Tag Archives: colony losses

Income and outgoings

I discussed beekeeping economics a couple of weeks ago.

I used some potentially questionable survey data on hive numbers, winter losses, honey yields and pricing, together with ‘off the shelf’ costs for frames, sugar and miticides.

Even ignoring the costs of travel and depreciation on equipment the ‘profit’ was not substantial.

Actually, it was just £102 per colony.

Consider the hard work involved, the heavy lifting, the vagaries of the weather and the amount of honey given away to friends and family.

You are not going to get rich fast (or at all) and the Maldives will have to remain a dream.

What a fantastic beekeeping year that was …

Most of us 1 keep bees for pleasure. However, a small profit from our endeavours can’t do any harm, and may actually do some good.

It might pay for a “sorry I was late back from the apiary … again” crate of beer/bunch of flowers 2 or for the new smoker to replace the one you reversed the car over.

Smoker still life

Smoker

So how do you fund the purchase of a crate of beer/bunch of flowers and a new smoker?

How do you increase the profit per colony from that rather paltry £100 to something a little more substantial?

It’s clear that to do this you need to reduce your outgoings and increase your income.

Income and outgoings

I’m going to restrict myself to the same range of outgoing costs and sources of income to those I covered on beekeeping economics.

I’m ignoring most equipment costs, depreciation, petrol, honey gifts to friends etc. All these reduce ‘profit’.

Here is the summary table presented earlier. Remember, this is for a four hive apiary, per annum 3.

Item Expenditure (£) Income (£)
Frames and foundation 40.00
Miticides 38.00
Food 26.00
Honey (jars/labelling) and gross 63.00 550.00
Nucleus colony 15.00 40.00
Sub totals 182.00 590.00
Profit 408.00

Cutting your food costs

Not a whole lot of leeway here I’m afraid.

Granulated sugar is probably the least expensive way of feeding your bees for the winter. Other than shopping around for the best price there’s not much option to reduce your outgoings.

However, before buying sugar it’s always worth asking your local supermarket for any spoilt or damaged packets. Supermarkets are under pressure to reduce waste and can usually be persuaded to support something as environmentally-friendly as local bees.

It costs nothing to ask.

Many beekeeping associations will arrange bulk purchases of either Ambrosia-type invert syrup or fondant. I’ll comment more extensively on this later.

Cutting your medicine costs

There are even fewer opportunities for savings if you want to use VMD-approved miticides.

I’ve discussed miticide costs extensively in the past. The figures are now a bit dated (and they omitted Apivar which was not available off-prescription at the time). However, it remains broadly true that the annual cost per hive is about the same as a jar of honey 4.

If you’re using Api-Bioxal for midwinter trickling remember that you can safely dilute it to a final concentration of 3.2% (w/v), rather than that recommended on the label. Historically the UK has used oxalic acid at 3.2% and there’s no increase in efficacy at the higher strength. Full details are provided on the preparation of oxalic acid elsewhere.

At 3.2% w/v a 35g “10 hive” pack of Api-Bioxal will treat 15 hives.

There … at £11.95 a packet I’ve just slashed your midwinter treatment costs from £1.20 a hive to  80p.

Look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves 😉

Frames and foundation

First quality ‘off the shelf’ frames with foundation cost about £3 each. Obviously it makes sense to shop around and/or buy in bulk.

However, much more substantial savings are possible if you do three things:

  • re-use frames after steaming and sterilising
  • use second quality frames bought on supplier ‘sale days’
  • use foundationless frames

If you nail and glue frames during construction they usually survive at least a couple of trips through a steam wax extractor. Yes, there’s some work involved in cleaning them up afterwards, but it’s no more work than building new frames each year.

Drone-worker-drone

Drone-worker-drone …

Second quality frames are sold in packs of 50 for about £37.50 5. Of the hundreds I’ve used I’ve had few (~2% or less) that were unusable due to knots, shakes, splits or other weaknesses.

Foundationless frames take a bit longer to build and you have additional expenditure on bamboo or wire/nylon. However, this outlay is insignificant when compared with the saving made on foundation.

Remember that foundationless frames built with bamboo supports can go through a steam wax extractor and be put back into service. Don’t use wax starter strips. Use lollipop sticks or tongue depressors fixed with waterproof wood glue.

Take your pick ...

Take your pick …

Purchased premium foundation is lovely stuff but freshly drawn comb on a foundationless frame is even better. Contamination-free, robust once fully drawn and much easier to clean from the frame when it eventually goes through the steamer.

Taken together – re-use, second quality and foundationless – I calculate that frames cost me ~25p each. This equates to a saving of £36.75 over a year 6. Remember also that additional outlay on brood frames is needed to produce nucleus colonies (see below) where the savings would be £13.75 per nuc produced.

That’s more like it 🙂

A co-operative association intermission

Beekeeping associations often have co-operative purchasing schemes. Bulk purchasing reduces both individual item costs and (often substantial) P&P costs. These schemes are often organised to pass on the majority of the discount and retain a small amount of the savings for association activities.

The larger the association the greater the savings that can be made, and there’s no reason why neighbouring associations or regional groupings cannot act together.

Yes, of course, it takes some organisation. If your association doesn’t have such a scheme either find one that does or set up your own.

My beekeeping alma mater (Warwick and Leamington Beekeepers) offered excellent discounts on jars, honey buckets, foundation, Ambrosia, fondant and gloves … and probably a load of other things I didn’t take advantage of when I was a member 7.

Products of the hive

That’s enough about outlay, what about income?

Honey bees make honey and bees.

Both are very valuable.

You can maximise income in two ways.

You can make more of either (or both) or you can sell them at a higher price.

You might even be able to achieve both.

I’ll deal with these in reverse order …

Maximising the prices of honey and bees

I’ve discussed honey pricing recently. If you’re producing a unique, high quality, well packaged product (and if you’re not, you should be) you need to price it accordingly.

More local honey

That’s not the £4 a pound charged for the imported, blended, filtered, pasteurised, uniform, dull, available-by-the-tonne-anywhere rubbish stuff sold by the supermarkets.

Look in the delicatessens and local artisan outlets … you might be surprised.

£10 a pound is not unreasonable.

£10 a pound is readily achievable.

But let’s not be greedy, let’s assume a very conservative £7.50 a pound.

Local honey

At £7.50/lb the average UK yield of 25lb of honey per hive equates to £687 (for the four hives) after paying out £63 for jars and labels 8

Two factors contribute to the price you can realise for bees (which, for this exercise, means nucleus colonies):

  1. Timing – to maximise the price you need to sell when demand is the highest and supply is limited. This means early in the season. You therefore must overwinter nucs and ensure they are strong and healthy in mid-late April. Four to six weeks later there’s a glut of bees available as colonies start swarm preparation … prices drop precipitously. Nucs are easy to overwinter with a little TLC.
  2. Quality – with a small number of colonies it is not easy to improve your stocks. However, by judicious replacement of poorly-performing queens/colonies you should be able to produce perfectly acceptable bees for sale. Don’t try selling bad bees – chalkbrood-riddled, poorly behaved, patchy brood or diseased (high Varroa, overt DWV etc.).

If you are selling one or more nucs you should expect to allow them to be inspected before the sale. Just like honey tasting, nothing is more convincing than trying the product.

Maximising the amount of honey and bees

All other things being equal 9 stronger colonies will produce more honey and generate more ‘spare’ nucs.

Compare a productive commercial colony and an unproductive amateur colony at the height of the season. What’s the difference?

Mid-May ... 45,000 bees, 17 frames of brood, one queen ... now marked

Mid-May … 45,000 bees, 17 frames of brood, one queen … now marked and clipped

The productive colony is on a double brood box underneath three or four full or rapidly filling supers. There are 16+ frames of brood and the beekeeper has already split off a nuc for swarm control.

In contrast, the unproductive colony has about seven frames of brood in a single brood box topped by an underwhelmingly light super. There’s little chance of producing a spare nuc this season … or much honey.

But at least they might not swarm 🙂 10

Generating these strong colonies requires good genetics and good beekeeping.

With further good management the productive colony could produce another couple of supers of late-season honey and at least one more nuc for overwintering.

Here's one I prepared earlier

Here’s one I prepared earlier

How does that help the bank balance?

Let’s assume an ambitious-but-not-entirely-unrealistic one nuc per colony and 75lb of honey per annum in total (being sold at £175 per nuc and £7.50 a pound for honey). Honey ‘profit’ for the four colonies in our hypothetical apiary works out at £2061 11 with a further £700 for the sale of four nucs at £175 each 12.

That works out at a very much more impressive £690 per colony.

Minimising losses

But wait, surely we have to use some of those valuable nucs to make up for the 25% overwintering colony losses that the average UK beekeeper experiences?

No we don’t 🙂

If you have the beekeeping skills to manage strong colonies you almost certainly also have below average overwintering losses.

And that’s because strong colonies are, almost by definition, healthy colonies which have low mite and virus levels. And, as we’ve seen time and time again, low virus levels means reduced winter losses.

This minimises the need for nucs to maintain overall colony numbers and so maximises the nucs for sale 🙂

For the sake of finishing this already overly long post, let’s assume overwintering colony losses are 12.5% (because it makes the maths easier … 10% or lower is readily achievable) rather than the 25% national average.

That being the case, for our four hive hypothetical apiary, we’ll need one replacement nuc every two years. Therefore, over a four year period we might generate 16 nucs and use just 2 of them to replace lost colonies.

Kerching!

Here are the figures for our hypothetical four colony apiary. These assume good bees, good beekeeping, low winter losses, good forage, good weather and a following wind.

I’ve assumed savings are being made where possible on frames and foundation, but also increased the number of frames (and miticides) needed to reflect colony size and strength.

Item Expenditure (£) Income (£)
Frames and foundation 7.50 13
Miticides 76.00 14
Food 52.00 15
Honey (jars/labelling) and gross 189.00 16 2250.00 17
Nucleus colony 5.00 18 612.50 19
Sub totals 329.50 2862.50
Profit 2533.00

Per colony the overall profit is £633/annum (cf £102/colony/annum for an ‘average’ hive and beekeeper).

These figures are not unrealistic (though they’re not necessarily typical either).

They won’t be achieved every year. They are dependent upon good forage, good weather and having the beekeeping skills needed to maintain strong healthy colonies.

They might be exceeded in some years. With good forage and a good season 100+ pounds of honey per colony can be achieved.

You have no control over the weather 20, but you can influence the other two factors. You can place your bees on better forage and you can continuously try and improve your skills as a beekeeper.

And learning how to maintain (and keep!) really strong healthy productive colonies is demonstrably a very valuable skill to acquire.

E & OE

Just like in the previous article, I’ve made all sorts of assumptions and cut all sorts of corners.

Managing big strong double-brood colonies producing a nuc each every year and topped by at least three supers inevitably means investing in lots more brood boxes, supers and nuc boxes 21.

It also means a lot more work.

Extracting and jarring hundreds of pounds of honey takes time. It also benefits from some automation … an extractor, a creamer, settling tanks, a honey processing room, a warm room for supers etc.

But that lot is not needed for our well-managed four hive hypothetical apiary.

The other things I’ve deliberately omitted are alternative ways of managing colonies for profit. For example, as suggested by Calum in a previous comment, propolis is a very valuable product of the hive. You can split a strong colony very hard to generate 6-10 nucs (but no honey). You can rear queens (very easily) and you can sell wax.

You could even produce Royal Jelly …

And it’s that endless variety and options that make beekeeping so fascinating.

 

 

CSI: Forensics in Fife

This is a long post. If you can’t be bothered to read it in its entirety the conclusion is …

It’s the viruses wot done it … probably.

But the take home message is that you can learn from colonies lost in midwinter.

Introduction

I always have mixed feelings about midwinter hive losses, or deadouts as they’re called in the US. Of course, I regret losing the colony and wonder whether I could have managed them differently, or prepared them better, to increase their chances of survival. At the same time I’d much prefer a weak colony perishes in midwinter rather than having to mollycoddle them through the spring.

Winter colony losses in the UK vary from year to year but have averaged about 20% over the last decade (BBKA figures and SBA data). Whether these accurately reflect real losses is unclear to me – there are no statistics and they are usually by self-selected beekeeper reporting, so possibly unreliable†.

Mollycoddling weak colonies in the Spring … a wasted effort?

The reality is that weak colonies in the spring require a lot of support and still may not survive. Even if they do, there’s little chance they will be strong enough to exploit anything other than the late season nectar flows.

If the colony is weak because of queen problems then they are likely to need re-queening. This requires a spare queen early in the season – not impossible, but it needs planning or is likely to be expensive. In my view you’d be better off using the ‘spare’ queen to make up a nuc from a prolific colony, rather than trying to rescue what might be a basket case.

If the colony is weak because of disease then having them limp on through the spring is a potential disaster for your other colonies. If it doesn’t recover quickly it’s likely that neighbouring colonies will rob it out, both destroying the weak colony and transferring whatever it was ailing from around the apiary.

Finally, the colony might be weak due to poor management e.g. insufficient stores in the early spring when the queen was gearing up to lay again. In this case you might be able to rescue the situation by boosting it with syrup, brood and bees. However, care is needed not to weaken your other colonies. Two half-strength colonies are more work and much less use – they will collect  less honey – than one full strong colony.

Learning from your losses

So, rather than pampering weak colonies in Spring – particularly if they’re struggling because of disease or queen problems – I’d prefer they expired in the winter. That sounds cruel but isn’t meant to. The reality is that a proportion of all colonies are likely to be lost in the winter … on average ~20%, but significantly more in long hard winters (or perhaps with more accurate surveys!). As beekeepers, all we can do is manage them in ways to minimise these losses – keep strong, healthy colonies and provide them with sufficient stores – and learn from those that are lost.

How do you learn from the losses? By examining the ‘deadout’ and trying to work out what went wrong. You then use this information in subsequent seasons to try and avoid a repeat performance.

For example …

A life in the year of a June swarm

Sometime in early/mid January a colony of mine died.

The colony was alive in early December when treated for mites. It was suspiciously quite at the end of that month when other colonies were flying. It looked moribund by mid-January on a quick visit to the apiary.

I took the hive apart on the 30th of January to see what might have gone wrong.

But before the autopsy, here’s the history of the deceased …

  • 7th June – a small to medium sized swarm arrives in a bait hive. The bait hive had foundationless frames so it was difficult to estimate the amount of bees in terms of ‘frames covered’. My notes state ” … 4-5 frames of bees (ish) …”.
  • 8th June – very brief inspection, two frames nearly drawn. Queen not seen.
  • 9th June – vaporised with an oxalic acid-containing treatment. 21 mites dropped in the first 24 hours. Not monitored after that as I replaced the solid floor of the bait hive with an open mesh floor.
  • 19th June – unmarked queen laying well. My notes state “… suspect this is a 2015 Q on account of the lousy weather we’ve had …”. There was already sealed brood present.
  • 27th June – clipped and marked the queen blue. At this point there were over 7 frames of brood in all stages – eggs, larvae and sealed brood – present.
  • Between then and mid-August the colony continued to build up very well … so well I ‘harvested’ three frames of brood and bees to make up nucs for circle splits.
  • In mid/late August I treated three times at five day intervals with a vaporised oxalic acid-containing miticide. My notes in August state ” … KEEP AN EYE ON THIS ONE … very high mite levels …” and (after a second round of treatment) in late September, ” … mite levels still high …”. Actual mite counts weren’t recorded.
  • In late September/early October the colony was fed with fondant. An additional block of fondant was left on into the late autumn.
  • Further miticide treatment was added in early December. Mite drop was high but not outrageous – about 44/day averaged over the first 5 days, dropping to 3/day over the subsequent five day period.
  • By late December the mite drop was less than one per day … however, by this time I was beginning to be concerned as there was very little activity from the colony on the warm days around Christmas.

The autopsy

I took the roof off the hive and removed the remaining fondant. Some of the fondant had dripped down between the frames but, in taking these apart, it was clear there were sufficient stores present.

The frames were clean. There were no sign of Nosema, which usually appears as distinctive faecal smearing and marking on the top bars, the face of the frames and – in a heavily infected colony – the front of the hive.

The frames were almost devoid of bees. There were a hundred of so clinging to the middle pair of frames. I brushed these away to reveal a dozen or so corpses stuck headfirst down in the cells. This is characteristic of starvation. These particular bees likely died of starvation, but the majority did not (or they would have also been wedged headfirst into the comb).

Having removed the frames the few hundred dead bees lying on the open mesh floor could be seen. Amongst these was the blue marked and clipped queen. The bees on the floor weren’t showing any obvious signs of disease – no characteristic shrivelled wings seen with overt deformed wing virus infection for example.

I’d walked to the apiary so couldn’t take the hive away with me. I therefore sealed up the entrance to prevent any robbing just in case there was disease present that could be transmitted to another colony. In due course I’ll burn old frames, I’ll treat some of the good drawn comb with acetic acid fumes and I’ll clean and sterilise the hive.

Elementary, my dear Watson‡

There’s no really obvious smoking gun, but there are some reasonably strong clues. I’m pretty sure why and how this colony succumbed.

But first, what didn’t kill off the colony? Well, Nosema didn’t and nor did starvation. Sure, a handful of bees in the middle frame died of starvation, but the majority were on the floor and there were ample stores in the hive and some fondant remaining. It had also been warm enough to move about within the colony to get to these stores.

It’s not possible to deduce much about the queen. The colony was strong in late August but not fully inspected after that. My notes state that brood levels were low in late September, but they were in all the colonies I peaked in at that time. She could have failed catastrophically soon afterwards. If she had I might have expected to find signs of attempted replacement e.g. a queen cell, as there were a few warm periods in the autumn. The fact that she was still present is far from conclusive, but suggests to me that she didn’t fail outright. The colony wasn’t full of drones late in the season suggesting she was poorly mated, though there are plenty of other ways the queen can fail. At least until late August she was laying very well.

I think the two main clues are the Varroa levels in autumn and December, coupled with the small number of bees present on the floor of the colony. Taking those in reverse order. There were far fewer bees than I would have expected from a colony that entered the autumn with about 8 frames of brood. This suggests to me that the bees were dying off at a faster rate than expected. Many bees that died off earlier in the winter would have been carried out and discarded on the warmer days.

The Varroa levels were very high in autumn and quite high (at least for my colonies) in December. In the autumn I didn’t record the numbers. A couple of hundred dropped after treatment in December isn’t huge … but I suspect that the colony was much reduced in size by now meaning the percentage infestation was likely significant.

The damage was already done …

Miss Scarlett in the ballroom with the lead piping

I think this colony died due to the viruses transmitted by Varroa, in particular deformed wing virus (DWV). DWV is known to shorten the life of overwintering honey bees – see this study by Dainat et al., for full details.

DWV symptoms

DWV symptoms

Why are there no symptomatic bees visible in the carpet of bees littering the floor of the hive? That’s easy … you only get these symptoms in very young bees that have emerged from Varroa-infested brood. In the winter there’s little or no brood (and there certainly wasn’t for some time in this colony). Any bees in this colony that had emerged with DWV symptoms would have been discarded from the colony months earlier. The colony was inspected every 7-10 days from mid-June to late July but there were no obvious signs of DWV symptomatic bees. They might have been missed, but I’m reasonably experienced at spotting them.

My interpretation is that the colony arrived with high Varroa levels and that – despite treatment shortly after arrival – these persisted through to mid-August. The mites transmitted the usual cocktail of pathogenic DWV strains within the colony. High Varroa levels are known to result in the massive amplification of virulent DWV strains in exposed bees. This late summer/early autumn period is a critical time for a colony. It’s when the overwintering bees are being reared. I discuss this at length in “When to treat?“. These overwintering bees, now infected with virulent strains of DWV, subsequently died off at a higher rate than normal. Despite the colony appearing reasonably strong in late August, many of the bees were carrying a lethal viral payload.

Bees that died in late autumn would have been carried out of the hive and discarded in the usual manner. Overall bee numbers continued to dwindle, leaving just a few hundred and the queen by the year end. We’ve had some hard frosts in the last month. The expired colony is in the same apiary as the bee shed which has a max/min thermometer inside. The lowest temperature seen was -6°C during this period. This probably finished them off.

So no crime scene … just another reminder that the viruses will get you if the Varroa levels are allowed to get too high.

Learning from my mistakes

I think I made one big mistake with this colony … way back on the 10th of June, just three days after it moved into the bait hive. I treated for mites, monitored mite drop after 24 hours and then left the colony with an open mesh floor. I should have monitored for longer (mite drop after vaporisation is often greater after the first 24 hours). I would have then realised how badly infested they were and could have taken greater care to reduce mite levels. By mid/late August mite levels were probably catastrophically high. They were hammered down with miticides but the damage was already done. I suspect that this is also a good example of why the timing of treatment is critical.

It’s sobering that an apparently minor oversight in midsummer probably resulted in the loss of the colony in midwinter.

If you got this far, well done. It wasn’t my intention to write so much. Swarms are a significant source of potential disease and carry a disproportionately high mite load … something I’ll discuss in the future.

† They are not unreliable because they are reported by beekeepers 😉  Not entirely anyway. They are unreliable because they are generally a self-selecting group that report them. The BBKA or SBA ask for beekeepers to complete a survey. Some do, many do not. The BBKA do not report – at least in their press releases – the number of respondents. Self-selecting bias in surveys means they may not be entirely (or at all) accurate. The SBA surveys by Magnus Peterson and Alison Gray are more thorough. For their 2014 report for example the sample size was 350, with a total of 213 respondents (for comparison, there are about 4000 beekeepers in Scotland). With this information, coupled with some additional data – for example, knowing that only 87% of respondents were actually keeping bees during the survey period! – you can determine how representative the survey is.

‡ Sherlock Holmes never uses this phrase in any of the books by Conan Doyle though he does use a number of similar expressions. The phrase “Elementary, my dear Watson” was first used by PG Wodehouse in Psmith, Journalist which was published contemperaneously (1909). The actor Clive Brook used the phrase in the 1929 film The return of Sherlock Holmes.

Reducing winter losses

A guaranteed way of reducing winter losses is to only overwinter colonies that are strong and healthy.  Although colony losses can occur for several reasons (e.g. starvation) researchers in Switzerland have shown that high levels of the parasitic mite Varroa and deformed wing virus (DWV), which the mite transmits, are the primary cause of overwintering colony losses. It is therefore important to minimise mite numbers in the colony in early autumn, preferably by treating with a miticide early enough for the queen to have time to lay up more frames before the weather gets too cold. Many mite treatments (e.g. Apiguard and MAQS) stop queens laying.

High levels of DWV

High levels of DWV …

I completed Apiguard treatment of my colonies by mid-September but noticed that one still contained lots of bees showing the characteristic symptoms of DWV infection – atrophied wing development, stunted abdomens and a generally dark coloration. In the photograph (right) there are at least 5 bees visible with these symptoms, one of which also has a phoretic mite attached (lower right hand corner). This colony had failed to build up after a mid-season setback. It was only taking limited amounts of fondant down and the flying bees were bringing back only small amounts of pollen (in marked contrast to neighbouring colonies that – now the Apiguard is off – are piling in huge amounts of pollen for the winter). There were also signs of sacbrood virus which often requires re-queening to eradicate. The queen was still laying, but there was only a frame and a half of sealed brood.

At this stage in the season there is no real chance this colony could build up sufficiently to overwinter successfully. It’s not simply dependent upon the size of the colony, it’s also the vigour. After all, it’s reasonably straightforward to overwinter Apidea or Kieler mini-nucs with a bit of care. These have far fewer bees present than the colony photographed above.

Shake them out

Shake them out …

If the colony had been healthy, but small, I would have united it with another over newspaper. However, I wanted to minimise exposure of other colonies to the brood so instead removed the queen, moved the colony to another corner of the apiary and shook all the bees out. The healthy flying bees should be able to get accepted by another colony. The symptomatic bees would be lost. Although there was a risk that bees carrying phoretic mites would get back to other colonies I carefully checked the frames before shaking them out and saw almost no mites. In due course I’ll treat these remaining colonies with oxalic acid. I subsequently uncapped a frame or so of brood and found almost 50% of capped pupae were mite-associated.

Figures collected and published by the BBKA indicate that, on average in England, ~20% of colonies are lost each winter. In particularly hard winters, such as 2012/13, losses can be significantly higher than this, reaching over 50% in certain regions of the country.

Annual colony losses

Annual colony losses

Aside from ensuring adequate stores are present in late autumn, with hives in good condition to provide protection from the elements, the best way to minimise overwintering losses is to not try and overwinter weak or diseased colonies. Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind …