Skip to content

Published on

In January I found that two hives had died. On opening the hive I fouind the cluster had been just too small to survive. There were no visible signs of Deformed Wing Virus and varroa levels had been kept very low by two winter sublimations and ten weeks of Apivar. The queens were from 2021 but these two colonies were the best yielding producing 7-8 supers each previous year. Why did they dwindle away? I'll never know. The hives have been removed and sterilizing pads put in each so that the uneaten frames of stores can be employed elsewhere.

The demise of two colonies however is not a major loss as I am now back to the eight colonies I’ve over-wintered in earlier years. Hives 9 and 10 will be moved across to the gaps left by 5 and 8. The boy’s go-cart was renovated last year so I now have an ideal hive transporter. The hives to be moved were very heavy; too heavy to be lifted for each move. On the seat of the g-cart however they can be easily pulled a further 3 feet every flying day.

I stress the flying day as I have yet to read a beekeeping book which recognises the fact that if you have ten days of bad weather and the bees stay indoors, continual daily moving of the hive means they will emerge from a hive 30 feet away from its original position. Too far for them to re-orientate.

Hive 10 reaches its new destination.

February has seen the longest, fattest hazel catkins I’ve ever known. The are many hazel bushes in the hedge and it's been marvellous to see so many bees all over them returning to their hives loaded with the pale greeny-yellow pollen.

Bees collecting hazel pollen from catkins.

Enough for two. Apis and Bombus share a crocus

The snowdrops, aconites and crocus have provided the regular springtime diet. One of two emerging queen bumbles have been joining them for a meal on the crocus.

The bullace and cherry plum are about to burst into flower and it's then that the spring feasting can commence.

Published on

All hives were prepared to be winter-fed with Apikel this year. Not all of them completely emptied their Ashforth feeders but that was simply because they were already well fed. One hive, hive 2, however took down hardly anything and that’s a bad sign; usually queenlessness.

Hive 2 therefore needed requeening and this was best done by uniting with S1; a smallish colony with a new queen.

S1 was gradually moved, 3 feet per flying day, until it stood alongside hive 2.

The two hives were then swapped over so most if not all of 2’s flying bees homed in on hive S1

S1 has been moved across
Hives 2 & S1 are swapped over
Deciding on unite method

It was now time for the final unite. With two small colonies it can be done quickly and easily by masking the colony aromas. I spray all the frames down with a very dilute mix of water with a drop of essential lavendre oil. On this occasion it was too risky as although I had looked through hive 2 and not found a queen, that didn’t rule out there being a virgin queen raised as a supersedure too late in the season to mate. This therefore had to be a brushing-out unite.

Hive 2 moved away
Brushing bees from frame
Bees brushed in front of S1

The bees on the ground in front of S1 will find their way in during the day but the guards wont allow in an alien queen, virgin or otherwise.

Any frames in hive 2 containing stores were put into S1 and it was job done.

Published on

Having a corrupt web site has unfortunately meant a blog-free year to date. This means that I’ve been able to spend more time with the bees rather than sitting trying to think what I could write. However, a much more knowledgable beekeeper was able to sort the problems and we are back on air again

Fortunately I practise what I preach and I can look back through my hive records, my varroa-count records and other documents to recall the story of the year.

Starting the year with 9 hives rather than the usual 8 was a wise precaution as one became queenless. How I don’t know.

A glorious week in February meant all the hives could be opened and given a treatment with Apivar. A weekly check was made and the strips were removed once the drop had been zero for two consecutive weeks.

An early spring meant that I was able to start spring-cleaning in early March. Every hive was given a clean floor, brood box and crown board and every frame was scraped clean of wax and propolis. My idea of cleanliness doesn’t necessarily match that of the bees but we both have to compromise to live together.

Over the apiary hedge was 175 acres of oil seed rape. My expectations of stacks of full honey-tubs were rudely dashed. Continual dry weather meant a low nectar yield so my rape harvest was below expectations.

Continual sunshine meant that the girls could at least continue flying day after day. It also meant that the airfield over the road was able to yield an abundance of ragwort: not good news. Ragwort has a most unpleasant flavour and it taints anything with which it is blended. I have a stack of tubs sitting on one side maturing in the hopes that the ragwort influence will slowly decrease.

I have experimented with sublimation. I bought an electric vaporizer and also a Gasvap. Both had to be used with a full-face gas mask although with the electric vaporizer it was possible to use it safely simply by standing well downwind as it warmed up. The Gasvap was not so successful. It was necessary to stand right by the entrance whilst the Gasvap belched (most of the) fumes into the hive entrance. Having a beard meant that the gas-mask was not a tight fit to my face and I was breathing in oxalic acid fumes. Not recommended.

Madeleine, my trainee/apprentice this year had a thorough grounding as she worked with me almost the entire season. Her help was invaluable, especially when it came to moving hives over to Debden Green to establish an out-apiary beside the borage. Yes, lovely borage honey. A beautiful, almost clear runny honey and the yield was sufficient to get me close to my target harvest weight.

Published on

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.

Published on

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.

Published on

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.

Published on

The number of colonies has been reduced to 9 for this winter; just a little bit less work to do.

Rather than mixing up sugar solution I decided to give Apikel (an invert sugar solution made from maize) another try. My first attempts some years ago could have been the cause of colony loss but others haven’t reported anything similar so I decided to try again. In addition to the Apikel I did give every colony a few pounds of waste honey.

Varroa figures were much higher that I’d hoped so I decided to give an autumn treatment of Apivar miticide rather that wait until mid-winter with the oxalic acid. Better that they go into the new year varroa-free. After three weeks, the Apivar strips were removed, heavily abraded, and then replaced in a different position. Research has shown that abrading increases the efficacy of the strips in the latter half of their life.

I have started compiling my End of Season records; provenance of the queen, average colony behaviour and total honey yield. This gives me a good picture of every colony when they start to emerge in the spring.

Lecturing and classes have been very different this year and will continue to be so in 2021. To this end Steph Green and I have started filming what I would call snippets to complement the theory classes when they start in 2021. So far we’ve done cleaning and storing of supers and next week we cover the choice of smokers, their effective use and keeping them clean.

Published on

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.

Published on

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.

Published on

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.

..