Wax moth larva

The wax moth is most active in August and October and will lay eggs in the hive given half the chance. I had seen some evidence of this earlier in the season as the worker bees had uncapped some of the sealed brood – a problem in itself called baldbrood.  Wax moth larvae will not be tolerated in the modern hive by a healthy strong colony but they will take advantage of stored brood comb, such as mine.

If you find you have a hive over run by wax moth it is likely that there are other problems stressing the colony that has prevented them from evicting these unwanted visitors.

Once the larvae are fully grown, having destroyed the comb,  they burrow into the woodwork of the hive to start their pupa stage causing further damage.

Destroyed comb

The larvae of the wax moth eat the cocoons, or linings, in the brood comb and this would happen in feral or wild colonies and would help to remove the unused or diseased comb from the cavity that the bees were occupying so would actually benefit the bees by  removing old comb and therefore creating more space for the bees to create fresh comb free from disease and parasites.

Wax moth larvae trail in comb

Luckily for the beekeeper they do not pose such a problem to the comb in the honey supers as this has not held any young and this is one of the beekeepers more valuable assets as it allows the bees to store honey as soon as the nectar flow starts each year without having to spend time and energy (and honey) drawing the comb from scratch.

As you can see from the photos the comb was totally destroyed so it has now all been cut,  from the frames which in turn have been cleaned in washing soda, the brood box itself has been flamed with a blow torch (paying particular attention to the corners and any crevices) so hopefully this will now remove all traces of the wax moth.

I asked a retired NBU inspector what was the best way of storing brood comb over winter and he replied ‘you don’t!’.

If it is brood comb you don’t store it as it is far better to put swarms direct onto fresh foundation and let them draw it out. If they are a swarm collected from an unknown origin then they will use the honey in their honey stomachs up producing wax for building comb rather than storing it in ready drawn comb and this can help prevent the spread of disease.

Old brood comb destroyed by wax moth

He also gave the following advice:

When not in use stack the brood boxes and supers withtheir comb outside with queen excluders below and a raised clearer board on the top to allow ventilation and of course a roof to top it all off. Spiders will enter the stack and happily eat any moths that enter.

Hope for a cold winter as when you get a frost the temperatures will kill all wax moth and their eggs in comb and frames .

Do not use mothballs or chemical that can taint the wax and eventually end up in the honey – if you do this and it is detected you will be in line for a hefty fine!

With the recent resurgence in beekeeping as a hobby the suppliers are finding it hard to keep up with demand and there is a a thriving market for second hand equipment (just look on eBay) and a there is also a real shortage of bees and I am sure many new beekeepers don’t ask enough questions as they are so excited just to get started on their new hobby.

It’s often suggested that the perpetrators of these thefts must be bee keepers with beekeeping knowledge but I don’t think that this is always the case, I have heard of non-beekeepers stealing supers from the  hives and braving the stings that they take in order to get the honey. It’s a hard deal for the bees, they are fighting off viral, bacterial and parasitic enemies in the hive, then there are the wasps robbing the honey and wax moths and mice destroying the combs and also woodpeckers attacking the hives during the winter months and if they survive this lot they get nicked and either destroyed or sold on to some unsuspecting beekeeper.

The iron brand

Having read several forum articles on protecting the hives, with suggestions ranging from fixing the hive floors to concrete blocks to more hi-tech solutions using motion activated cameras and alarm systems I decided to opt for the simpler solution of branding the wood components of my hives so at least they are more recognisable and therefore hopefully harder to sell on if they are stolen and this may act as a deterrent to potential thieves.

My initials burn't into the cedar

I emailed several local blacksmiths  to try and get a brand made up but received no responses at all, then I contacted a few commercial brand makers but the prices were astronomical. I eventually found a supplier in Texas who could make-up a 4 letter brand, delivered to the UK for about £35 so happily placed my order.

The brand does need quite a bit of heat to get it going – the blowtorch just didn’t get it there so I opted to firing up the wood burner and carrying out the branding in the comfort of my lounge with the results shown above.

So how can other beekeepers help to reduce the problem of theft? It’s in all our interests as you may think you are getting a bargain but then it could just as easily be your bees that are stolen next! A few thoughts are:

Only buy bees from a reputatble source, either a known supplier or from your local beekeepers association. This also helps to ensure that the bees that you receive are good tempered with a young queen and disease free and this also gives you a point of contact to return and ask those questions that will invariably come up.

If the hives appear to be marked with initials or a postcode don’t be afraid to ask where they have come from, if you are not 100% convinced of their origin don’t buy them. In fact report them to to your local beekeepers association or on the beekeeping forums (again its a sad refection on society that there seems to be areas dedicated to stolen hives and security).

The finished super

Finally if you are offered hives marked with ‘DJBM’ let me know as they will definitely be mine!

If you have enjoyed reading this blog then please let me know, comments and feedback are always welcome!

Colonies infected with a bee disease called European Foulbrood (EFB) had been identified within 3km of both of my apiary sites in Kent and therefore the National Bee Unit (NBU) inspector contacted me in order that he could come and inspect the health of bees and the brood in my colonies. It was a nervous few days waiting to find out if my bees would get a clean bill of health or ‘be burn’t at the stake’ or in a pit of fire anyway.

Food and Environment Research Agency (FERA)

The NBU is part of The Food and Environment Research Agency (FERA) set up by the government to assist and educate beekeepers to help to protect the health of national bee stocks and also to  monitor and prevent the spread of serious bee disease, often caused through the bees ‘drifting’ between hives or deliberately entering other hives  as ‘robbers’ where there are weaker colonies defending them.

European foulbrood is caused by Melissococcus plutonius,  a bacterium that infests the mid-gut of an infected bee larva. EFB is considered less deadly to a colony than American foulbrood. Melissococcus plutonius does not form spores, though it can overwinter on comb and symptoms include dead and dying larvae which can appear curled upwards, brown or yellow, melted or deflated with tracheal tubes more apparent, and/or dried out and rubbery.

Opening up the hives for inspection

European foulbrood is often considered a “stress” disease – a disease that is dangerous only if the colony is already under stress for other reasons. An otherwise healthy colony can usually survive European foulbrood.

David, the NBU inspector, arrived at the apiary and got kitted up in a very clean bee suit, freshly sterilised boots and proceeded to clean his hive tools in washing soda so there wasn’t much chance of him bringing infection in and I was hoping that he wouldn’t be finding any to take away.

We gently smoked the hives and David inspected the bees and the brood, paying particular attention to anything considered outside the ordinary.  David has a large number of colonies himself used for training and nuc rearing so not wanting to waste an opportunity of having an expert to hand both my friend Paul and I asked as many questions as possible relating to the health of our bees and we got very comprehensive answers.

David checking the frames for any signs of brood disease

The four colonies inspected on the day did not show any sign of EFB, this was a great relief both to myself (and the bees) as I had considered my bees to be relatively healthy, albeit with a touch of varroa mite that I had been treating over the last four weeks, and I hoped that I hadn’t simply missed spotting the symptoms of a serious disease through failing to recognise it or just plain ignorance. The hives were all active on the day with the foraging bees bringing in plenty of bright yellow pollen.

The brood inspections did identify a small amount of baldbrood, possibly caused by the bees removing cappings due to the larvae of the wax moth moving through the comb, and also a small amount of Chalkbrood. The infected larvae were removed from the comb for closer examination.

Chalkbrood or Ascosphaera apis is a fungal disease that infests the gut of the larva. The fungus will compete with the larva for food, ultimately causing it to starve. The fungus will then go on to consume the rest of the larva’s body, causing it to appear white and ‘chalky’ and it is quite sticky when removed from the comb which in itself is a useful field test for this disease. Hives with Chalkbrood can generally be recovered by increasing the ventilation through the hive but this should not pose a problem to my colonies.

Closer examination of the uncapped larvae for signs and symptoms of disease

The experience of having David come to inspect my bees was a very positive one, he was friendly and approachable and able to answer the many questions that we put to him. I would recommend, in fact urge, any beekeepers not currently registered on BeeBase to do so. This may well help to prevent the spread of serious disease from your colonies to others, or from others to you, in the future at a time when there are enough environmental pressures working against the bees survival on a global scale.

The last week in September has had a warm start and it is set to get hotter into the weekend so it looks like the summer has finally arrived and I am hoping that the bees will take full advantage of the fine weather and late flowering plants to bring in further stores of pollen and nectar for the winter.

Further information regarding the Healthy Bee Plan and for registering your UK apiaries on BeeBase can be found at:

https://secure.fera.defra.gov.uk/beebase/index.cfm

My new cross-mated buckfast queen

The last few apiary visits have been fine with healthy bees seen in the hive, good br0od (eggs and pupa) and plenty of stores for the winter (honey for the bees and pollen for early brood rearing) and I even got to finally meet my new queen in Ogwen (my hives are all named after Welsh mountains) introduced into the hive back in August by my friend Paul – she is much lighter in colour than my other queens and seems to be laying very well now and I have no doubt it is a good thing to increase the gene pool in the apiary!

My new queen in action

There is still some evidence of varroa mite on the bees and I am hoping that my Thymol treatment (Apilife Var) has been effective enough to reduce the mite see the colonies through the winter. In the photos you will see that the queen is marked with a white dot (to help find her easily during the inspections) if you look at the picture below you can see that the bee to her left is carrying a red varroa mite in the middle of its thorax (I didn’t spot this when I took the photo).

New queen, varroa mite on thorax of bee to her left

There has also been a small amount of unsealed brood in the hive, known as ‘bald brood’ caused by the bees uncapping the developing pupa prematurely due to the presence of lesser wax moth larvae in the cells (they feed on the cell lining) but on the whole the colonies seem to be strong and healthy and very active in all three hives and on both apiary sites.

My hives are registered with the National Bee Unit (NBU), which is part of FERA, and they keep a database of beekeepers and apiary sites called  BeeBase in order that they can monitor for disease and colony loss in the UK and try to prevent the spread of diseases through either treating or culling infected colonies. This is very important at a time when the global bee population seem to have their very existence threatened with many factors affecting their survival.

https://secure.fera.defra.gov.uk/beebase/index.cfm

I visited the NBU website last week and saw that they had been notified of a diseased colony within 5km of my hives and I was dreading hearing from them … well that call has finally come through today as they have had a case of European Foul Brood reported locally and as part of confining the spread they are now required to check my colonies for disease and then make a decision on their future. I am confident they are all okay and that my inspections and treatments have been effective but I am also aware that I am still very much a novice when it comes down to recognising bee diseases and I guess if they are infected that it’s better to find out now and deal with it rather than finding empty hives in the spring and not really knowing what happened.

Hive getting ready for the winter, will it survive or is it destined to be burn't?

If the hives are infected the bee inspector will decide on the best course of action – either treatment for light infestation in a strong colony or burning the bees, frames and even the hives in the worst case scenario.

After so much work in keeping the bees strong and healthy throughout the last two years I will be very disappointed if I lose all my bees now and have to start again in the spring next year but I guess that is all part of bee keepers life and the outcome of the inspectors  visit will no doubt be the subject of my next blog!

If you have enjoyed this blog feel free to tell me (or rate it)  it’s always nice to hear back from fellow bee-keepers and from those who love and want to support the bees but maybe don’t have the time or the opportunity yet.

But before the bees are securely wrapped  up with chicken wire in place to keep the woodpeckers at bay, and the metal guards attached over the hive entrance to keep the mice out, they need to be thoroughly checked to make sure that they have the very best chance of surviving the winter and into next year. This involves checking each colony for a healthy queen, healthy brood, treating the hives for varroa mite (a problem in virtually all UK hives these days) and any of the other bee diseases and hive parasites (of which there are many!) and at the same time feedback sugar syrup to replace the honey that was taken whilst it is still warm outside and there is a sufficient number of bees left to reduce it and store it before the winter period.

Spa Valley Honey

I carried out three separate honey extractions this year and this produced a total harvest of about 160-170 1bs of honey from just three hives, although one of these hives only yielded about 30lbs of honey so the other two did exceptionally well, but then it has been an exceptionally good year for beekeepers right across the country with the long dry spring being the main period of activity for the bees, unfortunately the summer was once again a bit of a washout being generally cool and wet.

Honey for sale

The colony is now reducing in size quite rapidly and the queen is currently laying the workers that will join her for the winter and then help her to build up a strong colony early in the spring. Most worker bees only live for about five weeks during the spring and summer months and they literally ‘work themselves to death’ but over winter the bees will live for about five months in the hive, clustering around the queen and keeping her warm, but using virtually no energy in a semi-comatose state. When she starts to lay eggs again early January they will once again raise the temperature of the brood area and that is when they will need the honey and pollen stored in the hive. Bees don’t starve in the autumn or early in the year – it’s at the end of February or beginning of March when there are no flowering plants to supply nectar but the bees need the food that the colony is most at risk of collapse.

I took up beekeeping due to the environmental concerns over declining numbers of primary pollinators in the UK (actually make that worldwide!!!) and the collapse of honey bee colonies  so I leave my bees in two brood boxes over winter, one deep and one shallow, and this allows them to retain far more honey than most beekeepers, or honey farmers, would leave on the hive. This doesn’t guarantee that they will survive the winter or prevent starvation but I am sure that it helps. When the bees start looking for honey in the spring they move up through the hive and may still starve with several frames of stores on both sides of the brood area  so I feed candy in January to counter this.

Treating hive for mite with Apilife Var

During the most recent inspections I have been unhappy with one hive in particular as the brood pattern seems more erratic than normal and there have been uncapped cells with the un-hatched larva exposed. This looks to me to be a problem called ‘bald brood’ that occurs when the hive becomes infested with the lesser wax moth larvae. Hopefully the colony is strong enough to sort itself out and eject these unwanted visitors that crawl through the capped cells feeding on the cell linings. This time of year also sees a reduction in the bee population and the hive easily becomes over-loaded with the parasitic varroa mites. I am currently treating all the hives with thymol (apilife var) and am hoping that this will be as successful as it was last year.

Treating hive for mite above the brood area

The new queen is also laying well but obviously the colony suffered by having a prolonged period with no queen and therefore no new workers coming into service, I am hoping that the colony recovers enough to see the winter through. Ironically the hive that I was most concerned about losing back at the beginning of August, due to the lost queen and egg laying workers, now seems like the contender for being both the strongest colony and the one with the greatest chance of surviving the winter, funny how everything can change in just a period of 4 -5 weeks!

Following the artificial swarm earlier in the season I had left the old hive with the new queen well alone to allow her to hatch, mate and start laying eggs. The new hive (with the old queen) was checked and they seemed exceptionally strong as a colony as the bees had drawn out the comb rapidly filling every inch with brood, honey and pollen, all within a matter of days and ‘getting grumpy’ with the lack of space in an 11 frame brood box within a fortnight (note – getting grumpy means they rush out to meet you when you arrive at the hives and all want to get inside your veil to sting!)

When I came to check on the new queens progress I knew I was a little overdue, a combination of bad weather, commuting for work and a young family leaves me on a tight time bee schedule. I was hoping to open the hive and find a beautiful new queen with at least five frames of brood, good pollen stores and plenty of the golden stuff but unfortunately my visit revealed quite the opposite. No queen was found and I can only assume she never returned from her mating flights but even worse there were eggs in the hive but these were randomly laid (in a pepper pot fashion), the eggs were not perfectly placed at the bottom of each cell and there were multiple eggs per cell.

Multiple eggs in each cell as laid by workers (4 shown in this cell!)

I knew straight away that this was the sign of a beekeepers nightmare – the egg laying worker! With the lack of a queen in the hive the colony slowly dies as there is no regeneration of the workers. In some cases a number of workers will then develop active ovaries and start egg laying, bought on by the lack of queen pheromone that normally suppresses the ovaries of the workers. The workers have not mated and are not fertile and therefore they can only lay drone (male) eggs.

Erratic egg laying with drone brood from an egg laying worker

Deformed worker brood comb now being used to house drone brood

Their bodies are not adapted for egg laying and being smaller than the queen they do not reach the bottom of the cells and they do not have the queens methodical approach of laying eggs in cleaned cells together so that they can be tended, there may also be several egg laying workers in one hive.

Lack of time didn’t allow for me to go home, read a book, speak to a bee master or look up the best way to deal with it on google so I made a decision to unite the queen laying worker colony with the very strong artificially swarmed colony using the paper method, in which the queenless colony is placed over the queen right colony with only a sheet of newspaper between them, with a few small tears in it. This allows the bees to chew their way through and merge the colony with minimal loses due to fighting and the resident queen takes control of the whole colony.

Uniting colonies using the 'paper method'

Feeling quite pleased with myself I rang my friend Paul who pointed out that this was the one thing that the books recommend not to do and a egg laying worker in a colony is really a lost cause, I checked and he was right – it now looked like I may lose both colonies instead of just the one but it was now to late to change anything – it was done!!!

After returning from my holiday I attended the hives for a routine check, now expecting the worst but was very happy to find that against all the odds the old queen, artificially swarmed into a new hive back in June had seen off her ‘laying worker rivals’ and was heading a very strong colony with a large brood area and good stores. I am happy that this colony when treated will be strong enough to pull through the winter months ahead.

Brood boxes united with queenless colony on top

two colonies united together

Checking my other hives I discovered that another colony that had been in shutdown conditions whilst the new queen hatched, mated and started laying was also queenless but here there were no laying workers and a new buckfast cross mated queen has been ordered from Paynes bee farm for introduction into the colony this weekend. The hive had swarmed back in early July but the old hive had not been checked in order no to damage the queen cells, but on the recent inspection there were no ‘used’ queen cells found so I can only assume that the queen fled without leaving a new queen behind – possibly due to weather conditions or hive conditions, guess I will never know but again I am hoping that this has been spotted early enough to remedy and save the colony.

A busy week lays ahead with a new queen to be established, final honey extractions from all hives, the application of varroa treatment and starting to feed sugar syrup back to the bees …. lets just hope that the rain clears long enough to get into the hives.

Steriliser, yeast and yeast nutrient to feed the sugar

‘Mead’ or ‘honey wine’ is literally honey and water fermented together and has historical ties to many areas around the world and it is as Wilkipedia accurately describes it ‘as the ancestor of all fermented drinks’. There are many many variations of the recipe, some include grain and fruit added during the fermentation process, and the eventual alcohol strength may range from 8% through to 18% (or a lot stronger if you distill it but making ‘moonshine’ is illegal so best left alone whilst you still have your eyesight!).

A quick google search led to several variations on mead making so I have listed here what I did and I guess I will have to wait at least a year to find out if it worked well, is drinkable or if I have created a monster …. either way I am sure it will get drunk and be tastier than the rhubarb vodka I made last year!

If, like me, you are a beekeeper you may well wish to use the honey remaining in with the cappings from the honey extraction and you need to measure the amount of honey dissolved in your liquor. The old method was to float a new laid egg in the dissolved honey and when only a piece of shell the size of an old sixpence was showing, the amount of honey was correct. Nowadays, you can purchase an instrument called a hydrometer which is easy to use and much more reliable. Personally I don’t own a hydrometer and wouldn’t trust the egg method so I have gone for the ‘make it and see how it turns out’method that may lead to a sweet or dry mead with an unknown final strength but maybe I will have a hydrometer by then. I washed the cappings in luke warm water, warm enough to dissolve the honey but not hot enough to melt the wax, I then strained it back through the honey filters to leave a very sweet honey syrup to form the base of my mead.

Liquid from washing honey cappings with 3lb of honey added

The Ingredients that I used were approximately:

3 – 3 1/2 lb. honey
Juice of 4 lemons (or 1/2 oz. citric acid)
1/2 cup black strong tea (or 1/2 tsp. tannin ).
Wine yeast (General Purpose Yeast will be suitable).
2 tsp. yeast nutrient & 1/4 tsp. yeast extract (e.g. ‘Marmite’) to provide vitamin B.
Water to 1 gal.

(S.G. approx. 1.100 = potential alcohol 13.4%)

Method:

Warm the honey in approximately three times its own volume of water, stir to dissolve (avoid burning the honey), bring just to the boil and simmer for a couple of minutes. Remove the scum. Do not boil fast as many desirable substances will be evaporated off, causing loss of flavour and bouquet.

When it has cooled, transfer the liquid to a 1 gal. glass demijohn previously well rinsed with hot water and then sterilised. Bring the remaining water to the boil and again when cool add to the dissolved honey. Add the yeast, nutrient, tannin and acid. Fit a bubbler air lock (or plug the neck of the jar with cotton wool) and leave in a warm place to ferment.

Mead bubbling away in a warm place

Within a few hours the fermentation process will have started with bubbles and froth appearing.

When fermentation is complete (when there are no more bubbles and it has begun to clear – possibly after 1 month), siphon the mead using a length of plastic tubing (or carefully decant) into a clean jar leaving the sediment behind and top up with clean water to within three fingers of the neck.

When another deposit has formed, siphon again.
When it no longer throws a sediment and is clear, bottle. If necessary, filter or add wine finings. Be careful as bottling too early can lead to disasterous results! The final mead should be clearer and inviting to drink.

The above recipe should produce a dry mead containing about 13% alcohol. If the finished mead tastes rather sweet, delay bottling until you are sure fermentation has finished to avoid burst bottles. A medium mead would need about 4 lb. honey and a sweet (or sack) mead 4 1/2 lb.

Sultanas give extra flavour, body and smoothness to mead and nourish the yeast. Rinse 12 oz. sultanas in warm water and chop or mince. Ferment on the pulp, stir daily, and strain after 10 days.

The  mead should be drinkable after a year or so. Having made mead, don’t be impatient to drink it – there is no comparison between young mead and the matured article. Brother Adam of Buckfast Abbey recommended maturing mead in sound oak casks for a full seven years before bottling but I am not sure that mine will last quite that long!

More honey will increase the specific gravity, more water will lower it.

2 lb. honey in 1 gal. gives S.G. 1.060, potential alcohol 7.8%.
3 lb. honey in 1 gal. gives S.G. 1.090, potential alcohol 12%.
4 lb. honey in 1 gal. gives S.G. 1.120, potential alcohol 16.3%.

Dry Mead: Starting S.G. 1.085-1.105. Finish S.G. 0.990-1.000.
Medium Mead: Starting S.G. 1.105-1.120. Finish S.G. 1.000-1.005.
Sweet Mead: Starting S.G. 1.120-1.130. Finish S.G. 1.005-1.015.

Honey for sale

With the hives filling very rapidly this year and the bees getting ready to swarm it seemed logical to give the bees back some space and take off the first honey crop of the year. Each of my three main hives had two supers full of ‘capped’ frames with the honey ready to extract.

Capped honey in a frame

The bees cap the honey comb once the water content of the honey has been reduced to less than 19% and there is no risk of it being able to ferment. Due to the size of the colonies I only remove one super from each hive at a time to retain the bees space inside the hive, rather than taking two in one go and condensing the bees down into a smaller space during the very hot weather which may then encorage them to swarm earlier than normal.

Clearer board on a hive

I attended the apiary on the Friday evening and placed clearer boards with porter bee escapes in the hive under the honey super containing the frames to be extracted. The bee escapes are really bee turnstiles, as in they let the bees out of the honey super to be removed but not back in again. You have to be careful that you leave no bee space into the super to be removed as once the bees are out it is very easy for robbing to take place and all your honey crop can disappear in a day!

Returning on a very warm Sunday morning I wasn’t sure how well the clearing would have worked as last year it wasn’t that successful but this year it seemed to have worked far better, maybe this was due to the hives being taller with more hive space beneath and the clearer boards being in place for longer or maybe it was just due to the unseasonal heat. The full supers were swiftly removed and the few lingering bees guarding the frames of honey were gently encouraged to return to the hive. There is little more off putting then a few bees flying around your head whilst you try to extract the stolen honey!

Using the uncapping fork

With bees and honey separated it was time to spin out the honey. The wax capping that seal the honey in the comb are removed using an ‘uncapping fork’ and the frames are then placed in a centrifugal device that allows you to gently spin out the honey, then reverse the frames and repeat this process until the combs are virtually empty.

There will always be traces of honey left in the comb and a little ‘set’ honey and this will be fed back to the bees who will clean it from the ‘wet comb’ and take the honey back down deeper into the hive. Once the frames are cleaned and dry they will be removed and stored until required again.

Once the honey has been removed from the comb it is allowed to pass through a coarse filter and then a very fine filter to remove some of the wax particles, pollen and anything else that may have made its way into the honey. This seems to be the longest part of the extraction process with the honey slowly dripping through the filters.

Following the extraction and filtering it is allowed to settle for at least 24 hours, this is allow any air bubbles introduced whilst spinning it out of the frames to rise to the surface. There is nothing wrong with these appearing in the honey but cosmetically it it better to lose them. The honey is then literally passed through quality control (tasted for sweetness!) and ‘poured off’ through the honey tap into the sterilised jars and labelled up ready for sale.

Quality control

The cappings contain a fair amount of honey and these are separated from the wax in warm water – this will now form the sugary syrup that will be the base for making this year’s honey mead – and probably form the subject of my next blog entry!

Labelling jars

Swarm in a tree

My last blog explained how I carried out an artificial swarm up at one of the apiaries. There  was only the one hive there so once the artificial swarm had been carried out the risk of a real swarm occuring was very minimal, although having left five new queens cells in the hive there is always the risk of a cast (a smaller swarm leaving with the first born, or subsequent, virgin queens) but on the whole I have now left them alone to get on with re-queening, mating and re-building the colonies.

Close up of swarm in a tree

I was at work in London a couple of weeks ago and the phone rang, my wife has literally stumbled into a small swarm on the ground on the local common whilst walking the dog so Paul popped up and mopped it up, then the very next day a large swarm was seen in flight crossing a field in the Teisse Valley and settling about 200m from the out apiary there.

Again Paul bravely donned his bee keeping suit and happily collected the swarm. Two days later and one of my hives, Ogwen, decided to surprise us with a large swarm which settled in a tree near the Spa Valley apiary and Paul duly collected it into a cardboard box and re-hived in one of the the prepared ‘swarm control’ hives.

Swarm collected in a box

This new swarm stayed for a few hours before deciding to head out again, but due to a well placed queen excluder under the brood body the bees left but returned when they realised they were missing their queen, without which the colony has no chance of survival. I have been contacted yesterday and again today being requested to collect swarms but we seem to have run out of luxury bee accommodation in which to re-house the bees with all the hives now occupied. Buying additional hives right now isn’t an option so we are having to pass these on. Swarming of different colonies in the same area often occurs around the same time each year, I assume some of the factors outside of the beekeepers control that then lead to swarming are common across an area, being weather and forage availability.

The last three weeks have seen high pressure and unseasonably hot weather and as the colonies near their peak numbers life in the hives must be very warm and congested. The long dry spring has allowed the bees to work hard and bring in much nectar and the supers are filling very fast. Time to crop some honey …..

A check on one colony about three weeks ago revealed far more ‘play cups’ than there were present in either of the other two colonies (the early indicator of a queen cell). This colony was also collected as a swam itself last year so would have had an older queen, previoulsy driven from a hive, and it looks like the colony had decided to eject her once again and start over with a new virgin queen.

Play cell - an early indicator of swarming behaviour

The checks carried out every ten days or so by beekeepers between April and August are partly to spot these signs of swarming and queen replacement and allow enough time to try to carry out some form of preventative action to avoid losing half your bees and therefore half your work force (and the honey that they will make) as well as being a responsible beekeeper and not allowing the hive to randomly throw swarms that then become a nusiance to other people.

I checked to make sure that the old queen was still present in the hive then removed some of the play cells – this would not prevent a swarm but at least buy me back a little bit more time before they were ready to go. At the next visit, carried out 9 days later, I took along a spare hive with frames of wax made up. This would be useful for swarm control if I needed it but if the hive wasn’t quite ready to swarm I could leave it set up at the apiary as a ‘bait hive’ and then if a swarm were to happen and I wasn’t around there is still a fair chance that the scout bees, searching for a new home, would simply come across the empty hive, realise it was dry and safe, about the right size and move the colony in without my assistance.

An audience with the queen

As it was, a quick check on the colony revealed 6 new queen cells, one of which was completed and capped – that is to say the larva stage had already been fed royal jelly and then sealed in to start her transformation into a new queen.

I removed the capped queen cell as I did not know how long it has been capped for and therefore have no idea when the new queen would arrive. This left 5 queens almost ready to be capped in the hive, only one of whom would eventually rule.

Queen Cells on a brood frame

Queen cells on a brood frame

Some beekeepers would now try and split the colony into more than two hives at this stage if they were wanting to expand their apiary rapidly, but time only really allows for me to deal with three colonies at the moment so I decided to split the ‘ready to swarm’ colony into two.

An ‘artificial swarm’ works on some very simple principles of bee behaviour that 50 million years of evolution has taught them, namely that their ‘homes’ do not move (these would normally be in  a hollow tree or similar in nature) and that if the ‘flying’ or ‘foraging’ bees suddenly find themselves in an new home with no honey, brood or worker bees then they have swarmed – even if they didn’t actually leave the hive themselves.

An artificial swarm involves firstly finding the old queen in the hive, a difficult task on a damp day when nearly all 60,000 bees are at home, but luckily I had found and remarked this queen with a white dot on her back during my previous visit and so it wasn’t long before she was found and safely removed in a ‘queen clip’, a device that looks and works like a hair clip but has slots to allow the worker bees to escape but traps the slightly larger queen.

Introducing the old queen to a new hive

Once the old queen is safely held a new, empty hive is set up in exactly the same location that the old hive had been stood with a queen excluder underneath the brood box – this is a sheet of metal or plastic, again with slots large enough to allow the worker bees free passage but to small for the queen to fit through – this prevents the queen from swarming straight away again. Sheets of wax foundation are added and also a frame of honey to prevent the swarmed colony from starving is included in the new house  deal. Bees from the original colony are added to the hive and then the old queen is re-introduced to her split colony before closing up the hive.

The original hive is set up a few feet away from its original location and now left alone for enough time for the new queens to hatch, the first of which will either kill her unborn sisters or flee the hive with a small number of foraging bees and allow the second born queen to reign. Any ‘flying’ bees left in this hive will leave the hive the morning following the split to forage for food but then return to the newly set-up empty hive as it is now in the original location, so after 24 hours or so you have split the old queen and all the flying bees from all the younger workers, brood, eggs and honey and unborn queens and its time to sit back and wait.

Artificially swarmed bees

As this has all occured during the first half of June there is not much forage for the ‘swarmed’ colony and there is a very real risk that they will simply starve in the hive so I have fed them 4kg of sugar as syrup to help them pull through to the start of the summer nectar flow in July and also to stimulate the bees wax glands so that they draw out the new comb rapidly and the old queen can start laying the next generation of workers straight away.

As a beekeeper there is always the temptation to take a ‘peek’ in the hive and see if everything is going to plan or the bees are slowly starving to death but by following the artificial swarm technique you give the ‘swarmed’ bees the best chance of survival and you really have to leave them alone to do their own thing.

Expansion and a happy apiary

Something of interest as a beekeeper is that you hear of other local swarms, and my wife even found one whilst walking the dog on Tunbridge Wells common this week,  it seems that bees really do all have one unique body clock in an area and seem to know exactly when to swarm at the same time, almost as one body. Well worth noting down for next years swarm control!

Without the preventative measure of the artificial swarm it is almost certain that my bees would have gone at the same time and unless you are there to witness it and catch and re-hive the swarm you stand to lose approximately  20,000 bees each time. Luckily on this occassion it looks like I stopped it in time and subsequent visits to the ‘swarmed’ hive to feed syrup have indicated a very full and lively hive (and another sting on the elbow and swollen arm!) and I am really looking forward to seeing how the colony expands during the sumer before the long autumn amd winter period spent in the hive.