The Ministry of Bees

I got a warning letter from the Ministry of Bees last month. Government inspectors had found that many hives of bees were close to starving, so the Ministry wrote to all beekeepers urging them to check that their bees had enough food.

I wasn't surprised - August is a terrible month for bees because there are so few flowers. Sure, bees living near the waterways may have purple loosestrife and Himalayan balsam to visit, but for most there are only slim pickings in suburban gardens.

Not that it should be a problem - strong colonies make 50 - 100 lb of honey during the summer which is more than enough to see them through to next year, so all would be fine, except for one thing. The beekeeper!

Greedy or incompetent bee-keepers strip the hives of all their summer honey. If the bees are 'lucky' they get fed sugar syrup and if they aren't .... they starve. The rapacious logic is simple; honey sells for £5/lb whereas sugar costs 25p/lb.

I wasn't concerned about the letter. I'd taken a good honey crop but still left my bees with plenty to see them through to the end of September - but not longer!

I'm relying on the ivy which is just coming into flower. Ivy produces lots of very sweet nectar which is almost 50% sugar. It's so concentrated that on warm sunny days you can see crystals of sugar glistening on the flowers. The bees, wasps and red admiral butterflies all love it!

But many beekeepers don't. The high glucose content of ivy honey causes it to crystalise in the honeycomb.  Beekeepers worry that their bees may not be able to access enough water in the winter months to dissolve the honey, resulting in starvation.

Come the spring any ivy honey left in the comb blocks up the brood nest and has to be removed, but the only way to remove the honey is to heat the comb, which destroys it. Worse still, ivy honey doesn't taste very nice.

So to stop their bees making ivy honey many beekeepers keep feeding their bees sugar solution - gallons of it.

Their bees seem to do well, but it doesn't feel right to me. Instead I let my bees make all the ivy honey they can. Even on the coldest days of winter condensation in the hive will provide sufficient moisture, and come the spring any frames of uneaten honey will be set aside to feed any colonies that need a honey top-up.

There is a risk - if the weather is really bad over the next month the bees may not collect enough ivy nectar, and it may then be too cold for an emergency sugar solution feed.

But you have to have faith in these things - such is the ministry of bees!

The cheats among the runners

Bees earn a lot of air miles during August, but it’s no holiday.

On average they will fly four kilometres to forage this month compared to just 400 meters in spring. It's necessary because of a shortage of flowers; most wild flowers have gone over so the bees are spending more time foraging around gardens and allotments.

Competition is intense and choice limited; just spend a few minutes watching insect activity on buddleia or oregano and you will see butterflies, bumblebees, hover flies and honey bees all competing for the nectar. When competition is this tough it’s hardly surprising that someone decides to cheat.... like this young lady.

She’s in our local allotment stealing nectar from runner bean flowers. Normally flowers provide nectar to bees in exchange for pollination services, but this little minx has decided to skip scrambling around inside the flower and is helping herself to the nectar by sipping it directly from a hole in the corolla tube.

It’s easy honey. But although it looks bad on the honey bee, someone else cheated first.

A bumble bee! Both the white-tailed and the buff-tailed bumble bees bite holes at the bottom of runner bean flowers so that they can get to the nectar without having to clamber inside.

When a honey bee lands on the flower the first thing she does is check whether a bumble bee has already punctured the flower. Although the bumble bee will have taken most of the nectar there’s always some left over, and it’s easy work.

In the mornings most flowers haven’t been visited by bumble bees so there’s no hole. Instead the honey bee climbs inside the flower to get a full dose of nectar in exchange for pollinating the flower. But by late afternoon most flowers have been holed, so climbing inside would be a waste of effort.

The honey bees are just being sensible - the bumble bees are the real cheats. 

So if your runner beans aren't setting you know who to blame. Although in the round bumble bees do a great job in the allotment pollinating all sorts of plants, ... like courgettes!

(Can you ever have too many?)

The Changing of the Guard

Bees work hard to make honey -they fly 50,000 miles collecting nectar from millions of flowers just to make a pound. At the moment strong hives contain 50 – 100 lb of honey, some even as much as 200 lb. It’s a valuable resource that will see the colony through winter, so it has to be guarded!

Most of the year a hive has around 10 guard bees on duty. They linger around the hive entrance ready to challenge potential intruders regardless of their intent; the innocent ladybird that wanders into the hive will be ejected just as vigorously as a thieving wasp, or a bee from another colony.

Distinguishing nest mates from other honey bees isn't easy – you have to get up close ...  and sniff! Bees that smell like family are allowed to pass, and those that don’t get ‘done over’. Wise bees submit and are allowed to fly off; those that struggle are killed.

Now that the honey stores are so large and the flow of nectar from the flowers is slowing, the guard is changing. Their numbers have increased substantially, and they are hyper-vigilant. They need to be too – because there are robbers about!

Wasps are the worst offenders. They can overwhelm a colony of bees and steal all the honey. Of course, the bees don’t give up without a fight, but a wasp can sting and sting again, whereas a bee can only sting once. For every dead wasp there are five dead bees; small hives don’t stand a chance.

Other honey bees can be just as bad. A poorly guarded hive is fair game for neighbouring bees looking for a free lunch. Sometimes the robbing is vicious –the weaker hive is simply overwhelmed. But often the robbing is silent, with the robbers sneaking into the hive and helping themselves to the honey.

Good guards become over-zealous and challenge all bees entering the hive, including their returning nest-mates! The confusion doesn't last long because in addition to passing the sniff-test the returning foragers just submit and offer up some of their bounty; robbers on the other hand arrive with empty stomachs.

Or empty buckets. I have yet to take off the honey crop so it’s going to be tense! I may be a friend of the honey bee but I'm not family, so I won’t be passing any sniff-test!

Can you Adam ‘n Eve it – I’m trendy!

Trendy urban middle-class beekeepers with ‘more enthusiasm than expertise’ have been blamed for increase swarms of bees in towns across southern England, according to the newspapers.

‘I'm not surprised’ I thought. ‘Monty Don’s encouraging folk to keep bees in their gardens without any thought to disease management and swarm prevention. We don’t need more beekeepers, we need more forage.’

Trendy? More like grumpy .... and just a tiny bit smug. I’d already swarm-controlled one of my hives a few weeks earlier, and I was counting down the days to sorting out another hive when my neighbour mentioned that ‘thousands of bees were flying around this afternoon.’

Impossible! I had it under control, or so I thought. But a quick check of my hive records revealed my error- I was a day out. It takes 8 days for bees to produce a sealed queen cell which then matures for another 8 days before the new queen emerges.  Swarming takes place any time between day 8 and 16, and usually depends upon the weather. It had been a fine day after a period of blustery weather and the bees had swarmed.

I was embarrassed and annoyed. Swarms frighten some people and can be disruptive, although they seldom harm anyone. Responsible beekeepers certainly try to prevent swarming.

With ‘more enthusiasm than expertise’ still ringing in my ears I spoke to two of my most experienced colleagues. They were sympathetic; ‘It’s happened to me too’, and ‘It’s been a funny year for swarms,’ they said.

Some consolation, but I know I should really have paid closer attention to the calendar and counted the days.

Of course for the numerically challenged there is another solution: Clip the queen’s wing, and then she won’t be able to fly anywhere.

This is a tricky operation and some beekeepers develop this ‘skill’ by cutting the wings off drones. They say the bees feel no pain but I'm not so sure. Regardless, I find the notion of mutilating bees to prevent them swarming somewhat disquieting.

So it seems I'm not only trendy, I'm sentimental too!

What do you think? 

It’s raining men!

Hallelujah!

The bees have been living like nuns in a convent these past 8 months – barren sisters led by an old matriarch. But that’s all changing because right now the colonies are raising male bees, called drones, as fast as they can.

Drones don’t do much around the hive except eat and occasionally lift their feet when one of their sisters is doing some cleaning. You’d expect the workers to get irritable with these slouches, but the opposite is true - a happy hive has lots of drones.

Drones are big; almost twice the size of their sisters. They have powerful wings and huge eyes and just one ambition – to mate!

It takes about 2 weeks for a drone to become sexually mature. During this time he will develop his flying and navigation skills and once he’s competent he’ll spend his afternoons hanging out with his brothers and the lads from other hives in a part of the sky known as a drone congregation area. Think of it as a boys’ afternoon out, which it is, until a virgin queen comes along  ....

She’s the ultimate femme fatale who deliberately seeks out these drone congregations. She’s game for certain and the boys know it. A chase through the skies begins as dozens of drones pursue the young queen, all wanting to mate with her.

They should be careful what they wish for! Those with the best eyesight and strongest wings soon catch up with the queen and seize her with their legs, arch their abdomen and immediately penetrate her.

 ‘Hallelujah!’

It’s all over in a second but it blows the drone away ..... from his genitalia! The poor drone, no longer in possession of his tickle-tackle, drops dead to earth. The queen meantime continues her flight with his lost bee-hood still in situ. She’ll mate with several more drones before returning to the hive, with each successful coupling resulting in a cry of ‘Hallelujah!’ and another drone dropping dead from the sky.

So the Weather Girls are right, from a bee’s perspective, it really is raining men!

Spring cleaning

Demolition experts don’t get much credit - plaudits always go to the builder, yet without the work of the demolition crews there would soon be no space to build.

Bees have exactly the same problem: They fill their home with delicate white comb which is used to store honey and pollen and to raise brood, and they eventually run out of space.

Raising brood is messy; every time a new bee emerges from its cell it leaves behind the thin skin of its cocoon. The house-bees quickly clean up any loose material but rather than scrape every last piece of cocoon off the cell walls they simply skim the surface with a bit more wax and polish it ready for the queen to re-lay.

In the course of a year a brood cell may be skimmed and polished 17 times, each time getting a little bit darker and a little bit smaller. Smaller cells means smaller bees, so it’s not surprising that in the wild, bees soon abandon old brown comb and make new white comb for the queen to lay in – provided there’s room!

This is where the demolition experts come in. Little silvery-brown moths lay their eggs in old brood comb and soon the caterpillars are munching their way through the comb, turning it to dust within a few weeks and creating space for the bees to make new comb.

You would think beekeepers would like wax moths – nature’s little demolition experts, but you would be wrong. The caterpillars are routinely squashed, frozen, or infected with lethal bacteria. The reason for the slaughter is simple – many beekeepers force their bees to keep using old brood comb, often for years on end, so that the comb is as black as tar and as thick as cardboard – and perfect for food for wax moths!

The obvious thing to do is remove the old comb, but that’s not so easy using standard hives. At best a diligent beekeeper would change the brood comb every 3 years; hardly surprising there's an ongoing battle with the demolition crew.

I don’t use standard hives so most of my comb is is less than 12 months old. Clean comb means less bee disease as well as bigger bees, but there is a downside - every spring I have dozens of old frames of comb that need cleaning, which takes hours of work.

Of course, I could spare myself the effort and just leave them out for the wax moths!

Another host of golden daffodils?

Now is a critical time for the bees - their stores of honey are low and they have run out of pollen. Without pollen they can't raise brood to replace the old bees, so the colony's survival is at stake. Hardly surprising then that on chilly dry days the bees are out when the rest of us would rather remain indoors!

It's easy to see what they are foraging on by looking at the colour of the pollen collected on their back legs; grey-white means they've been on the snowdrops, bright orange the crocuses, bright yellow is mahonia, and greeny-yellow pollen is from the hellebores.

Yet what is the most widely grown spring flower? The daffodil - pretty, but useless. In fact most flowers grown in the typical English garden are pretty, ... but useless, which is why this spring I'm giving further thought to how to make my garden even more insect pollinator friendly.

It's not as simple as growing plants that are 'Perfect for Pollinators'. Plants that are covered with bees in one location can be totally ignored when grown in my garden. Past 'failures' include agastache, monarda and asters. I don't know if it's the soil, or lack of moisture, or simply that the bees have better pickings elsewhere.

There have been successes: eryngium, solidago, lythrum, erysium, and verbena, but I want my garden humming so I'm always trying something new. This year I'm sowing honeywort (cerinthe), sweet rocket (hesperis), and vipers bugloss (echium) and sneezeweed (helenium autumnale). With luck they will germinate and flourish and be crawling with bees and butterflies.

If you want to help insect pollinators forget those pretty but useless flowers. It's a critical time for bees - so plan to get your garden buzzing.

Please comment if you have any plant suggestions or success stories - either in the comment box below or using the Facebook link.