Adventuresinbeeland's Blog

Recently my beekeeping club, the Cornwall Beekeepers Association (CBKA), has started running meetings via Zoom. I’m happy about this, as I can listen along curled up at home, without having to get lost among remote country lanes in the dark.

This week Kate Bowyer of the West Cornwall Beekeepers Association (WCBKA) gave a talk “Honey – but not as we know it” for the Bodmin Group of the CBKA – all about honey fraud. This is something I’ve found fascinating ever since watching the Netflix documentary, Rotten: Lawyers, Guns and Honey.

Kate had done an incredible amount of research, throwing in so many statistics that I often wished I could hit a pause button to take them all in. (I tried my best to keep up but apologies if I get any figures slightly wrong!). She has a particular interest in honey quality as she is the Show Secretary of the Royal Cornwall Show, where prizes are given out for the very best local honeys.

The good stuff

Kate explained to us that there are many strands to honey laundering. Adulteration is one of the most common – for example, cutting it with cheap sugar syrup, or adding in bee pollen to obscure its origins. Misrepresentation is another type of fraud – for instance, selling a honey as single source honey made mainly from one particular flower, when it is really not. Yet another type is importing cheap honey and reselling it as premium local honey. Honey fraud is the third biggest food fraud worldwide, topped only by milk products and olive oil!

The UK has increased its imports of Chinese honey by around 20 times over the last 20 years. China’s production has increased by about 88% between 2000-2014, while only increasing hive numbers by 21% (see EURACTIV article). One way Chinese producers deliver such high yields is by speeding up the natural ripening process, harvesting unripe honey in huge drying tanks where they artificially dry the honey (rather than the traditional method of bees frantically fanning it with their little wings).

The Manuka honey industry is particularly lucrative for honey fraudsters. The figures for Manuka honey don’t add up: 1,800 tonnes of manuka honey sold annually in the UK alone, while just 1,700 tonnes in total are produced by New Zealand beekeepers each year – The Manuka Honey Scandal.

In The Honey Regulations (England) 2015, honey has a very precise – and poetic? -definition – “In these Regulations “honey” means the natural sweet substance produced by Apis mellifera bees from the nectar of plants or from secretions of living parts of plants or excretions of plant-sucking insects on the living parts of plants which the bees collect, transform by combining with specific substances of their own, deposit, dehydrate, store and leave in honeycombs to ripen and mature.”

So honey on our shelves should not contain sugar added by humans; the sugar in honey should come only from the nectar collected by bees. Yet studies investigating the origins of honey often discover extra sugar syrup is in there. A 2016 European Commission study assessing 2264 samples of honeys found that around 20% of the samples were suspicious of containing added sugar (see Results of honey authenticity testing).

There is a shortage of good quality honey. In the US, 90% of commercial beekeepers now make most of their money from pollination contracts rather than honey sales. And beekeeping is an industry lacking in young beekeepers to keep it going. We’ve reached a ceiling on how much honey we can produce worldwide. The average harvest per hive is dropping.

Governments across the world have been working on developing a database of about 10,000 honeys as a reference point. Unfortunately, testing methods vary between countries and some fraudulent samples have been provided. People are protecting their own commercial interests, as there tends not to be an economic incentive for testing honeys and discovering problems. In the UK, DEFRA have been tasked with sorting this database out.

There is some good news: there is now a British Standard Institution (BSI) kite mark standard which honey producers can apply for. The Scottish Bee Company has achieved this for its Scottish Heather Honey. This may not be so great for small sellers though, as testing a sample costs about £150. Will there come a point where we all need kite marks to sell our honey?

For now, buying honey from small-scale local beekeepers at farmers markets or local shops is probably the safest way to ensure you get good quality honey. During the questions afterwards it was commented that customers are often pleasantly surprised when they try a local honey – because it tastes flavourful, whereas they are used to the cheap but bland honeys from the supermarket.

Thank you Kate for a fascinating talk.

Further reading

• Honeygate: How Europe is being flooded with fake honey
  EURACTIV.com 2017 article giving lots of facts and figures on honey imports into Europe
• Key facts about Europe’s honey market (infographic)
  An attractive European Parliament infographic illustrating honey trade figures in Europe
• The Manuka honey scandal
  A 2014 article by The Independent, investigating why there are usually discrepancies between the labels on jars of Manuka honey and what’s inside.
• Results of honey authenticity testing
  A European Commission 2016 study assessing the quality of 2,264 samples collected in Europe.

At the weekend I did my winter oxalic acid anti-varroa trickling – about 2-3 weeks later than is often recommended. But I did it, which I’m pleased with.

Having two children under 5 (and Holly’s birthday just before Christmas!) has made for a very hectic December. On top of that Tommy got ill just after Christmas and was waking up hourly crying out in pain. It took a little while to get to the bottom of that, but he’s now received the right antibiotics and seems to be recovered.

When both children are a bit older, and there’s not a pandemic on, and no-one in the house is in agony and needing trips to A&E, I imagine my oxalic acid trickling will be done at the perfect time 😉

I saw someone recommend using a poly hive roof and super to overwinter, so I’ve given that a go with one of my hives this year. So far so good. I have chicken wire around the hives to try to deter woodpeckers, though thinking about it I probably should put some over the top as well as the sides. Fiddling about with chicken wire has to be one of my least favourite beekeeping tasks though!

I’ve been continuing to help out my local association now and again by updating the website and answering emails sent in by the public. This week someone sent in a photo of a falling apart hive they had seen while out walking, full of ivy and cracks. They were worried about the colony inside, as they had seen bees going in and out on a few occasions. One of our members is going to have a look. It reminded me that bees can be remarkably resilient even in a less than perfect home 🙂

As the days shorten, the bees are still managing to find yellow pollen – probably from ivy? On the warmer days, they zip frantically in and out, bringing home as much as they can. As increasingly darker, rainy days come, they hunker down in the hive; perhaps similar to the way we curl up at home and listen to the comforting sound of the rain on our windows. 

Over the years I have got into a bit of a routine with my bees when it comes to over wintering. I’ve found methods that work for me and I don’t tend to adapt them too much. I started out in 2008 and have been lucky to not lose a colony over winter yet (but it helps that I’ve only been keeping between 1-4 hives each of those years). 

I like to feed fondant, and this year the bees are already devouring it fast. Below you can see the dent one of the colonies made in a 2.5kg pack of Fondabee within a week. I put it over the hole in the crown board and then pack insulation over the top. 

My winter checklist:

• Late summer varroa treatment – usually I do a thymol based treatment in late August-early September (with supers off)
• Feed syrup in September if stores are low
• Switch to feeding fondant after October
• Colonies are overwintered either in a single brood box or brood box with super on top (with queen excluder removed)
• I put sheets of silver foil style insulation over the crown board, above the brood box
• Mouseguard put on in early November, after the ivy pollen has finished (as the mouse guard can knock pollen off foragers’ legs)
• Oxalic acid treatment (Api-Bioxal nowadays) done around the winter solstice 

I’m enjoying our autumn colours and textures – the reds of hawthorn, holly and cotoneaster, the crunch of acorns under foot, the dewy wet grass of the field I walk over to take Holly to nursery in the mornings. This year has been a strange one, but at least in bee-world life continues as before. No social distancing in the bee hive! 

Holly and Ivy

Cotoneaster berries

Holly berries

I’ve suddenly realised that summer has come to an end. The vibrant wildflowers below in my local park are now dying back. Berries have taken over in the hedgerows – shiny blackberries, dusky blue sloes, the red of hawthorn. Green acorns hang from the oak trees.

Wildflowers and baby

Wildflowers

A few last treats for the bees and butterflies – sedum (ice plant). Bumble bees, honey bees, small tortoisehells and red admiral butterflies can all be found enjoying its sweet smelling scent.

Sedum (ice plant)

And last weekend I found my first flowering ivy of the year, by the sea at Flushing. An important last big feed of the year for honey bees. There is even a bee called the ‘Ivy mining bee’, which emerges in the autumn in time for the ivy flowers. The male Ivy bees emerge first, in late August, with females arriving around a month later. Incidentally Ivy has become a popular name for baby girls recently (though I prefer Holly ;))

Ivy at flushing

You may be wondering why all my images now have jazzy coloured borders. Well, a blogger friend of mine reminded me that this can be done. Thank you, Emilio!

My bees are currently doing well, zooming back and forth with bright loads of pollen. I step off the inspections in August, as the threat of swarming has mostly passed. Also, if I did accidentally squash my queen, my colonies might struggle to get a new one mated before drones disappear. Last week I observed my ladies kicking their brothers out of the hive entrance, shoving them away before they could get back in. Unfortunately their free ride of getting fed by their sisters has come to an end. The days are shortening and the focus of the bees and beekeeper is very much on winter preparation. More on that later.

A trip to Chapel Porth on the north Cornish coast, where the wind batters anyone who meets it. Drew enjoyed the wild effect it had on his lockdown hair. I enjoyed the views but not the earache I got from the ‘sea breeze’.

I took a photo of a couple of little solitary bees hunkered down in what I thought were dandelions. The wind was shaking the flowers about violently but the bees stayed put, nestled firmly in.

Large shaggy bee

At home one of the experts on the Bees, Wasps and Ants (BWARS) Facebook group told me this was the wonderfully named ‘Large shaggy bee’ (Panurgus banksianus). A long-term monitoring project called The UK Pollinator Monitoring Scheme looked at numbers of bees and hoverflies between 1980-2013 and found that the range of this species had declined by around 54%. So I was lucky to spot these beauties. The males are said to shelter in the flowers in dull weather.

They were not on dandelions as I thought but a plant called Catsear. Moira O’Donnell, the @nervousbotanist, wrote the helpful tweet below to help with ID’ing Catsear.

From a distance I’m still not sure if these yellow flowers are dandelions or more Catsear.

Foxgloves at Chapel Porth

The foot paths past the old mine house and along the coast take you past bright swathes of purple heather, mingled with the wizened thorns of gorse bushes. A few brave little wild flowers survive at the edges. A few bramble stems trail among the heather, but they don’t manage to take over.

Chapel Porth cliff top

It’s mad that this is only the second time I can remember seeing ladybirds this year. Tommy has learnt what ladybirds are from pictures in books. They used to be everywhere. One surreal summer when I was visiting family in Wales, a ladybird cloud was blown in on the beach and covered everything in ladybirds.

Tommy had a good time looking at bees and insects. He had an even better time later when he got an ice cream down on the beach!

A little further inland on the way back to the car park was this thistle. Another successful spiky plant managing to survive the eternal wind.

For weeks now both my hives have had no eggs or brood. So I’ve been reading about queenlessness and asking the advice of other beekeepers recently.

People said things like ‘Be patient. Bees won’t deliberately make themselves queenless’. So, rather than ordering a new queen in the post I managed to get a frame of eggs from a kind local beekeeper. A frame of eggs is a test of whether a hive is queenless – if it is, they should make queen cells. The bees did nothing with it. Did they have a queen, or were the eggs somehow damaged by being away from their colony and transported in the car without workers to care for them?

Still, I waited and hoped. And then finally last weekend one of the hives had the long looked-for eggs. One per cell, at the bottom of the cell. The sign of a queen! The bees seemed in a better mood. There were about three frames with eggs so I took one to the other colony which miraculously has no laying workers yet no eggs or brood either. It will be interesting to see what they do.

While I was waiting for eggs, some bees came to me. Unfortunately, they came to my chimney. Just as the old colony up there had started to dwindle and die out, a new swarm dramatically moved in, filling the air with bees. A procession of thoughtful neighbours knocked on the door to inform us… one said:  “If you go to the British Beekeepers’ website, you can find a local beekeeper”. When they discovered that I happen to be a beekeeper, I loved their confidence that I could sort it out… if only.

At the moment I am reading ‘Interviews with Beekeepers‘ by Steve Donohoe. There’s a lot to it and I am slowly moving through in the small bits and pieces of free time I get, taking in the advice and humour. It arrived quickly soon after ordering.

Below are a few photos of flowers out in Cornwall at the moment and cake that I’ve been eating.

Mexican fleabane – this grows everywhere along the Cornish walls

Hawthorn – the queen of May

Foxglove – good for bumble bees

Victoria sponge cake and a cookie I won as part of my runner-up prize in our street’s VE day art contest

I inspected my two hives for the first time this year recently. The weather in Cornwall has been gorgeous since lockdown began, so I was expecting to find some brood and honey, maybe even brood boxes bursting with bees. Sadly, though both colonies are still alive, neither seems to have a queen.

I inspected Demelza without needing my smoker; her bees remain as gentle as ever. They had stores, and plenty of foragers returning, but no sign of any eggs or brood. No chaotic cells containing the multiple eggs of laying workers yet either. Just lots of empty cells in the middle of the brood nest where brood should be. It’s unusual for queenless hives to be good tempered, but something isn’t right.

Kensa’s bees were a very different and more nerve wracking matter, needing heavy smoking. I would have been stung from head to toe if they could have reached me! I couldn’t blame them for being mardy though, as they were low on stores and only had a couple of frames of capped brood. I spotted no eggs. I didn’t see the queen in either hive, though I was deliberately focusing on trying to find eggs rather than the queen. Kensa’s queen is presumably quite flighty as I’ve always found her hard to hunt down.

I don’t think I can do much to help either colony. They’re not in a state to start a Bailey comb change as I had hoped. Ideally I would get another queen from somewhere but it’s probably too early in the season for that, especially with everything going on at the moment. I’ve set up a bait hive in case I can catch an early swarm. For now I will just use dummy boards to reduce the amount of space in the hives and feed Kensa’s hive syrup. They were battered by a winter of rain and storms, which perhaps was too much for them. With baby Holly around I haven’t had as much time to focus on them as I’d like. Guess what though… the chimney bees are still alive!

I’ve been enjoying seeing the spring flowers come out in my garden and in the couple of local parks I can reach on foot. Below are some pics.

Below is Lithodora – a favourite with the little black local female Hairy footed flower bees. I think they nest in my neighbour’s wall, as I have seen them coming and going around there.

These cheery yellow flowers are lesser celandine, which grows at the edges of fields, hedgerows and in woodland.

Cherry tree in my garden. The petals fall constantly, producing beautiful confetti. Our mini apple trees have come through the winter well and are attracting pollinators with their freshly scented white blossom.