Synopsis : Lime, linden, basswood … a fickle source of excellent honey and a potential bee killer. When and why does the lime yield well and what explains the association of some trees with dead bees?
Introduction
There’s an early 20th Century faux castle near me with extensive ornamental gardens. These gardens – or, more accurately, the gardeners – are almost certainly responsible for the introduction of Rhododendron ponticum to the area. This is an invasive species and has spread east with the prevailing wind, blighting the environment, choking the life out of the near-unique temperate rainforest and providing me with an almost unlimited supply of firewood.
Rhododendron provide no nectar or pollen for honey bees in the UK, but are famous as the source of mad honey in Nepal. The local bumble bees do visit it, but I don’t remember seeing a honey bee on the flowers.
However, on a more positive note 1 those same gardeners also planted a row of lime trees along the road which are now a stately 30-40 metres high, in full flower and which can sometimes provide an excellent source of summer nectar.
Listen … you can hear it from here
Early on a calm July morning you can hear the insects buzzing in the canopy from at least 75 metres away … not just honey bees, but bumbles, wasps, flies, moths, butterflies and all sorts of other things as well. If we had hummingbirds here (we don’t) they’d probably visit the lime when it’s in flower.
Synopsis : A few tips and tricks for first inspections; what to do (and what not to do) about brace comb, supering and queen reintroduction.
Introduction
The on again, off again, Spring this year has finally decided it wants to be here, rather than somewhere a lot further South. After an unseasonably warm February, March was about 2°C colder 1 than the 30 year average. This made meaningful inspections tricky – it was too cold to be opening hives – and largely pointless. What would a quick peek tell me that I couldn’t guesstimate from activity at the hive entrance?
The protracted cold weather meant that colonies got a fondant top-up in mid/late March to tide them over until the good weather arrived.
Which it did on Tuesday this week.
Unfortunately, I was scheduled to visit on Monday and arrived at the first apiary as the temperature reached a Baltic-feeling 9°C. Undaunted, I unloaded the car and set about a variety of activities designed to fill in time without doing too much damage; checking stacks of stored supers, arranging queen excluders, cutting back the ever-present buddleia ‘weedlings’ and periodically checking for activity at the hive entrances.
A good laying pattern
But, it wasn’t happening, so I disappeared to a coffee shop for an hour or so to read the paper and watch the world go by … and the sun finally appeared.
Synopsis : More discussion of modifying and maintaining mini-nucs for queen mating; judging queen quality, repeat queen mating, season’s end and overwintering mini-nucs.
Introduction
A couple of weeks ago I described some of the basics of using mini-nucs for queen mating. I’ll try and avoid overlaps with that post in the following discussion of ‘tips and tricks’, effectively a rag-bag collection of stuff I failed to cover last time, interspersed with some typical problems that might be encountered.
Inevitably some of the discussion will be about specific modifications to the particular mini-nucs I use (Kieler or Warnholz polystyrene mating nucs). I settled on these because I needed a dozen one season, I had zero experience in using any so had nothing to compare and I couldn’t afford Apidea’s.
Kieler mini-nucs: four topbar frames and an integral feeder
Overall I’ve been reasonably satisfied with the choice my younger, poorer 1 and (even more) ill-informed self made. Over a decade later I’m using the same mini-nucs and I’ve not been tempted to try anything else 2.
Nevertheless, despite a Kieler-centric flavour to some of the comments below, most still apply directly (or with a little finagling) to other makes of mini-nuc.
Finally, I’ll repeat the point I made last time … mini-nucs are ’high maintenance’. They are not ’fit and forget’ beekeeping. Unless placed in the shade they may well abscond on a lovely day 3. Late in the season, without care and attention, they can get robbed out by wasps in hours. If there’s no nectar flow they will need feeding.
But, looked after carefully, they can be an efficient way to get queens mated .
Painting and decorating
Any poly hive needs painting to protect it from UV degradation. Most of my mini-nucs were first painted with el cheapo masonry paint. This has a matt finish and has been reasonably hard wearing.
More recently, I’ve started painting – or overpainting – them with Hammerite garage door paint. This is an oil or solvent based gloss paint. It causes the surface of the polystyrene to melt (very slightly) and therefore bonds extremely well. The Swienty brood boxes I painted several years ago look as good now as they did then. The Hammerite paint comes in a range of colours, including a rather nice green or blue.
Hammerite Oxford blue, since you asked
Successful queen mating needs reasonable weather (and patience). However, it also needs the returning mated queen to successfully find the mini-nuc she set out from. It therefore makes sense to either place the mini-nucs in separate and distinctive locations, or (perhaps that should be and/or) to paint them in distinctive colours.
Red ‘Wilko’ masonry paint and ‘bin end’ yellow gloss
I tend to place mine in pairs and so often have a plain and coloured one on the same stand, facing in opposite directions to further help the queen discriminate between entrances.
Entrances and exits
Kieler-type mini-nucs have a rotatable entrance with three or four options – blanked off, ventilation, a queen excluder or fully open. I shouldn’t need to mention that, if there’s a virgin queen in the hive (that you want mated), the entrance must be fully open.
But I will 😉
Entrance discs for mini-nucs
You can purchase replacement entrance disks like those in the photo above from a range of suppliers (or eBay, which is significantly less expensive). Using these may help queens return to the correct mini-nuc after orientation or mating flights.
Oops, almost forgot … bees have a tendency to nibble away at the polystyrene around the entrance of these Kieler nucs (or at the ‘under entrance’ which I’ve never used) while confined. It’s therefore worth painting the entrance tunnel as well as the outside.
Crownboards
Apidea’s and several other mini-nucs I’ve looked at are sold with clear semi-rigid plastic crownboards. Some have integral flaps for adding the queen cell or feeding the mini-nuc without letting clouds of bees escape (admittedly small clouds, as they’re only primed with a few hundred millilitres of bees).
Kieler’s are sold without a crownboard. Don’t let that put you off. A thick piece of clear plastic works just fine as a crownboard and you can easily engineer (i.e. cut) a small flap to add the queen cell between the topbar frames. I use a small piece of tape to hold in down.
Plastic crownboard. Note flaps for adding the queen cell and (above the feeder) adding syrup
You can put an additional small flap above the feeder that allows you to add syrup without any bees escaping. This only needs to be a few millimetres square and doesn’t need taping down. Even if you don’t think you’ll be feeding syrup – which you do using a small funnel – this modification takes seconds and won’t be in the way (but you’ll be glad it is there if you need it).
Hold the crownboard in place with drawing pins. That way there’s less chance it will blow away should you open the box on a windy day. It also means the crownboard stays stuck to the brood body, rather than being removed with the tightly-fitting roof.
Feeder mods
The Kieler integral feeder has some good and bad points.
It’s a good size, so reducing the chance of the mini-nuc starving if left for an extended period. However, this inevitably cuts into the space available for bees and brood, meaning that retention of the feeder can lead to rapid overcrowding.
You win some, you lose some!
The feeder is easy to remove and only fits in one orientation. Irritatingly it is too deep to fit into the ‘second storey’ extension (see below). It also has no cover or queen excluder and the queen can sometimes end up in the feeder, particularly if the bees build comb there.
Feeder with queen excluder
I therefore usually fit a small rectangle of plastic queen excluder, balanced on map pins stuck into the inner walls of the feeder. This stops the queen entering the feeder, but doesn’t necessarily stop the bees building comb there.
Be thankful for small victories … 😉
If you need more brood space you can easily replace the integral feeder with a homemade frame feeder designed to feed fondant. I build these shorter than the integral feeder so that they can be used interchangeably in the ‘second storey’ extension.
Kieler frame feeders
These work well, cost pennies to make and can be quickly exchanged when needed. When I’ve overwintered queens in these mini-nucs I’ve always used these fondant frame feeders in the upper storey, with frames filling the entire lower level. This reduces disturbance when you need to feed them.
Frames
The Kieler is a mini-topbar hive. Each topbar has a longitudinal slot cut into its underside designed to take a strip of foundation. They also have a ‘pinched’ central area, so that a queen cell can be easily inserted between two adjacent bars.
The bars themselves are just 15 x 8 mm softwood. Purchased separately they cost 36 p each (Yikes! … and those don’t even appear to have the central pinched indent).
If you need more (and you will … to replace losses and for the the upper storey should you buy one) just make your own with some wood from the store, a metal ruler, a Stanley knife and some antiseptic cream and Elastoplast.
And, while you’re at it, don’t go fiddling about with little strips of foundation held in place with melted wax. I did this for years. They work perfectly well, but they are fragile. The foundation in unused topbar frames will get bent or broken, and then you’ll have to start all over again.
Instead, eat as many Fruit Splits, Rocket lollies or Twister’s as you can stomach 4 and keep the sticks. Split these lengthwise and glue them into the longitudinal slot in the Kieler topbar using normal wood glue and 5never re-wax them again.
Kieler mini-nuc topbar frames – no need for foundation or waxing
And, no, you don’t need to cover them in melted wax or anything else. All the bees need is a guide to help them draw the comb in the right place.
I’m sure there’s stuff I’ve forgotten about, but that lot will do for the moment. Let’s move on to four specific practical aspects of using mini-nucs.
Judging queen quality
You can’t … or at least I can’t.
I don’t think you can meaningfully determine the quality of the queen in a mini-nuc. The time between when she starts laying and when she runs out of comb is sometimes too short to even check whether she’s producing worker brood.
I usually leave her in the box until there’s some capped worker brood present and then – ideally – move her to a 2-5 frame nucleus colony. At the same time I clip and mark her. As long as she’s laying one egg per cell (and she sometimes starts laying more than this, but should slow down after a day or so) and the brood develops into worker brood then things should be OK.
However, it’s not until she’s laid a full frame or three of brood that you can judge the laying pattern (remembering that the laying pattern may also depend upon the bees in the box with her).
Brood frame with a good laying pattern
Furthermore, to properly judge her you need to observe the behaviour of the bees that develop from the eggs she lays.
Are they well tempered? Are they steady on the comb? Do they have the other traits you are keen to promote? Frugality? Good pollinators? Preferential collection of avocado nectar (Afik et al., 2010).
OK, perhaps not the last of those, but you’d be surprised about the traits some beekeepers favour.
Queen introduction
I remove the mated queen from the mini-nuc, place her in a JzBz cage without attendants and introduce her in the usual way to a queenless full-frame nucleus colony; I leave the sealed cage hanging between frames overnight and – assuming there are no signs of aggression to the caged queen – I remove the plastic cap and leave the workers to eat their way in through the fondant-plugged entrance/exit tube.
If there are signs of aggression, leave it another 24 hours.
Checking for aggression
A well designed introduction cage has some protection for the queen so she can avoid aggressive workers that can otherwise damage her feet. I’ve had considerable success with the JzBz cages (and happen to have inherited a bucket full and so don’t use anything else 😉 ).
I’ve inadvertently left a queen trapped in one of these cages for 6 days with no ill effects. Don’t rush things.
Rear some spares
What do you think happens with commercially reared queens, many or most of which are mated from mini-nucs?
Exactly … nothing, other than being popped into a shipping cage and having a £40 price tag attached.
In contrast, you have the opportunity to check your queens more thoroughly.
Rear a few more than you need, check out their performance, keep the best and donate the unwanted to one of the many, many beekeepers clamouring for queens – particularly late in the season. Even the also-rans are likely to be OK 6. Not necessarily great, but more than good enough to get the colony through to the next season 7.
Queen rearing diary; automagically populates days and events
And finally, make sure you keep good records. The first couple of times you do this you’ll think you will be able to remember the key points the following year; the dates of emergence, the time it took to have mated queens, the origin of the queen cell used to prime the mini-nuc etc.
But you probably won’t. The notes will be very useful for planning your queen rearing the following season.
Keeping things going
Populating mini-nucs early in the season is often a thankless and unpleasant task. The weather is cool, the bees are tetchy and – as described a fortnight ago – you may have had to shake through the colony twice to get the young workers.
That’s not the sort of task I like to repeat if I can possibly avoid it.
If you’re rearing queens all through the summer you can simply remove one mated queen and, shortly afterwards (within a few hours), add a new mature queen cell. This is the ideal situation and, with good organisation, good weather and good mating success, you can get three or four queens out of a single mini-nuc in one season.
Mainly good organisation.
You need to ensure you have a succession of mature queen cells ready at the about right time, remembering that queen mating often takes longer than expected (or wanted).
Scrub ‘caretaker’ queens
If that’s not possible, or if you want (or have) to interrupt queen cell production (e.g. your queenright cell starter swarms or a round of grafting fails) you can remove the mated queen from the mini-nuc and allow the bees to rear a ‘scrub’ queen.
A well populated mini-nuc will readily do this. The resulting queen is usually a bit on the small side, but she will keep the worker population ticking over and ready to accept a new mature queen cell in due course. In addition, the enforced brood break while they rear the scrub queen helps prevent the mini-nuc from getting too overcrowded.
These ‘caretaker’ queens are reared under the emergency response and – assuming there are suitable eggs in the little colony – emerge about 15 days after you remove the mated queen (remember, the bees preferentially choose 3 day old eggs to rear queens under the emergency response). A fortnight or so later the queen should be mated and laying. This approach therefore means you can take 4-6 weeks off if needed.
The end of the queen rearing season
What do you do with the contents of the mini-nuc after you’ve taken the last of the mated queens out? The little hive may well be bursting with bees, with all 4-6 combs containing brood.
Many beekeepers shake the bees out in front of a strong hive. The majority of the workers will be accepted, but the brood is wasted.
To avoid this I’ve used ‘zip’ ties to secure two Kieler topbar frames into a standard brood frame. At the very least these can be placed into a full sized hive for the brood to emerge. Usually, by the time of year I get round to this the bees have stopped drawing comb. Once the brood has emerged I move the frame to the side of the brood box and remove it.
Dave Cushman has details of some clever frame modifications that allow Kieler-type (he calls them Kirchhain mating hives) frames to be drawn at the beginning of the season and used to accommodate brood-filled frames at the end.
Unsurprisingly, when I’ve done this it’s been a lot more ’Heath Robinson’. The Kieler topbar frames are a little too long to fit end-to-end in a National frame. I therefore built some with a scrap 8 mm thick spacer (shown in black below) tacked under one side of the frame. I then use zip ties to hold everything more or less in place.
Using mini-nuc brood frames
Despite being a total bodge this has generally worked well. I’m pleased not to waste the brood.
Now I know the air freshener trick (described in this 2020 post) I’d probably just add the frames as shown in the diagram above together with the adhering bees, and give them and the recipient colony a quick blast of ’Sea breeze’ before uniting them.
Overwintering mini-nucs
Alternatively, with a little care you can overwinter queens in mini-nucs. This saves you the faff of emptying them at the end of the season, and means they are ready for queen cells the following year (after removing the queen of course) 8.
I’ve overwintered queens successfully quite a few times but certainly don’t consider myself an expert at it. There’s quite a high attrition rate. Remember how small these colonies are, how limited the space is for stores and the relatively small population of bees present to stop the colony freezing in the winter.
I think every mini-nuc I’ve overwintered successfully has been a double-decker, with the standard Kieler brood box underneath an additional extension brood body. These almost double the volume of the mini-nuc.
The mini-nuc needs to be strong in mid/late autumn, almost certainly boosted by combining the contents of two separate mini-nucs. You can unite them over paper in the same way you’d treat a full sized hive.
Unfortunately, the upper and lower brood boxes have different depths, so comb drawn in the bottom box needs to be trimmed to fit in the upper box. A messy and irritating task.
I replace the lower integral feeder with additional brood frames and place one or two fondant frame feeders in the upper chamber – usually one at either end to ensure the mini-cluster is near to one of them.
Place the box somewhere sheltered, leave the entrance open to allow the bees to fly for cleansing flights and cross your fingers …
Gimme shelter
I’ve not overwintered mini-nucs since returning to Scotland, though I know several beekeepers here who do this successfully. In the Midlands we often had quite harsh winter weather – certainly much colder than we usually get here on the north-west coast of Scotland.
Two double decker mini-nucs overwintered successfully in an unheated greenhouse
A decade ago, well before my bee shed experiments, I was successfully overwintering mini-nucs in an unheated greenhouse with entrance tunnels from the hive to the outside. These worked surprisingly well and got queens through some really hard weather (note the snow in the picture above – late March 2013).
Tunnel entrances to overwintered mini-nucs
If the winter was particularly severe I would cover the mini-nucs with a thick layer of bubble wrap to try and retain as much warmth as possible. The levels of stores needs to be checked regularly, particularly once brood rearing starts in earnest. These little colonies can starve surprisingly quickly 🙁 . It takes seconds and causes minimal disruption to swap out those fondant frame feeders.
With a little luck and the normal amount of good judgement it was sometimes possible to remove the overwintered queen to make up a nuc in mid/late April, replacing her with a queen cell from the first round of grafting.
Of course, it rarely worked quite as smoothly as that … 😉 9
Finally
The one thing I would not recommend you try is allow the mini-nuc to build up to a full-sized nuc without supplementing it with additional brood and bees. A mini-nuc is too small and it will take too long rearing a few hundred bees at a time to make even a five frame nuc. I’ve tried and it’s a waste of effort.
References
Afik, O. et al. (2010) ‘Selection and breeding of honey bees for higher or lower collection of avocado nectar’, Journal of Economic Entomology, 103(2), pp. 228–233. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1603/ec09235.
Synopsis : The rush and bustle of the first half of the season is over and things are calming down. Time to reflect on some aspects of the season so far, and the importance of keeping good hive records.
Introduction
Over the past few seasons I’ve noticed that there is an inflexion point in the beekeeping season. It usually occurs a bit after the summer solstice, though the precise timing is variable. This is the time when I realise I’m no longer ’just keeping up’ (or sometimes ‘not keeping up’), but am instead finally ’in control’.
Perhaps those aren’t the correct terms?
It’s the point at which my beekeeping undergoes a significant change, from being ’reactive’ to something a whole lot more relaxing.
Late June and – both amazingly and reassuringly – I know what’s happening in those boxes
The variable timing of course reflects the behaviour of colonies in the preceding weeks; the early spring build up (Is it fast enough?), the – often startlingly rapid – mid-spring expansion and consequent swarm preparations, swarm control, queen mating (Has she? Hasn’t she?), the spring honey harvest and the need for additional feeding during the June gap.
All of which of course depends upon the weather and forage availability, explaining the variable timing.
And then, almost like a switch has been flicked – and with very little fanfare – the apiary feels a lot calmer.
There are no unexpected swarms hanging pendulously in nearby bushes, no real surprises when I open the hives, and no ’catch me if you can’ virgin queens scuttling about.
Instead, the bees are just getting on doing exactly what they should be doing and – significantly in terms of my reactive vs. passive beekeeping – exactly what I expect them to be doing.
It’s all downhill from here
As I left one of my Fife apiaries on Tuesday evening I realised that we’ve just passed the inflexion point this season.
All the colonies were doing pretty well. Laying queens were laying well, though not as fast as a month ago, foragers were starting to return with increasing amounts of summer nectar 1 and supers were beginning to fill.
Of course, not every hive is at exactly the same stage. A few are queenless, or contain unmated virgins. However, even these hives are behaving largely as expected.
Whilst it’s a bittersweet moment, it’s also reassuring to feel on top of things.
Bittersweet because it means the bulk of the ‘beekeeping’ in my ‘beekeeping season’ is over.
Hive inspection frequency reduces from once a week to once a fortnight or even every three weeks. After all, the colonies are queenright, the new queen is laying well and they’ve got space for brood and stores … what could possibly go wrong?
A few things … but they’re much less likely to go wrong in the second half of the season to the first.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that there’s not still work to do.
The summer honey harvest will be busy, or at least I hope it will. It’s just starting to pick up, with the blackberry and (often not very dependable) lime.
Blackberry
That’s followed by the season’s most important activity – the preparation for winter and Varroa treatment. Without these I might not be a beekeeper next year.
However, none of these ‘second half’ functions are likely to produce any unwanted surprises – it should all be plain sailing.
The enjoyment of uncertainty
My move from the east coast to the west coast of Scotland has resulted in new challenges – more changeable weather, different forage availability – and I’ve still got a lot to learn here.
In contrast, despite the inevitable season-to-season variability, I feel reasonably confident with my east coast bees (I still have bees on both sides of the country). Only ‘reasonably’ because they can still produce the odd surprise.
However, with every additional year of beekeeping, I’m much less likely to be faced with a ”What the heck is this hive doing?” situation between now and late September than from April to June.
Nothing to see here … an old play cup in a queenright colony
The challenges are one of the things I really enjoy about beekeeping. It keeps me on my toes. Identifying the problems and (hopefully) solving them improves my beekeeping.
Even not solving them – and there have been plenty of those over the years – means I learn what not to do next time.
For some situations I’ve got a long mental list of what not to do … though little idea of what I should do.
No worries … perhaps I’ll learn next year 🙂 .
Weather dependence and queen mating
Three weeks ago I mentioned one of my queen rearing colonies had torn down all the developing queen cells, probably in response to the emergence of a virgin queen below the queen excluder. The box was set up with a Morris board, so was rendered queenless while starting the queen cells, and then queenright when finishing them.
One of the things this experience reinforced was the importance of continuing inspections on a queenright cell rearing colony.
Just because things all look OK above the queen excluder 2 doesn’t mean that it’s not all going ’Pete Tong’ in the brood box.
My records showed that I had checked the brood box on the 18th of May when I set up the Morris board. Grafts were added on the 25th and were capped on the 30th.
By the 1st of June they’d all been torn down 🙁 .
On finally checking the bottom box early on the 4th of June I found a virgin queen scurrying around.
Mea culpa.
The original queen had been clipped. The colony had presumably attempted to swarm around the time the virgin emerged – or perhaps a little earlier – and resulted in the loss of the clipped queen 3.
June rainfall, Ardnamurchan 2022
And then, as we segued into the second week of June, the weather took a turn for the worse.
Pollen
I watched for pollen being collected by foragers on flying days. It’s often taken as a sign that the hive is queenright. However, good flying days have been few and far between. I’d also been away quite a bit and there’s not a huge amount of pollen about at this point in the season.
However, is it a way to discriminate between queenright and queenless colonies?
I’ve watched known queenless colonies that are still collecting pollen, though perhaps at a lower rate than one with a mated, laying queen.
Do you remember the recent discussion about queenless colonies ’Hoping for the best but preparing for the worst.’ and preferentially drawing drone comb? Those drones will still need a protein-rich diet, so the colony – if it is to have has any chance of passing its genes on – will probably still collect pollen to feed the developing drones.
This particular colony was collecting pollen and was well behaved when I had a brief look on the 10th of June. My notes stated: ’Behaving queenright, but no eggs 🙁 ’.
On the 22nd of June, the next time the weather and my availability allowed a check, my notes were fractionally more upbeat: ‘No sign of Q or eggs, but no sign of laying workers either (let’s look on the bright side)’.
And then – on my next check – the 29th, there was a small patch of eggs, perhaps 2-3 inches in diameter 🙂 .
My notes this time were a bit shorter: ’Hu-bloody-rrah!’.
I also did some back-of-an envelope calculations which indicated that the egg used to rear the queen was probably laid on the 16th of May, and she was known to be laying 44 days later.
Flying days and mating days
I usually reckon – based upon published literature and accounts from much more experienced beekeepers – that a queen must mate within 4 weeks of emergence4.
It looks like this one just met that deadline.
June temperatures, Ardnamurchan 2022
We had good weather in the first few days of June, but the middle fortnight was cold and/or wet, with the temperature rarely exceeding 14°C.
Assuming the queen emerged on the last day of May she probably probably went on her orientation flights in the good weather at the beginning of June.
As an aside, I’m not sure of the weather-dependence for queen orientation flights. For workers – based upon hive entrance activity – it’s pretty clear that they preferentially go on these flights on warmer days. However, if queens restricted themselves to good weather – particularly in more northerly climates – they might limit their chances of making successful mating flights. Perhaps queens go on orientation flights even if the weather is sub-optimal, so that they’re ready 5 when there’s a suitable ‘weather window’ for mating flights?
Anyway, back to this queen … I doubt she went on her mating flights in early June because there were no eggs in the colony when I checked on the 10th or the 22nd. My eyesight isn’t perfect, but I looked very carefully. There were definitely ‘polished cells’, but no eggs.
The temperature reached a balmy 19.4°C on the 24th of June (a day with only 7mm of rain!) and she was laying a few days later.
Being able to relate queen age with the weather helps determine whether she may have missed her chance to mate successfully. This is important in terms of the development of laying workers, or the colony management to avoid this.
The extremes of the season
For those readers living in areas where the weather is a lot more dependable this might not be something you ever think about.
Queens just get mated.
No pacing backwards and forwards in the apiary like an expectant father 6 waiting for the good news.
Lucky you.
But, there are times when this weather dependence might be relevant. Early or late in the season it’s likely that the weather will be wetter, windier and cooler. At those times you also need to think about the availability of sufficient (and sufficient quality – they decline later in the season) drones for queen mating.
Queen rearing – or queen replacement of a colony that goes queenless – might be successful, but is it likely to be dependably successful?
On the west cost of Scotland this enforces a ‘little and often’ regime to my queen rearing. Rather than using lots of resources to produce a dozen or two at a time I do them in small batches. Some batches fail – grafts don’t ‘take’, colonies abandon cells, queens fail to get mated – but others succeed.
Little and often – mini nucs (some balanced on an unoccupied – and now unneeded – bait hive)
I’ve got a batch of mini-nucs out in the garden now, and will probably try one or two more batches before the season draws to a close.
Our most dependable (and these things are all relative 🙂 ) pollen and nectar is the heather which is still a fortnight or so away. If that coincides with good weather then there’s a good chance for some late season queen rearing.
Global warming
But don’t forget global warming. This affects all beekeepers whether living in the balmy south or the frozen north. Global warming, and more specifically climate change, is leading to more weather extremes.
Extreme weather is becoming more frequent
Warmer, wetter and windier is the likely forecast. The first of these might help your queen mating, but torrential rain or gale force winds will not.
And that’s before you consider the impact on the forage your bees rely upon … which I’ll deal with another time.
More misbehaving queens
The conditions for queen rearing on the east coast of Scotland are far more dependable. I’ve been busily requeening colonies, making up nucs and clipping and marking mated queens for the last couple of months.
Most of this has all been very straightforward. All of it forms part of the ’reactive’ part of the season I referred to above.
If a colony makes swarm preparation I make up a nuc with the old queen and leave the queenless colony for a week. I then destroy all the emergency queen cells and add a mature queen cell or a frame of eggs/larvae – in either case derived from a colony with better genetics.
In due course the new queen emerges, gets mated and starts laying. I then mark and clip her.
This time last year I discussed a queen that fainted when I picked her up to clip her. That queen recovered, I clipped and marked her the following week without incident and she is still going strong.
Although I’d never seen it before, It turned out that several readers had experienced the same thing, so it’s clearly not that rare an event.
One of my good colonies – #38 in the bee shed – started to make swarm preparations in the third week of May. I removed the old queen to a nuc, left the colony for a further week and then reduced the queen cells, leaving just one which subsequently emerged on the 2nd of June (I also ‘donated’ one spare queen cell to a neighbouring hive that was also making swarm preparations).
Colony #38 wasn’t checked again until the 20th8 when I found a good looking mated, laying queen.
I gently picked her up by the wings.
She didn’t feint 🙂 .
She died 🙁 .
That is an ex-queen
At least, I’m pretty sure she died.
She curled up into a foetal position and showed no movement for 15 minutes. There might have been a slight twitching of an antenna, but the regular expansion and contraction of the abdomen during breathing was not visible. I wasn’t even certain her antennae moved.
I had other hives to inspect so I popped her into a JzBz queen cage and left her with the colony whilst I got on with things.
When I returned – an hour or so later – she was still looking like an ex-queen.
I had little choice but to leave her lying on a piece of paper underneath the queen excluder 9. She was quickly surrounded by a group of workers.
Mourning or moving?
I closed the hive up, crossed my fingers 10 and went off to another apiary.
Like mother, like daughter
The following week the colony was indisputably queenless.
Their behaviour was less good and – a much more definite sign – they had produced a number of emergency queen cells from eggs the queen had laid. I knocked all the queen cells back and united colony #38 with another hive.
Uniting colony #38 with another after the queen ‘popped her clogs’
One week later they were successfully united.
Only later, when comparing my notes with last season, did I realise that the queen that died was a daughter of the queen that fainted last year. I wonder whether the ‘dropping dead’ is just a more extreme version of the fainting I had previously observed?
This implies it might be an inherited characteristic (as at least one of the comments to the fainting post last year suggested).
For clarity I should add that I’m certain that I didn’t directly harm the queen when I picked her up. She was walking around very calmly on the frame. I waited until she was walking towards me, bending at the ‘waist’ (either to inspect a cell, or crossing a defect in the comb) so pushing her wings away from the abdomen. I held her gently by both wings and immediately dropped her into my twist and mark cage.
No fumbling, no squeezing, no messing.
I’ve done this a lot and it was a ‘textbook example’.
Except she never moved again 🙁 .
And like sister?
If, as seems possible, this is an inherited characteristic it will be interesting to see whether the neighbouring colony I donated the spare queen cell (from colony #38) to also shows the same undesirable phenotype 11.
Not so much ‘playing dead’ and ‘being dead’ when handled.
The original fainting queen is currently heading a full colony in another apiary. I’ve had no cause to handle her since last June. She didn’t faint the second time I picked her up (for marking) but I might see how she reacts next time I’m in the apiary.
If she faints again, and particularly if the sister queen reared this season faints (or worse 🙁 ), I’ll simply unite the colony with another.
Firstly, it will be getting a bit late in the season for dependable queen mating and, secondly, it’s clearly an inherited genetic trait that I do not want to deal with in the future.
It doesn’t really matter how gentle, productive or prolific the bees are if the queen cannot cope with being (gently but routinely) handled. It doesn’t happen often, but the risk of ending up with a corpse when I manhandle her into a Cupkit cage, or have to repeat the marking, makes some aspects of beekeeping impractical.
Nicot Cupkit queen rearing system
But look on the bright side … it will be a very easy phenotype to detect and select against 😉 .
Hive records
If there is a take home message from these two anecdotes it’s that good hive records are both useful and important. They help with planning the season ahead and avoiding real problem areas of colony management.
I use a (now propolis encrusted) digital voice recorder (and spreadsheet) when inspecting multiple hives
Far better to know that the queen is almost certainly too old to mate than continue to hope (in vain) that it’ll work out. If you are certain – within a day or two – of her emergence date you can intervene proactively (e.g. by uniting the colony, or supplementing it with open brood) to delay or prevent the inevitable development of laying workers.
By also watching the weather you can also work out when she should have been able to get out and mate.
Similarly, by keeping a pedigree (which sounds fancy, but needn’t be) of your queens, you can avoid selecting for undesirable traits. These fainting/dying queens might be unusual, but there are other behaviours that might also be avoidable.
The original queen in colony #38 might have been a ‘one off’, but if her daughters also behave similarly then I should avoid using them to rear more.
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, “To lose one fainting queen may be regarded as unfortunate, to lose two looks like carelessness poor record keeping”.
Synopsis : Bad behaviour by bees – aggression, following and stability on the comb – may be transient or permanent. To recognise it you need to keep records and have hives to compare. Fortunately, these traits are easy to correct by requeening the colony.
Introduction
That’s a pretty generic title and it could cover a multitude of sins.
I don’t now and, conveniently, have forgotten the details anyway 1
So, instead of discussing bad behaviour by beekeepers, I’ll write about badly behaved bees.
Nice bees
Most beekeepers have an idea of what ‘nice bees’ are like. It’s a 2 term that encapsulates the various characteristics that a beekeeper values.
These characteristics could include temper, stability on the comb, productivity (in terms of either/both bees or honey), frugality, colour and any number of other terms 3 that define either the appearance or behaviour of individual bees or, collectively, that of the colony.
Of course, all these terms are relative.
Nice bees and a nice queen
My definition of aggressive bees may well differ from what another beekeeper would consider (un)acceptable.
The relatively calm and stable bees in most of my hives could be defined as ’running about all over the place’ by someone who’s bees stick, almost immobile, to the comb.
This relativity is nowhere more apparent than when visiting the apiary of another beekeeper. I’m always a little wary of someone donning a beesuit 100 metres from the hives 4 while simultaneously claiming their bees are ’very friendly’.
These differences don’t matter if you keep your bees in an isolated location where other people – in particularly civilians (i.e. members of the general public) – won’t be impacted if your ’friendly bees’ are actually ’murderous psychopaths’.
However, they do matter if your bees are in an urban garden, or a shared allotment.
They also matter when making comparisons between colonies to determine which to split (so creating a new queen) and which – perhaps urgently – need requeening.
Transient or permanent?
For the purpose of the following discussion let’s consider that the ‘bad behaviour’ is aggression.
Here’s a screenshot from a YouTube video (from CapLock Apiaries) which shows some really unpleasant bees. The final words (in this part of the video) by the beekeeper on the right is ”This queen has to die!”.
‘This queen has to die’ … beekeeping doesn’t have to be like this
The brood boxes were stuck together, presumably because the colony is less regularly inspected and everything gets gummed up with propolis. The first comment 5 was
I’m new to bees and thought I found a hot wild hive today. Went to youtube to find some comparison. The hive I saw was absolutely docile in comparison to these guys, and the first wild hive I extracted are absolute angels!
Which emphasises the relative nature of behaviour.
I dislike aggressive bees so have no videos of my own showing this sort of behaviour 6.
However, that doesn’t mean that my bees never show aggression … 😉
Weather, forage, handling, queenless … all can influence temper
Aggression – or defensiveness – can be a permanent feature of a colony or can appear transiently. In my view, the former is unacceptable under any circumstances 7.
However, in response to environmental conditions or handling, a colony may become defensive. Again, the amount of ‘aggro’ varies. Some bees may just buzz a little more excitedly, others can go completely postal. If you are careful to only select from your better behaved stocks for splits and queen rearing you can usually avoid even transient unpleasantness.
Environmental factors that can influence the behaviour of a colony include the weather, the availability of forage and the gentleness and care exhibited by the beekeeper during inspections.
Queenless colonies may also be more aggressive, but all the comments in the post this week relate to queenright colonies.
Scores on the doors
There are two easy to achieve solutions that allow a beekeeper to make sense of the variation in any of these traits. These are:
keeping good hive records to allow undesirable behaviour, or a gradual decline in behaviour, to be identified, and
managing more than one colony so comparisons can be readily made
I score temper, running (stability on the comb) and following, but I know some who record a much greater range of characteristics.
Each are recorded on a 1 – 5 scale (worst to best, allowing half points as a ‘perfect 5’ is unattainable as the bees can always be better, whereas a 4.5 is a really good colony).
The bees in hive #34 run all over the place. They are being requeened.
I also make a note of the weather. A colony may consistently score 4’s or better until you inspect them in a thunderstorm, but that’s OK because when you look back you’ll see that the conditions were woeful.
Compare and contrast
With just one colony you have no reference to know whether all colonies in the area are suffering because there’s a dearth of nectar, or if this colony alone is a wrong ‘un.
Increasingly – for reasons I’ll discuss in a future post – I think three is probably the minimum optimum number.
The more you have the easier it is to identify the outliers … the exceptional (whether good 🙂 or bad 🙁 ). That should be qualified by stating the more you have in one location as the local environment may differ significantly between apiaries.
The great thing about hive records is that they provide a longer retrospective view. You can overlook the hammering you received from a colony last week 8 if there are a long list of 4’s over the last 3 months.
They also allow you to observe trends in behaviour.
Growing old disgracefully
I’ve recently noticed that a couple of my colonies are markedly less well behaved now we’re reaching mid-season than they were throughout 2021 or the beginning of this year. I think at least one has (actually had, as it was requeened last week) a 2020 queen.
As the queen ages the behaviour of the colony has gradually changed.
I crudely classify my colonies into thirds – good, bad or indifferent. Anything ‘bad’ is requeened as soon as I have a suitable queen available (or the larvae to rear one).
These ‘declining’ colonies were never worse than indifferent last year but, as they’ve expanded this spring, are now firmly in the ‘bad’ category. I presume this is consequence of the combination of the influence of the queen’s pheromones and the size of the colony 9.
Whatever … I think all it really demonstrates is that consistently taking even cursory hive records is useful.
The colonies I’m referring to above haven’t become more aggressive (though this can happen). The characteristic I’ve seen change the most is the steadiness of the bees on the comb.
It’s worth noting here that colony size can fundamentally impact behaviour. A well-tempered nuc can develop into a big, strong and unpleasant colony. In contrast, the nucs I prepare from ‘indifferent’ colonies during swarm control and requeening don’t appear to generally improve much in temperament.
If I’m conducting swarm control on the third ‘bad’ tirtile 10 the queen is despatched so I never get to experience the performance of the resulting nucleus colony 😉
Aggression
I’ve discussed aggression above and covered it in more general terms previously. There are several studies of the genetics of aggression, usually by GWAS (Genome Wide Association Studies) of Africanised bees which can be significantly more bolshy than anything I’ve encountered in the UK 11. The colony shown in the video cited above is Africanised.
A recent study analysed individual aggressive bees 12 and compared them with pollen-laden foragers from the same colony. However, they failed to identify any genetic loci associated with aggression.
In contrast, by ‘averaging’ the genetics of hundreds of aggressive or passive (forager) bees, the scientists identified a region of the genome that – if originating from European honey bees – was more likely to result in gentle bees. Conversely, if this region is Africanised, the colony was more likely to be aggressive 13.
Hive genetics, not individual genetics
This is a really interesting result 14 as it means that, even if individual bees are Africanised and potentially aggressive, if the majority of the colony is European-like (and so gentle) the individual Africanised bees are unlikely to be aggressive.
Aggression is therefore a consequence of hive genetics, rather than individual genetics.
Neat.
Aggression in psychotic UK colonies (which, by definition, are not Africanised) may have a different genetic explanation, though some of the genes involved may be similar. Since aggression can manifest itself in several different forms – jumping up from the frames, buzzing around your head, response to sudden movement, targeting dark colours etc. – I suspect there may be multiple genes involved in the sensing or threat response.
Following
Some aggressive bees – particularly those that buzz agitatedly around your head during an inspection – also have the profoundly unpleasant trait of following you out of the apiary … down the track … back to the car … or even into the house.
The car is packed, you’ve taken you beesuit off … and PING!
The very worst of these lull you into a false sense of security by flying off, only to return in a lightning-fast kamikaze strike as soon as you remove your veil.
I consider ‘following’ a worse trait than overt aggression at the hive.
I’m suited and booted’ at the hive. Ready for anything … ’Come on if you think you’re hard enough’.
At least, I am if I’ve remembered to zip my veil up properly 😉
But 15 minutes later, when I should be contemplating a cuppa, I don’t want to be pestered by bees dive bombing my head.
Looking for trouble
Followers don’t necessarily just follow.
They can initiate long-range and unprovoked attacks on individuals just walking near the hive.
I think this is an example of bad behaviour that should not be tolerated.
If you think it’s bad as a beekeeper, just imagine how unpleasant it is for passers by.
Sometimes it’s difficult to identify which of several hives is showing this trait in an apiary. To confirm it, change the order of hive inspections, leaving the likely suspect to last. If the followers don’t appear until the final inspection you have your answer.
If they’re present before that you either guessed wrong or – Eek! – have more than one hive behaving badly.
I’ve seen many aggressive colonies that showed little or no tendency to follow. Conversely, I don’t remember seeing followers that were not from an aggressive colony. I presume this means that the genes involved are distinct but linked.
Whether different or not … they’re unwanted. Any colonies of mine showing overt aggression or following are requeened. Perhaps 5% of my colonies each season are requeened for this reason.
Running
Remember back to your early days of beekeeping when you had to ’find the queen’ and were faced with this … 15
Find the queen
I estimate there are about 1200-1300 bees on the face of that frame 16. There are the same amount on the other side.
All of the bees are moving.
Of course, this makes it much easier to find the queen as she moves differently to the workers on the frame. I’m probably not alone in sometimes struggling to ‘find the queen’ on a photograph of a frame when I rarely have trouble locating her on a frame in my hands 17.
However, the more the workers move, the more difficult it gets.
Spot the queen
See if you can spot the queen on this frame of relatively sedate bees:
And what about this frame of more mobile bees? It’s worth noting there are only about half the total number of bees on this second frame.
OK, I cheated. Only the first frame has a queen on it. She’s in the middle near the bottom of the frame, moving left to right 18.
The top frame is pretty standard in terms of ‘running’ (shorthand for the stability of bees on the frame) in my hives. The bottom video is nothing like the worst I’ve seen, but (if consistently like this) it’s certainly a reason to score the colony down and requeen them from a more stable line.
Inspections
Bees running around on the frame certainly make locating the queen more tricky.
However, as I’ve written elsewhere, you don’t need to find the queen unless you need to do something with her. The presence of eggs is usually sufficient to tell you the colony is queenright (assuming there are no big, fat queen cells or a queen corpse on the open mesh floor 🙁 ).
The reason I dislike bees that are not stable on the comb is because they make inspections more difficult. They prevent you clearly seeing eggs and larvae so you have to shake the bees off the frame, thereby overloading the next frame you look at with agitated bees.
Furthermore, the bees must have somewhere to run to … which usually means they run onto the frame lugs, and then your hands and – in the worst cases – up your forearms.
There was a frame lug there a few seconds ago
In addition, they run over each other, forming heavier and heavier ‘gloops’ 19 of bees that eventually become too heavy, lose their grip and fall … onto the top bars of the frames you have yet to inspect, onto the ground, or into the top of your boots.
A ‘gloop’ forming
Running appears to be a feature which isn’t influenced much by environmental conditions, perhaps other than a chilly and gusty wind 20.
Better bees
There are two good things about aggression, following and running:
these behaviours are easy to identify; you can easily tell if the colony is too hot for comfort, or if your neighbour complains repeatedly about getting chased by bees, or you’re plagued with ‘gloopy’ bees that make inspections a pain. Remember, there’s no standard to compare them to, no ‘reference colony’. All that matters is how they’re viewed by anyone that interacts with them. If they’re too defensive, if they bother you away from the hive or are too mobile, then score them down in your hive records. If they remain the same for the next two to three weeks, or don’t improve when the weather/forage picks up, then make plans to do something about it.
all these undesirable traits can be easily corrected by replacing the queen. Four to six weeks after requeening the characteristics of the colony will reflect those of the new queen. Of course, this only works if you source a good quality queen – either by rearing your own or purchasing one 21, or by ensuring that the colony raises its own queen from larvae sourced from a high quality colony. While you’re at it do yourself and your neighbouring beekeepers a favour and fork out any drone brood in the misbehaving colony.
It really is as easy as that.
Incremental but steady improvement
Over a few years the quality of your bees will improve.
Of course, with open mating you’ll occasionally get rogue colonies. However, as the average quality improves, you’ll have a greater choice of colonies from which to source larvae.
Over time you’ll need to recalibrate your scoring system. In five years a 3/5 will be a much improved colony over a 3/5 now.
When you next (reluctantly) open a bolshy colony, struggle to find the queen because of the wriggling mass of bees on the frames and are then stung repeatedly as you take your veil off by the car, think of it as an opportunity.
You have now recognised the problem and you already know the solution 😉
Note
I’ve chosen aggression, following and running as three easy to spot traits that can be, just as easily, fixed. There are other examples of bad behaviour that may well be unfixable. There’s a dearth of nectar in my west coast apiary until the lime flowers and robbing is a problem 22. Although robbing is a variable characteristic (amongst different strains of bees) I doubt it could be excluded completely by requeening. Selection would be time consuming, being dependent upon environmental conditions. However, the ‘fix’ is again relatively straightforward … keep very strong colonies, feed late in the evening (if needed) and physically protect colonies with reduced entrances and/or robbing screens. Robbing is an example of bad behaviour by bees where the solution is almost entirely the responsibility of the beekeeper.
