Hum bug

Beekeepers must stop being happy-clappy groupies for the eco-lobby and start telling the truth about honey bees;

THEY ARE NOT DYING OUT!

They never were, though if you'd be forgiven for thinking so if you rely on the popular press. Here are some typical alarmist headlines from British newspapers in the last 12 months:

"Humans are to blame for wiping out honeybees" - Daily Mail (5/2/2016)

"Honey bees are being killed off in Europe by 57 pesticides" - The Independent (11/3/2016)

"Honey bee crisis deepens as die-offs surge" - The Daily Telegraph (14/5/2015)

It's not just the popular press – even scientific news sources can't resist alarmist headlines:

"U.S. beekeepers lost 40 percent of bees in 2014 -15" - wailed Science Daily earlier this year. They're not kidding; here are the percentage annual losses for U.S honey bee colonies over the last 5 years:

2010/11	2011/12	2012/13	2013/14	2014/15
-37%	-28%	-45%	-34%	-42%

It looks horrendous. There were 2 ½ million colonies of bees in the USA in 2010 so based these losses you might calculate that there are now only 239,000 hives remaining*, but the actual number of hives is 2.66 million. Its gone up!

It's the same in Europe – the number of managed honey bee colonies has risen from 11 million in 2000 to over 12 million today. Hardly bee-mageddon!

So what's happening? Well the annual loses data above is based upon the 15 – 20% of beekeepers that bother responding to surveys so there's potential for bias – if you've had a particularly bad year you may be more likely to respond to a survey about colony losses.

But the real sleight of hand is the failure to mention that honey bees can easily double their numbers in one season by swarming, something many of us will notice in the coming weeks when the swarming season begins.

So even though U.S annual losses data isn't good, it's not disastrous. The situation across Canada and Europe is better with winter losses last year of around 17% - easily manageable.

Indeed what's perhaps more surprising, given the bees ability to double their numbers in one season, is why the number of hives isn't increasing more rapidly, but there's a simple explanation: Beekeepers merge their surplus colonies each year to keep things manageable … and profitable.

Yes – global economics is driving growth in the number of honey bees. Over the last 10 years high prices for manuka honey have led to a doubling in the number of bee hives in New Zealand (from 300,000 to 600, 000), and countries like China and Argentina have contributed to the relentless growth in global honey production, which is now at a record 1.6 million tons p.a.

So why all the scary headlines about honey bee decline? Well it's a combination of conspiracy and cock-up.

The conspiracy comes from those who gain from bee-mageddon. Tariffs on foreign honey are easier to obtain if national honey bees are thought to be 'at risk'. Suppliers of equipment, training and beekeeping publications make money from newbie hobbyists trying to 'save the bees'. Academics receive generous research funding, and politicians win plaudits.

Then there's the eco-lobby which too often is prepared play fast and loose with the truth in their perpetual war with the agro-chemical industry. According to Greenpeace;

“ Worldwide bee colony collapse is not as big a mystery as the chemical industry claims.”

Indeed! The reason it's not a 'big mystery' is because it isn't happening!

Cock-up is down to sloppy journalism. Most scribblers don't know a honey bee from hover-fly. When scientists rightly raise concerns about our 'native wild pollinators', this gets translated as 'bee' and to the average hack 'bee' means 'honey bee'. So they write about honey bees rather than the 2,000 other species that are actually at risk.

Its a shame. Well meaning folk are becoming beekeepers to 'save the bees' when a much better approach would be support activities that help our wild pollinators. For example:

• Don't pave over your garden and support the RHS's 'Greening Grey Britain' initiative
• Don't cut your grass when the dandelion and clover is in bloom
• Wash your car rather than lobbying to have trees cut down 
• Plant pollinator friendly flowers and trees
• Encourage your local authority, school, employer and other land owners to grow pollinator friendly flowers rather than the usual garish sterile hybrids

Oh – and buy local honey! (Well I would say that!)

Then you really will hear the bugs hum, rather than humbug about honey bee decline.

*Here's the calculation:
2,500,000 x (1-0.37) x (1 – 0.28) x (1 -0.45) x (1 – 0.34) x (1 – 0.42) = 239,000

Pixie Dust

My honey contains pixie dust, golden pixie dust.

The bees pick it up when they're visiting flowers for nectar and pollen. Not all flowers have pixie dust, it's found mostly on wild flowers although you will find it on some garden flowers.

Of course, the flowers themselves don't produce pixie dust, they just get coated in it when the fairies start throwing it around. You will know if you have a fairy-friendly garden, and if you do the bees will be inadvertently gathering pixie dust.

The pixie dust content of honey varies enormously. Some mono-floral honeys contain none, which is hardly surprising as you'll not find fairies in those monotonous fields of sunflowers or oilseed rape. Wild flower honey contains lots of pixie dust, but it's easily destroyed.

Pasteurisation ruins pixie dust when the honey is heated up to 70 degrees or more for a few minutes to kill of all the yeasts. Ultra-filtration which strips most of the pollen from honey also removes pixie dust. Most small scale UK honey producers do neither so there's a good chance your local honey contains pixie dust.

The problem is that pixie dust is difficult to quantify because analytical tests destroy the very thing they are trying to measure. As a result you seldom see pixie dust mentioned in the contents of honey.

Instead, purveyors of honey use words like 'full of natural goodness' to indicate its presence, or they'll refer to 'natural vitamins', 'living enzymes' or 'nutritional elements' – all code for pixie dust.

Pixie dust accounts for the medicinal properties of honey. It explains why honey is a powerful immune system booster, a digestive, a tonic, a treatment for cancer, sore throats, hang-overs, insomnia and of course, hay fever. Admittedly the scientific evidence is weak, but that's because most studies failed to use raw wild-flower honey. Anyway science is over-rated; you just have to believe as Peter Pan says:

All you need is faith and trust... and a little bit of pixie dust!

Sceptics will doubt my honey contains pixie dust.“If your honey contains pixie dust why don't your customers fly?”

It's a ridiculous argument. Of course honey doesn't make you fly. To get airborne you have to sprinkle pixie dust, not eat it!

Aromatherapy for Bees

Do you know what drives bees bananas?

Bananas!

Well not the banana itself, but the smell of bananas. Just a whiff is enough to make bees go ballistic. Bananas should really carry a health warning:

Bananas can cause bee attacks – do not picnic on bananas unless wearing protective clothing

You'll never catch beekeepers eating bananas because they know that the chemical that gives bananas that distinctive smell is the same chemical that bees use as a sting alarm pheromone. It's called isoamyl acetate, or more commonly, banana oil.

Isoamyl acetate is widely used as a flavouring, from pear drops to banana-flavoured yoghurt, and it's even used in some varnishes and lacquers. It smells nice – just like bananas!

But the bees hate it because the smell of isoamyl acetate means there's trouble, which means they're going to sting someone and then they're going to die.

It all starts with the guard bees which spend their time patrolling the hive entrance keeping out intruders. Usually there are four or five guards though if the colony is being harassed, by wasps for example, the guard may increase to 20 bees. That normally suffices but every now and then the guards can't cope with an intruder, so they call for reinforcements.

They do this by extending their stinger and releasing isoamyl acetate from a gland at its base. To make sure the odour of banana rapidly diffuses through the hive the guards fan their wings at the same time. The response can be spectacular; dozens of soldier bees rush out of the hive looking for a fight.

That's usually the moment when you see a beekeeper frantically puffing away with their smoker in an attempt to try and mask the smell of bananas and calm the bees down – but it doesn't help. What they should try instead is aromatherapy.

For those unfamiliar with quack medicine aromatherapy 'offers some of the best remedies for easing stress by using natural oils to enhance psychological and physical well-being'.

Probably tosh, but it seems that when it comes to bees there is scientific evidence showing that certain flower oils really do make bees less aggressive. A recent study found linalool (found in lavender oil) and 2-phenylethanol (found in rose oil) significantly reduced aggression in honey bees enraged by the sting alarm pheromone, and the effect was not simply due to the pong of flowers masking the scent of bananas.

Instead, what seems to be happening is that the soldier bees get two scent messages; the one from the banana oil says 'Go out and die for your colony!' but the one from the lavender oil says ...

'Lunch anyone?'

And given the choice between certain death and the promise of a little snack, soldier bees choose the snack.

Most beekeepers wont be surprised by this; during a strong nectar flow the hives are fragrant with the smell of flowers and bees are very calm.

I'm going to try aromatherapy instead of using my smelly old smoker. Lavender flowers (fresh or dried) infused in hot water, then allowed to cool and filtered into a plant sprayer. A few sprays at the hive entrance and a few more when the roof is off should suffice.

But just in case it doesn't work, I'll put a dab or two of 2-phenylethonol behind my ears to ensure that what ever happens, I still come out of the experiment smelling of roses!

1. “Appetitive floral odours prevent aggression in honey bees” Nouvian et al. Nature Communications 6, 10247 (Dec. 2015)

The Cling-ons

Some bees are bad ... really bad. In fact some are downright evil!

This may surprise some readers who blithely assume one honey bee is much like another, but most bee-keepers will know better. Bees may not have individual personalities, but each hive certainly has it's own characteristics.

Good bees are calm. They're the sort you see in those photos of people sporting a bee-beard or handling bees in a T-shirt and shorts. It's the result of good breeding.

Most bees aren't like that. My Berkshire mongrels are relatively well behaved, but not mellow enough for me to forego a veil and gloves. Their bad behaviour manifests itself in several different ways:

There are the 'Meeters and Greeters' – those troublemakers who save you the bother of visiting the hives by flying up the garden path to meet you. It's best to be fully kitted-up before going out if you have these bad girls in your apiary.

Next the 'Followers' – they just follow you like a black cloud as you move from hive to hive and back again to the house. It's annoying, but they're not usually much trouble.

More spectacular are the 'Pingers' – these bees fly with such ferocity at you're face that you can hear them pinging off the veil. They make bee-keeping stressful but you don't suffer much harm ... provided your veil is intact!

Then there are the 'Burrowers' – they're sly and will be quietly investigating every fold, seam and hole in your clothing to find a way to get inside and sting you. Burrowers will crawl up your trousers, through the cuffs of your sleeves, in between the tiny gap in the zip of your veil. They're the one's you find on the inside your bee suit, next to your face. Fortunately by the time most burrowers have reached their destination they have often forgotten why they're attacking you and are more concerned about making their own escape.

But the worst of all the bad bees are the 'Cling-ons'. They just hang onto you and wait for a chance to get even ….

I have a hive of Cling-ons at the moment. They were a swarm of bees I reluctantly collected in Eton last June. Nobody else wanted them so I cobbled together some kit to give them a home. This proved to be a thankless task because within weeks it was clear that these Eton girls were not as well behaved as our Eton boys - they lack breeding.

This was confirmed when I spotted the queen – she was unmarked and had led a primary swarm, which suggests that she had either come from a feral colony, or more likely an apiary where the bee-keeper had been too scared to manage such aggressive bees properly. Instead they were allowed to swarm, and probably swarmed again and again. Worse still the area was contaminated with drones spreading bad tempered genes into neighbouring apiaries.

My Cling-ons are manageable at the moment even though they hang on to my bee suit in out-of-sight and difficult-to-reach places which makes getting changed afterwards hazardous. But come the summer when there are 50,000 bees in the hive the thought of a hundred or more Cling-ons all over my veil and suit is no laughing matter. So they'll have to go.

Trekkies can relax - I wont be needing the services of the Star Ship 'Enterprise' to deal with these Cling-ons. Come the spring I'll kill the queen and unite the remaining bees and brood with a better behaved colony.

Not that good manners are learnt – they'll continue to be bad bees until the day they die, but at least I'll get some useful work from them in the meantime.  

Blossom must never fly from bee to bee to bee

'The King and I' need to have a conversation about the birds and the bees because he's got it so, so wrong. Here's his justification for polygyny:

A girl must be like a blossom with honey for just one man

A man must be like a honey bee and gather all he can!

To fly from blossom to blossom a honey bee must be free

But blossom must never fly from bee to bee to bee!

I can't imagine Blossom or any other woman agreeing with him, but the irony is that bees practice another form of polygamy – polyandry! Each queen gathers all the males she can and those lucky fellows that consummate the act promptly drop dead (read - It's raining men).

And it's just a small point but those bees that 'gather all they can' - they're female!

The King of Siam in the 1956 movie musical clearly knew nothing about bees, but now it appears he was wrong about the flowers too.

It's well known that flowers do their utmost to attract visitors by looking pretty, smelling nice and offering a sip from the honey pot. But they also do something else to help them 'fly' from bee to bee to bee – they use drugs!

Memory-enhancing substances in the nectar can improve the bees recall about where the flowers are located and a good dose of caffeine to boot, guarantees those bees will be dancing like demons when they get back to their hive. Bees dance to tell the rest of the colony about good food sources and the more vigorous the dancing the greater the eagerness for other bees to pay a visit to young Blossom.

So far from having honey for just one bee, the flowers in effect 'fly from bee to bee to bee'. Fair enough, but there's a downside to Blossom's promiscuity – infectious diseases! Every tongue probing the flower nectaries risks leaving or picking up a nasty infection, and not just from other honey bees. Bumble bees can also transmit diseases like nosema to honey bees visiting the same flower, and vice versa.

It's not normally a problem; bees have been visiting flowers for millions of years, but if disease carrying bumble bees or honey bees are bought into an area, local infection rates can spike. This is particularly so when flowers are scarce because the remaining few get many more visitors.

There's a simple remedy; plant more flower. That way each flower will have fewer visitors and harbour less disease, and even more nectar for those that do call.

The Ministry of Bees

I got a warning letter from the Ministry of Bees last month. Government inspectors had found that many hives of bees were close to starving, so the Ministry wrote to all beekeepers urging them to check that their bees had enough food.

I wasn't surprised - August is a terrible month for bees because there are so few flowers. Sure, bees living near the waterways may have purple loosestrife and Himalayan balsam to visit, but for most there are only slim pickings in suburban gardens.

Not that it should be a problem - strong colonies make 50 - 100 lb of honey during the summer which is more than enough to see them through to next year, so all would be fine, except for one thing. The beekeeper!

Greedy or incompetent bee-keepers strip the hives of all their summer honey. If the bees are 'lucky' they get fed sugar syrup and if they aren't .... they starve. The rapacious logic is simple; honey sells for £5/lb whereas sugar costs 25p/lb.

I wasn't concerned about the letter. I'd taken a good honey crop but still left my bees with plenty to see them through to the end of September - but not longer!

I'm relying on the ivy which is just coming into flower. Ivy produces lots of very sweet nectar which is almost 50% sugar. It's so concentrated that on warm sunny days you can see crystals of sugar glistening on the flowers. The bees, wasps and red admiral butterflies all love it!

But many beekeepers don't. The high glucose content of ivy honey causes it to crystalise in the honeycomb.  Beekeepers worry that their bees may not be able to access enough water in the winter months to dissolve the honey, resulting in starvation.

Come the spring any ivy honey left in the comb blocks up the brood nest and has to be removed, but the only way to remove the honey is to heat the comb, which destroys it. Worse still, ivy honey doesn't taste very nice.

So to stop their bees making ivy honey many beekeepers keep feeding their bees sugar solution - gallons of it.

Their bees seem to do well, but it doesn't feel right to me. Instead I let my bees make all the ivy honey they can. Even on the coldest days of winter condensation in the hive will provide sufficient moisture, and come the spring any frames of uneaten honey will be set aside to feed any colonies that need a honey top-up.

There is a risk - if the weather is really bad over the next month the bees may not collect enough ivy nectar, and it may then be too cold for an emergency sugar solution feed.

But you have to have faith in these things - such is the ministry of bees!

The cheats among the runners

Bees earn a lot of air miles during August, but it’s no holiday.

On average they will fly four kilometres to forage this month compared to just 400 meters in spring. It's necessary because of a shortage of flowers; most wild flowers have gone over so the bees are spending more time foraging around gardens and allotments.

Competition is intense and choice limited; just spend a few minutes watching insect activity on buddleia or oregano and you will see butterflies, bumblebees, hover flies and honey bees all competing for the nectar. When competition is this tough it’s hardly surprising that someone decides to cheat.... like this young lady.

She’s in our local allotment stealing nectar from runner bean flowers. Normally flowers provide nectar to bees in exchange for pollination services, but this little minx has decided to skip scrambling around inside the flower and is helping herself to the nectar by sipping it directly from a hole in the corolla tube.

It’s easy honey. But although it looks bad on the honey bee, someone else cheated first.

A bumble bee! Both the white-tailed and the buff-tailed bumble bees bite holes at the bottom of runner bean flowers so that they can get to the nectar without having to clamber inside.

When a honey bee lands on the flower the first thing she does is check whether a bumble bee has already punctured the flower. Although the bumble bee will have taken most of the nectar there’s always some left over, and it’s easy work.

In the mornings most flowers haven’t been visited by bumble bees so there’s no hole. Instead the honey bee climbs inside the flower to get a full dose of nectar in exchange for pollinating the flower. But by late afternoon most flowers have been holed, so climbing inside would be a waste of effort.

The honey bees are just being sensible - the bumble bees are the real cheats. 

So if your runner beans aren't setting you know who to blame. Although in the round bumble bees do a great job in the allotment pollinating all sorts of plants, ... like courgettes!

(Can you ever have too many?)

The Changing of the Guard

Bees work hard to make honey -they fly 50,000 miles collecting nectar from millions of flowers just to make a pound. At the moment strong hives contain 50 – 100 lb of honey, some even as much as 200 lb. It’s a valuable resource that will see the colony through winter, so it has to be guarded!

Most of the year a hive has around 10 guard bees on duty. They linger around the hive entrance ready to challenge potential intruders regardless of their intent; the innocent ladybird that wanders into the hive will be ejected just as vigorously as a thieving wasp, or a bee from another colony.

Distinguishing nest mates from other honey bees isn't easy – you have to get up close ...  and sniff! Bees that smell like family are allowed to pass, and those that don’t get ‘done over’. Wise bees submit and are allowed to fly off; those that struggle are killed.

Now that the honey stores are so large and the flow of nectar from the flowers is slowing, the guard is changing. Their numbers have increased substantially, and they are hyper-vigilant. They need to be too – because there are robbers about!

Wasps are the worst offenders. They can overwhelm a colony of bees and steal all the honey. Of course, the bees don’t give up without a fight, but a wasp can sting and sting again, whereas a bee can only sting once. For every dead wasp there are five dead bees; small hives don’t stand a chance.

Other honey bees can be just as bad. A poorly guarded hive is fair game for neighbouring bees looking for a free lunch. Sometimes the robbing is vicious –the weaker hive is simply overwhelmed. But often the robbing is silent, with the robbers sneaking into the hive and helping themselves to the honey.

Good guards become over-zealous and challenge all bees entering the hive, including their returning nest-mates! The confusion doesn't last long because in addition to passing the sniff-test the returning foragers just submit and offer up some of their bounty; robbers on the other hand arrive with empty stomachs.

Or empty buckets. I have yet to take off the honey crop so it’s going to be tense! I may be a friend of the honey bee but I'm not family, so I won’t be passing any sniff-test!

Can you Adam ‘n Eve it – I’m trendy!

Trendy urban middle-class beekeepers with ‘more enthusiasm than expertise’ have been blamed for increase swarms of bees in towns across southern England, according to the newspapers.

‘I'm not surprised’ I thought. ‘Monty Don’s encouraging folk to keep bees in their gardens without any thought to disease management and swarm prevention. We don’t need more beekeepers, we need more forage.’

Trendy? More like grumpy .... and just a tiny bit smug. I’d already swarm-controlled one of my hives a few weeks earlier, and I was counting down the days to sorting out another hive when my neighbour mentioned that ‘thousands of bees were flying around this afternoon.’

Impossible! I had it under control, or so I thought. But a quick check of my hive records revealed my error- I was a day out. It takes 8 days for bees to produce a sealed queen cell which then matures for another 8 days before the new queen emerges.  Swarming takes place any time between day 8 and 16, and usually depends upon the weather. It had been a fine day after a period of blustery weather and the bees had swarmed.

I was embarrassed and annoyed. Swarms frighten some people and can be disruptive, although they seldom harm anyone. Responsible beekeepers certainly try to prevent swarming.

With ‘more enthusiasm than expertise’ still ringing in my ears I spoke to two of my most experienced colleagues. They were sympathetic; ‘It’s happened to me too’, and ‘It’s been a funny year for swarms,’ they said.

Some consolation, but I know I should really have paid closer attention to the calendar and counted the days.

Of course for the numerically challenged there is another solution: Clip the queen’s wing, and then she won’t be able to fly anywhere.

This is a tricky operation and some beekeepers develop this ‘skill’ by cutting the wings off drones. They say the bees feel no pain but I'm not so sure. Regardless, I find the notion of mutilating bees to prevent them swarming somewhat disquieting.

So it seems I'm not only trendy, I'm sentimental too!

What do you think? 

It’s raining men!

Hallelujah!

The bees have been living like nuns in a convent these past 8 months – barren sisters led by an old matriarch. But that’s all changing because right now the colonies are raising male bees, called drones, as fast as they can.

Drones don’t do much around the hive except eat and occasionally lift their feet when one of their sisters is doing some cleaning. You’d expect the workers to get irritable with these slouches, but the opposite is true - a happy hive has lots of drones.

Drones are big; almost twice the size of their sisters. They have powerful wings and huge eyes and just one ambition – to mate!

It takes about 2 weeks for a drone to become sexually mature. During this time he will develop his flying and navigation skills and once he’s competent he’ll spend his afternoons hanging out with his brothers and the lads from other hives in a part of the sky known as a drone congregation area. Think of it as a boys’ afternoon out, which it is, until a virgin queen comes along  ....

She’s the ultimate femme fatale who deliberately seeks out these drone congregations. She’s game for certain and the boys know it. A chase through the skies begins as dozens of drones pursue the young queen, all wanting to mate with her.

They should be careful what they wish for! Those with the best eyesight and strongest wings soon catch up with the queen and seize her with their legs, arch their abdomen and immediately penetrate her.

 ‘Hallelujah!’

It’s all over in a second but it blows the drone away ..... from his genitalia! The poor drone, no longer in possession of his tickle-tackle, drops dead to earth. The queen meantime continues her flight with his lost bee-hood still in situ. She’ll mate with several more drones before returning to the hive, with each successful coupling resulting in a cry of ‘Hallelujah!’ and another drone dropping dead from the sky.

So the Weather Girls are right, from a bee’s perspective, it really is raining men!

Spring cleaning

Demolition experts don’t get much credit - plaudits always go to the builder, yet without the work of the demolition crews there would soon be no space to build.

Bees have exactly the same problem: They fill their home with delicate white comb which is used to store honey and pollen and to raise brood, and they eventually run out of space.

Raising brood is messy; every time a new bee emerges from its cell it leaves behind the thin skin of its cocoon. The house-bees quickly clean up any loose material but rather than scrape every last piece of cocoon off the cell walls they simply skim the surface with a bit more wax and polish it ready for the queen to re-lay.

In the course of a year a brood cell may be skimmed and polished 17 times, each time getting a little bit darker and a little bit smaller. Smaller cells means smaller bees, so it’s not surprising that in the wild, bees soon abandon old brown comb and make new white comb for the queen to lay in – provided there’s room!

This is where the demolition experts come in. Little silvery-brown moths lay their eggs in old brood comb and soon the caterpillars are munching their way through the comb, turning it to dust within a few weeks and creating space for the bees to make new comb.

You would think beekeepers would like wax moths – nature’s little demolition experts, but you would be wrong. The caterpillars are routinely squashed, frozen, or infected with lethal bacteria. The reason for the slaughter is simple – many beekeepers force their bees to keep using old brood comb, often for years on end, so that the comb is as black as tar and as thick as cardboard – and perfect for food for wax moths!

The obvious thing to do is remove the old comb, but that’s not so easy using standard hives. At best a diligent beekeeper would change the brood comb every 3 years; hardly surprising there's an ongoing battle with the demolition crew.

I don’t use standard hives so most of my comb is is less than 12 months old. Clean comb means less bee disease as well as bigger bees, but there is a downside - every spring I have dozens of old frames of comb that need cleaning, which takes hours of work.

Of course, I could spare myself the effort and just leave them out for the wax moths!

Another host of golden daffodils?

Now is a critical time for the bees - their stores of honey are low and they have run out of pollen. Without pollen they can't raise brood to replace the old bees, so the colony's survival is at stake. Hardly surprising then that on chilly dry days the bees are out when the rest of us would rather remain indoors!

It's easy to see what they are foraging on by looking at the colour of the pollen collected on their back legs; grey-white means they've been on the snowdrops, bright orange the crocuses, bright yellow is mahonia, and greeny-yellow pollen is from the hellebores.

Yet what is the most widely grown spring flower? The daffodil - pretty, but useless. In fact most flowers grown in the typical English garden are pretty, ... but useless, which is why this spring I'm giving further thought to how to make my garden even more insect pollinator friendly.

It's not as simple as growing plants that are 'Perfect for Pollinators'. Plants that are covered with bees in one location can be totally ignored when grown in my garden. Past 'failures' include agastache, monarda and asters. I don't know if it's the soil, or lack of moisture, or simply that the bees have better pickings elsewhere.

There have been successes: eryngium, solidago, lythrum, erysium, and verbena, but I want my garden humming so I'm always trying something new. This year I'm sowing honeywort (cerinthe), sweet rocket (hesperis), and vipers bugloss (echium) and sneezeweed (helenium autumnale). With luck they will germinate and flourish and be crawling with bees and butterflies.

If you want to help insect pollinators forget those pretty but useless flowers. It's a critical time for bees - so plan to get your garden buzzing.

Please comment if you have any plant suggestions or success stories - either in the comment box below or using the Facebook link.

If trees could walk

“Christmas? That’s 10 months off. Surely there’s a quicker way?” My bee-buddy was dismayed.

“We could move them all to the Chilterns,” I suggested, “That’s well over 3 miles.”

“No way!” he exclaimed, “It would take days to transport all these hives up there.”

We had a conundrum – how to move 13 bee-hives 100 yards from one side of an orchard to the other. Conventional beekeeping wisdom states that you should only move a hive 3 feet every three days, or you should move it more than 3 miles away.

The logic is simple: In the wild bees nest in trees and trees don’t walk. Consequently once a bee has learned where home is it always returns to the same spot; move the ‘tree’ and the bees are totally lost.

Fortunately these ‘rules’ are baloney. I convinced myself of this a few summers ago when I moved my hives 10 yards. If I had followed the book the move would have taken a month. Instead I waited until dusk when the bees were all home and then moved the hives to their new location, taking care to pile a load of branches in front of the entrances before leaving.

The following morning the bees were confused by the mayhem outside their hives so they spent time examining what had happened. In the process they quickly learned the new position of their hive before going off to forage.

In winter time the situation is even easier. During cold snaps the bees remain huddled together in the hive and they soon forget their bearings, so when it warms up they have to spend time re-learning their location.

Rather than taking 10 months to move the hives 100 yards we simply loaded them up on a tractor and trailer and took them off to the new apiary. The weather forecast suggested it would be cold for several days, so most of the bees would forget about their old location. Even so,we decided to leave some old crates leaning against the hive entrances to confuse the bees, just in case there were any smart alecs in residence.

Some beekeepers absolutely refuse to believe you can do this. But the logic is simple: Trees do occasionally ‘walk’ – they fall over!

Honey, get back..

I'm all right Jack keep your paws off of my stack!

There’s quite a stack of honey in the hives right now, thanks to a long warm autumn. Most of it is ivy honey which doesn’t taste very nice and has crystallised in the comb. But the bees like it, so they guard it jealously because it’s their only source of food for next 3 months.

The problem is that as it gets colder the bees huddle closer together to keep warm, so they are not so vigilant. Mice know this!

So they creep into the hive and dine on the honey and wax and any dead bees lying on the hive floor. Sometimes they even move in! It makes sense – the hive is dry and kept warm by the bees vibrating their bodies, and the mouse is surrounded by lots of food.

The trick is to move gently so as not attract too much attention. Sleeping helps - you don’t want to upset 8,000 bees when you are the size of mouse.

Usually beekeepers stop mice getting into their hives by making the entrance very small – too small even for a mouse. I had done just that in October, but the warm weather meant the bees were still very active bringing in lots of pollen, which was then being knocked off their back legs as they scrambled through the narrow hive entrance. So I removed the block and forgot about it.

Just before Christmas I was checking the hives when I noticed an unusual pattern of debris underneath one. Careful inspection confirmed my suspicions – a mouse was getting in because I’d left the entrance block off. Inserting the block is simple enough, but what if the mouse was still inside the hive? I needed to be sure it was mouse-free. There was one way to be certain – kick the hive!

Well, not so much a kick as a good bump on the ground to make the bees angry and startle any mouse. The culprit would then sprint out of the hive with a dozen or so bees on its tail.

In the event no mouse appeared. I wasn’t surprised. Day time temperatures had been relatively high and the bees were actively guarding their honey. It was only at night when the temperatures dropped and the bees were in a huddle that the mouse slipped in ....

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:

https://www.rhs.org.uk/science/conservation-biodiversity/wildlife/encourage-wildlife-to-your-garden/plants-for-pollinators

Natural England also explains how to make a wild flower meadow in your garden in this document:

http://publications.naturalengland.org.uk/file/98029

You can find out more about the National Pollinator Strategy here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-pollinator-strategy-for-bees-and-other-pollinators-in-england

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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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!

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?

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!

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?