Napalm for bee-giners

Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind and today was one of those occasions; it was my annual acid attack on the hives.
For the last 10 days I have been counting the number of varroa mites dropping off the bees on to the hive floor. The daily average was 0.3 which suggests there are between 35 and 130 adult mites in the colony. That's not usually regarded as high enough to warrant intervention, but I decided to treat my bees for two reasons:

• It's been very windy so some dead mites may have been blown away
• The cluster of bees is fairly small so the mite density is higher than 'average'

Varroa mites kill bees and also spread nasty viruses so timely treatment now should help my little colony to be in top condition by spring. The problem is there are so few treatment options. The mites in this area are resistant to approved mitocides and it's too cold to use thymol, so instead I have resorted to oxalic acid which is the bee-equivalent of napalm!
I'm not kidding: Acid is added to a sugar solution and then poured over the bees - it's sticky and it burns.
Get it right and the acid is just strong enough to burn the claws off those horrid varroa mites so that they drop off the bees, but if you get it wrong you will have a smoking pile of dead bees.
Non-scientists are best advised to purchase a commercially prepared solution, but my reading of the literature suggests that these are too potent for bees in our climatic zone, so I make my own.
I just hope I've got my maths right....

Robobee

It's cold so all is quiet around the hive.... but if you press your ear against the roof and listen very carefully you will hear mutterings of consternation - the bees are discussing 'Robobee', a bug-sized unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) or 'drone' being developed at Harvard.

Calling a UAV a 'drone' is offence enough to a honey bee, but what's really got the colony buzzing is the suggestion that Robobees could be used to provide pollination services to farmers.

Thus far the bees had been feeling rather self-important; average earnings in the USA had risen to 1 cent a month (see Workers Wages) and attempts by Chinese apple growers to hand-pollinate blossom with a paint brush dipped in a bag of pollen was proving an expensive failure. Even aerial bombardment of crops with pollen had flopped, producing lower quantities and smaller fruit.

It seemed as though agriculturalist were finally accepting that monoculture and indiscriminate use of insecticides was not a good way to farm; hedgerows, judicious insecticide use, and wild-flower field margins were the way forward, .... until Robobee appeared.

Suddenly the bees are feeling less secure. So what if they are wiped out - Robobee will fly to the rescue and pollinate those apples, almonds, onions, alfalfa etc .... for a fee.

The technical challenges of producing a UAV pollinator are enormous, which is part of the attraction for academics, as are the commercial gains for the tech giants should we succeed in destroying our insect pollinators.

But there's one thing they've overlooked. Robobee won't make honey, so there's hope for my bees yet.

Batten down the hatches

The Met Office has issued an 'Amber Alert'; there's a storm coming.
Wise beekeepers have secured their hives to stop the roofs flying off; the foolish will leave it to chance and risk killing their colonies.
There is an upside - with a force 10 gale at least none of us will be worried about hive ventilation over the next 24 hours!
However,once the storm has passed, the 'ventilation debate' will continue. That's because beekeepers basically fall into two groups: Top ventilators and bottom ventilators.
Personally, I'm a 'bottom' man because I use open mesh floors on my hives, which effectively means the bottom of the hive is open to the elements. You would think that would provide more than enough fresh air for my colonies, but apparently not. Last spring when I opened up my hives I noticed there was black mould all over the inside walls, which suggested inadequate ventilation.
Initially I was surprised because there was no problem with ventilation the previous winter. But then I remembered there were two important differences: Firstly, the hive was 3 boxes high rather than the usual 2, and secondly I had left the dummy boards in situ.
As a result the warm fug from the cluster of bees rose up to the top of the hive, cooled on the roof, and then slid down the sides, condensing on the dummy boards and walls, leaving them damp.
This winter I've left the dummy boards out and the stack is just two boxes high, so the air should be able to move freely around the hive.
I suspect it's already moving quite freely and will be even more so by tonight when those 60 mph winds set in!

Taste & Smile

In order to survive until spring a colony of bees needs about 20 kg of honey stored in the hive before the onset of winter. When I checked a month ago my colony had just 1/2 kg!
Nowhere near enough food, but I was quite happy because there was lots of brood. After months of waiting for the colony to build up the queen had finally got around to laying in earnest, and all those extra mouths to feed meant the bees were consuming food as fast as they were bringing it in.
But what to do? If I just left the bees alone they might make enough honey to see them through winter, but if they didn't they would starve... unless I fed them.
I could wait until November and then feed them if necessary, but there's a snag: Whether it's nectar or sugar syrup, bees have to evaporate off the excess water before they can store the stuff as 'honey', otherwise it will ferment in the comb, and drunken bees are not nice!
But by November it won't be warm enough for the bees to evaporate off the excess water, so I decided to feed them a 60% sugar syrup. They concentrate this to 72% sugar solution for storing in the comb by fanning-off some of the water with their wings.
So far they have taken about 17 kg of syrup, which will give them about 15 kg of 'honey'. That's not enough, but I think it will suffice because I know they have been frantically bringing in nectar as well.
As autumn progresses and the flowers die back it may be surprising to learn that right now we have a big nectar flow in progress, and the source of that nectar is ivy. Ivy makes a fairly unpleasant honey that sets rock hard in the comb, but it provides an important top-up for winter stores, which is just as well because all this sugar has proven expensive.
Word has obviously got out because I see Investec have just issued a 'Buy' note for Tate & Lyle shares.
I'm not surprised.

Go Daddy, go!

Male bees have a sweet but short life. If you are lucky you hang out in the hive for a couple of weeks being fed and pampered by the workers, and then, when the mood takes you, you fly off with some of your mates to a 'drone congregation area' and chillax. Before long a virgin queen on the pull arrives, flirts outrageously with you and your buddies, and then takes flight. She's fast in all senses of the word, and if you are quick enough to catch her, you will have sex that will blow your ... genitals off. Then you die.
I kid you not, successful copulation means loss of genitalia and death for male bees. It's brutal, but what an exit!
Pity the poor lads that don't get laid. They hang around the hive in a state of dysphoria, eating and putting on weight; life could be worse, and it is, in August.
Once the nectar flow stops in mid July the bees start making preparations for winter and forget all notions of swarming. They need to build up stores as quickly as possible and bring in lots of protein rich pollen raise the winter bees. Male bees that sulk around the hive eating stuff aren't wanted, so they get chucked out.
It's been a month since I looked at my bees. At the end of July there were lots of drones schmoozing around; yesterday there were none.
Which would you prefer - getting your tickle-tackle blown up, or being thrown out of the house by your sisters, and starving to death? Comments welcome!

Honey? I sunk the quids!

Beekeeping is an expensive business. Here's what your average novice might expect to pay in our local beekeeping store for the absolute basics:

• One colony of bees = £200
• Hive to keep bees in = £300
• Bee-suit, smoker, hive tool = £120

Add in a queen marking pen, queen cage, clearer board, Porter escapes, varroa treatment and feeder bucket and you are well on your way to spending £800 just to get started.

And here's the UK average honey yield per hive for last year (2012): 8 lb.

Yes, honey from your local small time beekeeper costs £100 jar to produce!

Okay, I exaggerate. To start with I'm mixing 'fixed' and 'variable' costs and there are economies of scale and if you shop around you can buy kit more cheaply, but on the other hand I haven't costed in the gloves, the jars, the labels and lids, the honey buckets, the honey extractor, the wax extractor, the wax moth treatment, the sieves, the uncapping knife.....and the time.

Still, some of us are better beekeepers than other, right? Last year I took 176 lb off my two hives versus 16 lb for your average Joe. Quids in,you might think.

So here are my results for 2013: Nothing, nada, rien, nichts, or diddly-squatum if you prefer Latin.

I predicted as much in my post of 13th June. My bees simply never got going. They've have ambled along all summer; good natured and healthy enough, but no honey.

Wicked wasps

There's a wasp's nest in the wall of my neighbour's garden. Up until now they have been doing a good job foraging for insects to take back to their nest. They are not fussy; last year I watched them tucking into a slice of ham with each wasp carefully cutting a piece off with it's mandibles before airlifting it back to the nest. Usually however, they predate caterpillars and other pests, and occasionally a dead bee they have found near the hives.
It's a good system - the wasps take meat back to their nests to feed their grubs, and the grubs secrete a sugary solution to feed the wasps. Everybody was happy, until now...
The wasp nest is starting to die. In the last few weeks the virgin queens have hatched and got mated and will soon be looking for somewhere to shelter through the winter. The old wasp queen is no longer laying so many eggs and she will die shortly. Fewer eggs means fewer grubs, which means less sugary solution for the adult wasps, who are hungry.
So they start to look around for sugary food and anyone picnicking or enjoying a drink in a pub garden this time of year knows the consequences - wasps are a pest.
But if you think you have problems, pity the poor bees. Thus far they have been working hard bringing in nectar and making honey. They need that honey to see them through the winter and well into spring next year. Without that honey they will die.
The wasps will die soon anyway, but right now they are hungry and determined to steal the bee's honey. So all day long they probe the defences of the hive, trying to find a way in. If the colony is weak the wasps can soon over-power it; a wasp can sting many times but a bee can only sting once, so it doesn't take long for the wasps to kill the guard bees and in the course of a few days completely strip a colony of any honey.
It's a sorry sight - a pile of dead bees, no food and few house bees wandering around aimlessly.
To help my bees protect their precious honey I've narrowed down the hive entrance so that only one or two bees can get into the hive at a time. It means there's a bit of a queue at busy periods, but it also means the guard bees can easily challenge any wasp.
But it's tiresome with so many wasps from that nest just 20 meters away, so it's time to make some wasp traps.

Who's your daddy?

There was only one thing to do with my suicidal bees - throw them out!
So I did.
Well to be truthful I threw them out of their hive on to the ground in front of another hive. Initially they started walking off in all directions and some got airborne, but after a few minutes half a dozen had found their way into the new hive. I watched with interest to see if the guard bees would attack the intruders, but there was no challenge. Instead the new arrivals sat in the entrance, stuck their tails in the air and started beating their wings, sending a scent from their glands back to the others. Sure enough within a couple of minutes all the other bees had turned around and were walking into 'their' new home. So now I have a colony containing both the suicidal and the non-suicidal bees, and the funny thing is that even though they are all mixed up, I can tell which is which, .... and it's nothing to do with happy faces.
Bees don't all look the same. My suicidal bees have almost black bodies with barely visible black stripes, whereas my happy bees have yellowy-brown bodies. The suicidal bees will die out over the next few weeks but in the meantime they can help with foraging and housekeeping duties. Gradually the colony will revert to just yellow bees again. Or may be not, it depends on who's the daddy.
When a virgin queen goes on her mating flight she is impregnated by several drones and receives millions of sperm cells which are stored in packets inside her body. Those sperm have to last for the rest of the queen's reproductive life, some 3 -4 years, and as the months go by some packets of sperm are used up and new packets are started.
New packets of sperm mean a new daddy, so it is not unusual to see the look and characteristics of a colony change over the months; same mummy - different daddy.
Right now my happy bees are yellow, which suggests daddy may be of Mediterranean extraction, and my suicidal bees are black, suggesting daddy may be of Scottish descent...
'Nuf said.

Suicide is painless

My bees are suicidal. Seriously, they have a death-wish and I'm beginning to suspect that chronic depression among the world's honey bee population is the reason for their decline. I rest my thesis on the following observation:

The bees I received from my bee-buddy were queenless and without a laying queen the colony was going to die out over the next couple of months. Fortunately I had raised a new queen and she was laying well in her little box, so it was time to introduce her to the queenless colony. You would think they would welcome her as their savior, but queen introduction is risky. So I placed her in a little cage to protect her from the workers and plugged up the exit hole with a wodge of icing sugar fondant. The idea is that the workers eat their way through the icing sugar and by the time they reach the queen they have got used to her smell and moreover are feeling too full of sugar to have the energy to harm her. Instead they start feeding her and within a day she is out and about in the colony and shortly thereafter she should be laying.

Except she wasn't. I opened up the hive a week later and there were hardly any eggs to be seen. So I hunted around to try and find her without success, until I noticed a bunch of bees in a huddle...

Huddles mean trouble. I poked my finger in the huddle to try and separate the bees and sure enough, there in the middle was the queen. They were killing her by 'balling' her, a process that involves smothering their victim and vibrating their bodies to generate so much heat that she would die of hyperthermia.

There was nothing I could do - she was finished, and so is the entire colony. 

The queen is dead - long live the queen!

Five weeks ago I was looking through someone's hive when we came across this:

Those six elongated structures hanging off the bottom of the comb are queen cells, each one containing a large grub. The three longest cells had just been sealed by the bees so I knew that over the next seven days those grubs would metamorphose into queen bees ... and promptly die!
The reason is simple - there can only be one queen. The old queen (and mother of these queen cells) had swarmed with 10,000 worker bees earlier that day, confident in the knowledge that she was leaving one of these developing queens to take over.
But only one, because the first queen to emerge promptly kills her unborn sisters by stinging them while they are still in their cells. So because most of these potential queens were doomed I didn't hesitate in gently cutting out some of the sealed cells and taking them home to put in the airing cupboard. I was confident they would hatch, but without nursery bees to feed and look after them they would soon perish. The problem was I didn't have enough bees of my own but I knew someone who did....
My beekeeping buddy has some very strong colonies so we shook a mug full of young bees into a tiny hive, then carefully inserted one of the queen cells between the frames using a paper clip for support, and added some fondant icing sugar to keep them fed.
Here's a picture of the little hive sitting on top of a normal hive. Within a few days the queen hatched and despite the poor weather she managed to get mated because when I looked a few days ago she was laying.
Which is just as well, because that hive of bees my beekeeping buddy gave me last week doesn't have a queen!

Robbers

Bees are thieving blighters. Given the choice between visiting flowers and collecting nectar to make honey, or simply stealing someone else's, they'll opt for thieving every time.
Sometimes a little colony of bees can be completely overpowered by robbers who will take every last drop of honey and leave the small colony to starve. In strong colonies guard bees will fight off potential robbers but in a little colony there may be insufficient guards, especially if the entrance hole is too wide. So beekeepers keep the entrance to small colonies very narrow so that potential intruders can be more easily challenged.
However sometimes robbers just get lucky and they find an abandoned hive where a colony has died out leaving lots of unguarded honey. Never creatures to miss a free lunch, the robbers generously sample the bounty before returning home to tell their friends and relations.The news about the 'free honey' causes huge excitement in the colony and within 20 minutes 100's of bees will have descended on the source and will be busy carrying the booty home.
All of which goes to explain those bees swarming around that bait hive in my last post.There must have been traces of honey in the comb used to make up the bait hive so when the scout bees reported back to base about a potential new residence nobody paid attention (as usual) until someone mentioned the free honey...
I got some more bees nevertheless. My beekeeping buddy was so embarrassed about mistaking robbers for a natural swarm that he gave me some of his!

Plan B - how to catch bees

Bees swarm. If it's a primary swarm around 10,000 bees pour out of the hive together with the queen and take to the skies, but not for long. They normally fly just a few minutes before resting on a nearby tree or wall. Then they hang in a big cluster and wait ... and debate ... for hours ... sometimes days .... until all 10,000 reach agreement on where they are going and how they are going to get there!
You would think a more sensible approach to moving home would be to agree all this before leaving the hive, but the old foragers are too set in their ways and the baby bees are too young to fly, making sensible discussion of relocation plans nigh on impossible.
So instead all those in favour of relocation leave in a swarm and then hang together somewhere trying to agree where they are going to live.
Fortunately not all the bees have a des res in mind otherwise they would never reach agreement. Instead dedicated scout bees scour the neighbourhood looking for a suitable home. This process probably starts days before the colony actually swarms, but nobody pays attention. Now the bees are homeless they are eager to learn what the scouts have found, and slowly, as more scouts return with enthusiastic reports about a potential new home, the bees reach a consensus.
Ideally, bees want a dry, airy cavity above the ground. If it has previously been occupied by bees, even better - which leads me to Plan B - Bait hives.
By placing empty hives containing old honeycomb around the locale beekeepers can reasonably expect to catch a swarm of bees. 'Catch' is a bit of an exaggeration because the bees simply walk in; one moment the hive is empty, the next moment thousands of bees have taken up residence.
I'm excited. My bee-buddy tells me one of my bait hives has hundreds of bees buzzing around the entrance. This could be it, more bees at last....

Decimate - Terciamate - Exterminate!

Around 93,000 colonies of bees in the UK died last winter. That's one third of our entire honey bee population! This isn't decimation, it's three times more, it's tertiamation!
But it's worse than that. The British Beekeepers Association's survey only monitored winter losses to the end of March 2013, but many more colonies died in the really cold April/May period, including one of mine.
It's a disaster and more worrying still is that the surviving colonies are not building up fast enough. The peak nectar flow around here is between 21st June and 14th July when the bees forage on white clover and blackberry. It takes at least 4 weeks to get from egg to foraging bee. It's simple mathematics - there's no way there will be enough bees to get a honey crop this summer.
Instead I need to focus is on building the colony up so that it's strong enough to survive next winter. That, and obtaining more bees. There's the rub; colonies are so weak that we are not seeing as much swarming this year so there's little chance of picking up some free-bees. I need to have a plan B(ee)....
More of which later.

The water carriers

Well spring turned out to be the coldest in 50 years according to the London Times but with the switch to 'meteorological summer time' on the 1st June the temperature has been above 15 C for the last 2 days; we are having a heatwave! So as you would expect the bees have been busy foraging and bring in....water.
When it's warm the bees know that a good source of water is the damp soil in the plant pots on our patio, because the warmer it gets, the more we water. Sometimes we leave it a day or two and the soil surface dries out, but that doesn't deter the bees; they simple drink the water from the tap!
Consequently, on a warm day before turning on the outside water tap its wise to check that there isn't a bee or two up the spout sipping on a residual drop.
Collecting water can be dangerous for bees. The bourne that runs along the edge of the fields has water all year long, but it is flowing too fast for bees to risk approaching. Muddy puddles soon dry up and those that don't contain unhealthy stagnant water that can make bees ill. Early rising bumble bees can take advantage of the morning dew, but my teenage honey bees wont stir until the sun is long up and the dew all gone. So getting water can be a challenge, which is why many beekeepers provide their bees with a water source such as bowl full of small pebbles that is regularly topped up with tap water.
Most of the water is used to cool the hives by dampening the comb which the bees then fan with their wings. On a hot day up to 80 or so bees can be tasked with carrying almost a litre of water back to the hive. It's thirsty work.

Oh crapus - there's no B. napus!

Well it's official - there's no Brassica napus being grown on Flemish Farm this year, which means no spring honey.

Brassica napus, or oilseed rape as it is commonly known, is more than just a flowering turnip that provides oil for chainsaws and chips; it's also the UK's largest source of nectar for honey bees. Last May one of my hives produced 90 lb of honey in 3 weeks when the rape was in flower!

So you might expect beekeepers to love B. napus, but opinion is divided. The main criticism of rape honey is that it has to be extracted as soon as the flowers begin to fade, otherwise the honey sets in the comb like concrete. The other criticism is that the honey is pale and rather bland.

Personally I don't see the problem. Extracting honey is tedious, especially if you have to do it twice in the season, but if you are getting bumper yields it's worth the effort. As for blandness, it seems to me that many people don't like strong flavoured summer honey which is why most commercially produced 'English Honey' is a blend of summer and spring honeys.

This year I'll only have summer honey, which is fine by me... except for one nagging doubt. Take a look at this picture:

The long cold winter not only took it's toll on the bees - the wheat crop also died. Two weeks ago the yellow tufts of dead wheat were ploughed in and last week the field was sown with ....

Oh crapus - I hope it's not B. napus! Spring rape is fine but summer rape will ruin the summer honey crop if it comes into flower the same time as the clover and blackberry!

How to kill bees

My neurotic bees have died. Over the past few weeks the cluster of bees got smaller and smaller until there were insufficient bees to keep the meagre brood warm, and the colony faded away.
It was always an unsatisfactory colony; constantly busy but unproductive. Last summer they produced a new queen and I was hopeful that their characteristics would change, but the neurotic behaviour continued. I could never find the new queen until a few weeks ago when I found her in the diminishing cluster. What a poor specimen she turned out to be - dark and skinny and not much bigger than a worker. "No wonder the bees were anxious" I thought.
But a poor queen does not explain why this colony died, only why it never flourished. The prolonged winter didn't help. Each cold day that passed meant fewer winter bees to keep the brood warm and no fresh pollen coming in to keep it fed.
And that shook swarm weakened the colony further - but shouldn't have killed it because my other colony is doing fine. So what killed this colony?
Well I'd like to say all of the above, but I'd be making excuses because .... I killed the colony.
It was a cock-up rather than a conspiracy. When checking the bees a few weeks ago the solid crownboard that sits on top of the hive got switched with the crownboard with a hole in it to allow the bees access to the feeder. The upshot was that for almost 2 weeks the bees weren't fed.
I'm not best pleased with myself and I realise now why those bees were neurotic - they didn't trust me, and who can blame them.

Don't confuse the issue with facts

So the eco-warriors and the bee-huggers got together for a protest in Parliament Square last Friday. The aim of the stunt was 'to grab the weekend headlines and pile the pressure on' ahead of an EU vote on banning neonicotinoids pesticides. The demo was called 'The March of the Beekeepers' which sounds impressive, except for one small detail; the British Beekeepers Association with it's 23,000 members wasn't involved! Clearly the green lobby is prepared to play fast and loose with the facts in it's ongoing war with the agro-chemical industry.

So why do UK beekeepers appear unconcerned - after all pesticides are wiping out the bees, right?
Well, actually we don't know because the available data are 'unable to demonstrate deleterious effects of neonicotinoids on honey bees managed by beekeepers in the UK.' Moreover, beekeepers are worried that an outright ban might encourage the use of older pesticides that are known to harm honey bees.

Of greater concern are bee diseases and habit degradation. You might have guessed - it's the ag-industry again, but this time it's trashing the environment with endless acres of monoculture ...except you'd be wrong.

Most beekeepers in the UK keep their hives in urban and suburban environments and the bees do very well  thanks to gardens providing all-year-round forage. But with in-fill development we are rapidly destroying these habitats.

What to do - march on Parliament and ban builders? No, just grow better plants and trees for pollinators, don't trim the privet hedge when it's in bloom, and let the clover grow in your lawn rather than trying to kill it with herbicides; it will have far more benefit for bees than banning those pesticides.

Biggles learns to fly

New bees spend the first few weeks of their life doing various jobs inside the hive, but there comes a time when they have to learn to fly: Today was that day. Exactly 2 weeks after I saw evidence of new bees being born (see last post) the youngsters took to the skies.
It was a perfect day for flying, warm and not too windy, so at around 2 pm scores of bees poured out of the hive and started flying....backwards!
There's a reason for this - flying is easy but navigation is difficult. The bees fly backwards a few feet whilst looking at the hive. They then fly from side to side, and eventually into ever widening circles around the hive. All the time they are learning the landmarks that will help then find their way home.
By 3.30 pm these so called 'play flights' were extending 20-30 meters away from the hive and the bees were getting increasingly curious as their confidence built. All sorts of non-forage flowers were investigated and then ignored once they realised there was no useful nectar. All blocks of colour caught their attention - including me in a bright purple T-shirt. Needless to say I had to make a run for it when some bees got a bit too curious!
Tomorrow the playing stops. They will be getting instructions on useful sources of forage from the winter bees and the work begins. Perfect timing because the apple is just coming into blossom.

New bees are fluffy

It takes exactly 3 weeks to make a honey bee. First there's an egg, which hatches into a tiny larva and quickly grows to become a fat white maggot. As if in disgust the bees then entomb the maggot in its cell by capping it over with wax. Slowly the maggot metamorphoses into a honey bee.
Watch carefully in the summer months and you will see the baby bees nibbling away at the wax capping covering their cells, before struggling to pull themselves out. Initially all the hairs on their body are sleeked down, but the nursery bees soon groom the new arrivals and within 10 minutes of emerging they look conspicuously fresh and fluffy, and ready to start work.
My colonies desperately need new workers. The winter bees are dying and they have to raise new bees otherwise the colonies are doomed. Until now there has been little sign of new life....until last Thursday.

It happened between midday and 4 pm - a small pile of wax cappings appeared on the floor underneath the hive, as dozens of new bees emerged from their cells.
Of course, I couldn't be certain. It was still far too cold and wet to open up the hives, but today, 40 days after my shook swarms on 5th March, it was finally warm enough to take a look inside. To my delight therein were 3 frames with eggs, grubs and sealed brood, and a number of fluffy bees. This hive looks like it will survive.
Not so the other hive containing the neurotic bees. Yes, there was brood in all stages, but not much, and the cluster of bees is barely enough to occupy two seams. Their future looks bleak.
They say spring is 3 weeks late this year; just the length of time it would have taken to raise those new bees.

Mortuary Bees

'Bring out your dead' - It's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it!

Usually bees leave the hive to die, but every now and then they pop their clogs on the inside, especially during the winter months. As the days go by dead bees accumulate on the hive floor and over time these would block the hive entrance.

Fortunately, some workers are tasked with being mortuary bees. These bees collect the dead and drag them out of the hive. During the summer months it's not unusual to see mortuary bees flying like mini Chinook helicopters with their cargo slung beneath them, before unceremoniously dropping the corpses several metres away from the hive.

For winter bees the mortuary task is much harder. To start with winter bees are heavier (see Fat Girls) making airlifting impossible, but the real issue is that by now the bees are old and tired.

So they struggle to drag the dead from the hive, and onto the ground, and through the grass for a few feet before returning exhausted to collect the next casualty.

It's been unseasonable cold for well over a month, and on those rare occasions the bees have been able to fly, the mortuary bees have been busy - as I look around the hives I can see hundreds of dead bees.

It's a worry; the bees have plenty of sugar syrup so they won't starve, but they desperately need the protein in fresh pollen to raise brood.

For without new bees who will dispose of the dead?

Workers' Wages

I'm concerned that my bees may be planning to take industrial action.

It was a broadcast last Tuesday morning on BBC Radio 4 - 'On the trail of the American Honey Bee' that got the hives buzzing. Apparently American bees get paid!

Not much admittedly, just 1 cent a month, but with 60,000 bees in each hive in the summer time that means I'm facing a potential wages bill of $1,200 a month. I'm ruined; just to cover the workers' wages I would have to charge £380 for a jar of honey.

Why do American bees get so well paid? Simple - they pollinate the most valuable crop on earth worth $2.5 billion p.a. - almonds.  With 1.5 million hives being trucked into California each spring it's clear that pollination services provided by honey bees is big business.

We don't have almonds in the UK, or oranges or cranberries, but our bees still provide a great service pollinating apple, pear and plum trees; oil seed rape, raspberries, blackberries, field beans, runner beans and dozens of garden and wild flowers.

Most hobbyist beekeepers don't charge for pollination, but if my bees demand fair payment for services rendered, I'm going to be knocking on my neighbours doors and presenting an invoice!

Fat Girls

Summer bees work so hard that they only live about 3 -4 weeks before they die. In contrast, winter bees live 4-5 months and spend most of their time mooching around the hive eating, and trying to stay warm. Not surprising, winter bees are a bit tubby.
To be fair this is more about genetic traits rather than life style choices - winter bees need to lay down fat deposits for survival, which is all well and good until some hapless beekeeper uses a queen excluder.
I had placed the queen excluder at the bottom of the hive to stop the queen rolling out or wandering off when I did that shook swarm. The queen is considerably bigger than the worker bees so she can't get through the wire mesh of the excluder. Neither can the fat girls as I found out last Thursday when there was a break in the weather.
Initially all looked encouraging; the bees were flying so they had clearly survived the cold snap. It was still too cold to take a look inside the hive, so all I wanted to do was check they had enough sugar syrup (they did) and remove the queen excluder.
That's when I realised that winter bees really are well padded, because there, trapped in the mesh were about 20 - 30 bees. It wasn't a disaster, but I was annoyed. Every dead bee means a smaller cluster which means its harder to stay warm.

Shook Swarm

I'm worried.
Last week when it was warm I decided to shake all of my bees out of their damp mouldy hives into clean dry hives using a technique called a 'shook swarm'. This involves taking each frame out of the old hive out and shaking off any bees into a new hive. It's absolutely essential to ensure you don't lose the queen, so I put a queen excluder underneath each hive to make sure she didn't roll out of the bottom!
Needless to say, bees don't like being thrown around like this, but mine were very good natured and within half an hour they were settled down and happily feeding on the sugar syrup I'd given them. I don't usually feed my bees sugar but all their honey and a few frames of brood were left behind in the old hives so unless I fed them they would starve.
It might seem brutal to remove the bees from their food and brood, but that brood contains varroa mite and those old frames might harbour bee diseases such as nosema. Although the manoeuvre will set the bees back a week or two, colonies purged of disease usually come back very strongly.
So why am I worried? Well more experienced beekeepers tell me it's too early in the season for such drastic measures. Initially I discounted their opinions because doing a 'shook swarm' in springtime is a relatively new technique that most of the 'old hands' have never used. But then it turned cold, and the forecast is for snow....
This cold snap is forecast to last for another 72 hours so I will have to wait until Thursday at the earliest to see if my bees have survived.

First Inspection of 2013

It's been five months since I took a look inside the hives. Throughout that time I've had to make educated guesses as to what was going on inside by carefully observing activity outside, but today it was warm enough to open up.

The first thing I noticed was that there were plenty of good-natured bees. That's a good sign because it suggests that they are well fed and have a viable queen.  As I lifted the first box on the stack I felt the unmistakable weight of honey; they did indeed have plenty of food. A quick glance at the middle box showed a large number of bees clustered on 3 frames which indicated they were looking after brood. So first impressions were good.

However, as I looked around I also noticed that woodlice had taken up residence, suggesting there was damp. Sure enough as I inspected the frames and the crown board it became obvious that there was a lot of black and a bit of green mould on some of the woodwork.

I knew this moisture could not have been due to penetrating rain because all the hive joints were sealed up with a bee glue called propolis. There was only one cause for the dampness - condensation due to inadequate ventilation.

As the bees munch through their honey to generate heat they also exhale water vapour; roughly 700 ml for every kilogram of honey. Over the last five months several litres had been released and with low outside temperatures this moisture had simply condensed on the cold interior walls of the hive.

I didn't have this problem last year because the stack was only two boxes high, whereas this year it was three. That extra box reduced the air circulation which resulted in the damp.

Bees hate a damp hive so by the time I'd finished my inspection they were re-housed in clean dry boxes, but how I managed that is another post....

Bee Poo

Healthy bees don't poo inside their hives which is just as well; imagine the mess 60,000 bees would make! Instead they fly off and rest somewhere to perform the business. The problem is that in winter they might not be able to leave the hive for weeks at a time. So they hold on, ... and on, ... and on.

My bees are lucky because in the this part of England cold snaps rarely last more than two weeks, but imagine what it must be like for the bees I saw in the Alps last week which have been cooped up for 3 months already with no hope of relief for at least another 6 weeks.

Fortunately bees don't make much poo because they dine mostly on honey. However, pollen grains floating around in the honey also get eaten, and those indigestible residues in the pollen need to be excreted. So as the days turn into weeks the bees rectum becomes more and more distended so that by the end of an alpine winter almost half the inside of a bee's body is filled by its rectum.

It has been cold here for the last week, but today was markedly warmer. You won't be surprised to learn that hundreds of bees were out and about. Many were foraging on the mahonia and winter-flowering heather, but others had something else in mind judging by the speed they left the hive!

Mead Survey Results

Many thanks to those of you that took part in the mead survey (see 20 December post in the 2012 Blog Archive). Here are the results:

• 7 respondents liked mead
• 2 didn't know because they had never tried it
• Nobody said they disliked mead!

Admittedly only nine people took part in the survey and I suspect there was some self-selection which introduced bias, but nevertheless I was surprised by the results which have me wondering why this drink isn't more widely available.

Not that I need to worry - I've just racked my 2012 vintage and took the opportunity to have a little taste... the flavour is good but not as sweet as the 2011 batch. I'll leave the must in a cooler spot to finish fermenting and when the liquor becomes crystal clear I'll rack it into bottles. That's the easy bit.

The hard bit is I should wait at least a year before drinking it. What do you think the chances are I'll have opened a bottle by next Christmas?

Use the comment facility below to let me know.

Marvellous Mahonia

It was mild for a few hours in the sunshine yesterday so I wasn't surprised to see plenty of activity around the  hives. Close inspection of some of the returning bees revealed small parcels of bright yellow pollen on their back legs; they had been foraging.
But what was the source of that precious pollen - nothing is in flower this time of year....except Mahonia. This pretty yellow evergreen shrub is non-native to Britain but is popular with gardeners because it  flowers in the winter and has a wonderful scent. I have one flowering in my garden so I set off to take a look. Sure enough, about 20 bees were diligently working the flowers. Here's one I took a picture of:

It's head was thrust deep into the flower suggesting that its not only getting pollen, but also nectar.
There are hundreds of Mahonia shrubs in the gardens of Windsor providing vital winter forage for honey bees. Perhaps that explains why suburban bees often fare better than those in remote rural areas.

Succession Planning

It's surprising what you can find out about your bees without opening up the hives. Take a look at these two photos that I've just taken of my hives in the snow. What do you notice?

You can see that the snow in the centre of the each roof has melted, but it remains around the edges. This is just what I wanted to see because a circle of melted snow means localised heat, and that heat is coming from the bees clustering together and vibrating their indirect flight muscles to keep warm. So I know my bees are alive... but take another look at the photos.

Notice how the hive on the left has a much larger area of melted snow. This hive is East hive, the one with the neurotic bees that are out and about as soon as the temperature gets above 7 C. Last week when it was mild they were bringing in pollen. That pollen and the large area of melted snow tells me that the queen is still laying, and the colony has a lot of brood to keep warm. This is not good because at this rate they are going to use up all their honey before spring and may starve unless I feed them.

West colony in contrast stays hunkered down and won't venture out unless its 10 C or more. It has no brood so the cluster of bees is tighter and the temperature of the cluster is lower. West colony's stores should easily last till spring. The only slight worry is that the reason they have no brood is because the queen has died - but I doubt it.

Contrary to what you might expect, bees survive quite well in cold snowy condition, provided they have enough honey. But the neurotic bees in East hive are not well suited for our climate so come the summer I'm thinking I might replace the queen with a young princess from West hive.

Do bees have personalities?

Most folk would find the idea of bees having different personalities as absurd, but I suspect most beekeepers would disagree.
To be fair it may be a bit of an exaggeration to talk about personalities, but bees certainly exhibit different behaviours. You can see this with individual bees, but it becomes more obvious when you look at the behaviour of the entire colony.
My two colonies are totally different. East colony is neurotic; as soon as the temperature is above 8 centigrade they start flying. It's been 10 degrees or more these last few days and there has been plenty of activity.
In contrast West colony spends most of the winter hunkered down. You won't see them for weeks at a time and the only sign of life is the slowly changing pattern of wax cappings on the ground as the bees gradually eat through their honey store.
But last week's 'no varroa' count on West colony had me worried. No varroa could mean no bees, so I decided to remove the entrance block at the bottom of the hive and take a peek.
Dead bees littered the floor. I scooped them out and had enough to fill a coffee mug.
Despair and confusion followed. Surely they hadn't all died. I hefted the hive; it certain felt heavy enough so lack of food wasn't a problem. There's been enough rain so lack of water wasn't an issue either. What to do?
If I opened the hive to investigate further the cold could kill the bees and would certainly stress them. But then I remembered these bees have different personalities to the others, so I decided to wait and see.
Yesterday the thermometer showed 12 degrees, warm enough to tempt even this colony outside. I watched and saw one, then two, then several more bees leave and return through the hive entrance. I took the block off for another peek. Thank goodness - no more dead bees.
It's normal for a proportion of the bees to die as the winter progresses; fewer bees means fewer mouths to feed so winter stores can be eked out. But if the colony gets too small it won't be able to keep warm so there's an optimal balance. My guess is that the bees that died sacrificed themselves for the sake of the colony - truly altruistic personalities.