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.
Friday, 26 July 2013
Saturday, 13 July 2013
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.
Sunday, 7 July 2013
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!
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!
Sunday, 30 June 2013
Robbers
Bees are thieving blighters. Given the choice between visiting flowers and collecting nectar to make honey, or simply stealing someone else's, they'll opt for thieving every time.
Sometimes a little colony of bees can be completely overpowered by robbers who will take every last drop of honey and leave the small colony to starve. In strong colonies guard bees will fight off potential robbers but in a little colony there may be insufficient guards, especially if the entrance hole is too wide. So beekeepers keep the entrance to small colonies very narrow so that potential intruders can be more easily challenged.
However sometimes robbers just get lucky and they find an abandoned hive where a colony has died out leaving lots of unguarded honey. Never creatures to miss a free lunch, the robbers generously sample the bounty before returning home to tell their friends and relations.The news about the 'free honey' causes huge excitement in the colony and within 20 minutes 100's of bees will have descended on the source and will be busy carrying the booty home.
All of which goes to explain those bees swarming around that bait hive in my last post.There must have been traces of honey in the comb used to make up the bait hive so when the scout bees reported back to base about a potential new residence nobody paid attention (as usual) until someone mentioned the free honey...
I got some more bees nevertheless. My beekeeping buddy was so embarrassed about mistaking robbers for a natural swarm that he gave me some of his!
Sometimes a little colony of bees can be completely overpowered by robbers who will take every last drop of honey and leave the small colony to starve. In strong colonies guard bees will fight off potential robbers but in a little colony there may be insufficient guards, especially if the entrance hole is too wide. So beekeepers keep the entrance to small colonies very narrow so that potential intruders can be more easily challenged.
However sometimes robbers just get lucky and they find an abandoned hive where a colony has died out leaving lots of unguarded honey. Never creatures to miss a free lunch, the robbers generously sample the bounty before returning home to tell their friends and relations.The news about the 'free honey' causes huge excitement in the colony and within 20 minutes 100's of bees will have descended on the source and will be busy carrying the booty home.
All of which goes to explain those bees swarming around that bait hive in my last post.There must have been traces of honey in the comb used to make up the bait hive so when the scout bees reported back to base about a potential new residence nobody paid attention (as usual) until someone mentioned the free honey...
I got some more bees nevertheless. My beekeeping buddy was so embarrassed about mistaking robbers for a natural swarm that he gave me some of his!
Wednesday, 26 June 2013
Plan B - how to catch bees
Bees swarm. If it's a primary swarm around 10,000 bees pour out of the hive together with the queen and take to the skies, but not for long. They normally fly just a few minutes before resting on a nearby tree or wall. Then they hang in a big cluster and wait ... and debate ... for hours ... sometimes days .... until all 10,000 reach agreement on where they are going and how they are going to get there!
You would think a more sensible approach to moving home would be to agree all this before leaving the hive, but the old foragers are too set in their ways and the baby bees are too young to fly, making sensible discussion of relocation plans nigh on impossible.
So instead all those in favour of relocation leave in a swarm and then hang together somewhere trying to agree where they are going to live.
Fortunately not all the bees have a des res in mind otherwise they would never reach agreement. Instead dedicated scout bees scour the neighbourhood looking for a suitable home. This process probably starts days before the colony actually swarms, but nobody pays attention. Now the bees are homeless they are eager to learn what the scouts have found, and slowly, as more scouts return with enthusiastic reports about a potential new home, the bees reach a consensus.
Ideally, bees want a dry, airy cavity above the ground. If it has previously been occupied by bees, even better - which leads me to Plan B - Bait hives.
By placing empty hives containing old honeycomb around the locale beekeepers can reasonably expect to catch a swarm of bees. 'Catch' is a bit of an exaggeration because the bees simply walk in; one moment the hive is empty, the next moment thousands of bees have taken up residence.
I'm excited. My bee-buddy tells me one of my bait hives has hundreds of bees buzzing around the entrance. This could be it, more bees at last....
You would think a more sensible approach to moving home would be to agree all this before leaving the hive, but the old foragers are too set in their ways and the baby bees are too young to fly, making sensible discussion of relocation plans nigh on impossible.
So instead all those in favour of relocation leave in a swarm and then hang together somewhere trying to agree where they are going to live.
Fortunately not all the bees have a des res in mind otherwise they would never reach agreement. Instead dedicated scout bees scour the neighbourhood looking for a suitable home. This process probably starts days before the colony actually swarms, but nobody pays attention. Now the bees are homeless they are eager to learn what the scouts have found, and slowly, as more scouts return with enthusiastic reports about a potential new home, the bees reach a consensus.
Ideally, bees want a dry, airy cavity above the ground. If it has previously been occupied by bees, even better - which leads me to Plan B - Bait hives.
By placing empty hives containing old honeycomb around the locale beekeepers can reasonably expect to catch a swarm of bees. 'Catch' is a bit of an exaggeration because the bees simply walk in; one moment the hive is empty, the next moment thousands of bees have taken up residence.
I'm excited. My bee-buddy tells me one of my bait hives has hundreds of bees buzzing around the entrance. This could be it, more bees at last....
Thursday, 13 June 2013
Decimate - Terciamate - Exterminate!
Around 93,000 colonies of bees in the UK died last winter. That's one third of our entire honey bee population! This isn't decimation, it's three times more, it's tertiamation!
But it's worse than that. The British Beekeepers Association's survey only monitored winter losses to the end of March 2013, but many more colonies died in the really cold April/May period, including one of mine.
It's a disaster and more worrying still is that the surviving colonies are not building up fast enough. The peak nectar flow around here is between 21st June and 14th July when the bees forage on white clover and blackberry. It takes at least 4 weeks to get from egg to foraging bee. It's simple mathematics - there's no way there will be enough bees to get a honey crop this summer.
Instead I need to focus is on building the colony up so that it's strong enough to survive next winter. That, and obtaining more bees. There's the rub; colonies are so weak that we are not seeing as much swarming this year so there's little chance of picking up some free-bees. I need to have a plan B(ee)....
More of which later.
But it's worse than that. The British Beekeepers Association's survey only monitored winter losses to the end of March 2013, but many more colonies died in the really cold April/May period, including one of mine.
It's a disaster and more worrying still is that the surviving colonies are not building up fast enough. The peak nectar flow around here is between 21st June and 14th July when the bees forage on white clover and blackberry. It takes at least 4 weeks to get from egg to foraging bee. It's simple mathematics - there's no way there will be enough bees to get a honey crop this summer.
Instead I need to focus is on building the colony up so that it's strong enough to survive next winter. That, and obtaining more bees. There's the rub; colonies are so weak that we are not seeing as much swarming this year so there's little chance of picking up some free-bees. I need to have a plan B(ee)....
More of which later.
Sunday, 2 June 2013
The water carriers
Well spring turned out to be the coldest in 50 years according to the London Times but with the switch to 'meteorological summer time' on the 1st June the temperature has been above 15 C for the last 2 days; we are having a heatwave! So as you would expect the bees have been busy foraging and bring in....water.
When it's warm the bees know that a good source of water is the damp soil in the plant pots on our patio, because the warmer it gets, the more we water. Sometimes we leave it a day or two and the soil surface dries out, but that doesn't deter the bees; they simple drink the water from the tap!
Consequently, on a warm day before turning on the outside water tap its wise to check that there isn't a bee or two up the spout sipping on a residual drop.
Collecting water can be dangerous for bees. The bourne that runs along the edge of the fields has water all year long, but it is flowing too fast for bees to risk approaching. Muddy puddles soon dry up and those that don't contain unhealthy stagnant water that can make bees ill. Early rising bumble bees can take advantage of the morning dew, but my teenage honey bees wont stir until the sun is long up and the dew all gone. So getting water can be a challenge, which is why many beekeepers provide their bees with a water source such as bowl full of small pebbles that is regularly topped up with tap water.
Most of the water is used to cool the hives by dampening the comb which the bees then fan with their wings. On a hot day up to 80 or so bees can be tasked with carrying almost a litre of water back to the hive. It's thirsty work.
When it's warm the bees know that a good source of water is the damp soil in the plant pots on our patio, because the warmer it gets, the more we water. Sometimes we leave it a day or two and the soil surface dries out, but that doesn't deter the bees; they simple drink the water from the tap!
Consequently, on a warm day before turning on the outside water tap its wise to check that there isn't a bee or two up the spout sipping on a residual drop.
Collecting water can be dangerous for bees. The bourne that runs along the edge of the fields has water all year long, but it is flowing too fast for bees to risk approaching. Muddy puddles soon dry up and those that don't contain unhealthy stagnant water that can make bees ill. Early rising bumble bees can take advantage of the morning dew, but my teenage honey bees wont stir until the sun is long up and the dew all gone. So getting water can be a challenge, which is why many beekeepers provide their bees with a water source such as bowl full of small pebbles that is regularly topped up with tap water.
Most of the water is used to cool the hives by dampening the comb which the bees then fan with their wings. On a hot day up to 80 or so bees can be tasked with carrying almost a litre of water back to the hive. It's thirsty work.
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