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Category: flow

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Not really something I want to write about but something which has to be recorded.

Possibly the worst year I can remember in the last 40.

Having started with 9 colonies I managed to get a reasonable crop from the oil-seed-rape but from this point it all went down-hill.

The weather turned cold and wet throughout the spring and the bees were confined to their hives for long periods. The result was overcrowding and a strong swarming urge. This couldn’t be quelled by adding supers or replacing comb with foundation so it became a continual battle to prevent swarming. This was exacerbated by a period of bad health (mine) which prevented me from doing brood inspections. The result was a massive loss of bees in swarms and a line of hives with virgin queens. The bad weather meant that the queens were unable to fly for weeks and having failed to do so for nearly a month, became barren. This resulted in them becoming drone-layers and the colony gradually dwindling away.

The summary of my losses were

Drone Layers 10

Regicide 3

Mating Flight Loss 7

In a drone-laying situation, you cannot do a paper unite as the colony, to all intent and purposes, has a viable queen and unless and until she is removed she cannot be put together with a colony which has a viable queen. Finding a small virgin queen to remove can be done but it does involve a high level of luck. The only answer is to simply shake out the colony, remove the hive and leave the workers to seek refuge in another hive; again and again.

Then disease struck. I was having to shovel up heaps of dead bees beneath the hive entrances and it was spreading along the hives. Unable to diagnose the problem I called in a seasonal inspector and between us we came to the decision that it could only Chronic Bee Paralysis Virus on a grand scale and for which there was no cure. With existing colonies dwindling down to a few frames of bees I united the two larger ones to make one viable colony and took it to an out-apiary over at Cutler’s Green to get them away from the infection.

The home apiary now looks a poor shadow of its former self.

What's left of a once thriving apiary

The out-apiary at Cutler’s Green was boosted with two ‘cut-outs’. A neighbouring farmer had two old rotten hives sitting on a field headland which had been populated by a swarm and a cast. He wanted them removed so I duly obliged hoping they were in fact swarms from my own hives. No such luck, as I could tell from their personality that they weren’t from my well behaved colonies. They were however bees and I wasn't going to look a gift-horse in the mouth. Having got them on the borage at Cutler’s Green they soon settled down and started producing brood.

Early morning at Mill Hill, Cutler's Green

The borage was a god-send as it may-have-well just saved my honey harvest.

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Everything started at least two weeks earlier this year. The good weather we experienced meant that I could start spring cleaning on 1st of April, well before any large flow.

I also took advantage of the now smaller post-winter colonies to quickly find and clip all the queens (except one).

Hive 9 was a real surprise. This was a colony which had been moved away from the main apiary due to suspected infection with sac brood. It was also one of two that I deliberately did not give a full winter-feed. Whereas hive 5, the other colony treated in a similar fashion succumbed early in the winter, hive 9 continued to thrive and once we were clear of winter, an inspection showed no sign of sac-brood and they had existed on less than a Miller feeder of syrup.

Hive 4 which was a poorly laying queen was moved out of line and replaced with the now healthy hive 9.

The first supers were going on on 13th April again 2-3 weeks earlier than in the past.

After the early start to the season we were then subjected to an extended period of very poor weather which confined the bees to their hives. This enforced stay-at-home induced a swarming instinct in all the colonies even though they were all on 2023 queens. Needless to say, it was the unclipped queen which was the first to go. Fortunately they stayed close to home and were captured and hived.

All the others with clipped queens were reduced to one queen cell and allowed to swarm. The little clusters of bees in front of each hive were gathered up and added to the swarm hive.

By mid May, all the oil-seed-rape had finished flowering and honey extraction started with several hives yielding 2-3 supers.

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Most people only think of garden flowers or fields of rape as honey and pollen yielders but many trees have hidden talents.

Whilst we are familiar with stone-fruit and pip-fruit blossom the other forest trees have more unseen flowers. Chestnut and hawthorn are two glorious show-offs but have you ever noticed the beautiful racemes of the sycamore? What about the flower-heads of field maple or ivy? If you do an internet search for these two you’ll get all sorts of sites as suggestions which will tell you the height, the spread, the leaf shape, leaf colour and so on, but the poor flower doesn’t get a mention.

The bees know them though and the sycamore and field-maple are worked so avidly that it can tempt them away from the oil seed rape. In fact 10% of my clear spring honey in 2020 was from the field-maple. Maple is a lovely sweet honey but sycamore has a strong nutty flavour which might not be to everyone’s taste, but to others it’s a distinctive difference.

By mid June 2023 I had done four extracting sessions and everything was looking very encouraging. The harvest so far was exceeding 2022. At this point it all went pear-shaped.

I thought the dearth of the June gap was not going to occur as field-bean continued flowering. However by the middle of the month there was no nectar coming in. What they had collected was ripened and capped and supers only half full were abandoned in favour of just collecting pollen. Cold late-autumnal weather has brood nests visually shrinking and winter preparations underway. There is no excited chasing after a lovely summer ‘flow’ and the poor bees just seem to be passing the time of day drifting around.

Two hives taken over to Debden Green were initially given an extra two empty supers for all this lovely borage honey on the doorstep. Five days later these had to be removed because the weather was too cold for them to cope with such a large empty space to heat. The inclement weather has continued throughout the month so these two hives will probably come home having achieved nothing.

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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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My first honey extraction was very late this year due to the absence of rape honey. The field was right on my doorstep but no nectar.

That’s three years in a row with rape within easy flying and all they’ve harvested is pollen. I went to speak with John, the farmer, to see if he’d changed his seed variety recently but “No, I’ve been using the same variety for the last three years.”; Campus. A quick search revealed that research done by Newcastle and Exeter Universities found that modern hybrid rape, Campus in particular yielded nectar little better than water. The bees know best; not worth the energy.

It’s ironic actually that said farmer gets a subsidy for sowing pollinator strips along his headlands but can then sow a distinctly pollinator-unfriendly crop in the remaining 35 acres.

On a similar note, another long-standing member of Saffron Walden Beepers was talking with a farming friend who was disappointed that he could no longer appreciate the once beautiful aroma of his field beans. This beekeeper had moved some hives onto his huge field which he reckoned should yield in the region 1,000 lbs of bean honey. He got 150 lbs. Yes, the farmer had changed to a hybrid variety.

Who is to blame? Is it the farmers or the seed merchants?

Queen mating has been a problem this year with the loss of seven queens failing to return from mating flights. This has left me on the verge of a problem but I should just have enough 2018 queens to go into 2019.

The last two weeks of July have seen a terrific mystery flow and this has helped tremendously to overcome the oil-seed-rape loss; not so good for creamed honey but it is at least a harvest.

This mystery flow finished on the 29th. On the 30th I saw intense robbing of hive 1. I removed the entrance block and replaced it with one which had only a one bee-width hole in it and leaned a large sheet of glass on the front of the hive.

 

Single hole entrance block

By the time I had gone round all the other hives and narrowed their entrances down to winter-width (about 40mm) the intensity of the raiding had decreased noticeably. The hive inspections I had planned for that day were put on hold. Opening up a hive under these circumstances was only asking for trouble.

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