Napalm for bee-giners

Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind and today was one of those occasions; it was my annual acid attack on the hives.
For the last 10 days I have been counting the number of varroa mites dropping off the bees on to the hive floor. The daily average was 0.3 which suggests there are between 35 and 130 adult mites in the colony. That's not usually regarded as high enough to warrant intervention, but I decided to treat my bees for two reasons:

• It's been very windy so some dead mites may have been blown away
• The cluster of bees is fairly small so the mite density is higher than 'average'

Varroa mites kill bees and also spread nasty viruses so timely treatment now should help my little colony to be in top condition by spring. The problem is there are so few treatment options. The mites in this area are resistant to approved mitocides and it's too cold to use thymol, so instead I have resorted to oxalic acid which is the bee-equivalent of napalm!
I'm not kidding: Acid is added to a sugar solution and then poured over the bees - it's sticky and it burns.
Get it right and the acid is just strong enough to burn the claws off those horrid varroa mites so that they drop off the bees, but if you get it wrong you will have a smoking pile of dead bees.
Non-scientists are best advised to purchase a commercially prepared solution, but my reading of the literature suggests that these are too potent for bees in our climatic zone, so I make my own.
I just hope I've got my maths right....

Robobee

It's cold so all is quiet around the hive.... but if you press your ear against the roof and listen very carefully you will hear mutterings of consternation - the bees are discussing 'Robobee', a bug-sized unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) or 'drone' being developed at Harvard.

Calling a UAV a 'drone' is offence enough to a honey bee, but what's really got the colony buzzing is the suggestion that Robobees could be used to provide pollination services to farmers.

Thus far the bees had been feeling rather self-important; average earnings in the USA had risen to 1 cent a month (see Workers Wages) and attempts by Chinese apple growers to hand-pollinate blossom with a paint brush dipped in a bag of pollen was proving an expensive failure. Even aerial bombardment of crops with pollen had flopped, producing lower quantities and smaller fruit.

It seemed as though agriculturalist were finally accepting that monoculture and indiscriminate use of insecticides was not a good way to farm; hedgerows, judicious insecticide use, and wild-flower field margins were the way forward, .... until Robobee appeared.

Suddenly the bees are feeling less secure. So what if they are wiped out - Robobee will fly to the rescue and pollinate those apples, almonds, onions, alfalfa etc .... for a fee.

The technical challenges of producing a UAV pollinator are enormous, which is part of the attraction for academics, as are the commercial gains for the tech giants should we succeed in destroying our insect pollinators.

But there's one thing they've overlooked. Robobee won't make honey, so there's hope for my bees yet.

Batten down the hatches

The Met Office has issued an 'Amber Alert'; there's a storm coming.
Wise beekeepers have secured their hives to stop the roofs flying off; the foolish will leave it to chance and risk killing their colonies.
There is an upside - with a force 10 gale at least none of us will be worried about hive ventilation over the next 24 hours!
However,once the storm has passed, the 'ventilation debate' will continue. That's because beekeepers basically fall into two groups: Top ventilators and bottom ventilators.
Personally, I'm a 'bottom' man because I use open mesh floors on my hives, which effectively means the bottom of the hive is open to the elements. You would think that would provide more than enough fresh air for my colonies, but apparently not. Last spring when I opened up my hives I noticed there was black mould all over the inside walls, which suggested inadequate ventilation.
Initially I was surprised because there was no problem with ventilation the previous winter. But then I remembered there were two important differences: Firstly, the hive was 3 boxes high rather than the usual 2, and secondly I had left the dummy boards in situ.
As a result the warm fug from the cluster of bees rose up to the top of the hive, cooled on the roof, and then slid down the sides, condensing on the dummy boards and walls, leaving them damp.
This winter I've left the dummy boards out and the stack is just two boxes high, so the air should be able to move freely around the hive.
I suspect it's already moving quite freely and will be even more so by tonight when those 60 mph winds set in!

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.