Tuesday 2 December 2014

Bees support BKIP

My bees have decided to vote BKIP in next year’s election.

I was astonished, “Surely you‘re not worried about over-population. Aren't honey bees in decline?”

There was a hollow laugh from inside the hive, “That’s just propaganda put out by the eco-warriors and bee-huggers!”

It turns out my bees were right. UK honey bee colonies fell steadily from 1957 to 2005 as beekeeping declined in popularity, but since 2007 the number of beekeepers has more than doubled from 11,000 to 24,000 today. More beekeepers mean more hives, which means more honey bees.

I was still sceptical, “What about all those headlines we read about bees dying out?” I asked.

“They’re muddling up honey bees and bumblebees,” explained a worker.  “And they are confusing the position elsewhere with the situation in England,” added another.

So it's bumblebees, butterflies and other insects that are in decline. It’s hardly surprising. Since the Second World War we have lost over 95% of our wild flower meadows. Hedgerows have been ripped out and vast tracts of our countryside are now barren monoculture.

 But it still didn't explain why my bees are planning to vote BKIP.

“It’s the housing,” said one.

“What, not enough housing?” I queried.

“No, too much!” came the exasperated reply.

All over the Thames Valley gardens are being lost due to in-fill development. Food is becoming scarcer for the honey bees at a time when the population of has doubled. Competition with other pollinators is tough so during the summer months the bees have to fly even greater distances to find food.

“We don’t need more honey bees – we need more flowers,” was the unanimous view.

“Yes, but they have to be the right type of flowers. Seventy-five percent of garden flowers are either useless or of little use to pollinators. What we need are insect friendly flowers that can feed all sorts of insects including butterflies, hover flies, bumblebees and honey bees.”

I realised my bees weren’t being ‘bee-ist’; they simply wanted to help all pollinators. It got me wondering. “What does BKIP stand for?” I asked.

Be Kind to Insect Pollinators!” they roared in unison.

Someone who is being kind to pollinators is James Headington of Paley Street Farm near Maidenhead. Take a look at this video clip of his field margins this summer.



You could do something similar. Please support the National Pollinator Strategy by planting insect friendly plants in your gardens, window boxes and school fields.

Resources:
The RHS provide a list of plants perfect for pollinators:
Natural England also explains how to make a wild flower meadow in your garden in this document:

Tuesday 21 October 2014

The workers and the shirkers

Busy bees – they work all day long for the good of the hive.

It’s hardly surprising that sociologists have long considered honey bee colonies to be a perfect example of collectivism; comrades living in a higher phase of a communist society, in which Marx would expect ‘From each according to her ability, to each according to her needs.’

But there’s a problem with this analogy because whenever I open up my hives it seems to me that only half the bees are actually working.

Now admittedly they could be having a tea break, but I’m beginning to suspect there is more than a grain of truth in the old joke about communist economics:  They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work!

For sure worker bees don’t earn much (see Worker’s Wages) but could it really be that some socialist workers are really lazy shirkers? The answer seems to be.... yes!

Scientists attached radio-frequency identification tags to hundreds of individual honey bees and tracked their activity for several weeks to discover that over half of all the nectar and honey bought into the hive came from just 20% of the foraging work force. It seems the bees know that hard work kills, so most of them opt for a life of indolence.

It makes sense. The hard working bees provide more than enough food for the colonies needs so the shirkers only pull their weight if they have to.

On reflection it seems that bees provide a pretty good model of socialism.....

I've embedded a video clip about the research below:
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Wednesday 17 September 2014

Wannabees

Even in a strong healthy hive there are wannabe queens. These pretenders to the throne are kept in check by loyal workers and a chemical cosh in the form of pheromones released by the queen. Revolution and anarchy are kept at bay..... until the queen dies.

Usually the colony quickly raises a new queen, but sometimes the anarchists get the upper hand. It doesn't end well because, put simply, the wannabes lack breeding.

Queens are carefully cultivated and well bred. As larvae they receive a superior diet of royal jelly and live in spacious queen cells. When they come of age they earn their right to the 'throne' by killing any challengers. Once secure in their position they mate with only the best suitors.

Pretenders on the other hand lack class. They were fed standard worker's rations so they are scrawny with under-developed ovaries. They never fought for anything nor have they ever loved, but they still wannabe queen! Beekeepers show them no deference and disparagingly refer to them as 'laying workers'.

The problem with laying workers is that their eggs aren't fertilised which means they can only create male bees. Moreover, they have no sense of order so they lay eggs in a random fashion, often 2 or 3 to a cell. Most larvae perish but those that survive develop into stunted drones. It's a disaster for the colony which will die out within a month or so.

The obvious thing to do is introduce a new queen, but the pretenders, having tasted power, won't give it up, so gang-up together to kill her.

Today I found one of my colonies had laying workers. There was only one thing to do. I shook all the bees out onto the grass in front of a strong healthy hive. The workers will probably be accepted by the strong colony without too much of a fight, but the pretenders will be refused entry and will crawl off to die.

There have been several pretenders to the Scottish throne, and all have failed. But I suspect whatever the outcome of tomorrow's referendum on independence, Alex will be the new 'King' of Scotland.

He has a tough act to follow; the  'Last King of Scotland' was Idi Amin!

Monday 25 August 2014

Too fat to fly?

I should have known something was up last week; there were no eggs in one of the hives - so either the queen was dead, or she had stopped laying.

I assumed she'd stopped laying. It was the convenient option - I didn't want to hunt through the colony to find the queen because it was hot and the bees were irritable, and anyway I had a simple explanation; the hive reeks!

The pong was coming from a thymol and eucalyptus treatment I had used to kill varroa mites (see Noah the varroa). It's one of the few 'organic' treatments against varroa and is surprisingly effective, but it stinks of Vick's VapoRub. The bees hate it so much that they would rather sit on the outside of the hive than put up with the stench within.

No wonder then that the queen stops laying, and a quick check on the internet confirmed my suspicions. As events proved, I was right.... but for the wrong reason, as I found out yesterday lunch time when I suddenly noticed a lot of bees flying around the garden.

There were hundreds circling around; far too many for the play flights of young bees (see Biggles learns to fly). It looked like they were swarming which left me astonished because it's very late in the year for swarms. For a moment I wondered whether the bees had finally had enough of the 'VapoRub' and simple absconded!

I watched expecting them to disappear over the horizon but instead within 10 minutes they had settled on a nearby fence. As you can see, it's a small swarm and within the hour it was safely housed in a little 'nuc' box.

I doubted they would stay and sure enough within two hours the sky was once again full of bees, only this time they settled in a nearby tree, fifteen feet above the ground.

Queuing to get back in the 'nuc'

"Blow it!" I said, "I'm not clambering up a ladder to re-home them so that they can just fly off again. It's going to rain tomorrow so getting cold and wet should teach them a lesson."

I think they heard me because within half an hour they had returned to the 'nuc' box and were lining up to get back inside. It was a good decision because it's been raining all day!


If the queen starts laying again they'll remain in the box, but why did she stop laying in the first place?

Well it wasn't the 'VapoRub'. Instead it was a strict diet that the bees had put the queen on so that she could lose weight and be able to fly.

I wonder whether Michael O'Leary has contemplated a similar strategy for those wanting fly Ryanair?

Saturday 2 August 2014

Show me the honey!

This year's summer honey is good - really good.

I knew it was going to be particularly tasty when I saw what the bees were foraging on: White clover - which gives the honey a wonderful floral aroma; lime blossom - which provides a hint of mint; and small quantities of lavender, oregano, verbena, veronica and countless other flowers, including knapweed.

Honey fresh from the comb
Knapweed makes a dark-coloured honey which has a taste reminiscent liquorice, and when first saw the honey in the honey buckets I was concerned it would taste like a well-known brand from Bassett's!

However, the hay in Stag Meadow was cut earlier than normal this year, just as the knapweed was in flower. Besides killing a thousand or more foraging bees with the grass-cutters, the loss of forage resulted in a smaller honey crop.

But what was lost in quantity has been made up for in quality because there is just enough knapweed in the honey to give it a rich golden colour with a nuance of liquorice, but not enough to detract from the other flavours.

Special Reserve Honey
Better still, there's no bitter after-taste which seemed to mar much of the local honey last year. This year's crop looks good, and tastes even better.

Talking of Tastes - I'll suggest to Karen that she keeps this honey as a 'Special Reserve' for those who really appreciate great local food.

Not that the less discerning should worry; it's been a good year for the bees and I'm sure there will be plenty of other local honey available - just not as good as mine!

Saturday 28 June 2014

Housing the homeless

Bees take a very pragmatic approach to housing the younger generation; Mum simply moves out leaving a perfectly good home for the kids to raise a family.

This makes sense. The youngsters are strong and virile, so providing a home in a desirable location helps ensure survival of the next generation. But it does leave Mum with a problem - she finds herself homeless.

Not that she's on her own. Usually when she leaves the hive the old queen takes about 10,000 workers with her in a swarm. Initially the swarm rests somewhere before sending out scout bees to find new lodgings. However, this lack of forward planning means that the bees can be homeless for days. Sometimes they die, especially if they are a small swarm, but mostly they find new accommodation  in someone's house or garden shed, which is when the trouble really starts.

If they're lucky a beekeeper will coax the bees out of their newly found cavity and into a hive, but often times swarms are a nuisance and are destroyed by pest control companies.

So you will understand the sense of urgency we had earlier this week when we went to collect a swarm that had settled on an old apple tree.

The swarm had arrived that afternoon, but by the time we got there it was raining and getting dark. In the gloaming we could make out the bees on the trunk of the tree ... and on a branch .... and on another branch ... and on another branch. This swarm was huge; probably 30,000 bees!

Catching 30,000 bees in the pouring rain at dusk is not easy, but two hours later we had most of them inside a small box (called a nuc), with a thousand still queuing to get in. The nuc was evidently too small, but by carefully wrapping the box and remaining bees in a sheet we managed to safely get them into the car.

These bees really needed a full size hive, but because there have been so many swarms this year there is no spare kit available, which is causing a housing crisis. With a bit of juggling the bees could be re-homed in a day or two, but in the meantime there was a risk they might decide to decamp to somewhere better.

My worst fears were confirmed that evening - the nuc box was empty!

I was gutted - until I noticed that the hive next door was over-flowing with bees.

It seems the swarm had simply decided to squat in their neighbour's hive, and the incumbents accepted them willingly rather than leave them homeless.

I think we could learn something from bees. What do you think?

Friday 30 May 2014

In praise of pants

Unlike the Duchess of Cambridge, beekeepers should  never go commando. Let me explain why.

My bees are fairly placid, but some bees can be really nasty as I was reminded yesterday. I was helping my bee-buddy with his hives. It had rained for the last week and we expected the bees would be tetchy, especially as the day before he had removed some honey. Tetchy is an understatement; before we got within 20 yards of the apiary we were being attacked.

 'We'll start with the feisty hive first,' he suggested. On reflection this was not the smartest strategy, but I was well protected with my veil and gloves.....or so I thought.

When bees are annoyed they buzz around your face trying to ward you off, and when they are angry they 'ping' off the veil because they fly so hard at you, but when bees go ballistic.... they burrow! They crawl all over you looking for any gap in your armour and if one manages to sting it releases pheromones that direct the other bees to your weak point.

'Ouch!' One managed to get me on the back of the neck delivering it's sting right through the bee suit. She was lucky, the material must have been close to my skin for a moment and she seized her chance, but such a long shot did no real harm.

More worrying were the bees on my legs. They'd worked out that my trousers had worn a bit thin on the thighs. Then some discovered the trousers had pockets and went burrowing, whilst others found the gap between my legs and Wellington boots and headed down to my feet, intent ascending my trousers on the inside.

I beat a retreat, initially 50 yards, but they were still going for me so I carried on walking. At 200 yards the flying bees finally left me, but I still had to deal with the burrowers!

I gingerly emptied my pockets - bees! Then my boots - more bees! Then off came the veil - no bees thankfully, .... but I could feel something tickling my leg. I dropped my trousers. I'm not sure who was more embarrassed, me or the bee, but she gave up all notion of further attack and flew away - laughing, I suspect.

I had 6 stings on one leg and 4 on the other, some perilously close to .... well let's just say, 'Thank goodness for pants!'

My bee-buddy toughed it out with no stings. I was astonished.

'Do your trousers have pockets?' I asked.

'No,' he replied smugly.

Nevertheless I expressed surprise that he hadn't been stung through his trousers, as I had.

He smiled. 'I'm wearing two pairs,' he explained.

I didn't ask if he was dressed 'comme la duchesse'.

Sunday 18 May 2014

Tell them about the honey, mummy!

You've got to be quick with rape honey - as soon as the flowers start to fade the honey has to be off the hive and into the extractor, otherwise it sets rock solid in the comb.
I wasn't quick ........ I went on holiday instead and after I got back it rained and rained. So when I finally got into the hive earlier this week I wasn't sure whether I would need a honey extractor or a pneumatic drill!
Initial signs were encouraging - I couldn't lift the top box because of the weight of honey. Instead I had to resort to removing the frames two at a time and carrying them into the house, having first carefully brushed off the bees. Twenty frames later and all the honey was safely inside and a number of rather angry bees were buzzing around outside.
As I started to uncap the honey comb with a knife it became immediately obvious that some of the honey had already crystallised, which meant extraction was going to be tricky: Spin the extractor too quickly and the honeycomb would fly apart; spin it too slowly and the liquid honey would stubbornly remain in the comb.
Three hours later I had one smashed comb and about 10 lb of honey remaining firmly set in the frames. But best of all I had 40 of these:


40lb of spring honey off one hive is a respectable result, but as you can see, it has already set in the jar just 4 days after extraction.
There's one consolation -  at least the Honey Monster won't be able to get his paws into it!

Thursday 1 May 2014

A foxy tale

Foxes eat bees.
Well they eat bumble bees for sure because I watched an emaciated old fox wandering around the flower beds one afternoon last summer snapping at them, so you can imagine my consternation at seeing a young vixen sniffing around the hives early one morning this week.
I wasn't too concerned about the large hive - it's over five foot high and full of honey, there's no way a fox could topple it. But a couple of weeks ago I created a little colony of bees which is housed in a small box, and sure enough, the fox went over to it, then back on to it's hind legs to reach up to the hive and poked it's nose in the entrance hole.
"Oh no!" I thought, "she's going to tip it over...."
Both the fox and I assumed that because the bees weren't flying at that early hour, they must be sound asleep. Not so - the guard bees were clearly vigilant because as soon as the fox poked her nose in the entrance hole she leaped back in surprise!
Was she stung on the nose? I don't think so because she didn't dance around in agony. I suspect they just gave her an angry buzz, which was enough to send her running.

Thursday 17 April 2014

Fields of gold

With prices for oil seed rape currently at £330 per ton most farmers might not agree that this is a field of gold, but the owner who lives in the castle in the background seems to be doing all right!
Fields of gold in Windsor Great Park
 For sure, oilseed rape is 'gold' for my bees because over the last week or so they have been frantically working this field. Already one 'super' has been filled with about 30 lb of honey and they are starting to fill a second box. What a turn around compared to last year (see Oh crapus - there's no B. napus!).
Better still, the field in the foreground contains field beans which should start to flower in the about a month, just as the rape is fading and before the wild flowers in Stag Meadow come into bloom. It should be a good year provided the weather holds.
However, there's a Sting in the 'tale' - your man was singing about barley!





Friday 28 March 2014

When the south wind doth blow..

We're off!
The wind switched from a cold north easterly to a warm southerly breeze at 1.00 pm today and out came the sun .... and the bees; hundreds of them!
They had been more or less hive-bound except for the occasional 'comfort' flight. Even so, I knew from a pile of wax cappings underneath the hive that lots of new bees had emerged over the the last 7-10 days and they would be curious to experience the outside world; today they had their chance.
Initially most of the youngsters were engaged in short play flights (see Biggles learns to fly) which ended with them resting on the hive roof, panting to get their breath back. But within an hour they could be seen 'foraging' on various flowers around the hive such as forget-me-not, grape hyacinth, pierus, rosemary and heather. I say 'foraging' because it was the half hearted effort of a novice that has yet to learn her trade. That's going to change over the next 24 hours because I can see the rape fields in the distance are turning yellow by the day. It's going to stay warm so by this time tomorrow a more senior forager will have found that rape and all those youngsters will get their flying directions. Then the nectar gathering will start in earnest.
It's time to put another box on the hive and with luck and good weather in 2 weeks time it will be loaded with of honey.

Saturday 22 March 2014

Who you gonna call?

Ghost Busters!
Something spooky is going on around the apiary; there are yellow ghostly figures gliding around before disappearing into the hives. Initially I thought they were some sort of exotic wasp, but its too early in the year and they were the wrong shade of yellow. Moreover, these things were translucent and seemed to glow....
One landed on the outside of a hive and I had to laugh. It's was just a worker bee that had been out collecting pollen. Usually pollen is neatly collected in pollen sacks on the back legs, but this bee looked like it had fallen in a bucket of yellow powder paint; it was covered. It could only mean one thing - the pussy willows are in flower.
Pussy willow produces masses of pollen at a critical time the when the colonies are building up, which is just as well because bees eat a lot of pollen - between 20 and 60 kg per hive per year!
Pollen contains proteins and fats required to raise brood, but it's not very appetising. So instead the bees store it in the comb together with a some bee-spit, and leave it to ferment. Various yeasts and bacteria get to work on the pollen and the result is a sort of 'pollen sauerkraut' known as 'bee bread'.
Bee bread builds better bees because its packed with vitamins, thanks all that microbial activity. Better still queens that are fed lots of bee bread lay more eggs - which means more brood, and more bees.
That's just as well because the oilseed rape is starting to flower in the fields around Flemish farm and I need all the bees I can get to bring in the spring honey crop.

Sunday 23 February 2014

Killer bees?

It's been a mild winter and on sunny days the bees have been out gathering pollen. Until recently it was light grey pollen from the snowdrops, but yesterday I noticed heavily laden sacks of bright orange pollen being bought into the hives. That could only mean one thing - the bees were working the crocuses.
I checked a patch I'd planted last summer and sure enough, there was a bee rummaging around inside a flower. On closer observation it appeared that the only way she could get at the pollen was to poke her head right into the middle of the stamens and give them a good shake. The result was a bee with a ridiculous bright orange head! Hardly the face of killer, you would think, but research published this week in Nature suggests otherwise. It seems diseases that infect honey bees also infect bumblebees, and transmission is from honey bee to bumblebee, not the other way around.
This is surprising. Honey bees have relatively short tongues and therefore don't usually work the same flowers as bumblebees. From time to time I have seen a bumblebee and a honey bee in the same flower, poppies for example, but just for seconds; surely not enough time to transmit an infection?
But the DNA evidence is damming; bumblebees are getting Deformed Wing Virus infections from honey bees, and this is probably contributing to bumblebee decline.
Thankfully nobody is suggesting culling the UK honey bee population, but there is now an even greater requirement of beekeepers to ensure their bees are healthy. That means controlling varroa mite, because more varroa means more Deformed Wing Virus, which means more chance of infecting wild bumble bees.
My orange-headed honey bee was too comical to be a killer bee, but the consequences of poor beekeeping on my part is no longer a laughing matter.

Saturday 1 February 2014

Comfort food

The last 45 days have been the wettest in almost 250 years. We can thank the Radcliffe Meteorological Station at Oxford University for this fact; it is the oldest weather station in the world, founded in 1767, and there is no doubt it's been wet, really wet....but not cold.

This is not good for the bees because if it's warm the queen keeps laying and the bees use a lot of energy looking after the brood. More energy means eating more food, so they are rapidly using up their winter stores.

I'm not overly concerned. Last autumn I decided to feed them sugar syrup and they should have plenty left, but I can't be certain without opening up the hive, and it's far too cold for that! So I've decided to err on the side of caution and feed them doughnuts. Well not the entire doughnut, rather the fondant icing that goes in or over the typical doughnut.

You see, making fondant is a bit tricky; get it wrong and its either rock hard or runny. Some beekeepers get around this problem by purchasing ready made fondant from the supermarket but that usually contains glycerine as a softener, and bees don't normally eat glycerine.

Not so the fondant in doughnuts; this is made of sucrose and glucose syrups only, and carefully blended to give the right consistency - not too hard, not too soft.

Fortunately our local doughnut fryer is sympathetic to the needs of my bees and he lets me have some fondant as a freebie when the need arises. I don't eat doughnuts, which I consider a comfort food, so there's nothing in it for him.

But if this weather continues I might start!

Thursday 2 January 2014

Mite massacre

Result!
Thirty four dead mites in the first 48 hours following treatment with my home made 'napalm' (see previous post). Another 10 or so mites will probably drop over the next 24 hours and then then the treatment effect will wear off. Overall oxalic acid is about 95% effective, so it looks as though there were about 40-50 mites in the hive; well within the range I had estimated in my last post.
Moreover, all the dead mites were fully grown adults. This is encouraging because it suggests that there is very little bee brood in the hive right now. Those adult mites (which are all female) were waiting for the queen to start laying again so that they could lay their eggs on the bee larvae. When the baby mites hatch they feed on the developing bees and grow, then reproduce and lay more eggs, so by the time the new bee emerges it's covered in mites and infected with viruses.
I doubt I've killed all the mites in the colony but they have certainly been knocked back. Once the queen starts laying again in the next few weeks there should be plenty of health brood, which augers well for a strong colony come spring.
Best of all the 'napalm' hasn't done too much harm to the bees; it's warm today and dozens of them were flying around the hive taking a 'comfort break'.