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!