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....