Adventuresinbeeland's Blog

I looked back at some garden photos from when we first moved into our house in 2017, and was quite taken aback at the change in the patio area! There is a lot more green.

Before

After – apple trees, lambs ear, foxgloves

I know that some people would look at the before photo as ‘neat’ and the after photo as ‘messy’. And that’s ok with me – I like messy! Messy is life, messy means homes for insects and birds.

We have two resident crab spiders at the moment – the apple tree spider is particularly successful, catching one to two bees a day on a sunny day. Many different species of bees have been caught, from honey bees to bumbles to solitary bees, he or she pounces on them all with a paralysing bite. At least their death seems fast, for they are always perfectly still when I come across the spider feeding.

And finally…

I completed a winter hive loss survey for COLOSS (Prevention of honey bee COlony LOSSes) today. The email from Dr Anthony Williams, COLOSS Survey Coordinator for England, contained some interesting information on colony losses during 2017:

“Last year beekeepers in your region participated in the COLOSS survey for Winter Losses in 2017.   Thanks to your support for the first time in a number of years we were able to submit a return to the pan European COLOSS Monitoring initiative.   I can report that overall Winter losses were on average 28% for England.  Losses in Europe were on average 16%.  Losses varied from region to region from 9% in Cornwall to  33% in Warwickshire and 41% in Leicestershire, my home regions which were above the national average.  A more detailed note of Winter losses will shortly be presented in the Journal of Apicultural Research… Last year we received approx 500 valid responses which represents about 1.7% of all beekeepers in England, this year I hope we can improve on this and get a more accurate picture of Winter losses at a Local, National and European level.”

A fair number of the beekeepers whose blogs I follow lost bees overwinter, so it’s good to know that winter losses are not as high on average as we might think.

If you want to help COLOSS by completing the survey, the link is: https://www.bee-survey.com/index.php/368949. It’s scheduled to close on the 5th June. Let’s improve on the 1.7% reply rate!

It was the first sunny day in ages – or the first day not filled by wind and rain in ages – and I was out in the garden sweeping up vast pink piles of camellia blossom when my phone rang. It was my father-in-law, Tom, and he informed me that the bees were very busy, busier than he remembered them being last year.

I suspected that the bees were probably just happy to get some sun at last, but thought it best to check they weren’t about to swarm into someone’s chimney, so I headed over.

When we moved to Cornwall Tom and Carol took in our cat Bob. A bit of a change for him from our old London flat. He was eager to head out in the sunshine too.

Having had a nice cup of tea with Carol and Bob first, I crouched down by Kensa’s entrance and took a look. Kensa (pronounced Ken-za) is a Cornish word for ‘first’. I named the queen heading up this hive Kensa as her colony was my first in Cornwall, rather conveniently swarming on a low tree in Tom and Carol’s garden. Her bees were bringing back fat yellow and orange pollen baskets.

I opened up the hive and found the bees were not particularly pleased to be interrupted. They had taken advantage of the break in inspecting during winter to stick everything together with propolis. I like to see plenty of propolis as it’s hygienic and helps keeps drafts out of the hive, but it makes for slow inspecting. Kensa’s bees used to be very gentle but not so this week! They had developed a disconcerting technique of rushing at my fingers as I picked up each frame. While trying to prise the frames apart with my hive tool, they grumpily gathered around the tool, making the job harder. I didn’t actually get stung through my thin latex gloves, but I wouldn’t have liked to inspect them barehanded as I did with some of my old London colonies.

I found eggs, larvae, no queen cells, a few adult drones and a small amount of drone brood.  The brood box is packed full of brood and honey and they are making good progress in drawing out the super frames I added this month. Now that the weather has changed again I think they will keep me on my toes. My prediction is they try to swarm in 2-3 weeks time, but it could be earlier!

Below is a photo of my other hive, Nessa. I bought this colony from a local beekeeper last year (Nessa means ‘second’ in Cornish) and they’re a similar dark colour to Kensa. Within some bee colonies you see a wide variation in colour between the workers, depending on their fathers, but in these colonies all the workers are dark. My friend Thomas asked if they are Cornish dark bees – I don’t know but hope they might have the black honey bee genes!

Nessa seemed a little bit weaker than Kensa. Bizarrely I found some water had accumulated inside the hive. Though the hives were tightly strapped together, some of the horizontal rain we’ve been having must have found a way to get in. I was glad to be able to get rid of it for the bees.

Nessa’s bees – check out the propolis

Nessa’s bees – they didn’t like my phone!

Inside the colony was at a similar stage to Kensa’s bees. They had gathered even more propolis in big wads around the frame lugs. I concentrated hard on moving slowly and gently, aware that the colony’s buzzing was at an irritated pitch. There is a big difference between the hum of a happy colony and the buzzing of angry bees. I had to use smoke to get them to stay calm, something I rarely did with my London colonies. It was on the second-to-last frame when one of the worker’s patience broke and I received a sharp hot jab in the thumb. I hastily smoked my hands to mask the sting pheromone and set about putting the hive together again.

Back in my garden again, I observed what I think is a female hairy-footed flower bee

going back and forth between our mini apple trees. A very welcome little visitor. They like primroses too and we have plenty of those in our garden.

By now I think I can tentatively say both my hives – Kensa and Nessa – have survived winter. Over the past couple of weeks my priority has changed from getting the bees through the cold months to being on the alert for swarming!

On Tuesday I popped down to try to check inside the hives and sort a few things out. But the Cornish weather just wasn’t playing ball. The sun would come out while I was getting my smoker going, only for a downpour of hailstones just as I was trying to inspect. The belligerent rain defeated me and I retreated inside with only my Kensa hive peeked at. At least I managed to quickly confirm that Kensa is laying and both colonies have begun to draw out the supers of foundation I put on at the weekend.

We did have some sunshine for Mothers Day luckily. Drew took Tommy and I to Glendurgan Gardens in Cornwall. As Drew ran energetically round the maze there with an ecstatic Tommy bouncing on his shoulders, I had a look at a spectacular bank of wildflowers and was rewarded by an unexpected sight. A large hole had been dug in the surface of the bank and the occupant was coming slowly out. At first I couldn’t work out if I was seeing its front or back – the creature looked almost like a tiny black mole with a wiggling blue nose. Then its face emerged and I realised I was looking at a rather pretty large black beetle with a blue sheen to its front legs.  I took a video and uploaded it to YouTube: Black Oil beetle at Glendurgan gardens, Cornwall

Back at home, I joined a Facebook group for British beetles (or for people into British beetles, I expect beetles have better things to do than go on Facebook). Some kind people on this group quickly identified it as a oil beetle, which they explained rely on solitary mining bees to complete their life cycles. The beetle I saw was a female Black oil beetle laying her eggs. After her larvae hatch they will climb up a suitable flower and jump on a solitary bee, riding back to its nest.

Once inside the bee’s nest, the larva disembarks and begins to feed on the bee’s eggs and her carefully gathered store of pollen and nectar. The larva develops in the bee burrow until it emerges as an adult oil beetle ready to mate and start the whole cycle again. Like solitary bees, these rather special sneaky beetles are becoming rarer in the UK due to loss of their habitat.

Having enough wildflowers is so important for our wildlife. The charity Buglife have an information sheet on oil beetles which says that the adult black oil beetles prefer Lesser celandine and soft grasses as food plants, but Dandelion and Buttercups may also be important.

Here are a few photos I’ve taken over the last couple of weeks of the flowers around Cornwall:

Spanish bluebells and forget-me-nots have now turned my garden blue. Our pale pink cherry tree has come out and our two mini apple trees have dark pink buds. Lots of dandelions, still a profusion of primroses – I don’t remember seeing so many primroses anywhere else I’ve lived before Cornwall. I love seeing all the different flowers coming out as the year goes on. This week I bought some sunflower and borage seeds – to plant when the rain stops!

The children’s clothes company JoJo Maman Bebe contacted me recently and asked me to write a post about ‘The day in the Life of a Beekeeper‘ – so here it is! A day in the life of a very small-scale and winging-it hobby beekeeper, that is.

I actually did some intense beekeeping prep earlier in the week, by banging together a whopping eleven frames and organising my beekeeping shed. As usual this took far longer than it should have done.  Most of the time taken seemed to involve gingerly rooting around in the spider infested shed trying to find the hammer, nails, foundation and frame parts.

Above is a photo of old and new wax foundation. The old foundation has been sitting around unused too long and has gone all brown and brittle so is probably unusable now. The nice new yellow foundation on top was bought this year.

And here’s the finished frames. After a decade of frame making I must be improving slightly as this was the first time I didn’t bang a nail in wonky and have to pull it out.

Foxgloves

Lambs-ear (Stachys byzantina)

Queen bumblebee

Cornwall has been blasted by storms recently which have been battering the poor garden, so I was relieved when we got a break from the rain most of the day on Tuesday. The foxgloves and lambs-ear seem to be thriving in the wet. A queen buff-tailed bumblebee spent some time investigating a hole in a little stone wall in the garden but decided against it as a nest site. Probably too small to hold a nest! Her buzz was so loud that I heard it from several feet away.

My next beekeeping job is to paint my new nuc that I bought in the winter sales. I will then have two spare nuc boxes ready if my two existing colonies, Kensa and Nessa, want to try swarming.

I’m hoping to start selling over-wintered nucleuses after next winter (at a reasonable price), to try and make some money back from beekeeping. This seems to me a preferable way of making a small profit compared to the sticky job of extracting honey, jarring it up, labelling it and finding a buyer for it. To sell honey you need to buy or borrow rather a lot of equipment: an extractor, uncapping fork, jars, labels. To sell nucs you just need a nucleus and some healthy bees, so the focus is on the bees, which are my favourite part of beekeeping. That’s the plan anyway!

This week the UK has been enjoying warm air from Africa and the Canary Islands coming our way – I even felt toasty enough today to happily sit outside eating lunch and walk around without a coat on. A record winter temperature of 21.2°C was recorded in Kew Gardens (west London). So our flowers are out early too – but are there enough to feed all the bumblebees which have come out of hibernation?

Here’s a few of the flowers out in Cornwall now.

Yellow flowers –

Good old dandelions and daffodils

Purple flowers –

The little light purple star flower below grows everywhere in my garden. Anyone know what it’s called?

Anyone know what this is called?

Purple crocuses

Grape hyacinth

Pinky purple flowers –

At the weekend Drew and I have been doing a little work in the garden, with some great help with weeding/toddler distracting from Drew’s family. Drew and his niece Bella planted the purple scabious, which is meant to be a bee-friendly plant. I’m not sure what the pink blossom on the right is, a fruit tree?

Pink primroses

Scabious

Tree blossom