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Category: Beekeeping

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What a mixed spring and summer. The poor bees didn’t know what was happening. We had a totally dry glorious April but then an appalling May.

No rain means no nectar.

Cold and wet in May means no foraging

Like everyone else I spoke to, every hive made swarming preparations. Fortunately all bar one was able to be prevented. This did mean however that I had a preponderance of nucleus hives with one year old queens and lots of production colonies waiting for virgin queens to mate. Mating seems to become more problematical year on year. Four queens failed to return and one is already becoming a drone-layer.

Also, the number of swarm calls I took meant that I had three swarm hives on the go, being added to with each successive swarm.

No oil-seed rape was within flying distance and at the other end of the season there was no borage or echium. The harvest was well below my target and consisted of a veritable assortment of forage.

Saffron Walden Beekeepers ran some General Husbandry training on Zoom where I did a talk or two and I also had one beginner in the apiary as an apprentice. I did three garden meetings which constituted a new record as none of them were rained off.

The wet supers are been licked clean and the last colony-unite is in position. I’ve been given a bundle of past Financial Times which I think are the only paper left in broadsheet format; ideal for paper-unites and padding between winter-stored supers.

175 acres of Buck wheat has been drilled between the rape which is just over the hedge. I was hoping for a crop from this but it was too thin on the ground and the ivy was strongly calling.

Feeding this year will be a mix of Apikel and the honey-drainings from the nine extraction days.

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This is the first March In the Apiary since 2017. This is the month when little happens apart from anticipation and making sure all the tools are ready.Two Asian Hornet traps have been cleaned up, recharged with home-pressed apple juice and hung, one beside the bee-shed and one in the apiary. These are the two pieces of equipment I hope will not get used.

Prunus in flower

The bee-shed hornet trap is hanging in the beautiful prunus domestica in full bloom. When the sun shines it positively hums all over with pollen foragers.

Asian Hornet Trap

The bullace, prunus insititia, is also giving a lovely display this year but does not get as many visitors as the flight-path to this tree passes right over the p. domestica.

White Bullace tree 2021

I have cleaned out my tool-box and checked that all the necessary equipment is there and is in good shape.

Three lovely days right at the end of the month was a real bonus. All the colonies were moved into nice clean hives. Clean floors and entrance blocks, scraped and scorched brood boxes with sanitised crown boards. The first time I’ve got all the spring cleaning done in March.

Hive 6 needed so many new frames that I have decided to do a Bailey Frame Change. This will take place tomorrow and you can see this In the Apiary April 2021.

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A really mixed bag of weather this year. Some glorious spring weather early on and at the end of the month had me thinking that hive spring cleaning could start early again this year. It wasn’t quite warm enough to pass the ‘gardening in your shirt-sleeves’ test so they have been left undisturbed. All the hives are active on the warmer days as witnessed by the activity on flowers around the garden.

  • Aconite
  • Crocus
  • Snowdrop
  • sarcococca

Although no varroa treatment is actively being pursued at this time, the drop tray gives a good indication of the size of the cluster and its position in the hive. Instead of looking for varroa one can inspect the spread of discarded cell cappings; where are they in the box? Are they moving around to find food?

Not having seen the green woodpecker for several months I decided to gamble on the netting and left it off. I kept a constant presence in the apiary however, inspecting for any signs of hive damage.

In the workshop, some equipment has been repaired or replacements made. I now have another design of clearer-board, two new crown boards and several new entrance blocks. The old entrance blocks were a good indication of what forty years of bee foot-fall wear can do to a piece of wood.

Probably one of the most useful jobs done this winter was to totally clean and recondition the smoker. Apart from the hive tool, the most used item in the tool box so it takes quite a hammering throughout the year.

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Varroa started appearing on the drop trays early in the summer so monitoring was started. Hive 1 was given three of the new slim beegyms, hive 2 had three of the old design beegyms and hive 3 was left to drop naturally as a control. Counts have continued to be taken every Wednesday. The two hives with beegyms have continually had a higher varroa drop than the control hive.

Slim Gyms in hive 1

Every hive attempted to swarm this year in spite of the fact that all the queens were 2019. This was probably because of the extremely hot weeks in May. Yet again, queen loss on mating flights was a major handicap and this year it was at least six virgin queens that failed to return.

When I have been doing hive inspections it has always been my policy that you don’t have to individually inspect the supers. Simply feeling their weight is sufficient indication. This year I was caught out. Hive three was artificially swarmed and no brood appeared as the queen had been lost on her mating flight. The colony drew out several emergency queen cells and I allowed the best to grow through to fruition. After this hatched I once again failed to get any brood appearing and test frames failed to produce a positive result. There was no queen cluster beneath the open mesh floor and yet the colony appeared quite contented with no brood. It wasn’t until I started removing supers for extraction that I found why. The new queen, in her wisdom, had, on returning from her mating flight gone straight through the queen excluder and set up home in the first super. That will be 9 shallow frames which they will be loathe to use for storing honey in future.

All the extraction has been completed and although it is nowhere near as much as last year it is not as bad as I had feared. One interesting batch this year had an extremely high pollen content. I ran off a jar straight from the extractor and you could actually see the pollen settling out.

Batch 5/20 settling out

Decisions now have to made as to which colonies to keep and which which colonies to unite. One has already made its decision. The small cast which found its way into the apiary and tookup home on the end of the Dartington has built up well but they have scored zero for behaviour on the last two visits. Two consecutive visits and that's their lot.

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I have had two swarm calls so far but they were only casts. This is a small secondary swarm headed by a virgin queen. They are bees never-the-less and by uniting them I have recouped one of my colony losses. They were treated with 24 hours of Apivar at the same time as hiving to knock down any varroa which had hitched a ride.

The girls have been foraging for oil-seed-rape honey but the nectar flow wasn’t as strong as I’d hoped due to the continual dry weather. This was also accompanied by foraging for hawthorn nectar on the may blossom. This is a rare honey which changes the aroma of the rape honey and crystallises very coarsely.

May blossom in the spinney

Queen cells had started appearing so now was the time to start making nucleus colonies to replace my winter losses. One QC in hive 3 was used to start a nucleus but the girls in their wisdom tore it down. A week later they had made 6 emergency queen cells.

One hive made three beautiful queen cells so I established another nucleus and gave the third cell to the other nucleus with the emergency cells.

The colony making the queen cells has not made any more so no need to do an artificial swarm.

During the CV lockdown, the road passing the apiary is no longer a tunnel of air pollution so the bees can can forage right up to the roadside.

Another lockdown effect that we have noticed is that without the noise pollution we can hear the whole garden humming.

On 12th of May, there were bees all round the garden pond so I knew the rape had finished. In the absence of nectar to fan for cooling and also thirst quenching they had resorted to water. I put clearer-boards on early next morning so I could do the first extraction the following day.

A second brief extraction for just two tubs and that was that. The June gap had already started a week before the end of May.

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Although on the surface it looked as if all 10 hives had survived the winter, the first spring inspections revealed otherwise. Two were queenless and two had drone-laying queens. The fifth was so weak it really didn’t deserve to survive.

Result; I have lost half my stock. Only once before in over 40 years have I ever lost colonies in the winter.

What was strange was that queenless hives 5 and 6 continued to forage keenly bringing in both nectar and pollen. The latter is said to indicate a colony being queen-right. Test frames of eggs from another colony were inserted into both. Had they no source of queen pheromones they would have immediately started to draw out emergency queen cells. No such cells were developed which was a weird phenomenon. The colonies continued to dwindle as no eggs were being laid.

They had to be united with another colony but a normal unite wouldn’t work as they thought they already had a queen. Their population was used to supplement the abysmally small, but queenright hive 2. Bit by bit they were moved closer together until they could be shaken out in front of 2. First I caged the queen in hive 2 just as a precaution and shook out the smaller colony and took their hive right away. A few days later I then did the same with the larger. The result is that hive 2 now has sufficient bees to care for brood and the queen is merrily laying away. By the beginning of May they should be large enough to take a super.

The rape came on flower and the first supers have gone onto the five healthy hives. This is where the excitement starts to build and we see the distinct difference between colonies. By the last week of April, hive 3 has three supers and hive 4 is still on its first.

The month has been gloriously sunny and as I gardened each day, the air was full of the gentle hum of the girls hard at work in the greengage branches and down at ground level on the wallflowers.

Of course, continual sunshine meant that the nectar dried up and by week four they were getting a little cross. A solid day’s rain in the last week has hopefully corrected the situation.

However, only half the usual number of bees means half the usual amount of honey so they’ll have to work twice as hard. Maybe the lack of air pollution due to CV lockdown will give them extra impetus.

To those I promised bees this spring, don’t hold your breath.

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Four of the hives have now been spring-cleaned. A freshly scorched box, floor, entrance block and crown board are positioned alongside the hive and frames are removed one by one, inspected, scraped clean and placed in the new box. Halfway through the exercise, boxes are exchanged whilst they are easier to lift, and the remaining frames moved across. Hopefully the queen will be seen and the egg laying rate assessed. Unfortunately the first hive I did this year had a drone-laying queen. How could I tell? The larvae and brood in worker-size cells had domed cappings like full-sized drone brood. The quickest and easiest way to rescue what remained of the colony was to unite rapidly. The whole colony was shaken out during the afternoon and the workers wasted no time in seeking refuge in the neighbouring hive.

Comb with drone cappings in worker cells

At the time of cleaning, the Apivar has been removed as the weekly varroa counts have dropped to zero or the odd 1.

This has been the month when the world was hit by the CV19 virus. Not only were supermarkets hit by panic buying but honey sales as well. In four days I sold an average month’s number of jars. No sooner had I instituted rationing and put a notice in the porch to that effect than the government introduced a lock-down so sales ceased.

The foragers are more interested in pollen rather than nectar. The hives I’ve cleaned still have loads of honey stores but are in need of pollen for brood food. I’ve removed several nice clean frames full of honey and replaced them with drawn comb in order to give more laying capacity. The honey-full combs are being sterilized and will be used as food for any swarms.

The Dartington hive is finished. I’ve cut some letter-box slots for the varroa tray and finished painting it. Supers will have to wait as doing real beekeeping now calls.

  • Cut timber for a Dartington Long Hive
  • Assembly Dry Run
  • Assembling the roof
  • Ready for Painting
  • Finished Dartington

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Work continues in both the apiary and the workshop.

We’ve had no long cold spell again this winter. Maybe climate change means they are a thing of the past?

Never-the-less oxalic acid treatment had to be done, brood or no brood. Total drop varied from 570 down to 70 which I didn’t think was too bad. There was still a small natural drop the following week so I’ve followed up with an Apivar treatment.

Weeks of dull cloudy and cold weather has kept the bees confined to hive but a morning sunshine early in the month brought them out. It wasn’t just cleansing flights either. The aroma of the winter honeysuckle was hanging like a cloud around the shrub and the girls were foraging madly. I have at long last succeeded in getting some winter aconite to grow in the damson copse and their gloriously yellow blooms were a real magnet. No aconite in the spinney yet which is a real disappointment

Honeybees working the aconite

The Dartington Long-hive continues (unapace) to grow steadily. I have tried to do a little each day through the winter. The brood box is now finished, the roof is assembled and it is all ready for proofing. Honeyboxes and insulated dummy-boards can be gradually completed throughout the spring. The former are of course not vital as I can always use conventional supers if necessary.

The honey DNA testing results have come back from the CEH (Centre for Ecology and Hydrology). Some results were as expected but there were some surprises as well. The three varieties of open-pollenated rape were the main leaders in the spring and they showed up quite distinctly. The surprise was a noticeable content of sycamore. The spinney, which is only a third of an acre, consists of sycamore and elm 50:50 about twenty five years old but already yielding well. Unfortunately sycamore is an alien species and everyone I’ve consulted about the spinney’s future has said “You can get those out!”. We’ll see.

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In addition to giving my smoker a thorough clean-out I shall also be going through the cupboards in the bee-shed and clearing things which haven’t been used for years.

In addition I’ve decided to return to a long-waiting project. This autumn, Saffron Walden Beekeepers had a visiting speaker who talked about different hive designs. One in particular which he was recommending was a Dartington Long Hive.

Some years ago, when Saffron Walden division organised the Essex Beekeepers conference we had Robin Dartington as one of our visiting speakers and he demonstrated how to use his new hive to the most advantage. I was very impressed and bought all his publications. I followed this with a visit to his apiary where we spent half a day working his hives.

Robin Dartington inspecting a colony in a long hive

I bought some of the wood to make my own hive but then the bee season started and it got shelved. I have now resurrected all the pieces from the back of the bee-shed and hope the workshop won’t be too cold to enable me to push the project further along. As it is now fifteen years since I started the project, I’ve accumulated a lot of off-cuts in various sizes so hopefully I will be able to finish using recycled wood.

Cut timber for a Dartington Long Hive

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That’s it for another year.

The harvest was just sufficient to meet my annual needs as it passed my target by a mere 5kg. I still have a super of comb to cut but that is only about half full and much of that not really suitable for the size of the cutter. However, we’ll see.

All the honey in the supers has been extracted and brood-box frames have been moved around to ensure that all colonies have sufficient stores until I give them their winter feed.

Having extracted the honey, I replaced the supers of wet frames above an empty box with the crown board feed-hole cracked open. Three supers a day and they soon had them all licked clean and dry. The excitement started some potential robbing so the affected hives were fitted with an entrance block with a one-bee-width hole; much easier to defend.

The girls have been plagued with CBPV (Chronic Bee Paralysis Virus) this year and I fear that several colonies wont make it through the winter. I have united colonies down to a total of ten in number rather than the usual eight just to be on the safe side.

Varroa-drop figures are still being collected. Hive 9 became frighteningly high so on Stuart Roweth’s advice I have increased the number of Beegyms to three. There is now a distinct pattern of varroa drop beneath these.

Feeding starts soon so I’d better buy my sugar for a 2:1 feed.

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