Category Archives: Swarm control

Getting answers

Synopsis : Getting good answers involves asking good questions. But remember that the bees have no concept of what is ‘best’, or of the calendar.

Introduction

If you’re just starting beekeeping it’s likely you will have a never-ending list of questions about the somewhat arcane and often perplexing hobby you are embarking on.

And if you’ve been beekeeping for years (or even decades) you might have the same number of questions, albeit somewhat more specialised or esoteric 1. You’ll also probably be involved in answering some of the questions from less experienced beekeepers.

Hive tools ...

Hive tools … which is the best?

Getting good quality and appropriate answers broadly depends upon three things:

  • who (or what) the question is directed at,
  • the wording of the question, and
  • whether the answer is simply factual or involves a subjective assessment

Let’s take a simple example …

Q. What is the scientific name of a bee?
A. The scientific name for the order of bees is Hymenoptera, but this encompasses many different species of bees, not just a single type of bee. To specify a particular species, a scientific name would be necessary, for example, the scientific name for a honey bee is Apis Mellifera.

… so, let’s be more specific …

Q. What is the scientific name of a honey bee?
A. The scientific name for a honey bee is Apis Mellifera.

By asking a more specific question you have received a better answer.

Unfortunately, it’s still not completely correct.

There is a convention on the capitalisation of scientific names; the name of the genus (in this case Apis) is always capitalised, but the name of the particular species (mellifera; meaning honey-bearing) should start with a lowercase letter.

The correct answer should therefore be Apis mellifera.

Or what?

You may have noticed the who (or what) in the list above. The ‘or what’ was deliberate because, increasingly these types of questions will be answered, not by humans or beekeepers 2, but by a machine.

In fact, the two questions and answers shown above were answered by a machine … in this case one called ChatGPT. In this post, ChatGPT responses are shown in red text. The only reason you may not have heard of ChatGPT 3, released just 2 months ago, was because you’ve been living as a hermit in the Tora Bora cave complex for the last few years.

If ChatGPT is new to you then you’re going to have ample opportunity to experience it – or its successors – in the next few months and years. ChatGPT is described as a chatbot which has been trained through supervised and reinforcement learning. It can do a range of things that are a lot more impressive than not quite getting the scientific name of honey bees correct … it can compose music, write computer code and pass written exams for medicine. It can produce essays and it is causing considerable concern in education, where students are already using it for homework 4.

Perhaps I’ll save myself some late night writing by asking ChatGPT to do my homework …

Write a 500 word article for beekeepers about hive tools and Taranov swarm control, remembering to include a handful of poor quality puns and some truly shocking, punctuation.

I asked it to do this … it generates the answer in less than a minute. I’ve added the answer as a separate page as I don’t want to get even more distracted from the topic of the post today.

Factual inaccuracies

ChatGPT does OK on the poor puns (beeeing, buzz-worthy etc.) but less well on the shoddy punctuation, unless you count the Oxford comma.

It does much less well on Taranov swarm control. Indeed, I had started by asking it to “Describe how to conduct swarm control using the Taranov method” and received the following answer:

The Taranov method is a technique used for swarm control in beekeeping that involves manipulating the hive to prevent swarming. The process begins by identifying a colony that is likely to swarm and removing any queen cells, which are the cells that contain developing queen bees. Next, the beekeeper will divide the colony by removing a section of comb with eggs and young larvae, and placing it in a new hive box. This creates a population imbalance in the original hive, which triggers the bees to start raising new queen bees. Finally, the beekeeper will monitor the hive to ensure that no new queen cells are forming, and will continue to remove them as they appear. This method aims to reduce the likelihood of swarming, by keeping the colony balanced and preventing the development of new queen bees.

Which is almost completely wrong. I’m not going to describe Taranov swarm control, but it’s not that. If you want to know (and it is an intriguing method, though not one I have used) I suggest you ask an experienced beekeeper, not a machine. It requires a simple, correct, factual answer.

Subjective or qualified answers

The other thing ChatGPT is not good at is answering questions that require some experience and/or may be subjective. For example …

Q. What is the best type of beehive for a beginner?
A. For a beginner, the Langstroth beehive is considered the best option due to its standardized dimensions, ease of management, and wide availability of equipment and accessories. Additionally, it is commonly used by many beekeepers and has a strong community of support and resources available.

… OK, what about something even more important?

Q. What is the best type of hive tool for beekeeping?
A. A J-shaped hive tool is widely considered as one of the best for beekeeping. It is versatile, durable and can be used for a variety of tasks such as prying apart beehive boxes, scraping propolis and wax, and removing frames.

The first answer actually isn’t bad, particularly if you are in the US. However, the justification is a little odd and could equally well be applied to a National, Dadant 5 or Layens hive.

The ‘best hive’-type question is one commonly asked by beginners and one where a better question improves the answer. If you instead ask ChatGPT for the best beehive for a beginner in the UK it recommends a National hive (justified by compatibility).

However, the answer ChatGPT gives to the ‘best hive tool’ question is clearly wrong.

Simply the best … no contest!

Anyone with even passing experience of opening a hive knows that the claw-type hive tool is by far and away the most practical, comfortable and good looking 😉 .

The ’widely considered’ in ChatGPT’s answer is the giveaway. It’s (obviously) never used a hive tool and so cannot speak from experience.

Flame wars

The examples above are trivial but they do show both the abilities and shortcomings of ChatGPT. But it will get better – more accurate, more factually correct, better at providing qualified subjective answers (and hiding the fact that it has no direct experience of any of the things it is comparing).

You’d better get used to it as it will revolutionise our interactions – direct or indirect – with computers; websites, discussion forums, computer programming, teaching, student assessment and – increasingly – creative work as well.

It’s going to put a lot of people out of work 🙁 .

I’m already out of work, so I don’t feel too threatened, but perhaps it’s also going to eventually replace the beekeeping blogger.

As an aside, I thought a ChatGPT-powered ‘user’ on a beekeeping discussion forum like Beesource in the US, or the BeekeepingForum here in the UK would be – at least briefly – entertaining. Some of the discussion threads on these can get really out of hand, even with strict moderation (a thankless task).

ChatGPT can already interact conversationally, its command of the subject and of English (and, of course, a range of other languages) is already better than many readers/contributors, and it would be a whole lot more persistent in an online argument (though it is currently not particularly creative when it comes to insults).

It’s going to render many of these discussion forums worthless and is already banned from some of the computing forums. The scientific journal Nature has established ground rules for its use – it cannot ‘share’ authorship (!), its use in data analysis must be documented etc.

I already find many discussion forums unrewarding … they might get a lot worse, at least in the short term. Since many beginners use them a lot, I thought it was worth mentioning.

Better answers

Although I’ve been wandering some way off topic there are some important points embedded in the first half of this post.

The question you ask influences the answer you get.

In beekeeping, your local environment and your latitude are particularly influential in the lives of your bees.

I gave a talk this evening on queen rearing. One of the questions was ‘How early in the season can I start?’

That’s a perfectly good and valid question, but answering it requires knowing something about the local climate and colony development.

It also varies from year to year … for example, a cold spring delays things.

Some might simply answer ‘mid-May’ or ‘late-April’ … indeed, questions like that may be asked by someone wanting a calendar-based answer.

Unfortunately, beekeeping isn’t that simple. Beekeepers on the UK south coast can often start queen rearing two months before I can here in north west Scotland.

My answer involved something about drone availability. A drone takes 24 days to develop and a few days after that to become sexually mature. Studies have shown that the peak of drone brood production occurs about one month before swarming (Page and Erickson, 1988), though production starts earlier.

And the correct answer is …

So a better answer is to keep an eye on your colonies, observe drone brood production increasing and – 3-4 weeks later (or perhaps a little before 6 ) – start your queen rearing with every expectation the bees will have got the timing about right.

Shallow depth of field

One of many …

In a cold spring they’ll start producing drones later, at a more southerly latitude they’ll produce drones much earlier than they will in northern Scotland.

Yes, the answer is more difficult to understand than ‘the 19th of April’, but it’s much more likely to be correct because it is based on an understanding of the biology of the bees.

It’s also likely to be correct most years. You can test this by keeping notes. You’ll then have something to refer back to next year and the one after that, and you’ll be able to answer, with compelling authority, anyone who asks you the same question 😉 .

In about 30 years you’ll be able to review your notes – of drone production and queen rearing successes – and see whether the timing needs revising 🙂 .

In doing that you’ll have completed the transition from seeking a calendar-based response, to understanding the drivers that determine colony development and reproduction, and end up with an answer that is generically applicable, qualified and based upon personal experience.

Expect biased answers

My preference for a particular type of hive tool is based upon personal experience (and unrelated to the fact that I bought 20 of them very cheaply a decade ago). Do not underestimate the importance of personal experience in answering beekeeping questions … or its ability to generate biased, unqualified or even completely incorrect answers.

Ask three experienced beekeepers a question and you’ll get five answers … one will be completely wrong, another will involve ‘brood and a half’ (also wrong … obviously), a third will answer a different question altogether and the final two will express diametrically opposing views about whether the J-shaped or claw-shaped hive tool is ‘best’.

The answer you get is based upon the experience of whoever you ask … and how willing they are to answer.

Be warned, it’s not unusual for the most (usefully) experienced and the most vociferous beekeepers to be different individuals. In fact, it’s not unusual for the most vociferous to be much less experienced than they sound.

For a subject as practical as beekeeping, practical experience is far, far more valuable than ‘knowledge’ gleaned from the internet (after all, you might have been reading something written by ChatGPT).

I know the difference between the Miller and Hopkins methods for queen rearing. I’ve not used either (yet) so I don’t know which is better – either outright, or in particular circumstances.

This can all be a bit overwhelming as a beginner … use your judgement, listen, check some of the answers in a good book 7 or a reputable online source, ask a follow-up question.

Nobody knows all the answers and it sometimes feels as though the more knowledge you acquire, the more questions appear.

Answer your own questions; observation and understanding

There is no ‘best’ hive, or 8 hive tool. The bees don’t care and – through experience – you’ll find what suits your beekeeping.

It’s likely that the ‘best’ anything in beekeeping – bee, hive tool, hive, smoker, forage, honey, hive stand, extractor, queen excluder etc. – is a meaningless concept.

It’s an irrelevant question as far as bees are concerned. There may be good ones and bad ones, but it’s surprising how tolerant and accommodating the bees – and a beekeeper – can be.

I’d strongly recommend that anyone starting beekeeping ignores articles with the word ‘best’ in them – except perhaps this one.

Ask meaningful questions and look for insightful answers.

The ‘when to start queen rearing?’ is a good – albeit incomplete – question and I suggested how I would (or did) answer it above.

In that example it is really by observing and understanding the bees that you answer the question. I think those are two of the most important skills to acquire as a beekeeper; doing so will always help you get better answers, not least because they help answer them yourself.

Asking an experienced beekeeper gets you part way there but it doesn’t come close to working something out yourself.

Do an experiment

I used the word ‘arcane’ in one of the opening sentences. It means mysterious, obscure or little understood. Despite sounding a little like the word archaic – meaning old fashioned or belonging to an earlier period – it has a totally different etymology. Arcane is derived from the Latin arcānus meaning ‘closed or shut up’, whereas archaic is from the Greek ἀρχαϊκός for ‘ancient’.

Nevertheless, bits of beekeeping are both arcane and archaic.

Sometimes they’re ‘old fashioned’ because experience has shown that a particular method works reliably well, so is promoted and becomes widely used. However, sometimes it’s because ”it’s always been done like that” and everyone unquestioningly follows the approach without asking whether there are other – perhaps better – ways of achieving something.

Let’s take a trivial example … starter strips in foundationless frames.

Beautiful …

A foundationless frame is a frame containing no foundation (helpfully, the clue is in the name) . Every foundationless frame you use saves you about £1.40 based upon the current price of foundation. What’s more, because commercial foundation contains miticide residues, every frame you use reduces traces of miticides in your hive.

And, if you read online about making foundationless frames you’ll find lots of descriptions, many of which include instructions to provide a wax, or waxed, starter strip attached under the top bar for the bees to start drawing comb from.

When I started using foundationless frames I – unquestioningly – followed these instructions, cutting 2 cm strips of commercial foundation and nailing them in place in my frames.

Foundationless frame

And they often fell out … which prompted me to ask a question I should have done in the first place, and to do an experiment.

Ask the bees

Where do bees naturally start drawing comb?

Wherever the swarm ends up. If it’s in a previously unoccupied tree hole, or loft space, there are no convenient strips of wax foundation to be used as guides. The cavity may be completely empty.

Clearly they don’t need a starter strip to work from.

However, the beekeeper does not want the bees to build comb totally haphazardly. We want them to stick within the confines of the frame or it becomes impossible to manipulate. It’s therefore useful to provide them with ‘guides’ on where to start … they might not follow them, but they almost always do.

So, by understanding what the bees do naturally, qualified by our own selfish interests in managing the colony, we can ask the bees what suits them … a strip of wax foundation, a waxed wooden guide or a lollipop stick.

And, having worked out which the bees prefer, we can make a decision based upon what also suits us.

Take your pick ...

Take your pick …

I therefore did a simple experiment. I built a dozen or so foundationless frames, each containing three randomly positioned starter strips under the top bar – one third wax foundation, one third waxed wood and one third plain wooden lollipop stick (or ‘tongue depressors’).

Over the course of a season I used these in a variety of colonies and observed which of the starter strips was preferred … indicated by which the bees chose first, or which they avoided.

And the results are in …

It made no difference at all. There was no correlation between the type of starter strip and use by the bees.

They just don’t care.

So I only now use plain wooden starter strips. They are quicker and easier to prepare, impervious to the steam wax extractor and much more robust. I use them in full hives and in my mini-nucs for queen mating, simply gluing the wood in place.

Kieler mini-nuc topbar frames – no need for foundation or waxing

A little understanding of what the bees do, coupled with a little experimentation and some observation, allowed me work out the answer to the question ’What is the best material for starter strips’ 9.

I should note that many other have reached exactly the same conclusion independently. I’m not claiming to have discovered this first, but I did formally test what the bees preferred.

Some ChatGPT creativity to end with

To finish I thought I’d ask ChatGPT to do something creative.

Rather than eliciting incorrect answers about Taranov swarm control I asked it for a poem, in the form of a haiku 10, about honey bee swarms;

Golden bees swarm forth
Honeyed scent on the breeze
Nature’s sweet bounty.

Not bad 🙂


References

Page, R.E., and E. H. Erickson, Jr. (1988) Reproduction by Worker Honey Bees (Apis mellifera L.). Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 23: 117–126 https://www.jstor.org/stable/4600197. Accessed February 3, 2023. Note: this might not be accessible online, so you could try this instead – Page, R.E. Jr (1982) The seasonal occurrence of honey bee swarms in north-central California. American Bee Journal 121:266-272.

 

Learn from my mistakes

Synopsis : It’s good to learn from your mistakes. It’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes.” Here are some related ones of mine and the lessons I (again) learned from them.

Introduction

This is the 50th post of the year. Usually 1 this is the week in which I write some erudite words 2 about the season in retrospect.

What went well, what could have gone better and what was an unmitigated disaster. The highs and the lows, together with a smattering of the in-between bits that actually constitute the majority of the beekeeping year.

Writing these review-type posts is quite enjoyable 3. I have to go back through my hive notes which inevitably brings back a flood of memories of warmer days, heavy supers, lost hive tools and unmated queens.

Laden foragers returning ...

Laden foragers returning …

These notes are succinct – rarely more than ~10-20 words – littered with acronyms but surprisingly informative. At least they are when you take into account their dates and the timing of the development cycle of workers, drones and queens.

And, as a bonus, they are also legible.

Hive records

I’ve mentioned before that I take my hive inspections records on a digital recorder in the apiary and then transfer them to a spreadsheet with the company of a coffee 4 later.

Testing, testing, one, two three

Whilst this approach misses the immediacy of a scribbled note on a sheet of paper under the hive roof, it does allow me to easily refresh my memory before the next apiary visit.

It also means they don’t blow away, get damp, eaten by slugs or require me to have a functioning pen in my beesuit … the recorder lives in the bee bag, so is always available.

By looking at the hive records in advance I’m reminded that – for example – I need more supers for hives #23 and #27, that the former had a good open queen cell on frame 7 (OC/7 in the notes) which should now be sealed 5 and that nuc #13 has a recently mated queen who will need finding (!), clipping and marking.

And by looking at the same records in mid-December, with the temperature plummeting outside, I can see how the season progressed week-by-week in my three main apiaries.

The nuc was sold a fortnight later, the queen in #23 eventually emerged but was lost before she got mated (or perhaps on her way back) and supers filled so rapidly that I regretted not adding more at once.

It was a great year for honey, the best since returning to Scotland in 2015.

But that can wait until the review of the season … which will now be next week 6.

Impressions vs. reality

I give a lot of talks on beekeeping. Whilst a talk might be about bait hives, swarm control or queen rearing, the questions afterwards can be more wide-ranging. It is quite fun to get questions on apparently random beekeeping topics (I’ve done ’ask the expert’ 7 panels at beekeeping conventions which are enjoyable; for one question and four panel members you get six different answers and a good-natured argument … no wonder we run out of time).

Some of the more ‘left field’ questions can be a challenge and require a degree of lateral thinking. I’m more than happy to acknowledge that I’m sometimes stumped for an answer … I understand the question, but I cannot explain why whatever happened 8, er, happened.

However, the very fact that I’m asked for an opinion at all suggests that I give the impression I know what I’m talking about 9 when it comes to almost any subject about honey bees.

I don’t.

Hive inspections

Even if you just restrict the topic to the hive, its contents and what’s happening in it on a week-to-week basis, the apparent impression some have of my understanding can be wildly different from reality.

I know that because of my hive notes.

And I’m acutely aware of this because I’ve just re-read them … 😉 .

Perhaps I’m not being entirely fair. If you read the entries for any individual week in isolation it’s clear I sometimes don’t have a scooby 10 what’s happening in the hive.

It’s obvious because as well as acronyms there’s a dusting of ??? throughout the notes 11.

Not every hive and certainly not every week (thankfully), but more often than I’d like.

However, the regular repeat visits combined with the utter predictability of honey bee development, and comparison with adjacent hives, usually allows me to work out what’s happening with some certainty.

I think the take home message 12 here is that hive notes are very useful. Even if you don’t quite understand what’s happening in the hive, record what you see.

At the next visit, or the one after that, it should start to make sense.

And, when you re-read them in midwinter with the benefit of knowing what happened time, tea and a roaring stove, you’ll at least learn what to do in the same situation next year.

Or what not to do 🙁 .

Train wreck

But, there remains this disconnect between that impression of insightful understanding and the day-to-day reality of some of my apiary visits.

These are are not always as polished and assured as I’d like …

Photo by Roberto Prusso from 1913

… frankly, they can sometimes be a bit of a train wreck.

I trip over or drop stuff 13 .

I reassemble the hive leaving the queen in a JzBz cage in my pocket.

Hives are inspected in the wrong order, meaning I might have to re-open one again to the understandable irritation of the bees.

I leave the hive tool inside a hive and can’t find another, or put it in the wrong pocket of my beesuit so it falls through the hole, down the inside of the leg and into my boot.

An elusive unmarked queen is found on my third run through the brood box … at exactly the same time as I find a suicidally psychotic worker inside my veil. I have insufficient hands to hold the frame, the queen and the worker (though, truth be told, I’m probably not intending to just ’hold’ the worker if she’s that agitated). The queen is abandoned until the following week.

When I fail to find her altogether.

Or, I do and she dies as I pick her up.

Composed and unruffled

Thankfully, not every apiary visit is like that.

Many are reassuringly ‘composed and unruffled’; I open the box, the bees are wonderfully calm. The queen is on the second frame I check, but the first had eggs anyway so I didn’t need to see her. However, since I found her and she’s mated and laying well, I mark her and clip her wing. The colony barely notice her absence and I run her gently back in between two brood frames to get on with her business.

Returning a marked and clipped queen – not distressed, just sauntering down between the frames

This is the beekeeper I’d like to always be … not that other ham-fisted muppet in an ill-fitting beesuit.

Here are a couple of queen-related examples from the season just gone. At the time I was flummoxed. In retrospect I’ve learned a few important lessons.

Or re-learned those that I had been taught already … and subsequently forgotten 😉 .

A tale of several queens

Almost all of my swarm control these days uses the nucleus method. In comparison to the widely-taught Pagden artificial swarm it only requires an additional nuc box. In my experience, it is almost totally foolproof as long as:

  • you take care to only leave a single queen cell in the hive; remember, this requires a visit one week after removing the queen. They cannot swarm if you leave just one cell.
  • you don’t make the nuc too strong; if you do there’s a chance it might swarm anyway.

My colony #7 contained an ageing but really lovely queen. I’d used her last year for queen rearing and hoped to do so again. At the start of May I’d obviously tempted fate by noting … ’Strong. Lovely BP. PC only … graft next week’ 14.

Lovely BP (brood pattern)

And, of course, the next week (the 8th of May) there were a couple of big, fat, 3-4 day old (i.e. open) queen cells and it was clear they were making plans to vamoose. I made up a nuc (number #47) with the old queen and moved her to a distant apiary.

One cell was left in box #7.

This box had overwintered with a nadired super and the original queen had snuck down in April and laid it up. Irritatingly, she’d chosen the frames of drone comb … not the end of the world because the queen was so good, but I didn’t want the new queen to do a repeat performance so moved the super above the queen excluder (QE). I discussed this in Early season inspections back in April – go there for all the gory details.

Upper entrances

Drones emerging above a QE is a recipe for carnage as they try and squeeze through 15, so I added a thin eke that included an upper entrance. The drones could fly from this and, in due course, they did.

Hive with an upper entrance

In the meantime, the new queen should have emerged and got mated … but she was nowhere to be found. There were polished cells in the brood box and the colony was behaving as though it was queenright.

On the 12th of June I decided to give it ’one more week’ and, eventually, I then found her in the supers on the 19th, together with several frames of open brood.

D’Oh!

Since there was no sealed brood she had presumably been slow getting mated and only started within the last week or so. I clipped and marked her and returned her to the brood box.

But she didn’t stay long.

My notes on the 21st of July include the comment ’no eggs’ (there had been on the 12th) and at the end of the month I found a new laying queen in the box.

She’s still there … or was when I last checked the colony (’lovely, well-tempered bees’ I was pleased to record in my notes) in mid-September. I presume the previous one hadn’t been ‘up to scratch’ and so was superseded sometime in mid-July .

Lessons learned

When I removed the supers (unsurprisingly disappointingly light 🙁 ) and the plastic QE I found the latter had a couple of cracks in it. Although these didn’t result in any gaping holes, it’s possible the QE deformed sufficiently to let the queen through.

Lesson No. 1 – try and avoid using those inexpensive cheap plastic QE’s. A framed, wired excluder costs less than three jars of honey and is a good investment. I bought more at the start of this season, but still didn’t have enough.

You know it makes sense

However, I suspect the queen didn’t get into the supers through the QE.

I expect she instead returned from her last mating flight and entered the hive via the upper entrance. It’s not at all unusual for returning queens to end up in the wrong hive altogether, so simply mistaking an upper for the lower entrance is understandable.

Lesson No. 2 – ideally avoid upper entrances altogether on hives containing virgin queens, or at least orientate them to the opposite side of the hive.

What happened to the nuc?

The original queen was moved to another apiary in nuc #47 created during swarm control. A fortnight later (22/5/22) they were moved to a full hive 16 and three weeks later (12/6/22) I found a single charged queen cell in the middle of a central frame.

Although I suspected supersedure (ageing queen, single QC etc.) I’d seen the queen and she was still laying well. I therefore transferred the frame with the open cell to a neighbouring queenless and poorly tempered hive in the same apiary. She emerged, was mated and laying well by late July … and is heading the colony through this winter.

However, back to hive #47 … they attempted to swarm ~10 days later. Since the queen was clipped the swarm returned to the hive, but the queen was lost 🙁 .

I knocked back all but one of the charged open cells and guesstimated that she would emerge on the 6/7th of July. On my next inspection (on the 5th), the queen was quacking in the cell 17. My maths suggested she should be mated around the 20th but I didn’t open the box again until the last day of July when I found her laying well.

And it was about then that things started to go ‘pear-shaped’ 18.

Hands like feet

I fumbled the first couple of attempts at picking up the queen to mark her.

In my defence … it had been a long afternoon. This was the last of about 15 colonies I’d inspected and the supers were very heavy. It was hot, the sun was bright and I was really tired.

I’d removed the supers and set them aside, lifted the QE and found the unmarked laying queen after just a couple of minutes.

The first attempt at picking her up was pretty reasonable, albeit unsuccessful, but the second was badly botched. She skittered across the frame, clambering over and under the workers without giving them a chance to move aside.

Lesson No. 3 – when it comes to picking up queens, if at first (or at the most, second attempt) you don’t succeed, do not ’try, try and try again’. Close the box, leave her for another day when both she and you will be calmer.

Of course, I persevered 🙁 .

On the third attempt she took off, seemingly in slow motion, but still too fast for me. She circled around, briefly landed on my shoulder, lifted off again and then – like Baron von Richthofen – was obscured by the dazzling sun.

I never saw her again.

But it gets worse …

I’ve had queens fly off before. In my experience they often (perhaps over 50% of the time) manage to return to the hive. They fly poorly and often crash land in the grass. It’s therefore important not to stampede about like a herd of wildebeest, but instead to calmly reassemble the hive and quietly retreat.

Ideally without moving your feet.

I managed the former but not the latter, cursing my failure to learn from ‘Lesson No. 3’ … it is not the first time that I’ve attended that lesson 🙁 .

I rarely inspect hives in August. This hive was on the other side of Scotland and I didn’t open it again until I removed the supers during the summer honey harvest at the end of the month. With only one and a bit filled supers there were relatively few bees above the QE … but there was a queen.

At least, there was evidence that there had been a queen present as there was a ~5 cm patch of brood on opposing faces of two of the super frames.

Small patch of brood – all of about the same age – in a super

I didn’t see the queen, and only discovered the brood as I shook the bees off the frames to remove them for extraction.

It was a patch of similarly aged brood; there were no younger larvae or eggs, and only a few cells were capped. It must have been laid 7-9 days previously.

Remember, I’d not opened the hive in the last 23 days.

There was no upper entrance and the QE was wired. 

And the final lesson today

I ended up uniting the hive over a QE with a known queenright colony. I simply laid some newspaper over the top bars of the latter, added a QE to hold it in place and added the ’is-there-or-isn’t-there-a-queen-in-this-box?’ upper brood box onto which I shook the bees from the remaining super frames.

Newspaper and queen excluder

I do not understand the brood in the super.

The brood pattern indicated it was laid by a queen (rather than laying workers – in which case it would be scattered all around the frame). However, the age of the brood suggested she had only laid for a day or so. The brood looked like worker, but I didn’t photograph the frame until it was back in the extracting room and it was a bit bashed about by then.

My best guess is that the queen that flew away landed back on top of the open stack of supers next to the hive. However, that was over three weeks earlier. If it was the original laying queen that I’d failed to mark (or even pick up) then why didn’t she continue laying at the same rate?

Why the fortnight’s hiatus?

And why did she stop laying having only just started?

I’m afraid we’ll never know.

Which doesn’t mean that there’s not a lesson from this sorry debacle:

Lesson No. 4 – if a mated and laying queen does fly off, check the hive again one week later. If she’s back she’ll be laying and all will be well. If she’s missing in action there will be queen cells, but no remaining larvae young enough to rear queens from. Knock back all the cells you don’t want and let them get on with things 19.

One final queen

If you rewind about 1500 words you might remember that I found two good open queen cells in box #7. The one I didn’t leave in that hive I used to requeen an adjacent hive (#6).

Waste not, want not 😉 .

A week previous I’d already started swarm control on colony #6 by removing the queen to a nuc. I’d intended to let them requeen themselves 20 but the availability of a good queen cell from much better stock was too good an opportunity to miss.

I knocked back all the queen cells in hive #6, confident that there were no larvae young enough start as queens.

I added the frame from #7 with the queen cell and she emerged on about the 17th of May. She was mated and laying well by the 12th of June … probably earlier but I hadn’t checked at the intervening visit as I’d been taking three full supers of spring honey from the hive. I got a further three full supers of summer honey 9 weeks later.

The bees are well tempered and productive. They went into the winter very strong … headed by the same queen.

Sometimes, actually most of the time, everything ’just works’ 🙂 .

And a final word

The tale of misadventures recounted above was probably the only truly shambolic part of my beekeeping year in 2022 21. It was just a coincidence that it all originated from one hive. Some of it was self-inflicted, but other bits were just dumb luck.

Shambolic, but not catastrophic, and it all ended OK.

And I learned some valuable lessons.

Again 🙂 .


Notes

The opening quote, It’s good to learn from your mistakes. It’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes”, is attributed to Warren Buffet

A few readers signed up to receive notifications either about new posts or comments added to the post last week will have received repeat emails sometime on Tuesday evening. These were seemingly due to a hiccup in the server software and outside my control. With thanks to those who brought this to my attention, and apologies to the recipients. The current commenting and notification software is becoming ‘unfit for purpose’ due to subscriber numbers. I have plans to change, both along with some other developments, sometime next year.

Feral facts and fallacies

Synopsis : Are feral colonies recently lost swarms or a self-sustaining ‘wild’ honey bee population? The latter must reproduce faster than they perish. Measuring rates of colony loss and nest occupancy provides a good indicator of the likely origin and independence of feral populations.

Introduction

Most colonies try to swarm every year. Most – not all – but if your colonies are strong and healthy they are likely to swarm. That’s why swarm prevention and subsequent swarm control are such important skills for the tyro beekeeper to master. Without swarm control the majority of the workforce is ‘lost’, the residual colony will be left temporarily queenless and the potential honey crop is probably much reduced.

A small swarm

A small swarm …

It is not difficult to become competent at swarm prevention and control. However, any beekeeper who claims to never lose swarms is probably being ‘economical with the actualité’ as the late Alan Clark once said.

What happens to those ‘lost’ swarms?

Some forward-thinking beekeepers set out bait hives. Any swarms that end up being attracted to these ‘swarm traps’ will eventually find their way back to a managed apiary. Some swarms end up in the church tower where ‘there have always been bees’, according to local parishioners.

Others move into the roof space above the entrance to the local nursery school, causing fascination, irritation and consternation in equal measure. Their fate depends upon whether the head teacher contacts a beekeeper or a pest controller … but their arrival reinforces the importance of swarm control and the use of bait hives.

A bait hive deployed in mid-April in good time for the swarming season ahead

And other swarms disappear over the apiary fence, across the field and into the local woods, eventually establishing a new colony in a suitable hollow tree.

No risk, no reward

Swarming is a risky business. The swarm leaves with the majority of the flying bees and the mated queen. However, it takes more than that to establish a functional colony. They need to draw comb, rear brood and collect sufficient stores to get through the winter.

That’s a tall order and most swarms fail.

Data from Thomas Seeley in The Lives of Bees suggests that only about 23% of swarms survive the winter.

In contrast, the swarmed colony has about an 80% chance of survival. They’ve got drawn comb, stores, eggs and larvae … ‘all’ they need to do is rear a new queen.

And then they’re likely to swarm again the following year 1. In fact, without swarm control, the average number of swarms produced by a colony is two per year – presumably a prime swarm (headed by the old queen) and a cast (headed by a virgin queen).

So, swarming is risky, but those swarms that succeed in establishing a new colony and overwintering can themselves attempt to reproduce again the following year.

That’s the reward.

Where are all these bees?

Even taking account of the exemplary swarm control by the UK’s ~25,000 beekeepers 2 I’m reasonably certain that a lot of swarms are lost every year.

Where do all these bees go?

I’ve been told of lots of churches or schools or trees with resident bees.

Quiet churchyard

A swarm magnet … or just an old church?

However, it’s certainly not every church, or school or hollow tree that’s occupied. Even when there’s a surplus of suitable nest sites, those that are occupied by a colony are the exception, not the rule.

The main reason of course is Varroa.

In the absence of intervention to reduce the mite population, the developing winter bees get parasitised by Varroa, and the resulting high levels of deformed wing virus (DWV) reduces the longevity of these necessarily 3 long-lived bees.

Consequently the winter cluster shrinks in size, from that of a football (early October) to a honeydew melon (late December) to a large orange (early February).

And then it freezes to death during a cold snap 🙁 .

The apiary in winter ...

The apiary in winter …

Numerous studies have shown that untreated colonies, in the absence of any natural resistance or tolerance to Varroa or DWV (though the latter is rarely discussed, and even less frequently tested for), almost always perish within a year or two of Varroa infestation.

Look back at the recent post on Biological control with Varroa for a reminder of the devastation wreaked on an island population of honey bees after the introduction of mites.

Wild? They’re livid feral …

Technically, swarms lost by beekeepers (that become established in the environment) are probably best termed feral colonies.

Originally feral meant simply ‘wild or untamed’, but the more common usage these days means ’animals or plants that have lapsed into a wild form from a domesticated condition’.

Bees aren’t domesticated, but I think feral conveniently encompasses their origin.

However, I’m more than happy to accept that a colony, initially feral, that becomes well-established in the church tower and throws off a swarm or two every year, that requeens every two or three seasons, surviving without intervention or management, must be considered ‘wild’ at some point.

It’s not worth discussing when a colony transitions from feral to wild.

It’s semantics, though I think the distinction between ‘recently arrived from a swarmed managed colony’ and ‘self-sustaining’ is an important one.

Notwithstanding the ravages of Varroa, whether feral or wild, there are colonies in the environment – churches, schools, trees – and probably rather more than many beekeepers are aware of.

The missing bees

Periodically there’s a little flurry of interest in the press about ‘long lost’ or ‘missing’ wild bees discovered in the woods.

Late last summer there were articles in all the newspapers about bees found on Blenheim Estate. The Observer reported this discovery with the headline ”No one knew they existed”: wild heirs of lost British honeybee found at Blenheim.

‘Blenheim bees’ article in the Observer, 7-11-21

As an aside – as this isn’t the real topic for discussion today – there are at least three challenging claims made in that headline; how can you be sure that no-one knew they existed? Is the British honey bee (it is not honeybee) actually lost? How do you know that these bees are their heirs?

Pedantic is my middle name.

But the 2500 hectare Blenheim Estate 4 isn’t the only location with apparently self-sustaining populations of honey bees. There are trees, churches and (I dare say) even nursery schools up and down the country that appear to have a ‘resident’ colony or two of bees.

Periodically they’re observed swarming. Sometimes things seem a bit quiet in the spring, but perhaps it’s too cold for the bees to be flying strongly anyway.

By May there’s a lot of activity so all must be well.

Right?

Perhaps 😉

Citizen science

These wild/feral colonies are infrequent but widely distributed. They are therefore difficult for one person to regularly observe. As a consequence there are several ‘citizen science’ projects monitoring some of these sites. Magnus Peterson regularly reports in The Scottish Beekeeper on the one he coordinates for the University of Strathclyde.

The criticism of these types of studies – certainly not Magnus’s specifically – but any study the largely relies upon infrequent observation by volunteers, is that stuff gets missed. A visit doesn’t happen because it’s raining hard. Or it does happen in heavy rain and no activity is observed and the colony is recorded as dead.

Or worse, recorded as alive, but not flying because of the heavy rain.

With more systematic observation, though not necessarily more frequent, you can have increased certainty that the site that was occupied last autumn is still occupied this spring.

The timing of these observations is important. Three per season is probably the minimum, early, mid and late, but they have to be at particular times of the season – see below.

Crowdfunding

So, let’s assume a colony is found in the autumn and the same hollow tree is occupied in late-April the following year … yippee, the colony is still alive.

Feral – or are they now wild? – bees living successfully with Varroa (at least presumably living with Varroa if they’re almost anywhere in mainland UK).

Perhaps they’ve evolved to have some interesting and useful trait(s) that renders the colony resistant to or tolerant of the dreaded parasitic mites?

These are valuable bees.

They are an important genetic resource.

They must be protected at all costs.

Perhaps it’s time to set up a web colony cam to record their activity? That’s going to cost a pretty penny, so some crowdfunding is needed.

A website is created … a dozen mini-nucs are purchased for the ambitiously planned queen rearing programme and – inevitably – there’s a misquoted article or two in the Guardian.

But hold on …

Are they really the same colony in April that were there the previous autumn?

How can you be sure?

How can you be certain that it’s not an unseasonably early swarm that was missed by the – usually eagle-eyed – local beekeepers? 5

It’s not unusual to find the odd charged queen cell during the first colony inspection of the season. At least, I’ve sometimes found queen cells during that first inspection. I’m sufficiently experienced to not go rummaging about in the boxes too early in the season, and so I am sometimes surprised at how well developed the colony is when I open the box.

Charged queen cell

But what if it had been raining, so I’d postponed the inspection?

On the next warm spring day – well before I was able to return to the apiary – the colony could swarm.

I’ve regularly seen April swarms in Scotland and there are many reports of even earlier swarms on social media every year.

Perhaps the active ‘overwintered’ colony is nothing of the sort.

Maybe it’s just been occupied by a very early swarm?

To be sure it’s the same colony you need to do some genetic testing. If the colony is the same the genetic testing will show identity. If the testing shows significant variation then it’s a different colony.

And, if you combine some genetic testing of overwintered colonies with three carefully-timed visits – late season, very early season and mid-season – to a large number of wild/feral colonies, or likely sites that they would occupy, you can determine their longevity and whether they are a self-sustaining population.

Bee trees

And I wouldn’t have given that long and rambling introduction if there wasn’t a recent scientific paper where they’ve done exactly that (Kohl et al., 2022). I’ll describe it briefly as it’s a nicely written and compelling story. The paper is open access, so you can read it if you want to check my interpretation of the data.

Importantly, I think it provides a very good guide to both the quality and quantity of data that are needed to be sure a population of bees are truly wild and self-sustaining 6 … or just regularly boosted by careless local beekeeping!

Feral colonies are few and far between. It’s hard work walking around the woods looking for hollow trees that may (but probably won’t) contain a colony. You find lots of trees with holes, but they need to lead to a suitably-sized cavity to be of any use to a colony of bees. Binoculars help (the holes are often 15 metres off the ground) … but perhaps there are better ways of doing this?

A bee tree?

Bee-lining – as described by Seeley in Following the Wild Bees – is an effective way of tracking down wild colonies, but needs good weather, good forage and ample time. It works well when locating a few colonies, but probably takes too long if you want 100+ to produce a statistically compelling set of results.

But what if you also wanted to record how many new nest sites are occupied? You would need to know where the empty cavities were before they were occupied. That’s not something you can determine by bee-lining, so you’re back to traipsing around the woods with a pair of binoculars.

Woodpeckers

But in Germany they have some very large woodpeckers.

The black woodpecker (Dryocopus martius) is a crow-sized bird that excavates correspondingly large holes for nest sites in old-growth forests. The average volume of a black woodpecker nest is about 10 litres, smaller than optimal for a swarm, but appreciably larger than most ‘natural’ tree cavities.

Black woodpecker

Conveniently, there are high-resolution maps of (historical) woodpecker nesting trees in old-growth forests in Swabian Alb, Weilheim-Schongau and the counties of Coburg and Lichtenfels. 98% of these woodpecker nest sites are in large beech trees, most are 10-12 metres above ground and with an entrance of ~10cm diameter (again, not optimal, but better than no nest site for a swarm).

Kohl and colleagues surveyed about 460 of these ‘cavity’ trees three times per season; in July (after the main May/June swarming season) to determine peak occupancy rates, in mid/late September to determine late summer survival and in early/mid April to determine winter survival.

‘Occupancy’ was determined by visual inspection and regular forager activity and/or pollen loads (i.e. they ignored scout bees checking empty cavities). In addition, for some colonies, a dozen or so workers were collected for genetic analysis.

With these data, the mathematical calculation of annual survival rates could be determined, as could the prediction of the annual numbers of swarms needed per colony for the population to be self-sustaining 7. In addition, it was possible to determine the average lifespan of a colony.

There were a bunch of perfectly reasonable assumptions made, based upon the known biology of honey bees – all are listed in the paper.

Yo-yoing colony numbers

The scientists counted colony numbers, but could also determine colony densities per km2. By making observations over a 3-4 year period it was strikingly obvious that the largest number of ‘cavity’ trees were occupied after swarming in summer, but that numbers dropped dramatically overwinter. This ’recurring temporal pattern of population fluctuations’ is very obvious in the major data figure in the paper.

Temporal population fluctuations of feral honey bee colonies in Germany; A) occupancy rates, B) population density

The average maximum occupancy rate and population density was 11% and 0.23 colonies per km2. This ‘dropped massively’ over the winter to just 1.4% and 0.02 colonies per km2.

The majority of nest sites (n = 112) occupied in late summer were unoccupied the following spring, before swarming started. 90% of colonies survived the summer (from July until late September), but only 16% of colonies survived the following winter.

The spring survival rate was calculated as 74% based upon genetic testing of colonies in early spring and mid-summer

Knowing the summer, winter and spring survival rates enables the annual survival rate to be calculated.

This was a sobering 10.6%.

Therefore, to maintain a stable population, each surviving colony would need to produce an average of 8.4 swarms per season.

That’s an unachievable amount of swarming.

The average lifespan of a feral colony in these three German forest regions was just 0.619 years … a little over 32 weeks.

Clearly, these honey bee populations are not self-sustaining.

Are these German forests typical?

There are two other regions where similar quality data exists for wild/feral honey bee populations. These are the Arnot forest in the USA, studied for decades by Thomas Seeley, and Wyperfield National Park in Australia.

There are striking differences between these two regions and the German forests, both in terms of colony lifespan and swarm numbers needed to be self-sustaining.

For the Arnot forest and Wyperfield National Park, lifespan was calculated as 1.34 and 1.53 years respectively (cf. 0.62 years for Germany), with annual survival of ~50% (cf. 11% in Germany). Annual swarm numbers per colony for the population to be self-sustaining was 0.94 and 0.85 for the the Arnot forest and Wyperfield National Park respectively (cf. 8.43 for the German forests).

Other than these obvious differences in the related figures for survival/longevity and ‘swarms needed’ the other significant difference between self-sustaining populations (like the Arnot forest and Wyperfield National Park) is the colony density.

In areas where feral/wild honey bees are self-sustaining the colony density is at least 1 per km2. In contrast, in Germany and a large number of other studied feral populations in other parts of Europe (including Ireland, Spain, Serbia, Poland and other regions of Germany), the colony density is usually much lower, at 0.1-0.2 per km2.

So, these German forests are seemingly typical of honey bee populations that are not self-sustaining. These are regions where the feral population is boosted annually (and is essentially dependent upon) an influx of swarms that become temporarily established in natural nest sites.

Environmental colony density

Where do all these swarms come from?

The average managed honey bee colony density in the areas of Germany studied is 4 per km2, appreciably higher than either the Arnot forest or Wyperfield National Park. Precise figures for these two were not quoted, but in both locations the feral colonies (remember, these were at ~1 per km2) outnumber managed colonies.

It therefore seems very likely that managed colonies from farmland areas surrounding the German forests acts as the source for swarms, and the latter – because of the paucity of suitable nest sites in the arable land (relatively few buildings, few mature trees etc.) – gravitate towards the forests looking for suitable nest sites.

Feral and managed colonies may therefore be spatially separated, though not very widely. In contrast, in urban environments – where nest sites are probably common – it might be expected that feral and managed colonies are intermixed in the environment.

A by-product of the study by Kohl and colleagues is that they could also calculate the difference in the relative attractiveness of woodpecker nests that had previously, or had never, been occupied by bees. When new colonies occupied woodpecker nest sites there was a strong preference of 5 to 15-fold for sites that had previously been occupied by bees.

This, of course, is why it makes sense to include a single old, dark comb in your bait hives.

That seems like a good place to stop …

I think this German study is interesting. It shows the quantity and quality of data needed to make a compelling case that a location has a self-sustaining population of feral/wild honey bees.

Such locations are likely to exhibit colony densities of at least 1 per km2 and to be physically separated from higher density managed colonies. This physical separation could be in the form of simple geographic isolation – just a long way from other apiaries – or something more complex like being surrounded by high hills or water etc.

Self-sustaining wild/feral populations are likely to exhibit >50% annual survival rates, to live for an average of ~1.5 years and to produce about 0.8-0.9 swarms per colony per year 8.

If survival rates are lower, or the life expectancy of a colony is much less, then the number of swarms needed to maintain the population rapidly becomes so high that they are unattainable.

In which case, large numbers of feral/wild colonies cannot be self-sustaining, but instead must be present because the area acts as a ‘sink’ for lost swarms from nearby managed colonies.

This post is already longer than my self-imposed-but-regularly-exceeded 3000 word limit so I’ll save further discussion of the Blenheim bees and other feral colonies for another post.

However, I hope the study shows that a healthy scepticism is perhaps sensible when considering any claims made about self-sustaining feral colonies.

That church tower in which ‘there have always been bees’ may well have had bees in it every year.

But that’s not the same as having the same bees in it.

In fact, with an ~90% attrition rate of feral colonies annually it’s very unlikely to be the same colony in successive years.


Note

In the final stages of completing this post – very, very late at night – I re-discovered an article (Moro et al., 2018) on citizen science and feral colonies that I’ll return to sometime in the future.

References

Kohl, P.L., Rutschmann, B. and Steffan-Dewenter, I. (2022) ‘Population demography of feral honeybee colonies in central European forests’, Royal Society Open Science, 9(8), p. 220565. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.220565.

Moro, A. et al. (2021) ‘Using Citizen Science to Scout Honey Bee Colonies That Naturally Survive Varroa destructor Infestations’, Insects, 12(6), p. 536. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3390/insects12060536.

 

Tim Toady

Synopsis : The large number of beekeeping methods is both a benefit and – for beginners particularly – a distraction. Learn methods well enough to be confident when you apply them. Understand why they work and their pros and cons.

Introduction

In an earlier life as a junior academic I was generously given a crushingly boring administrative task. The details don’t matter 1 but it essentially involved populating a huge three-dimensional matrix. The matrix had to be re-populated annually … and, when I was allocated the task, manually.

To cut a long story short I taught myself some simple web-database computer programming. This automated the data collection and entry and saved me many weeks of tedious work.

Geek alert …

This minor victory resulted in me:

  • writing lots more code for my admin and research, and for my hobbies including beekeeping and photography. It’s been a really useful skill … and a lot of fun.
  • inevitably being given an additional mundane task to fill the time I had ‘saved’ 🙁 2.

The programming language I used was perl. This is a simple scripting language, which although now superseded in popularity by things like python, remains very widely used. All proper computers 3 still have perl installed.

Perl is perfect for manipulating text-based records. The name is an acronym for ’practical extraction and reporting language’ … or perhaps ’pathetically eclectic rubbish lister’, the latter reflecting its use to manipulate text (‘garbage in, garbage out’ … ) 4.

Perl was (and remains) powerful because it’s a very flexible language. You can achieve the same goal in many different ways.

This flexibility is reflected in the perl motto: ’There’s more than one way to do it’, which is abbreviated to TMTOWTDI.

TMTOWTDI is a mouthful of alphabet spaghetti, so for convenience is pronounced Tim Toady … the title of today’s post.

Why?

Because exactly the same acronym could be applied to lots of things in beekeeping.

Ask three beekeepers, get five answers

But one of the five is wrong because it involves ’brood and a half’.

Anyone who has attended an association meeting and naively asked a simple question will understand the title of this section.

’How do I … [insert routine beekeeping problem here] … ?’

The old and the wise, or perhaps the old or the wise, will recommend a series of solutions. Some will offer more than one.

Each will be different.

Many recommendations will be perfectly workable.

A few might be impractical.

At least one will be just plain wrong.

How do I avoid brace comb?

Confusingly … despite all being proffered solutions to the one question you asked, many will appear contradictory.

Do you move the queen away (the nucleus method) or leave the queen on the same site (Pagden’s artificial swarm) for swarm control? How can they both work if you do such very different things?

Ask twelve beekeepers, get nineteen answers (ONE IN ALL CAPS)

Internet discussion forums (fora?) are exactly the same, but may be less polite. This is due to the absence of the calming influence of tea and homemade cake. At least one answer will include a snippy suggestion to ’use the search facility first’.

Another will be VERY VERY SHOUTY … the respondent either disagrees vehemently or has misplaced the CAPS LOCK key.

Actually, in many ways internet discussion forums are a lot worse … though not for the reasons you might expect.

It’s not because they’re populated with a lot of cantankerous ageing beekeepers and arriviste know-it-alls.

They’re not 5.

There are some hugely experienced and helpful beekeepers online, though they probably don’t answer first or most forcefully.

The internet is worse because the audience is bigger and is spread over a wider geographic area. This is a problem as beekeeping is effectively a local activity.

If you ask at a local association meeting there will be a smaller ‘audience’ and they should at least all have some experience of the particular conditions in your area.

Včelařské fórum … and something you won’t see on the BKF … a whole sub-forum on subsidies

But if you ask on Beesource, Včelařské fórum or the Beekeeping & Apiculture forum the answers may literally be from anywhere 6. The advice you receive, whilst possibly valid, is likely to be most relevant where the responder lives … unless you’re lucky.

On one of the forums I irregularly frequent many contributors have their latitude and longitude coordinates (and sometimes plant hardiness zones) embedded in their .sig.

Geeky perhaps, but eminently sensible … 7

Tim Toady beekeeping

Let’s consider a few of examples of Tim Toady beekeeping. I could have chosen almost any aspect of our hobby here, but I’ll stick with three that are all related to the position or fate of the queen.

Queen introduction

Perhaps this was a bad option to choose first. Queen introduction isn’t only about how you physically get the new queen safely into the hive e.g. in some form of temporary cage. It’s also about the state of the hive.

Is it queenless? How long has it been queenless and/or is there emerging brood present? Is the brood from the previous queen or from laying workers? Is it a full hive or a nuc … or mini-nuc?

Successful introduction ...

Successful introduction …

And it’s about the state of the new queen.

Is she mated and laying, or is she a virgin? Perhaps she’s still in the queen cell? Is the queen the same (or a similar) strain to the hive being requeened? Is she in a cage of some sort? Are there attendants in the cage with her?

And all that’s before you consider whether it’s ‘better’ to use a push-in cage, a JzBz (or similar) cage or to omit the cage and just rely upon billowing clouds of acrid smelling smoke.

Uniting colonies

This blog is nothing if not ’bleeding-edge’ topical … now is the time to consider uniting understrength colonies, or those headed by very aged queens that may fail overwinter.

Uniting two weak colonies will not make a strong colony. However, uniting a strong with a weak colony will strengthen the former and possibly save the latter from potential winter loss (after you’ve paid for and applied the miticides and winter feed … D’oh!). You can always split off a nuc again in the spring.

All the above assumes that both colonies are healthy.

There are fewer ways of uniting colonies than queen introduction, and far fewer than the plethora of swarm control methods.

This is perhaps unsurprising as there are fewer component parts … hive A and hive B, with the eventual product being A/B.

Or perhaps B/A?

United we stand …

But which queen do you keep? 8

And does the queenright hive go on top or underneath?

And how do you prevent the bees from fighting, but instead allow them to mingle gently?

Or do you simply spray them with a few squirts of Sea breeze air freshener, slap the boxes together and be done with it?

Swarm control

If you find queen cells in your colony – assuming they haven’t swarmed already – then you need to take action or the colony will possibly/probably/almost certainly/indubitably 9 swarm.

The primary goals of swarm control are to retain the workforce – the foragers – and the queen.

There are a lot of swarm control methods. Many of the effective ones involve the separation of the queen and hive bees (those yet to go on orientation flights) from the foragers and brood. Some of these methods use unique equipment and most require additional boxes or split boards.

Split board

Split board …

But there are other ways to achieve the same overall goals, for example the Demaree method which keeps the entire workforce together by using a queen excluder and some well-timed colony manipulations.

No landing boards here ...

confused.com

And then there are the 214 individual door opening/closing operations over a 3 week period (assuming the moon is at or near perigee) needed when you use a Snelgrove board 10.

Like any recommendation to use brood and a half … my advice is ‘just say no’.

Just because Tim Toady

… doesn’t mean you have to actually do things a different way each time.

The problem with asking a group – like your local association or the interwebs – a question is that you will get multiple answers. These can be contradictory, and hence confusing to the tyro beekeeper.

Far better to ask one person whose opinion you respect and trust.

Like your mentor.

You still may get multiple answers 😉 … but you will get fewer answers and they should be accompanied with additional justification or explanation of the pros and cons of the various solutions suggested.

This really helps understand which solution to apply.

Irrespective of the number of answers you receive I think some of the most important skills in beekeeping involve:

  • understanding why a particular solution should work. This requires an understanding of the nitty gritty of the process. What are you trying to achieve by turning a hive 180° one week after a vertical split? Why should Apivar strips be repositioned half way through the treatment period?
  • choosing one solution and get really good at using it. Understand the limitations of the method you’ve chosen. When does it work well? When is it unsuitable? What are the drawbacks?

This might will take some time.

More hives, less time

If you’ve only got one colony you’ll probably only get one chance per year to apply – and eventually master – a swarm control method.

With more colonies it is much easier to quickly acquire this practical understanding.

Lots of learning opportunities here

Then, once you have mastered a particular approach you can decide whether the limitations outweigh the advantages and consider alternatives if needed.

This should be an informed evolution of your beekeeping methods.

What you should not do is use a different method every year as – unless you have a lot of colonies – you never get sufficient experience to understand its foibles and the wrinkles needed to ensure the method works.

Informed evolution

If you consider the three beekeeping techniques I mentioned earlier – queen introduction, uniting colonies and swarm control – my chosen approach to two of them is broadly similar to when I started.

However, as indicated above, there are still lots of subtle variations that could be applied.

With both queen introduction and uniting colonies I’ve more or less standardised on one particular way of doing each of them. By standardising there’s less room for error … at least, that’s the theory. I now what I’m doing and I know what to expect.

In contrast, I’ve used a range of swarm control methods over the years. After a guesstimated 250+ ‘hive years’ I now almost exclusively 11 use one method that I’ve found to be extremely reliable and fits with the equipment and time I have available.

It’s not perfect but – like the methods I use for queen introduction and uniting colonies – it is absolutely dependable.

I think that’s the goal of learning one method well and only abandoning it when it’s clear there are better ways of achieving your goal. By using a method you understand and consider is absolutely dependable you will have confidence that it will work.

You also know when it will work by, and so can meaningfully plan what happens next in the season.

So, what are the variants of the methods I find absolutely dependable?

Queen introduction

99% of my adult queens – whether virgin or mated – are introduced in JzBz cages. I hang the queen (only, no attendants) in a capped JzBz cage in the hive for 24 hours and then check to see if the queenless (!) colony is acting aggressively to her.

If they are not I remove the cap and plug the neck of the cage with fondant. The bees soon eat through this and release the queen.

Checking for aggression

I used to add fondant when initially caging the queen but have had one or two queens get gummed up in the stuff (which absorbs moisture from the hive). I now prefer to add it after removing the cap. The queen needs somewhere ‘unreachable’ in the cage to hide if the colony are aggressive to her.

It’s very rare I use an alternative to this method. If I do it’s to use a Nicot pin on cage where I trap the queen over a frame of emerging brood 12.

Nicot queen introduction cages

I use this method for real problem colonies … ones that have killed a queen introduced using the JzBz cage or that may contain laying workers.

Doing the latter is a pretty futile exercise at the best of times 🙁 .

Uniting colonies

Almost all colonies are united over newspaper. A sheet to two of an unstapled newspaper is easy to carry and uniting like this is almost always successful.

The brood box being moved goes on top. I want bees from the moved box to realise things have changed as they work their way down to the hive entrance. That way they’re more likely to not get lost when returning.

An Abelo/Swienty hybrid hive ...

An Abelo/cedar hybrid hive … uniting colonies in midsummer

I don’t care whether the queen is in the upper or lower box and, if there’s any doubt that one of the colonies isn’t queenless, I use a queen excluder over the newspaper. I then check the boxes one week later for eggs.

I’m not absolutely certain one of the colonies is queenless

At times I’ve used a can of air freshener and no newspaper. This has worked well, but it’s one more bulky thing to carry. I also prefer not to expose my bees to the chemical cocktail masquerading as Sea breeze, Summer meadow or Stale socks.

Since uniting doesn’t necessitate a timed return visit there’s little to be gained from seeking alternatives to newspaper in my view. Perhaps if I lived in a really windy location I’d have a different opinion … placing the newspaper over the brood box can be problematic in anything more than a moderate breeze 13.

Swarm control

Like many (most?) beekeepers I started off using the classic Pagden’s artificial swarm. However, I quickly ran out of equipment as my colony numbers increased – you need two of everything including space on suitably located hive stands.

I switched to vertical splits. These are in essence a vertical Pagden’s artificial swarm, but require only one roof and stand. If you plan to merge the colonies again i.e. you don’t want to ’make increase’, vertical splits are very convenient. However, they can involve a lot of lifting if there are supers on the colony.

Vertical split

Vertical split – day 7 …

Now I almost exclusively use the nucleus method of swarm control. Used reactively (i.e. after queen cells are seen) it’s almost totally foolproof. Used proactively (i.e. before queen cells are produced) also works well. In both cases the timing of a return visit to reduce queen cells is important, and you need to use good judgement in deciding how strong to make the nuc.

Here's one I prepared earlier

Here’s one I prepared earlier

The nucleus method has a couple of disadvantages for my beekeeping. However, its ease of application and success rate more than make up for these shortfalls.

Tim Toady is ‘a good thing’

I love the flexibility of perl for programming. I can write one-liners to do a quick and dirty file conversion. Alternatively I can craft hundreds of lines of well-documented code that is readable, easy to maintain and robust.

Others, in the very best tradition of Tim Toady, might write programs to do exactly the same things but in a completely different way.

The flexibility to tackle a task – the three used above for example, or miticide treatment, queen rearing, uncapping frames or any of the hundreds of individual tasks involved in beekeeping – in different ways provides opportunities to choose an approach that fits with your diary, manual dexterity, available equipment, preferences, ethics or environment.

In this regard it’s ‘a good thing’.

Choice and flexibility are beneficial. They make things interesting and, for the observant beekeeper, they provide ample new opportunities for learning.

… and a distraction

However, this flexibility can also be a distraction, particularly for beginners.

That is why I emphasised the need to learn the intricacies of the method you choose by understanding the underlying mechanism, and the subtleties needed to get it to work absolutely dependably.

Don’t just try something once and then do something totally different the next year 14. Use the method for several years running (assuming it’s an annual event in the beekeeping calendar), or at least on a lot of different colonies.

Choose a widely used and well-documented method in the first place 15. Read about it, understand it and apply it. Tweak it until it either works exactly as you want it to i.e. reliably, efficiently, quickly or whatever, or choose a different widely used and well-documented method and start over again.

Get really competent at the methods you choose.

Once your beekeeping is built upon a range of absolutely dependable methods you have the foundations to be a little bit more expansive.

You can then indulge yourself.

Explore the options offered by Tim Toady.

Things might fail, but you always have a fallback that you know works.


Note

The Apiarist is moving to an upgraded server in the next few days, If the site is temporarily offline then I’ve either pressed the wrong button, or the site will be back in a few minutes … please try again 😉

Queen rearing miscellany

Synopsis : Queen cell selection by the beekeeper or the bees – which is more reliable? Nectar collection  and comb building by requeening colonies. Three miscellaneous queen rearing topics this week.

Introduction

May to July are the busiest months of the beekeeping season for queen rearing 1. We’re fast approaching the halfway point so I thought I’d write about some related topics, rather than rehash previously covered areas, or pen a magnum opus on just one subject.

This forces me to be a bit less expansive. It means you can skip over less intervening text in the (vain?) hope of finding something of interest … 😉

Marked queen surrounded by a retinue of workers.

Here’s one I made earlier …

It also means I should deal with things in less detail.

Alas – I’m writing this introduction after completing the majority of the post – I’ve failed and wrote a lot more than originally intended on the first topic so the miscellany will spill over to next week as well 🙁 .

A loyal listener reader asks …

Fans of Tim Harford’s incomparable More or Less will be familiar with the concept of loyal listeners 2. Since this isn’t a podcast 3 listeners is clearly inappropriate.

Unfortunately, I’ve singularly failed to come up with a synonym for loyal starting with an ‘R’, so losing the all-important alliteration with ‘readers’.

Never mind … let’s get back on topic.

One of the pleasures of writing regularly – other than forever playing catch-up with my bloated email inbox 4 – is corresponding with beekeepers around the country 5. Sometimes this is in the comments section, but it also involves a considerable volume of email … including many questions or requests for help.

As I’ve previously mentioned, sometimes these exchanges are short and sweet.

Q. What’s the recipe for thin syrup?

A. D’oh! 6

In these instances that might be the only correspondence 7 but in other cases there’s a bit of to and fro.

Regular readers 8 will recognise some names repeatedly appearing in the comment sections. Many of the questions asked are interesting and some are challenging 9, forcing me to do some thinking and/or reading.

A few allow me to expand further on a topic that I’ve covered, explaining something I either ‘meant to, but ran out of space/time/caffeine’ … or ‘completely forgot’.

And Maccon Keane, a regular reader 😉 from the West of Ireland asked just such a question in the comments to the post last week about beekeeper vs. worker selection of queen cells.

Does beekeeper selection of emergency cells reduce quality?

Here’s the question in full:

Thank you for a really interesting post. My question is this. Using the nucleus method of swarm control by queen removal and induction of the emergency response the beekeeper has to select a queen cell to head the original colony. From these data there is a one in 20 chance (5%) that the chosen cell will not emerge. This is a problem but low risk. However there is a one in two (50%) chance that the beekeeper will select a cell that the bees would have torn down and therefore actively select a lesser quality queen. For an individual colony this may not be particularly significant but over a few generations this negative selective pressure (50%) against the best quality Queens will rapidly lead to a deterioration in stock compared to that which would have happened had the queen been chosen by the bees themselves. Can you think of any way to avoid introducing this systematic negative selection pressure to ensure we let the bees choose the queen because as you title the piece ‘the bees know best’?

This is something I’d thought about, but I’d run out of space to discuss it.

Let’s agree from the outset that the 5% non-emergence rate is an acceptable failure rate. It will be compounded by a small percentage of queens that fail to mate 10.

The beekeeper can’t do very much about either of these.

But what about the beekeeper having a 50:50 chance of selecting a queen cell that the bees would have torn down?

Will this lead to a deterioration of the quality of the bees over time?

It’s an interesting question.

Why do the workers cull about 50% of developing queens?

If you remember, 50% of emergency cells were torn down and these generally contained lighter and smaller queens.

I suggested, or hinted strongly, at three reasons why the bees might favour large queens 11 :

  • higher fecundity i.e. laying more eggs and/or laying over a longer period
  • increased polyandry (and hence colony fitness)
  • more likely to survive fights with ‘sister’ queens during polygyny reduction

Fecundity

The researchers addressed this by counting the ovarioles and the volume of the spermatheca. There were no differences between the chosen queens or those that would have been culled. This suggests, though it’s not definitive, that all should have been equally fecund (assuming similar numbers of matings etc.).

You could probably measure this (with sufficient energy, time and money) but it’s not a trivial thing to determine 12. I think the similarity in the number of ovarioles and the capacity of the spermatheca is compelling enough 13.

My assumption is that all, or at least the majority, of queens would be sufficiently fecund to successfully head a colony.

There’s a recent paper on genetic and phenotypic variability of queens that might be useful here, but I’ve not had time to read it properly. If and when I do – if relevant – I’ll update things.

Increased polyandry

I suggested that larger, heavier, queens might fly more strongly, and so spend longer in drone congregation areas or visit more DCAs … and thereby mate with more drones. David Tarpy hints at this in one of the papers cited last week (quoting unpublished results.).

However, I don’t think the work was ever published in a peer reviewed paper as I’ve been unable to find it.

That doesn’t mean it’s wrong 14. Again, it would be a time consuming thing to determine. Queen mating numbers are quite variable so there would have to be a very large number of repeats to get statistically compelling results, but it is doable given sufficient time, money and energy.

Of course, larger/heavier queens might fly less strongly. This hasn’t been tested.

Polygyny reduction

I think this trait is essentially irrelevant in the context of our beekeeping.

By definition we cull all but one developing queen, so the one that is selected should never have to fight another queen. However workers may select for this – perhaps to avoid the risk of two queens fighting and both being damaged/killed – but if they do we can safely ignore it.

Are these ‘lower quality’ queens quantifiably worse for beekeeping?

So, of the three potential differences suggested I’d argue we can rule the last out as being irrelevant (for managed colonies), and we can perhaps safely assume that fecundity will be sufficient (assuming the queen mates with enough drones).

Increased polyandry remains an open question.

So, one possibility is that any queen cell should result in a queen that will be good enough, assuming the queen emerges and mates successfully.

A second possibility is that any differences between the ‘high’ and ‘low’ quality queens – selected from a single colony – are so minor that they have little or no material effect on our beekeeping.

Similar, but not quite the same thing.

It’s worth noting that the only size characteristics (measured) that differed were weight and either thorax length or width. Other dimensions e.g. wing length, were similar.

Is there other evidence to suggest that differences are likely to be minor (with regard to beekeeping)?

Capped queen cells

Capped queen cells produced using the Ben Harden queenright queen rearing system

In support of this I’d suggest that grafting day-old larvae would not be so universally (successfully) practised if it routinely generated sub-standard queens.

It doesn’t.

When you graft you’re making the selection after less than 24 hours of larval development. The majority of larvae that develop fully, emerge and mate, make perfectly acceptable queens.

But, from a beekeeping perspective, good quality queens are often defined using alternative criteria.

In fact my definition of a good quality queen might well be different from one that the bees would ‘choose’ … or, for that matter, that Maccon would favour.

Selection of good quality stock

And this is where I think selection does have a big influence.

The traits I favour in my bees – steady on the comb, good temper, no following, frugality etc.vary between my colonies.

I score these traits and preferentially rear queens from the colonies that I consider are my ’best’.

I do this by thirds:

  • My ‘worst’ third are always requeened – as soon as is practical – with queens from larvae from my ‘best’ third.
  • I similarly requeen my ‘middle’ third with similarly-sourced queens if I have enough spare, but am happy to requeen the ‘middle’ third from the ‘middle’ third (so to speak).
  • The ‘worst’ third are never used for queen rearing (or allowed to rear queens from their own larvae). The ‘worst’ third are also discouraged from rearing drones.

If the ‘worst’ third need swarm control I allow them to rear emergency cells, knock them all back a week later – leaving them hopelessly queenless – and then add a frame of eggs/larvae from a better colony.

It’s a guaranteed way to easily improve the quality of your bees.

Which I think pretty much brings me to the end of my answer to Maccon’s question.

In summary … I suspect the difference between queens culled or not by the workers is either irrelevant for our beekeeping, so minor as to be unmeasurable, or swamped by other variables in the mating biology of honey bees (e.g. number of drones available, age of those drones and consequent sperm viability).

Over millennia many factors have resulted in the evolution of the worker selection of developing queens, but over a few ‘honey bee generations’ of managed beekeeping I think we can safely ignore them.

Furthermore, in my opinion, the importance of using a good quality colony as the source of larvae for queen rearing far outweighs the inherent variation in the queens reared from any one colony.

It’s a bit like computing … rubbish in, rubbish out.

Queenless colonies – honey and comb

To close this post on miscellaneous items about queen rearing I thought I’d end with an anecdote and an observation.

The former is supported by little more than my dodgy memory and the latter is backed up by some real science 🙂 .

Foraging efficiency and queenlessness

In Fife the spring honey supers are ready for recovery and extraction. I collected the first batch on Monday and have more to get in a couple of days.

The peak nectar flow seems to have been in the last fortnight of May. Much of it is oil seed rape.

Soon ...

Oil seed rape

Inevitably, some of the colonies have already had swarm control applied before the peak of the nectar flow. All of my swarm control this year has been using the nucleus method.

At the first sign of swarm preparation (queen cells, either sealed or charged) I make up a nuc with the old queen, destroy any sealed queen cells and leave one charged cell. I return a week later and knock back all but the one selected cell (which is now sealed). The queen subsequently emerges, mates and starts laying.

This means that several colonies have been queenless throughout the peak nectar flow.

All of these colonies have more and/or heavier supers 🙂 .

Full super ready for extraction

Full super ready for extraction …

The queenless colonies seem to have doubled-down on nectar collection and done particularly well this season.

I’ve noticed this before, but it’s really obvious this spring.

My increasingly foggy memory has a dim recollection of beekeepers in the ‘olden days’ removing queens during the nectar flow precisely because they were more productive. I can’t remember when or where I heard/read/imagined this.

Hold on, not so fast

Are they collecting more or just using less because there is no brood to feed? Remember, 8-9 days after applying swarm control, there will be no larvae to feed as all eggs will have developed into sealed brood.

I could do the maths 15 but there’s a bunch of assumptions to make about the amount of unsealed brood when the queen was removed etc.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that a queenless colony stores more nectar because the foragers forage more and because there are fewer hungry mouths to feed in the colony.

Perfect … I’ve got a plan for next season.

I’ll preemptively remove the queens 8-9 days before the main flow and buy 20,000 labels and 6 tons of jars in preparation for a bumper honey crop 16.

But, wait a minute … which are the colonies that usually first start swarm preparations?

That’s right … the strongest colonies.

These are the colonies already filling a double brood box, or overflowing a single brood box.

Perhaps they collect more nectar for the simple reason that there are more foragers?

That’s not the impression I have when I compare the performance of what appear to be equally strong colonies with or without queens. However, ’appear’ is a bit of a loose definition and to be sure I’d need to count frames of brood and the number of foragers.

But it’s an interesting thing to think about 17.

Drawing comb

Another thing I noticed is that queenless colonies provided with foundationless frames continued to draw fresh comb. Clearly they don’t need to have eggs or larvae to occupy the new comb to stimulate comb building.

But the vast majority of the comb drawn was drone comb.

Drone-worker-drone

Drone-worker-drone … this frame drawn in a queenright colony

Which, in a roundabout way, led me to this interesting paper:

Smith, M.L. (2018), Queenless honey bees build infrastructure for direct reproduction until their new queen proves her worth. Evolution, 72: 2810-2817.

Michael Smith dequeened colonies and investigated whether they built drone or worker comb. The colonies were provided with frames but no foundation (which would otherwise determine the type of comb drawn).

Comb building in queenless and queenright colonies.

His dequeened colonies built less comb than those with laying queens (A, above), but over 80% of the comb they did build was drone comb (D, above).

Furthermore, they built drone comb even if the colony already contained 25% drawn drone comb (an amount that usually inhibits further drone comb production in a queenright colony).

Finally, he demonstrated that drawing new drone comb only stopped when the colonies contained a new laying queen.

The terminal investment hypothesis

Why should a colony that was queenless or that contained a virgin queen (or for that matter a mated but not laying queen) produce drone comb?

The argument goes something like this.

A colony that is hopelessly queenless can only pass its genes to subsequent generations if it produces laying workers – which lay unfertilised eggs – which consequently develop into drones that mate with virgin queens from other colonies.

The terminal investment hypothesis predicts that the reproductive investment of an individual will change depending upon their reproductive prospects.

Essentially – until there is a laying queen present – the workers pessimistically invest in (i.e. build) drone comb as it offers the only chance of reproductive success should the queen fail to start laying.

Once the queen starts laying they start drawing worker comb again.

As Michael Smith neatly puts it ’When faced with reproductive uncertainty, honey bees may “hope” for the best, but they prepare for the worst’.

And what are the chances of ‘the worst’ happening?

’The worst’ being the failure to replace the queen.

Conveniently Michael Smith also measured the probabilities of successful completion of each of the stages in rearing a replacement queen.

Schematic of the process of rearing a replacement queen, with probabilities of each outcome.

In his studies 98% of queens emerged from the capped cell 18, 95% of virgins returned from mating flights and 95% of those returnees were successfully mated.

0.98 x 0.95 x 0.95 = 0.88 i.e. a queenless colony has an 88% chance of successfully requeening itself, assuming it has eggs/larvae suitable for rearing a new queen.

And the relevance of any of this to practical beekeeping?

  1. Have confidence during swarm control that the bees will predominantly rear good quality queens (so it doesn’t matter which you choose to keep), if …
  2. they are good quality bees. And if they’re not then provide them with eggs/larvae from a better colony. You can easily remove deleterious traits and promote good ones. And, if you’ve not got enough (or good enough) colonies to choose from either a) get more 😉 , or b) ’phone a friend’ and scrounge some suitable eggs/larvae.
  3. Monitor nectar collection by queenright and queenless colonies. Is it different? Many novice beekeepers fret when their colonies are queenless. Maybe at certain times there are benefits 🙂 .
  4. If you want worker comb, don’t provide queenless colonies with foundationless frames.
  5. You should assume ~90% of your virgin queens (0.95 x 0.95) will mate successfully and start laying. Always graft a few more larvae than you actually need.