacement queen. This they did NOT do. Weird.

We only discovered two weeks ago that the queen was there alright. But she had somehow found her way into the “supers” above. These are supposed to be for honey storage, but because the queen was in there she laid eggs in there and they ended up full of brood! What a mess.

The solution was to shake all the bees off every super frame into the lower brood box, and hope that included the queen.

Luckily that worked fine, and the following week we found that she was now in the brood boxes and laying eggs fine. Now we just have to wait for all the brood in the supers to emerge and we can tidy up things and get them back to normal.

Swarm prevention

It is inevitable that in this lovely warm spring the bees will be making preparations to swarm. So far we have spotted the signs of swarm preparations in hives 1 and 4. So both of these hives have been “split” – a process where you take the queen and some frames of brood and stores into a new box. This makes her think that she has swarmed and crucially makes the original colony think she has gone so they stop their swarm preparations. The other side-effect is that you end up with more colonies. This is a double-edged sword, because it means more time doing inspections and requires more equipment.

Through June

So that is where we are at the end of May. June is still a prime month for swarming, so we’ll be watching carefully for that. And also hoping that there has been a good enough nectar flow to bring in at least some honey.

Bee bombs - wildflower seeds

Last week I planted my “bee bombs” in the planters by our hives. Bee bombs are native wildflower seedballs. You just scatter them on open ground. We chose to plant them in the planters by the bees to give them some food right next to the hives.

At last we are having a bit of good weather! The bees from at least two of our hives were out today, very active. There won’t be any nectar at this time of year, but plenty of pollen, for example on the hazel trees in the car park.

Cleaning old hives

We were kindly given an unused hive recently, which will be very useful as a spare when the new beekeeping season starts in April. (Why? Check out this post about “hive splits”: https://cpbees.blogspot.com/2019/04/hive-splits_26.html)

To reduce this risk of passing a disease to our bees, the hive boxes needed to be cleaned thoroughly. This process involves scraping all the wax and propolis (“bee glue”) from the hives boxes, and then scorching the insides with a blowtorch. This should kill any pathogens and allow our bees to live in the boxes safely.

Here are a few photos of the process. We plan to give them a lick of paint too, to make them match the rest of the hives in our apiary.

Weeds and leaves

Ste and I had a good clear up around the hives today. It’s much easier to do on a cold dry day when there are no bees flying about.

It’s a lot tidier looking now, but I also wanted to ensure there were no weeds growing under the hives. Sometimes it is important to be able to see what is dropping out of the bottom of a hive – it can give clues as to what is going on inside.

We spotted that catkins are already out. These will provide a bit of pollen for the bees in the next few weeks, which is good. I think these are hazel. http://beespoke.info/2013/12/26/bee-trees-hazel/