Sunday 30 December 2012

Noah the Varroa

Here's something really gross: A live blood-sucking bee mite.

This little critter is magnified 80 times. It keeps moving it's front right leg upwards towards its mouth, which are the two smaller protuberances just above the moving leg. With each swing of its leg it's trying to hook onto a bee and stick its fangs into the bee's body. Yuck!
These little pests are called Varroa mites. I've called this one Noah the Varroa but it's not male, it's a female mite that is about 1.5 mm in diameter. She's just dropped off a bee and wants to climb back into the hive to continue feasting.
These little blood-suckers were originally pests of Asian honey bees but they hopped on to our honey bees a few decades ago and now they are endemic. Besides sucking the blood of adult bees they breed on the baby bees. Worse still they spread viruses that cause birth defects.
Left untreated Varroa mites kill bee colonies, so every few months I check my hives for mites. Over the last 10 days I've been collecting mites that drop off the bees on to a board under the hive. In winter a mite drop of more than 2 per day means treatment is necessary.
My two colonies dropped of 0.5 mites per day and zero mites per day respectively, so treatment is not indicated.
But that figure of zero has me worried. Either the bees have no mites, or I have no bees. I need to investigate further.

Wednesday 26 December 2012

When penguins are like bees

With thanks to the folk at Inkscape for a great scalable vector graphics program.

Thursday 20 December 2012

Mmmm.....Mead

One of the benefits of keeping bees is that you get to make your own mead. One pound of honey makes about two pints but this would be a waste of good honey. Instead I use the wax cappings that are left over following honey extraction. These are washed in hot water to remove the residual honey in the wax and filtered to leave a dark sugary solution. I then check the specific gravity with a hydrometer and add more water if necessary. Some lemon juice and yeast nutrient is then added, followed by a wine yeast. Then you wait.....
Mead gets better with age but I'm too impatient to leave it for 2-3 years. In fact I'm down to my last bottle of last years vintage which I'm now enjoying with some mince pies.


Mmmm...Merry Christmas!

Do you like mead? Let me know by clicking on the appropriate button below. Don't forget to click continue so your response gets registered. I'll publish the results next month.

Saturday 15 December 2012

Food for thought

Local honey retails for about £15 a kilo so my bees will eat their way through about £600 worth of honey this winter. I don't mind - it's their honey and they did do all the work collecting the nectar and I'm grateful for any surplus. But some beekeepers take a more hard-nosed commercial view: If honey is worth £15 kilo and sugar only costs 90p kilo, why not take all the bees' honey and feed them sugar water instead?
Here's what is in honey:

  • Sugars: Fructose, Glucose, Maltose, Sucrose and some other complex sugars
  • Vitamins: Riboflavin (B2), Niacin (B3), Pantothenic acid (B5), B6, Folate (B9), Vitamin C
  • Minerals: Calcium, Iron, Magnesium, Phosphorus, Potassium, Sodium, Zinc
  • Other anti-oxidants and organic acids
  • Pollen and protein and amino acids
  • Water

And this is what sugar water contains:

  • Sugar (sucrose)
  • Water

Which do you think is most nutritious for you? And for the bees?




Sunday 9 December 2012

Show me the honey...

The amount of honey the bees eat each week during the winter varies a lot. Although a big colony of bees needs more food than a small colony, the small colony has to work harder at keeping warm. If there's brood present they'll eat even more.
As a rough guide I expect my bees to eat between 300 g - 1 kg of honey each week! In a worst case scenario, if no forage was available from November to end of March my bees would need up to 20 kg of honey to get through winter (about 44 jars).
All this honey is stored mostly above the bees. I've tried to show this in the diagram below:


The top box weighed 22 - 25 kg at the beginning of winter but as the weeks go by it will get lighter as the bees munch through the honey. It will be almost empty by the end of winter so if it gets really windy in March I'll have to put some bricks on the tops of the hives to stop them from being blown over!


Tuesday 4 December 2012

Why bees are like penguins


Bees don’t hibernate. Instead, when it’s cold they cluster together in the hive and vibrate their muscles to keep warm. If they have brood (baby bees) they keep the temperature in the cluster at 33⁰C, but if there is no brood present they prefer a more comfortable 20⁰C. However, because the bees on the outside of the cluster get cold they shuffle around so that each has a chance to warm up, just like Emperor Penguins.

Of course all that heating means big fuel bills. I try to help by not opening up the hives in the winter and letting all the heat out. But can anyone guess how much honey the colony needs to eat each week to keep warm? (Answers in the comment box below) 

Saturday 1 December 2012

Yaffle don't snaffle my bees!

Mice are not the only threat to bee hives in the winter. Green woodpeckers will often peck right through the wall of  hive to get at  the bee brood, which results in the death of the entire colony. For that reason many beekeepers protect their hives with wire netting during winter. As you can see in my last post, I'm not protecting my hives from woodpeckers.
So am I reckless? Well not really because it appears that woodpecker attacks on bee hives is a learned behaviour which is passed from one generation to the next. Fortunately, around here hive vandalism hasn't entered yaffle culture. Instead our woodpeckers seem quite happy looking for crane fly larvae and ants on the lawn as you can see from this photograph I took a couple of days ago.

However, recent frosts are making the ground hard, so I'll need check the hives regularly just in case this fellow has been taking lessons!