When the south wind doth blow..

We're off!
The wind switched from a cold north easterly to a warm southerly breeze at 1.00 pm today and out came the sun .... and the bees; hundreds of them!
They had been more or less hive-bound except for the occasional 'comfort' flight. Even so, I knew from a pile of wax cappings underneath the hive that lots of new bees had emerged over the the last 7-10 days and they would be curious to experience the outside world; today they had their chance.
Initially most of the youngsters were engaged in short play flights (see Biggles learns to fly) which ended with them resting on the hive roof, panting to get their breath back. But within an hour they could be seen 'foraging' on various flowers around the hive such as forget-me-not, grape hyacinth, pierus, rosemary and heather. I say 'foraging' because it was the half hearted effort of a novice that has yet to learn her trade. That's going to change over the next 24 hours because I can see the rape fields in the distance are turning yellow by the day. It's going to stay warm so by this time tomorrow a more senior forager will have found that rape and all those youngsters will get their flying directions. Then the nectar gathering will start in earnest.
It's time to put another box on the hive and with luck and good weather in 2 weeks time it will be loaded with of honey.

Who you gonna call?

Ghost Busters!
Something spooky is going on around the apiary; there are yellow ghostly figures gliding around before disappearing into the hives. Initially I thought they were some sort of exotic wasp, but its too early in the year and they were the wrong shade of yellow. Moreover, these things were translucent and seemed to glow....
One landed on the outside of a hive and I had to laugh. It's was just a worker bee that had been out collecting pollen. Usually pollen is neatly collected in pollen sacks on the back legs, but this bee looked like it had fallen in a bucket of yellow powder paint; it was covered. It could only mean one thing - the pussy willows are in flower.
Pussy willow produces masses of pollen at a critical time the when the colonies are building up, which is just as well because bees eat a lot of pollen - between 20 and 60 kg per hive per year!
Pollen contains proteins and fats required to raise brood, but it's not very appetising. So instead the bees store it in the comb together with a some bee-spit, and leave it to ferment. Various yeasts and bacteria get to work on the pollen and the result is a sort of 'pollen sauerkraut' known as 'bee bread'.
Bee bread builds better bees because its packed with vitamins, thanks all that microbial activity. Better still queens that are fed lots of bee bread lay more eggs - which means more brood, and more bees.
That's just as well because the oilseed rape is starting to flower in the fields around Flemish farm and I need all the bees I can get to bring in the spring honey crop.

Killer bees?

It's been a mild winter and on sunny days the bees have been out gathering pollen. Until recently it was light grey pollen from the snowdrops, but yesterday I noticed heavily laden sacks of bright orange pollen being bought into the hives. That could only mean one thing - the bees were working the crocuses.
I checked a patch I'd planted last summer and sure enough, there was a bee rummaging around inside a flower. On closer observation it appeared that the only way she could get at the pollen was to poke her head right into the middle of the stamens and give them a good shake. The result was a bee with a ridiculous bright orange head! Hardly the face of killer, you would think, but research published this week in Nature suggests otherwise. It seems diseases that infect honey bees also infect bumblebees, and transmission is from honey bee to bumblebee, not the other way around.
This is surprising. Honey bees have relatively short tongues and therefore don't usually work the same flowers as bumblebees. From time to time I have seen a bumblebee and a honey bee in the same flower, poppies for example, but just for seconds; surely not enough time to transmit an infection?
But the DNA evidence is damming; bumblebees are getting Deformed Wing Virus infections from honey bees, and this is probably contributing to bumblebee decline.
Thankfully nobody is suggesting culling the UK honey bee population, but there is now an even greater requirement of beekeepers to ensure their bees are healthy. That means controlling varroa mite, because more varroa means more Deformed Wing Virus, which means more chance of infecting wild bumble bees.
My orange-headed honey bee was too comical to be a killer bee, but the consequences of poor beekeeping on my part is no longer a laughing matter.

Comfort food

The last 45 days have been the wettest in almost 250 years. We can thank the Radcliffe Meteorological Station at Oxford University for this fact; it is the oldest weather station in the world, founded in 1767, and there is no doubt it's been wet, really wet....but not cold.

This is not good for the bees because if it's warm the queen keeps laying and the bees use a lot of energy looking after the brood. More energy means eating more food, so they are rapidly using up their winter stores.

I'm not overly concerned. Last autumn I decided to feed them sugar syrup and they should have plenty left, but I can't be certain without opening up the hive, and it's far too cold for that! So I've decided to err on the side of caution and feed them doughnuts. Well not the entire doughnut, rather the fondant icing that goes in or over the typical doughnut.

You see, making fondant is a bit tricky; get it wrong and its either rock hard or runny. Some beekeepers get around this problem by purchasing ready made fondant from the supermarket but that usually contains glycerine as a softener, and bees don't normally eat glycerine.

Not so the fondant in doughnuts; this is made of sucrose and glucose syrups only, and carefully blended to give the right consistency - not too hard, not too soft.

Fortunately our local doughnut fryer is sympathetic to the needs of my bees and he lets me have some fondant as a freebie when the need arises. I don't eat doughnuts, which I consider a comfort food, so there's nothing in it for him.

But if this weather continues I might start!

Mite massacre

Result!
Thirty four dead mites in the first 48 hours following treatment with my home made 'napalm' (see previous post). Another 10 or so mites will probably drop over the next 24 hours and then then the treatment effect will wear off. Overall oxalic acid is about 95% effective, so it looks as though there were about 40-50 mites in the hive; well within the range I had estimated in my last post.
Moreover, all the dead mites were fully grown adults. This is encouraging because it suggests that there is very little bee brood in the hive right now. Those adult mites (which are all female) were waiting for the queen to start laying again so that they could lay their eggs on the bee larvae. When the baby mites hatch they feed on the developing bees and grow, then reproduce and lay more eggs, so by the time the new bee emerges it's covered in mites and infected with viruses.
I doubt I've killed all the mites in the colony but they have certainly been knocked back. Once the queen starts laying again in the next few weeks there should be plenty of health brood, which augers well for a strong colony come spring.
Best of all the 'napalm' hasn't done too much harm to the bees; it's warm today and dozens of them were flying around the hive taking a 'comfort break'.

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.