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.

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!