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Tag: honeybees

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All the healthy hives were autumn-fed with a 50:50 mix of Apikel and waste honey from extracting. Hive 3 turned its nose up at the bulk of it and stopped taking it down when it was only partially used. Life was too short to try and work out the reason so I just went by the adage that the bees always know best. I cleared their feeder of bees and moved it to hive 8 who had gratefully received their initial sustenance.

Hives 10 & 11 had both sac brood and bald brood. There is no cure for these other than trying requeening so they were moved away from the apiary and given no winter-feed. They were now small colonies so were left for nature to take its course.

On November 1st all hives received an oxalic acid sublimation and the varroa drop trays were left in place. There was still a not insignificant varroa drop so all hives 1 to 8 were given an oxalic dribble treatment at the start of December.

Hive 10 soon succumbed to the winter weather so that was removed from the apiary, cleaned out and then give the 7 day acetic acid disinfection treatment. Hive 11 however, built up to such an extent that they were across 8 frames when they were given an oxalic acid dribble treatment. All that without getting any extra winter feed.

The huge wild plum is on flower again and the aroma and the sound of bees all over it is simply witness to the amazing creation which we all share.

A lure hive has been set up in the spinney again. I caught nothing last year but this year may be different and provide a colony for an apprentice.

Asian hornet is here; no two ways about it. Over 70 nests were found in Kent last year so this year they will cross the Thames. I have started my precautions by making the first of many mouselieres.

Next will be some Jabeprode traps and then maybe some harpes-electronique. Let’s wait and see.

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Most people only think of garden flowers or fields of rape as honey and pollen yielders but many trees have hidden talents.

Whilst we are familiar with stone-fruit and pip-fruit blossom the other forest trees have more unseen flowers. Chestnut and hawthorn are two glorious show-offs but have you ever noticed the beautiful racemes of the sycamore? What about the flower-heads of field maple or ivy? If you do an internet search for these two you’ll get all sorts of sites as suggestions which will tell you the height, the spread, the leaf shape, leaf colour and so on, but the poor flower doesn’t get a mention.

The bees know them though and the sycamore and field-maple are worked so avidly that it can tempt them away from the oil seed rape. In fact 10% of my clear spring honey in 2020 was from the field-maple. Maple is a lovely sweet honey but sycamore has a strong nutty flavour which might not be to everyone’s taste, but to others it’s a distinctive difference.

By mid June 2023 I had done four extracting sessions and everything was looking very encouraging. The harvest so far was exceeding 2022. At this point it all went pear-shaped.

I thought the dearth of the June gap was not going to occur as field-bean continued flowering. However by the middle of the month there was no nectar coming in. What they had collected was ripened and capped and supers only half full were abandoned in favour of just collecting pollen. Cold late-autumnal weather has brood nests visually shrinking and winter preparations underway. There is no excited chasing after a lovely summer ‘flow’ and the poor bees just seem to be passing the time of day drifting around.

Two hives taken over to Debden Green were initially given an extra two empty supers for all this lovely borage honey on the doorstep. Five days later these had to be removed because the weather was too cold for them to cope with such a large empty space to heat. The inclement weather has continued throughout the month so these two hives will probably come home having achieved nothing.

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On the 11th of April Aimie and Sophie came for their first ‘in the apiary’ training session. Continued cold weather precluded opening any of the hives so it had to be a dry run

By the latter half of the month, all hives had been spring cleaned; clean floor, brood-box and crown board. None of the 2022 queens had been clipped as I am loathe to do this at the end of the season. Better to wait until the spring. A smaller colony means that she is easier to find and she is less likely to be rejected when they need all the fresh brood they can get.

20th April. Madeleine, apprentice of the year 2022, telephoned to say that her hive had swarmed. I’ve never known it to happen so early. Instant action was taken and all hives given a 1st super to relieve any pressure whether they had been spring cleaned or not. Three of the hives were supered too late as a later inspection revealed swarm queen cells.

Having watched a very informative zoom talk by Wally Shaw of the Welsh Beekeepers Association I downloaded his brochure from the WBKA web site and decided to follow his Snelgrove II method of artificial swarming. No extra equipment needed other than a spare hive and not even any need to hunt for a queen. (There is always the added advantage that you can requeen with queen cell raised from a more suitable colony.) One colony has undergone tis process successfully and a second will be completed next week.

Nectar and pollen is being foraged enthusiastically from both the oil seed rape and the sycamore. The loud humming coming from the sycamore trees is a sound to be heard.

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Work continues in both the apiary and the workshop.

We’ve had no long cold spell again this winter. Maybe climate change means they are a thing of the past?

Never-the-less oxalic acid treatment had to be done, brood or no brood. Total drop varied from 570 down to 70 which I didn’t think was too bad. There was still a small natural drop the following week so I’ve followed up with an Apivar treatment.

Weeks of dull cloudy and cold weather has kept the bees confined to hive but a morning sunshine early in the month brought them out. It wasn’t just cleansing flights either. The aroma of the winter honeysuckle was hanging like a cloud around the shrub and the girls were foraging madly. I have at long last succeeded in getting some winter aconite to grow in the damson copse and their gloriously yellow blooms were a real magnet. No aconite in the spinney yet which is a real disappointment

Honeybees working the aconite

The Dartington Long-hive continues (unapace) to grow steadily. I have tried to do a little each day through the winter. The brood box is now finished, the roof is assembled and it is all ready for proofing. Honeyboxes and insulated dummy-boards can be gradually completed throughout the spring. The former are of course not vital as I can always use conventional supers if necessary.

The honey DNA testing results have come back from the CEH (Centre for Ecology and Hydrology). Some results were as expected but there were some surprises as well. The three varieties of open-pollenated rape were the main leaders in the spring and they showed up quite distinctly. The surprise was a noticeable content of sycamore. The spinney, which is only a third of an acre, consists of sycamore and elm 50:50 about twenty five years old but already yielding well. Unfortunately sycamore is an alien species and everyone I’ve consulted about the spinney’s future has said “You can get those out!”. We’ll see.

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All the honey has now been extracted. This year was the first year I noticed such a strong floral smell as I lifted each crown-board. It was possibly the hawthorn which has a strong pungent aroma and is a most erratic yielder. All the honey this year is dark in colour, strong and loth to crystallize. I fear my creamed honey regulars are going to have to get used to clear honey .

One super was simply fitted with eleven starter strips rather than foundation. As the bees drew out this 100% fresh comb, one frame was removed and the remaining ten spaced a little more widely. This gave a slightly wider and heavier comb to cut into blocks. Much of it was also drone comb which, with its larger cells, meant less wax and more honey.

Having removed all the supers I can now complete my records of honey-yield per hive in order to make my decisions as to which queens to over-winter. Eleven colonies and one nucleus are going down to 8 hives. The queen in hive nine was culled and the colony moved around the apiary further than three feet each time placing it alongside other colonies whose number I wanted to boost. Each time it was moved, the flying bees returned to the hive nearest its old position. This way I gradually bled half the colony into other hives. The remainder was then united in its full-sized box with the nucleus colony. Each frame of bees was gently misted with a dilute sugar solution with a drop of oil of lavender to mask the colony aromas and the frames placed alternately into the 14 x 12 box and left for a few days to settle down. This box was then united with hive 1 using the newspaper method. The queen was removed from colony 1 and then later in the evening, this queenless colony was placed above the queen-right colony with a sheet of paper between them. By the time they had nibbled through, their aromas were sufficiently blended as to avoid any confrontation.

The varroa counts have reached scary levels so I decided to treat with Apivar before I feed. Having had Deformed Wing Virus and Chronic Bee Paralysis Virus during the year I thought it best not to just leave it to the beegyms. The hives fitted with beegyms have registered noticeably higher mite-falls but the beegym instructions do say ‘use as part of your integrated pest management’.

Next week we have the ‘Taster Session’ for prospective beekeepers followed by Audley End Apple Weekend. Lots of hard work to finish the season.

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What had seemed an amazing start to the season rapidly turned sour. The marvellous weather we had in March enabled supers to go on eight of the hives earlier than ever before. April arrived, the oil-seed-rape came on flower, and the weather turned for the worst; next to no rain meant no nectar and the bitterly cold winds meant the foragers could not leave the hives. These conditions lasted for almost the whole of the rape’s flowering season. Some of the hives got up to two supers but I added the second just to ensure there was plenty of space to store any incoming nectar.

Varroa counts have continued on a weekly basis and Stuart Roweth (www.beegym.co.uk) has kindly supplied some more up-to-date beegym equipment. His floor-mounted model has been upgraded once again and these are installed in hives 7 & 8. Hive 9 has ten of the new production model minigyms.

Beegym 2017
The latest model Beegym

Varroa has unfortunately been the least of my worries. Last year I had a severe case of CBPV (Chronic Bee Paralysis Virus) in hive 8 which I managed to clear by hand-picking all the infected drones from the combs. This year the virus has swept through all the colonies killing thousands. Being confined to their hives has exacerbated the problem because it meant that infected bees were not dropping out of the sky away on foraging trips but were staying at home to share the infection with their brothers and sisters. To add to the misery I also had cases of DWV (Deformed Wing Virus). Each day the ground in front of the hives has been littered with dead bees, to the extent that I got ‘The man from the ministry’ to come and have a look. He confirmed not only my diagnosis but the fact that there is no known cure. He scooped up several handfuls of dead bees, put them in a carrier-bag to send off for analysis just in case there was something else we hadn’t noticed. All we can really hope for is more rain at night and more sunshine in the day.

Varroa drop record sheet 2017
Weekly varroa drop so far

Over the road is a crop of field beans just about to come on flower but whether they’ll yield a harvest for me as well as the grower remains to be seen.

On a less despondent note, the Saffron Walden beekeepers group had a trip out to Kew Gardens to see The Hive. A marvellous edifice in stainless steel complete with lights and music. Not a lot to do with bees unfortunately, apart from the interior shape, which resembled a skep.

The Hive, Kew
The Hive at London's Kew Gardens