Oh crapus - there's no B. napus!

Well it's official - there's no Brassica napus being grown on Flemish Farm this year, which means no spring honey.

Brassica napus, or oilseed rape as it is commonly known, is more than just a flowering turnip that provides oil for chainsaws and chips; it's also the UK's largest source of nectar for honey bees. Last May one of my hives produced 90 lb of honey in 3 weeks when the rape was in flower!

So you might expect beekeepers to love B. napus, but opinion is divided. The main criticism of rape honey is that it has to be extracted as soon as the flowers begin to fade, otherwise the honey sets in the comb like concrete. The other criticism is that the honey is pale and rather bland.

Personally I don't see the problem. Extracting honey is tedious, especially if you have to do it twice in the season, but if you are getting bumper yields it's worth the effort. As for blandness, it seems to me that many people don't like strong flavoured summer honey which is why most commercially produced 'English Honey' is a blend of summer and spring honeys.

This year I'll only have summer honey, which is fine by me... except for one nagging doubt. Take a look at this picture:

The long cold winter not only took it's toll on the bees - the wheat crop also died. Two weeks ago the yellow tufts of dead wheat were ploughed in and last week the field was sown with ....

Oh crapus - I hope it's not B. napus! Spring rape is fine but summer rape will ruin the summer honey crop if it comes into flower the same time as the clover and blackberry!

How to kill bees

My neurotic bees have died. Over the past few weeks the cluster of bees got smaller and smaller until there were insufficient bees to keep the meagre brood warm, and the colony faded away.
It was always an unsatisfactory colony; constantly busy but unproductive. Last summer they produced a new queen and I was hopeful that their characteristics would change, but the neurotic behaviour continued. I could never find the new queen until a few weeks ago when I found her in the diminishing cluster. What a poor specimen she turned out to be - dark and skinny and not much bigger than a worker. "No wonder the bees were anxious" I thought.
But a poor queen does not explain why this colony died, only why it never flourished. The prolonged winter didn't help. Each cold day that passed meant fewer winter bees to keep the brood warm and no fresh pollen coming in to keep it fed.
And that shook swarm weakened the colony further - but shouldn't have killed it because my other colony is doing fine. So what killed this colony?
Well I'd like to say all of the above, but I'd be making excuses because .... I killed the colony.
It was a cock-up rather than a conspiracy. When checking the bees a few weeks ago the solid crownboard that sits on top of the hive got switched with the crownboard with a hole in it to allow the bees access to the feeder. The upshot was that for almost 2 weeks the bees weren't fed.
I'm not best pleased with myself and I realise now why those bees were neurotic - they didn't trust me, and who can blame them.

Don't confuse the issue with facts

So the eco-warriors and the bee-huggers got together for a protest in Parliament Square last Friday. The aim of the stunt was 'to grab the weekend headlines and pile the pressure on' ahead of an EU vote on banning neonicotinoids pesticides. The demo was called 'The March of the Beekeepers' which sounds impressive, except for one small detail; the British Beekeepers Association with it's 23,000 members wasn't involved! Clearly the green lobby is prepared to play fast and loose with the facts in it's ongoing war with the agro-chemical industry.

So why do UK beekeepers appear unconcerned - after all pesticides are wiping out the bees, right?
Well, actually we don't know because the available data are 'unable to demonstrate deleterious effects of neonicotinoids on honey bees managed by beekeepers in the UK.' Moreover, beekeepers are worried that an outright ban might encourage the use of older pesticides that are known to harm honey bees.

Of greater concern are bee diseases and habit degradation. You might have guessed - it's the ag-industry again, but this time it's trashing the environment with endless acres of monoculture ...except you'd be wrong.

Most beekeepers in the UK keep their hives in urban and suburban environments and the bees do very well  thanks to gardens providing all-year-round forage. But with in-fill development we are rapidly destroying these habitats.

What to do - march on Parliament and ban builders? No, just grow better plants and trees for pollinators, don't trim the privet hedge when it's in bloom, and let the clover grow in your lawn rather than trying to kill it with herbicides; it will have far more benefit for bees than banning those pesticides.

Biggles learns to fly

New bees spend the first few weeks of their life doing various jobs inside the hive, but there comes a time when they have to learn to fly: Today was that day. Exactly 2 weeks after I saw evidence of new bees being born (see last post) the youngsters took to the skies.
It was a perfect day for flying, warm and not too windy, so at around 2 pm scores of bees poured out of the hive and started flying....backwards!
There's a reason for this - flying is easy but navigation is difficult. The bees fly backwards a few feet whilst looking at the hive. They then fly from side to side, and eventually into ever widening circles around the hive. All the time they are learning the landmarks that will help then find their way home.
By 3.30 pm these so called 'play flights' were extending 20-30 meters away from the hive and the bees were getting increasingly curious as their confidence built. All sorts of non-forage flowers were investigated and then ignored once they realised there was no useful nectar. All blocks of colour caught their attention - including me in a bright purple T-shirt. Needless to say I had to make a run for it when some bees got a bit too curious!
Tomorrow the playing stops. They will be getting instructions on useful sources of forage from the winter bees and the work begins. Perfect timing because the apple is just coming into blossom.

New bees are fluffy

It takes exactly 3 weeks to make a honey bee. First there's an egg, which hatches into a tiny larva and quickly grows to become a fat white maggot. As if in disgust the bees then entomb the maggot in its cell by capping it over with wax. Slowly the maggot metamorphoses into a honey bee.
Watch carefully in the summer months and you will see the baby bees nibbling away at the wax capping covering their cells, before struggling to pull themselves out. Initially all the hairs on their body are sleeked down, but the nursery bees soon groom the new arrivals and within 10 minutes of emerging they look conspicuously fresh and fluffy, and ready to start work.
My colonies desperately need new workers. The winter bees are dying and they have to raise new bees otherwise the colonies are doomed. Until now there has been little sign of new life....until last Thursday.

It happened between midday and 4 pm - a small pile of wax cappings appeared on the floor underneath the hive, as dozens of new bees emerged from their cells.
Of course, I couldn't be certain. It was still far too cold and wet to open up the hives, but today, 40 days after my shook swarms on 5th March, it was finally warm enough to take a look inside. To my delight therein were 3 frames with eggs, grubs and sealed brood, and a number of fluffy bees. This hive looks like it will survive.
Not so the other hive containing the neurotic bees. Yes, there was brood in all stages, but not much, and the cluster of bees is barely enough to occupy two seams. Their future looks bleak.
They say spring is 3 weeks late this year; just the length of time it would have taken to raise those new bees.

Mortuary Bees

'Bring out your dead' - It's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it!

Usually bees leave the hive to die, but every now and then they pop their clogs on the inside, especially during the winter months. As the days go by dead bees accumulate on the hive floor and over time these would block the hive entrance.

Fortunately, some workers are tasked with being mortuary bees. These bees collect the dead and drag them out of the hive. During the summer months it's not unusual to see mortuary bees flying like mini Chinook helicopters with their cargo slung beneath them, before unceremoniously dropping the corpses several metres away from the hive.

For winter bees the mortuary task is much harder. To start with winter bees are heavier (see Fat Girls) making airlifting impossible, but the real issue is that by now the bees are old and tired.

So they struggle to drag the dead from the hive, and onto the ground, and through the grass for a few feet before returning exhausted to collect the next casualty.

It's been unseasonable cold for well over a month, and on those rare occasions the bees have been able to fly, the mortuary bees have been busy - as I look around the hives I can see hundreds of dead bees.

It's a worry; the bees have plenty of sugar syrup so they won't starve, but they desperately need the protein in fresh pollen to raise brood.

For without new bees who will dispose of the dead?

Workers' Wages

I'm concerned that my bees may be planning to take industrial action.

It was a broadcast last Tuesday morning on BBC Radio 4 - 'On the trail of the American Honey Bee' that got the hives buzzing. Apparently American bees get paid!

Not much admittedly, just 1 cent a month, but with 60,000 bees in each hive in the summer time that means I'm facing a potential wages bill of $1,200 a month. I'm ruined; just to cover the workers' wages I would have to charge £380 for a jar of honey.

Why do American bees get so well paid? Simple - they pollinate the most valuable crop on earth worth $2.5 billion p.a. - almonds.  With 1.5 million hives being trucked into California each spring it's clear that pollination services provided by honey bees is big business.

We don't have almonds in the UK, or oranges or cranberries, but our bees still provide a great service pollinating apple, pear and plum trees; oil seed rape, raspberries, blackberries, field beans, runner beans and dozens of garden and wild flowers.

Most hobbyist beekeepers don't charge for pollination, but if my bees demand fair payment for services rendered, I'm going to be knocking on my neighbours doors and presenting an invoice!