Adventuresinbeeland's Blog

Exams over – and the Bailey comb exchange begins…

Posted on March 26, 2012 by Emily Scott

After months of revising, I finally took the British Beekeeping Association’s Module 1 Honeybee Management exam on Saturday. It’s a relief to get it out of the way – I can finally start on the pile of non-beekeeping related books I haven’t been able to read! The revising has been mostly fun really though, I like learning new things about bees.

The questions weren’t too bad…not too many hive dimensions needed…for the four section B 12 minute questions, I answered ways of clipping & marking a queen, how to make up a five frame nucleus, one way of carrying out swarm control and how to identify queenlessness, a drone laying queen and laying workers in a hive.

For the longer 30 minute section C question, which you get the most marks for, I chose the question on how to advise someone on beginning beekeeping – much easier than the alternative question on preparing bees to take them to heather! That’s a question for the northern beeks.

Home for lunch, then off out to proper beekeeping. It was a beautiful day – 22°C in London! – so a perfect opportunity to inspect our hives for the first time since October.

First, Rosemary:

These photos of Emma holding up honey stores may look pretty idyllic, but all was not quite right within Rosemary’s hive. Plenty of adult bees, but also lots dead on the floor. And most worrying, small amounts of brood – less than 3 frames worth – and drone cells in the middle and top of the comb, which is a sign of a failing queen. Usually drone cells would be found towards the bottom of the comb. Only a few eggs could be seen, and it took several goes by different people before Pat was finally able to spot them.

John Chapple brought a frame from another hive over to us. “What can you see here?” he asked. The frame contained lots of drone brood in the centre too. “Yes”, John said, “but look at the bees – what are they?”. They looked like workers in size, but John revealed they were drones, given away only by their bulbous eyes, much bigger than those of workers. The drones were stunted as the result of having been laid in worker cells. They are doomed, unable to reproduce, only able to eat stores. Unless it is requeened, a hive which has a drone laying queen or laying workers can only get weaker and weaker.

Below is a photo from the government’s Beebase website showing domed drone brood in worker cells. Some of those worker size bees have very beady eyes and I believe may actually be stunted drones. The difference is subtle. You can also clearly see a dark drone with damaged wings as a result of deformed wing virus towards the top centre of the photo.

"Courtesy The Food and Environment Research Agency (Fera), Crown Copyright"

Here’s what Ted Hooper has to say about drone laying queens in his Guide to Bees and Honey, p182:

“The drone laying queen is usually quite obvious when she first starts to produce drone brood in worker cells because these will be mixed in with worker brood. As time proceeds the amount of worker cappings reduces and the number of drone cappings increases. Whilst there are worker cappings left it is obviously a queen laying, and not workers, but as the queen gets progressively shorter of sperm so the time will come when nothing but drone cappings is present. The colony will still be reasonably large – with at least two or three combs of brood – and normally the beekeeper who regularly examines his colonies will see what is happening and will have solved the problem by requeening.”

We saw Rosemary, and we saw a small amount of worker brood, so that appears to be what is happening here. There won’t be many spare queen cells around the apiary in March, but I guess we could order in a queen. Rosemary has been a great queen though, and it would be a shame to lose her ultra-calming genes. We could hope the bees produce a supersedure cell from the few remaining worker eggs now that the weather has improved, or we could put Rosemary out of her misery and combine the workers with Lavender’s hive (Lavender is Rosemary’s sister). Emma and I will have to talk it through and reach a decision.

Incidentally, it is a little odd that she seems to have become a drone layer. She’s less than a year old and there are hundreds of hives producing drones for her to mate with in Ealing, so she shouldn’t be poorly mated or getting old and running out of sperm. Chris Slade has an interesting blog post at http://chrissladesbeeblog.wordpress.com/2012/03/25/darg/ – he says that there is research going on in Devon with regard to the increasing incidence of drone laying queens. Certainly lots of people seem to be having this problem at the moment, and the bee inspectors say commercial US beekeepers have taken to requeening every six months! Wonder if the problem is associated with varroa as is so often the case.

Emma and I changed our minds at the last minute about doing a shook-swarm, as an experiment we’re trying out the Bailey comb exchange method instead this year. The first step is to put a brood box of clean foundation on top of the old brood box. You funnel the bees up by putting dummy boards on the edge of the brood nest in both boxes, which helps keep conditions warm to aid wax drawing, and feed with a 2:1 strength sugar syrup through the crown board. The idea is the bees draw out new combs from the foundation and once that happens you can move the queen up, put a queen excluder between the two boxes and destroy the old combs below once the brood has hatched out. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Emma has done a great blog post with more photos from the day, including Queen Rosemary, the stunted drones John showed us, and more info on the Bailey exchange: http://missapismellifera.com/2012/03/30/bailey-comb-change-for-spring-bees.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Bailey comb exchange, drones | 15 Comments

9th Honeybee Management revision post: the value of honey, pollen, water and propolis

Posted on March 19, 2012 by Emily Scott

A 9th revision post for the British Beekeeping Association’s Module 1 exam, Honeybee Management, which I’m taking…on Saturday (arrrgh so not ready!). I’m at 1.15 on the syllabus:

“The Candidate shall be able to give a detailed account of:- the value of honey, pollen, water and propolis to the honeybee colony;”

This is one of the easier points on the syllabus, as I find it more interesting than frame sizes.

Honey

The scientific name for the European or Western honey bee is Apis mellifera. Apis is Latin for “bee”, and mellifera comes from Latin melli- “honey” and ferre “to bear”—so the scientific name means “honey-bearing bee”.

As all beekeepers know, honey bees must collect nectar to create their honey. On average loads of 30-50mg of nectar are collected by a forager – quite impressive considering a honey bee weighs about 100mg. Each year an average honeybee colony requires around 120kg of nectar. Approximately 70kg of this is eaten during the summer months to provide food for the brood and adults for their nutrition, for extra energy to keep the brood warm, and to provide energy for foraging. The remainder of the nectar – 50kg – is converted to around 20kg of honey stored in the nest for the winter months. (David Aston & Sally Bucknall, Plants and Honey Bees: their relationships, 2004).

Little honey munchers

Despite all this hard work, collecting so much nectar is obviously worth it. The efforts of the spring, summer and autumn bees enables the colony to overwinter safely on their stores, whereas bumble bee colonies must die off in autumn, leaving only a mated queen to hibernate and begin again in spring.

What do bees obtain from honey? It is basically a concentrated sugar solution, mainly consisting of fructose and glucose sugars with a small amount of sucrose also present. The ratio of fructose to glucose varies considerably between honeys, depending on which nectars were collected by the bees. The workers evaporate water from nectar to reduce the water content down to 17-18% before it becomes honey. Chemical changes to break down the sugars, due to enzymes added by the bees, also aid this process. This sugar rich solution gives the bees carbohydrates – energy! Without it they will die – they cannot live on pollen alone.

It’s worth noting that nectar varies considerably in sugar & water content – it can consist of as little as 20% or as much as 70% water depending on the plant species and local environment. Even flowers on a single plant can vary on how much nectar they provide and how sugary it is, depending on factors such as how close to the ground they are or how much sunlight they’re in. So the more sugary the nectar, the less work it takes, and the less nectar is needed, to produce honey which contains 17-18% water.

Capped super frames being removed by Albert, one of the other Ealing apiary beekeepers, last year.

Albert’s honey

Pollen

Pollen is incredibly important to keep honey bees healthy. It provides them with protein, without which larvae and young adult bees will not develop properly. Preferably the pollen should be from mixed sources, as if bees can only find one pollen it may well lack some essential amino acids (the building blocks from which proteins are made).

Beekeepers seeing bees flying back to their hives laden with bright pollen are often pleased, as this is a good sign that the queen is laying well. But how is the pollen actually used inside the hive?

Young worker bees need to eat large amounts of pollen themselves, in order for their glands to produce brood food, which is fed to the brood, the queen and young drones.
Some pollen is also mixed in small amounts with brood food and fed to older larvae.
Adult worker bees generally need small amounts of protein to produce enzymes & hormones and enable other minor body repair and building jobs to be done.
Autumn bees must eat protein in order to develop their fat bodies enough to overwinter successfully.

You can see from the points above that most of the pollen is not actually being fed directly to the brood; it is the young nurse bees who consume the most pollen, during the first 8-10 days of their lives. They must eat it in order to be able to produce ‘brood food’, a mixture of hypopharyngeal and mandibular gland excretions mixed with honey, digestive enzymes and water. Probably tastier than it sounds.

It takes 70-150-mgs of pollen to rear one larvae into an adult bee. On average foragers can collect 16mg of pollen a trip (8mg x 2 pollen baskets), so you can see plenty of trips are needed even for just one larvae. A strong colony will collect 50-100 lbs of pollen during a season. Adult bees can rear brood for a short time if fed a pure carbohydrate diet, but to do so they must break down their own body tissues to produce the brood food.

A reassuring sight: bees returning to the hive laden with pollen (taken in Sept 2011)

Water

A hive needs five to six litres of water per day in midsummer. In hot weather it is used for cooling by hanging it through the brood nest in tiny droplets. At the same time workers fan their wings to increase its evaporative power.

When it is needed, foraging bees are encouraged to collect water by the hive bees. Foragers returning with water or very watery nectar have their load taken enthusiastically, in under 60 seconds, while those returning with concentrated sugary nectar have difficulty finding a younger sister willing to take it from them. As the hive temperature cools down, water will be less excitedly received – water unloading times greater than 180 seconds almost eliminate water foraging (Lindauer, 1954).

Water’s use in cooling the hive is well known amongst beekeepers, but perhaps less realised is that larvae need water, as it is a large component of ‘brood food’, a mixture of hypopharyngeal and mandibular gland excretions mixed with honey, digestive enzymes and around 70% water. Water is also used by adult bees to dilute honey stores before they feed. Ann Chilcott has observed bees in the Scottish Highlands collecting water in winter at temperatures as low as 4.2-4.5°C (BBKA News, February 2018, p.60-61).

Above: bees drinking from a water butt.

Propolis

Most beekeepers know propolis as that sticky reddy brown stuff that sticks the hives together and gets all over your nice clean beesuit.

But perhaps we should appreciate propolis more, as it seems to be remarkably useful for the bees, who use it throughout the hive, despite only collecting about 100g a season. It is a resinous substance secreted by some plants, particularly trees such as poplars. Like nectar, the composition of propolis varies considerably between plants, but it often contains mostly resins and balsams, plus about 10% essential and aromatic oils, as well as waxes, various acids, flavonoids and other compounds. This mix gives propolis disinfectant properties which help act against bacteria, fungi and even viruses. So if anything we should be breeding for bees which use plenty of propolis!

Some uses the bees find for it:

Filling cracks and crevices in the hive (up to 5-6mm).
Reducing entrances for extra defence by building ‘curtains’ – in Greek the meaning of propolis comes from ‘pro’ (before) and ‘polis’ (city) – propolis is the defence of the bee city.
A thin layer of propolis can be mixed in with beeswax to strengthen the comb. It is now believed that this stiffens the whole comb structure, helping vibrations pass through from piping queens or bees performing the waggle dance. Using their sensitive feet, bees can pick up the direction of the vibrations and make their way to the dance area.
The cells are varnished with it before the queen lays her egg. Its disinfectant properties help to combat disease-causing organisms.
Embalming dead intruders such as mice, which would be too heavy for the bees to remove themselves.

Below is a photo taken by @Loiscarter of the home-made mouse guard her bees made, quite spectacular. A great example of its use to defend the walls of the colony. She originally posted this at http://twitpic.com/5t1byf

Propolis mouse guard. Photo taken by Lois Carter.

References:

Books/pamphlets
‘Fat bees, skinny bees – a manual on honey bee nutrition for beekeepers’, Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation (2005)
Keeping Healthy Honey Bees, David Aston & Sally Bucknall (2010)
Module 1 Study Notes, Mid Bucks Beekeeping Association (2012)
The Honey Bee Around & About, Celia Davis (2007)
The Biology of the Honey Bee, Mark L. Winston (1987)

Journal articles

‘Propolis’, Alan Riach, BBKA News October 2013, p.7-9
‘Water collection in winter’, Ann Chilcott and Tom Seeley, BBKA News February 2018, p.60-61

Posted in Exams, Honey | Tagged Module 1, pollen, pollination, propolis | 12 Comments

When it doesn’t rain, plant thistles…

Posted on March 17, 2012 by Emily Scott

Everyone has been talking recently about how dry it is down here in SE England. A hosepipe ban is due to start soon, London’s first for six years. Dry is and isn’t good for bees. Rain stops them flying (honey bees, anyway – I’ve seen furry bumbles busy foraging in heavy drizzle), but rain also helps plants produce nectar.

(A very happy man juggling bees in the rain, from the Bee Bright website)

So we need the rain, and I kept trying to feel grateful for it as it finally pounded down at the apiary today. But it did stop us shook-swarming – we’re going to try next weekend instead. That might be just as well, because that has given Emma and me time to make up frames in the privacy of our own homes, without an audience of bearded beekeepers snorting with laughter at our hammering skills.

Boots for beekeepers to wear in the rain. I found loads of bee boots at thefind.com/apparel/info-bee-rain-boots!

I asked Pat for advice on whether frames of foundation we’ve had since last summer would be ok for the shook-swarm. The National Bee Unit’s shook-swarm fact sheet says “Make sure that your foundation is ‘fresh’. Old foundation becomes hard and brittle so bees tend to chew it into holes. It can be restored by carefully warming it, which releases oils making it usable again.” I’ve heard before that heating these old foundation sheets with a hairdryer can restore them, but Pat advised doing this had caused them to buckle and bend for him. Instead he advises dipping them in warm water, after which they take about a day to dry out. Beeswax melts at 64C (147F) so the water must be colder than that – think Pat suggested 40C was best which is just slightly above normal hive temperature.

For this “dry” weather, Thames Water has given advice that Mediterranean drought-resistant shrubs and thistles should be planted. Plants that love arid conditions include sea holly, globe thistle and lavender. The great news is that these type of flowers happen to be favourites with bees!

Sea holly

The BBC’s gardening section says: “This attractive sea holly forms clumps of evergreen, soft, deep green heart-shaped leaves. In early summer, the thin wirey stems emerge, set with spiny leaves. The branched stems carry a profusion of small, sea holly flowers in bright, steely blue. This plant prefers full sun and well-drained soil.”

Pic from the Paghat’s Garden blog

Pic from Wikipedia, author Lee Kindness

Globe thistle

From the BBC website: “The prickly, grey-green leaves and powder-blue pompon flowers of this variety of globe thistle make it a striking architectural plant for the back of a summer border. It also works well planted in drifts in a wild garden. The flowers attract large numbers of bees, butterflies and other insects, and can be dried for winter decoration if cut while immature. Lift and divide overcrowded groups in autumn or spring.”

Bees visiting a globe thistle, photo credit Dennis Hinkamp

When it comes to bee flowers, it’s all about the blues.

EDIT: The RSPB blog has done a great post on conserving water with photos of a drought-resistant garden: ‘Water: it’s liquid gold.‘ They suggest catmints and sages (the bees will also love those mints).

Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments

8th Honeybee Management revision post: honeybee feeding

Posted on March 14, 2012 by Emily Scott

8th revision post for the British Beekeeping Association’s Module 1 exam, Honeybee Management, which I’m taking very soon, on 24th March. I’m at 1.14 on the syllabus:

“The Candidate shall be able to give a detailed account of:-

the principles involved in feeding honeybees, including types of feeder, amounts of food, types of food and timing of feeding;”

Uh oh. I know that whatever I say here, someone will disagree with me. Feeding is one of those sensitive topics that beekeepers tend to argue over. I will just go through the tips I’ve picked up from the my bees, my books and the Ealing beekeepers and hope I get it right for the BBKA exam judges.

Why feed bees?

To try and build the colony up in time to take full advantage of a particular crop, such as oil seed rape or heather.
Emergency feeding if the colony is short of stores.
To help the bees out if they need to draw comb, for instance if you have hived a swarm or just carried out a shook-swarm.
To give certain treatments such as Fumadil B for nosema.
To help replace their winter stores if you have harvested their honey supers.

Some beekeepers do not feed their bees and prefer to operate on a ‘survival of the fittest’ approach, leaving an appropriate amount of honey for the bees overwinter but not providing extra food such as sugar syrup or fondant. I think this is probably psychologically easier to do if you have plenty of local forage and plenty of colonies. Our two hives are very precious to me and I would hate to lose them, particularly as they are very gentle bees and seem to overwinter well.

Methods of feeding differ during the year, so I’ll go through them by season, starting with spring.

Spring feeding

Up till carrying out an annual shook-swarm/Bailey comb exchange procedure in late March, I usually have fondant on my hives. Between about November – March in the UK it is generally too cold to give the bees sugar syrup, as they have difficulty processing it whilst the temperature is still cold, and the liquid feed causes them to need to defecate, a bad thing when they are confined in the hive during cold weather.

A shook-swarm involves shaking the entire colony into a new brood box full of fresh foundation. Their old brood combs and the honey stores within the combs are then burned, to ensure that any AFB/EFB/nosema spores are destroyed, along with a load of varroa mites busy reproducing in the brood cells. The process is quite an extreme one, so some beekeepers prefer to use a Bailey comb exchange instead to provide new combs, especially if the colony is a small one. Ensuring that brood comb is replaced annually in these ways is good for the colony’s health. However, immediately after the shook-swarm, the bees need to be provided with 2: 1 ratio sugar syrup, otherwise they will starve on the foundation. The syrup enables them to draw out replacement comb fast. You can usually stop feeding the syrup after 2-3 weeks or so, once they’ve drawn out & filled a good number of brood frames.

Photo of wax building below from the ‘Bee Photographer‘ website, an amazing collection of photos. The caption for this photo says “Bees use 8 to 9 kilos of honey and pollen to produce one kilogram of wax. Wax is produced by eight abdominal glands turning out tiny 0.2 mm specks. The building of 80,000 cells requires 80,000 hours of work and 991,000 specks of wax.”

For general stimulative spring feeding for a colony that hasn’t been shook-swarmed, 1 pound of sugar can be dissolved in 1 pint of hot water to make up a 1:1 ratio syrup mix, which is usually used in spring (rather than the 2:1 sugar-water ratio used in autumn). The weaker solution replicates early nectar coming into flow and encourages the queen to increase her laying. The sugar must be white granulated sugar, never brown which upsets the bees’ digestive systems. I have also been taught to use cane sugar rather than beet, although some beekeepers say beet is fine.

If using a rapid or other type of feeder that sits above the crown board, trickle a small amount of syrup down through the feeder tunnel so the bees know it’s there. As Clive de Bruyn bluntly says in Practical Beekeeping (1997), “Why on earth the honey bee, with 30 million years of collecting its food from flowers, is expected to know that suddenly there is a lake of food on top of the hive is hard to credit.” Flowers have the benefit of scent and colour to attract foragers to them, sugar syrup in the darkness of the hive does not.

Below is a photo of feeding sugar syrup in a Rapid feeder to my bees after shook-swarming them last year. Unfortunately I didn’t cover the other crown board hole up and some of the bees managed to get in the feeder and drowned. I’ve learnt from this to cover up crown board holes and to weigh the feeder lid down with a brick just in case!

Summer feeding

Most healthy colonies will not need feeding during the summer. If you have honey supers on which you plan to harvest, feeding is a big no-no as you will end up with sugar syrup stores rather than honey, which you could get into trouble for if you attempted to sell it.

At the end of the summer, once you take supers off to harvest, keep an eye on your colony’s remaining stores. If there is a period of bad weather colonies could starve if they don’t have sufficient stores in their brood area. Make sure small colonies and nuclei have their entrances reduced to the minimum whilst you feed them, in case robbing begins. Only ever provide food inside individual hives, not by leaving honey frames or other food out in the middle of an apiary, which can provoke a robbing frenzy and spread disease.

A captured swarm will benefit from a weak sugar solution, but wait 48 hours, until wax-building and foraging are under way, before feeding. This ensures that any disease contaminated honey brought in the bees’ honey stomachs is used as energy for wax secretion and not stored in the frames.

Autumn feeding

September is the month to begin preparing bees for the winter ahead. At this time of year the colony begins producing bees that will overwinter until the following spring. These winter bees are physiologically different to summer bees. They develop fat bodies which are reservoirs of protein in their abdomen. These fat bodies allow the bees to produce brood food in their hypopharyngeal glands in the late winter and early spring at times when it is too cold to forage or even for the bees to move away from the cluster to reach pollen stores in other parts in the hive.

To ensure that these winter bees have well developed fat bodies, make sure the colony is well provisioned with food to last well into the following spring. The bees will need at least 20kg/40lb of stored honey in the hive (just over one British National hive super’s worth) to survive the winter, especially if there is a wet spring. Protein from pollen is important as well as carbohydrates from nectar; if bees suffer from poor pollen supplies, they age more quickly and will die sooner. My colonies usually seem to have plenty of pollen stores in autumn, but it is something to be aware of and keep an eye on. If you have a garden, putting in suitable (plus pretty!) early and late pollen sources, such as crocuses, hazel and willow for spring and Michaelmas daisies and ivy for autumn, is a good idea.

Photo below from the ‘Bee Photographer‘ website. The caption for this photo says “Pear trees bloom from mid-March to May. The pear flower is not really attractive to bees but its early blooming makes up for its poverty for bees in need of pollen to feed the brood.”

In the last sugar syrup feed of the year, in late September/early October, many Ealing association beekeepers treat against nosema using Fumadil B. Nosema is a parasite that multiples in the gut of adult bees; it has no obvious symptoms but its main effect is to shorten an infected bee’s life by about 50%, so dwindling colonies which are slow to build up may be suffering from it. Fumadil B is a naturally occurring antibiotic which is dissolved into sugar syrup and fed to the colony. You can use a microscope to test a sample of your bees for nosema first to see whether you need to treat or not.

Feed the sugar syrup in the evening, using a stronger 2:1 (e.g. 2lb-1pt) sugar-to-water ratio to help them build up their winter stores, rather than the weaker 1:1 mix recommended in spring. This lower water to sugar ratio takes less effort for the bees to lower the moisture content down to under 20%, ready for storage. Large feeders can be used in the autumn; for instance the Miller or Ashforth type feeders, which hold between two and three gallons. They are efficient in warm conditions and are used to get a large amount of syrup onto the hives in one go.

The Miller feeder sits over the brood box and enables the bees to come up and feed from a central slot.

Winter feeding

Ideally colonies will now have their required minimum 20kg/40lb honey stores, which they will have built up with the help of the sugar syrup and ivy nectar. Sugar syrup feeding should have been finished by early October in Britain, as if syrup is fed too late in the year the bees will have insufficient time to evaporate the excess water, and the syrup will be stored and could ferment, causing digestive problems for the bees when they come to feed on it later.

As a just-in-case precaution, I like to give them a slab of fondant over the crownboard in early December, although it usually won’t be finished until February/March. If the colony was desperately short of food the fondant could be placed directly on the top of the frames with an eke to provide space. Ambrosia fondant is shown below; this is a sucrose, fructose & glucose fondant paste which can be bought in for around £6-£12 for a 2.5kg bag, depending on where you buy it from.

References:

Guide to Bees & Honey, Ted Hooper (2010)
Keeping Healthy Honey Bees, David Aston & Sally Bucknall (2010)
Module 1 Study Notes, Mid Bucks Beekeeping Association (2012)
Practical Beekeeping, Clive de Bruyn (1997)
The Honey Bee Around & About, Celia Davis (2007)
Bees at the Bottom of the Garden, Alan Campion (2001)

Further reading:

‘Flower power‘ by Dr Sally Bucknall, p11, BBKA News November 2013 – an article on the benefits of ivy for bees. It explains that because of its high glucose content, pure ivy honey crystallises easily in the comb and is not useful to the colony when stored. However, if the honey contains a mixture of nectar from other late flowers such as Himalayan Balsam, it may not crystallize.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged foraging, Module 1 | 8 Comments

A Bath Bumblebee

Posted on March 12, 2012 by Emily Scott

I’ve missed beekeeping this weekend as we were away celebrating Drew’s 30th birthday in Bath. It was a beautiful day for the “Bath Half”, an annual half-marathon through the city centre, and whilst waiting for Drew’s mum to finish the race I spotted this little madam on the flowers in the park.

I’ve had a go at identifying her using the Bumblebee Conservation Trust’s guide to the “Big Six”, the six bumble species most found in British gardens. It’s hard without seeing the tail end but I think she may be a garden bumblebee, Bombus hotorum. They have long tongues, which I get the impression she has from the pic above and the fact that she’s on these tubular bell flowers (anyone know what they’re called?). I may be wrong – please do correct me if you think otherwise. I thought at the time that she looked different to a buff-tail, which is the species I see most in London.

While she was hard at work collecting nectar in the sunshine, Kenyan runner Edwin Kiptoo was building up a sweat of his own nearby, beating the Bath Half previous record in a time of 62 minutes and one second.

Edwin Kiptoo storming towards the finish line

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged bees on flowers | 4 Comments

The bees in March

Posted on March 4, 2012 by Emily Scott

After a chilly start, yesterday grew into a surprisingly warm and sunny day. The bees were going crazy. Today has been a definite umbrella day, wet and windy. That’s British weather for you.

The pic below shows Rosemary’s bees zooming back home. Rows of bright crocuses were out in the nearby parks, so I expect they were finding pollen from them. The bees below don’t have much pollen to show, but others were bringing it in.

I found this bee hanging in the mouse guard. She looked recently dead.

Emma and I checked up on the fondant levels of both our hives. Surprisingly they hardly seem to have touched it, although both hives feel reasonably heavy still. Perhaps they are content with their honey stores. We also talked with some beginner beekeepers, who wanted to know the origin of the term ‘super’ and how the shook-swarm we’re going to be doing soon works, so we were nattering quite a while and missed the explanation for this magnificent hive below.

This is Cliff’s latest attempt at innovative top bar hive design. Cliff is the Ealing Association’s R&D department. He has exceptional carpentry skills and isn’t afraid to experiment with them.

John Chapple presiding over the hive. Cliff was too shy to pose with his creation.

John Chapple with Cliff's hive

A few flowers I found around the apiary…crocuses

…and hyacinths. Are hycainths any good for bees, does anyone know?

We’re probably going to shook-swarm both hives in a couple of weeks time, fingers crossed that it goes well.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged John Chapple | 14 Comments

Bee Keepers’ Day part 3 – how the National Bee Unit protects our bees

Posted on March 3, 2012 by Emily Scott

A third post carrying on from my previous on last weekend’s Federation of Middlesex Beekeepers’ Associations annual ‘Bee Keepers’ Day‘.

Our final speaker was Mike Brown from the government’s National Bee Unit. He had very kindly travelled all the way down from York to see us. The Unit’s role is to protect the honey bee through carrying out research, inspecting hives across the country for disease and providing training for beekeepers. Below are my notes from Mike’s talk.

Mike Brown, Head of National Bee Unit technical Staff
‘The NBU function in protecting our bees and current research’

The National Bee Unit keeps around 200 colonies up in York and has 60 inspectors who work out in the field inspecting apiaries (many of these inspectors are part time, so getting round to all the apiaries is quite a challenge). Mike believes the NBU run probably the most comprehensive inspection and training programme anywhere in the world. He showed us a picture of some NBU hives with two brood boxes and seven supers, so they are obviously doing something right with their bees.

The NBU estimates that only 50-60% of British beekeepers are registered on Beebase – https://secure.fera.defra.gov.uk/beebase – their free website for beekeepers which provides a massive amount of free, and most importantly, authoritative and trustable information on bee pests and diseases. Registering tells the inspectors where you are and enables them to arrange an annual visit to see you. I wrote a post last year about our visit by Caroline Washington, our local bee inspector – A bee inspector calls. The inspectors are very helpful and just do a quick check that your bees are doing okay.

Caroline taking a sample last year from a hive – she was scooping up bees using a small plastic container. The bees are tested back at the NBU lab.

What issues do the inspectors find?

From the NBU’s point of view, varroa still seems to be causing most of the problems for colonies and is the most common reason for a colony dying off. Over the last few years there have been “tremendous problems” with wasps and woodpeckers. In the London area there is a high frequency of European Foul Brood (EFB) infection. Nosema apis, nosema ceranae and deformed wing virus (which is associated with varroa) are very common across the UK. Despite Nosema ceranae (an asian species of nosema, which is a fungal parasite) having arrived here more recently, surprisingly the NBU is finding more ceranae than apis! The prevalence of both nosema species increases in larger apiaries, and they tend to be found together – if apis is present ceranae is likely to be too. Thankfully Kashmir bee virus (KBV) and Israel acute paralysis virus (IAPV) are very rarely found.

As well as looking out for pests currently here, the inspectors are constantly on the alert for new pests and diseases which might enter the country. Last year a swarm of bees attached themselves to a plane on a runway on Nigeria. Incredibly, the plane took off, stopped in Germany and finally landed in Britain, where the swarm of yellow African type bees were found still attached to it and still alive. After surviving that chilly trip, they were destroyed because they represented a disease risk to our bees here. The fear is that exotic pests such as the Small hive beetle and Tropilalaelaps mites will arrive in one of the many containers constantly entering the country.

The NBU have assessed that there is a high risk that one of the Asian hornet species, specifically Vespa velutina nigrithorax, will arrive here from France, become established and spread. It was confirmed present for the first time in Lot-et-Garonne in the South West of France in 2005, thought to have been imported in a consignment of pottery from China, and has since spread rapidly up to northern France.

Vespa velutina nigrithorax is anticipated as likely to have a moderate impact on bee colonies here. The reason it strikes such fear into the heart of beekeepers is that the hornet workers prey on bees, decapitating honey bee workers in seconds and feeding their larvae on their pulped bodies. Each hornet can kill up to forty bees a minute; 30 hornets can kill 30,000 honey bees in three hours. This very upsetting You Tube video shows it happening – the poor honey bees are tiny in comparison with their huge orange-faced attackers. In France beekeepers have had some success with hornet traps put out early in the season. The traps are specially designed to trap hornets only and release smaller insects. Preventing hornet colonies getting going early in the year seems to be the way forward.

A most unwelcome visitor.

A much cheerier picture below from a post called ‘The bees fight back‘ on the ‘Bees in France‘ blog. That appears to be a dead hornet lying in the hive entrance. Yay!

Previous posts:

Bee Keepers’ Day 1 – The decline of insect pollinators
Bee Keepers’ Day 2 – Improve your bees and beekeeping – simply

Posted in Disease prevention | Tagged research | 7 Comments

Bee Keepers’ Day part 2 – Improve your bees and beekeeping-simply

Posted on March 1, 2012 by Emily Scott

A second post carrying on from my previous on this weekend’s Federation of Middlesex Beekeepers’ Associations annual ‘Bee Keepers’ Day‘.

Our second speaker was Roger Patterson, advertised simply as a “Sussex beekeeper of great practical ability”. He will be well known to those of you who visit the BBKA forums. The theme of his talk was ‘Improve your bees and beekeeping- simply’. Roger arrived with his two dogs who sat at the back and were very well behaved. They were rewarded with some ham from Emma’s lunch. Below are my notes from his talk – settle nicely on the comb while you read them please.

Roger gave us a bit of advertising info first – he now owns and runs Dave Cushman’s beekeeping and breeding website since Dave passed away – www.dave-cushman.net. He also has his own honey recipes website – www.honeyrecipes.org.uk. He also recently published a book, ‘Beekeeping – A Practical Guide‘.

“Treat bees as a wild animal”, Roger told us. But one which you should expect to be good tempered. He has only walked away from about ten colonies which he couldn’t handle in a veil and no other protection. He has found that crosses between a pure sub-species of honey bee and mongrels are often very bad tempered. But he believes it’s a myth that the temper of bees is determined by the drones the queen mated with – more likely to be the drone the queen’s mother mated with.

What should you look for in your bees? (If you live in the UK)

Good temper
Quietness on the comb
Non-runners – “runners” being bees which appear to boil over the combs and hive – there is a risk the Queen might come out of the hive during an inspection too.
Storing honey in the brood frames – something Roger sees as a positive trait – this ensures survival if the supers are harvested by the beekeeper.
Dark colouring – important to Roger. In general, he feels the yellower honey bees, for example yellow Italians such as those bred in New Zealand, tend to be more prolific and need more than a single brood chamber. He prefers a native/near native type of bee closer in origin to the original British Black subspecies of Apis Mellifera. Such bees tend to be darker, non-prolific, less susceptible to nosema apis & acarine, nice and frugal with their stores and good over-winterers. Of Roger’s 42 colonies all were still alive when he last checked a week ago, and he hasn’t started thinking about feeding yet.

As a side note – as Roger himself admits, beekeeping books disagree that colour alone is a reliable indicator of sub-species type. To identify a sub-species properly, technically overall size, tongue length, and other external features must be measured. In his book ‘Practical Beekeeping‘ (1997) Clive de Bruyn suggests that the dark bees now present here are not necessarily descended from the British Black bee, as large numbers of continental dark bees were imported in the early 20th century from France and Holland to compensate for the heavy losses of bees due to the ‘Isle of Wight’ disease. However Roger insists that the British bee is alive and kicking up in the Orkneys and doing very well in the harsh weather up there. He believes most beekeepers here have mongrels of mixed colours and genes, whereas he is trying to breed for the traits above.

In their book ‘Keeping Healthy Honey Bees‘ (2010), David Aston and Sally Bucknall say “The honey bees of the British Isles are a mixture of genetic types produced through the introduction of strains of bees from abroad, the Dark European Honey bee and its variants, and those produced through crossing with imported strains and races of honey bees.” We are mongrels and our bees are too 🙂

A frame from Rose’s hive last year – showing Roger’s preferred trait of storing honey in the brood combs.

Photo of our bees last April – most are dark but you can see some are darker than others, the striping of the abdomen differs from bee to bee as they are local mongrels.

Now compare our darker bees above with the workers and drones below produced by a queen imported from New Zealand, where light-coloured Italian bees tend to be bred.

How can you help yourself?

A nice thin hive tool to fit between the frames easily – Bee Basic hive tools recommended
A good smoker – with easy to puff bellows
Use firm but gentle movements. Bees are a pack of sensors – antennae, legs, exoskeleton – so extremely sensitive to vibrations. Roger believes some people are naturals and others are not but luckily improvement is possible!
Read the colony – comes through experience but even a beginner can check the amount of pollen and liquid stores available to a colony. Combs empty of pollen will cause nutrition problems.
Smoke – but only when needed.

Get yourself a nice thin hive tool…

Other posts:

Bee Keepers’ Day 1 – The decline of insect pollinators
Bee Keepers’ Day 3 – How the National Bee Unit protects our bees

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Bee Keepers’ Day – The decline of insect pollinators

Posted on February 26, 2012 by Emily Scott

Yesterday I went to the Federation of Middlesex Beekeepers’ Associations annual ‘Bee Keepers’ Day‘. Each year the Middlesex associations (Ealing, Enfield, Harrow, North London, Pinner & Ruislip) take it in turn to host a day of beekeeping talks; this year the day was held in Ruislip. Below are my notes from the first speaker.

Dr Stuart Roberts of Reading University, Centre for Agri-Environmental Research. ‘The decline of insect pollinators’

Dr Roberts began by asking the question: is there a bee decline or not?

Before trying to answer this, he gave an overview of just how many bee species there are. There is only one species of honey bee native to the UK (the European honey bee, Apis mellifera). There are rather more species of bumbles: 25ish. The reason for the ‘ish’ is that a few species have only been spotted near the Channel and may have been blown across. The honey bees and the bumbles are the bees you are most likely to have seen. Going unnoticed and unappreciated by most people here are a whopping 240 other bee species, such as little solitary and parasitic bees.

Worldwide we have 9 species of honey bee, 25o bumble species and a staggering 19,300 other species of bee in total, many of which in the tropics come in shimmering tones of metallic blue, green or violet. The polinizador.wordpress.com blog is a good place to see galleries of these jewel like bees, I found the photo below there.

In size, the world’s bees vary from a tiny 2mm long, such as the least carpenter bee, found in southern Europe, to the huge 39mm Wallace’s Giant mason-bee, a species believed to be extinct until 1970s and still threatened as it requires primary forest. This research paper by its 1970s re-discoverer, Adam Messor, has a photo showing just how collossal these bees are compared to Apis mellifera: www.pollinators.info/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/giant-bee.pdf.

Now, back to Dr Roberts’ original question – are bees really threatened? There is, he told us, a clear difference between a well known fact and a widely held belief, even though these two things are often confused. To try and distinguish between the two, Dr Roberts’ and his colleagues at Reading University have spent the last four years gathering data on honey bee numbers. At first he thought it should be relatively easy to put such datasets together, but in reality he found reliable data was scattered and published in obscure, hard to track down journals. There is a need for consistently gathered data across countries. Not all countries require beekeepers to register their hives, and there is a considerable black economy of honeybee products in Europe. Migratory beekeeping in the USA makes it hard to collect data – where and when do you count the bees?

When it comes to honeybees, saying whether we’ve had a decline depends when you start counting! In Europe hive numbers are generally higher than in the 1800’s but lower than since the 1980’s. There has been roughly a 23% decline in colony numbers and a 36% decline in beekeepers in central Europe since 1985. The introduction of varroa may have something to do with this. The Mediterranean basin bucks the trend, with a genuine increase in beekeeping and Mediterranean hillside honey particularly in demand.

Next Dr Roberts turned to bumbles and solitary bees. In one historical source, the shrill carder bee (bombus sylvarum) is described as the ‘commonest bumblebee’. It has sadly greatly declined here, so much so that it is now restricted to only four grassy sites in southern England and Wales. Many species of solitary bees show a great decline too. Specialist species which forage on a particular crop or nest in a particular type of place, such as the ‘snail shell bees’ bee artist Val Littlewood has drawn so beautifully for us, tend to be more in decline. Species which produce more brood cycles during the year (double brooders such as Bombus hypnorum) and generalist feeders are doing better.

The shrill carder bee, so called because the queens fly very quickly, producing a high-pitched buzz

Dr Roberts concluded that the decline of bee species is occurring everywhere, although the larger the scale of the area you look at the harder it is to measure decline. Many reasons for the decline have been put forward – some fanciful..

Car exhaust – compared with wholesale destruction of habitat, probably a small impact, Dr Roberts said
Mobiles – “cited in some appalling papers”
Electromagnetic fields from power lines – “no evidence”
Osama bin Laden – “bonkers suggestion but at least is now testable”!
Whisked off to heaven in the rapture – no need to comment.

More serious suggestions include:

Monocrops
Agrichemicals
Large-scale migratory beekeeping
Plus parasites and pathogenic viruses affecting bees already stressed by the above, e.g. varroa, small hive beetles, tracheal mites

For bees in the UK in particular, Dr Roberts sees the following factors as the biggest problems:

Habitat loss – 50% of the problem, so much prime bee habitat has been lost to housing, golf courses, gravel mining, conifer plantations, kebab shops…
Intrinsic factors such as low population densities & restricted range – some bees have always been rare
Native species dynamics – some favourite species of plants are declining and, in the case of parasitic bees, some host species are in decline
Climate change

People tend to think honey bees do the most pollination but in fact for agriculture the contribution of honey bees is only about 8.7%. The combined value of all pollinators to UK agriculture is £402m per annum, of which honey bees only contribute £38m pa. Why bother about saving the other pollinators? Why don’t we just put in more honey bee hives?, Dr Roberts was asked when he went over to Washington DC to speak. In reply to that, he pointed out that you don’t make up a football team using only quarterbacks. It’s not a good idea to try and rely on just one species.

Some plants can’t even be pollinated by honey bees, such as tomatoes and bell peppers, which require buzz pollination. 50,000 bumbles are imported here each year for pollinating these types of crops in poly tunnels. The preferred species are the European type of Bombus terrestris, the buff-railed bumble. The buff-tail is one of the top five bumbles you are most likely to see in a UK garden, but the ones found in poly tunnels look different. The breeders rear for large specimens which have a rapid turnover of colony and produce a small number of workers in relation to sexuals (males & queens), so that farmers have to restock more frequently and spend more money doing so. Allowing these bees to escape from a poly tunnel breaks the law – but how do you control this? There is already suspicion that American species of bumbles reared in Europe and transported over to the US for commercial purposes have escaped and spread European pathogens amongst wild populations.

A buff-tail I photographed last summer. Those found in poly tunnels have a bigger body but less of a ‘buff’ to their tail.

Is there any good news amongst all these indicators of decline? We should not despair, said Dr Roberts. He believes this is not a catastrophe – yet. We have noticed the problem in time to do something about it and much research is currently going on.

On a personal scale, we can all do something to help bees. How great would it be if everyone who read this post planted a bee-friendly flower somewhere this spring? I have a strip of garden which is something like 3 x 6 feet and mostly in constant shade from fences and walls. Yet last summer, by putting a few bee friendly pot plants in, including lavender, rosemary and mints, I was able to attract bumbles and other pollinating insects to this unpromising spot.

Dr Roberts recommends a book called ‘Befriending bumble bees‘ by Elaine Evans for information on attracting and even rearing bumbles. And don’t forget the little solitary bees – Dr Roberts has put on his garden wall the most extravagant solitary bee nesting house he could put in “without needing planning permission”! It has 1,000 tubes and last summer every single tube was occupied. Not just by bees but by tiny solitary wasps too – which handily hunt garden aphids.

The type of nesting sites which solitary bees enjoy. There is a photo of Dr Robert’s actual super deluxe bee hotel here – it is a thing of beauty: http://www.flickr.com/photos/87532379@N00/2423347448

Also, check out this post by Morgan Bowers on the Invertebrate Challenge Project in Preston: ‘A Luxury Bee & Bee‘ – her group has built the biggest solitary bee hotel I’ve ever seen:

Photo by Morgan Bowers, from her ‘A luxury Bee & Bee‘ post.

And a final example, from the ‘Food from the Sky‘ project above Budgens supermarket, north London:

Follow-up posts:

Bee Keepers’ Day 2 – Improve your bees and beekeeping – simply
Bee Keepers’ Day 3 – How the National Bee Unit protects our bees

Posted in Bees | Tagged bumblebees, gardening for bees, research | 19 Comments

7th Honey bee Management revision post: honeybee drifting

Posted on February 18, 2012 by Emily Scott

A 7th revision post for the British Beekeeping Association’s Module 1 exam, Honey bee Management, which I’m taking in March. Moving to 1.13 on the syllabus:

“The Candidate shall be able to give a detailed account of:-

the drifting of honeybees, the dangers caused and techniques used to minimise the problem;”

Drifting occurs when worker bees, usually returning foragers, or perhaps young bees on their first orientation flights, accidentally drift into a hive close to their own. They will have an unfamiliar smell to that colony’s guard bees, but if they are carrying nectar or pollen and display submissive body behaviour they are likely to be let in. Ted Hooper, in ‘Guide to Bees and Honey‘ (2010), p39, gives us this description of guard bee behaviour towards drifters:

“a drifting bee entering the colony by mistake, perhaps because it has been blown down to the hive by a cross wind, or misled by a similarity of the approach picture, will be challenged. In this case the guard will press the challenge because the smell of this bee is not the right one. The drifter, because its instinct says it is in the right place, will not try to fight the guard but will submit. If the drifter is facing the guard it will offer food, which the guard will usually ignore. If the guard is attacking from the side […] the drifter will tuck its tail in and stand quiet, with its head tucked down, or it may rear on to its two back pairs of legs, extending its tongue and strop this with its front legs. These patterns of behaviour denote submission and the guard […] will do no real harm and certainly not attempt to sting. As with all bees, the guard’s concentration period is short, and in a few seconds it gets tired of the whole affair and lets the drifter proceed”

If you’re not very impressed by the rather lackadaisical bouncer skills of the guard bees Ted describes above, take a look at this landing board view video for a sense of the amount of bee traffic guard bees might be dealing with during a nectar flow: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tZ607q-OHA. The Italian honeybee Apis mellifera ligustica, the most popularly kept bee worldwide, is thought to have a greater tendency to drift than other bees (as well as being renowned robbers of other colonies).

The problem with the innocent behaviour of drifters is that they can spread disease and parasites, whether American Foul Brood (AFB) spores or varroa. A newly mated virgin queen who mysteriously goes missing could have drifted into the wrong hive. A less serious issue is that it can result in uneven numbers of bees in an apiary’s hives, as a result of bees returning to some colonies more often than others. This can weaken some hives whilst making others stronger, resulting in the colonies requiring different management for swarm control, super adding, harvesting etc (more troublesome if you have twenty hives than if you have two).

In his book ‘Practical Beekeeping‘ (1997), Clive de Bruyn remembers

“a time when local beekeepers from Manchester and Sheffield used to place their hives on the north Derbyshire moors in long lines. It was the boast of one old time beekeeper that he always got the best honey crops by being the last one to place his hives. By placing them at the ends of the stocks already there his colonies benefited from the extra foragers he collected.”

I can just imagine that old Northern beekeeper chuckling cannily to himself. Do the hives still get lined up across the moors, does anyone know?

To reduce drifting, beekeepers can paint hive entrances different colours and provide distinctive landmarks in front/nearby to hives (perhaps a big branch or shrub). Hives should be positioned with their entrances facing in slightly different directions – in a circle, with hives facing outwards is recommended – and as far apart as possible, preferably 1.2 – 1.5 metres apart. Ted Hooper suggests facing the hives towards cover between 4-6 feet away, such as a hedge, to provide calm air in front of the hives so bees are not blown off course as they try to land.

Barnsley Beekeepers Association use the below photo on their website as an example of a set up which could cause drifting (http://barnsleybeekeepers.org.uk/apiary.html), as the hives are lined up close together in a row all facing the same direction, towards a fairly flat nondescript looking field.

An example of different coloured hives – Michael Bush’s hives, photo from www.bushfarms.com. The best colours to use are black, white, blue and yellow (bees are red colour-blind so do not use red).

The hives of a church in Gradišče Pijavo Gorizia, Slovenia, also making use of blues and yellows to differentiate the hives for the bees.

EDIT: As Chris reminded me in his comment below, drones deliberately pay visits to other hives, where the workers welcome them in and feed them. I like to think they are hunting out virgin queens about to go on their first mating flights, so they can get a head start in the chase. Nothing much can be done to prevent this deliberate drifting, as opposed to the accidental drift of a returning forager.