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?

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'.

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!

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.