Tag Archives: responsible beekeeping

BOGOF

The swarm season this year has been atypical. At least here in the coolish, dampish, East coast of Scotland.

I hived my first swarm of the year on the last day of April and – as I write this – my most recent one in the middle of July.

The intervening period has been pretty quiet as the weather in May and June was – after a warm early spring – rather poor ¹. The weather picked up a week or so ago, but it’s not been consistently good.

What we have had recently are some very warm and sunny days. The combination of some iffy weather, a bit of nectar coming in and then a few hot days are great conditions to trigger swarming.

Bait hives

For this reason I keep bait hives in my apiaries and one in my back garden throughout the season. These consist of a brood box with a solid floor, one old black frame anointed with lemongrass oil on the top bar, ten foundationless frames, a plastic crownboard and a roof of some sort.

Bait hive …

Any interest in these by scout bees suggests that there’s a colony nearby thinking of swarming. Scouts clearly check out potential locations before the colony swarms, but the scout activity increases significantly if they find your offering attractive and once the colony swarms and sets up a temporary bivouac from which it subsequently relocates.

Watching scout bee numbers increase allows you to guesstimate when a swarm might arrive. It’s an inexact science. A few scout bees are nothing to get excited about. Dozens are good and a hundred or two are very promising.

However, what’s best of all are a hundred or so scouts that rather suddenly disappear leaving the bait hive suspiciously quiet.

Which is more or less what happened on Sunday at the bait hive in my garden.

Walking wounded

Scout bees had discovered the bait hive sometime on Friday (or at least, this was when I first noticed them).

The weekend started warm with thunder threatened. I finished my colony inspections and returned for lunch to find a couple of dozen scouts checking out the bait hive ². As the cloudy and muggy conditions continued scout bee numbers increased during the afternoon and then eventually tailed off as the evening cooled.

Sunday dawned warm and bright. Scouts were up and about before I’d made my first mug of coffee at 7 am. Numbers increased significantly during the morning.

While taking a few photos for talks I noticed a handful of corpses and walking wounded bees crawling around on the ground by the bait hive.

Missing in action

On closer inspection it was clear that there were intermittent fights between scouts at the hive entrance. There were more fights than cripples or corpses, and most fights ended with the scrapping bees breaking apart and continuing to, er, scout out the suitability of the bait hive.

Scout bees fighting from The Apiarist on Vimeo.

This behaviour seemed a bit unusual, but there wasn’t an obvious explanation for it. I wondered if I’d inadvertently used a frame with some stores tucked away in the top corners, with the fighting being between scouts and robbers perhaps ³.

Gone but not forgotten

Scout numbers continued to increase …

The calm before the storm

By Sunday lunchtime I was confidently predicting a swarm would be arriving ‘shortly’.

This prediction was upgraded to ‘very shortly’ once I realised – around 3 pm – that the scout bee activity had suddenly dwindled to just a few.

This happens when the scouts assemble en masse and persuade the bivouacked swarm to take flight and relocate. Honeybee Democracy by Thomas Seeley has a full explanation of this fascinating behaviour.

And, sure enough, ten minutes later a swirling maelstrom of bees approached purposefully down the street at chimney height, spiralling down to the bait hive.

You hear it first. Is it? Isn’t it? You look up and around. You can’t place the direction the noise is coming from. Then, at walking pace, they appear.

Hundreds, then thousands, milling around, getting lower, festooning the hive front, landing all around, taking flight and settling again.

Incoming! from The Apiarist on Vimeo.

At the hive entrance are hundreds of bees fanning frantically. The queen must have already entered the box. Slowly, over an hour or so, the bees settle, enter the box and just leave a few stragglers around the entrance.

One hour later from The Apiarist on Vimeo.

Swarms are a fantastic sight in their own right. They’re even better when you have some insights into how ten thousand individuals with a brain the size of a pin head are corralled and coordinated to rehouse the queen, the flying workers and a few dozen drones that are ‘along for the ride’.

Again, I cannot recommend Honeybee Democracy highly enough as a very accessible guide to swarms and swarming.

Late evening, another move

The evening slowly cools. I can’t resist gently hefting the box to guesstimate the size of the swarm. Small to middling perhaps … a view pretty-much confirmed when I peek under the roof to see about 5-6 seams of bees occupying the back of the box.

We have a new puppy and it was clear (i.e. I was told in no uncertain terms) that the occupied bait hive must be moved to a less accessible spot.

I plug the entrance with some tissue and gently carry them around to a puppy-free location on the other side of the house.

Swarms suffer short-term geographic memory loss. They can be moved any distance you want for the first day or two after hiving them. After that they’ll have reorientated to the new location and the standard 3 feet/3 miles rule applies (which isn’t a rule at all).

Early morning, more activity

Monday dawned calm, warm and bright.

It was clearly going to be a fabulous day.

One of the great things about being an academic is the flexibility you have once the students have disappeared to Ibiza or Machu Picchu or wherever for the summer ⁴.

I was therefore looking forward to a day of wall-to-wall meetings, at least 3 hours of which would be in a basement room with no windows 🙁

At 7:30 am I checked the relocated and occupied bait hive. All good. Almost no entrance activity but a contented gentle buzzing from inside suggested that all was well.

As I left the house I noticed a dozen or so bees milling around the stand where the bait hive had originally been located.

Puppy territory. Oops!

I quickly dumped a floor, a brood box with half a dozen frames and a roof on the stand in the hope that any stragglers from the swarm – which I suspected were scouts that had got lost, or workers that had already reorientated to the occupied bait hive late the previous afternoon – would settle (or clear off).

No signal

Having been trapped underground in an overrunning meeting on the hottest day of the year I missed the following messages that all appeared in a rush when my phone reconnected on surfacing.

11:55 Lots of bees

13:27 Even more bees. I thought you’d moved them last night?

15:06 Bl%^dy hundreds of bees. Where are you?

16:11 HUGE swarm

As I blinked myopically in the bright sunlight, like a lost mole, I realised what I’d seen yesterday were scouts from two separate colonies fighting at the bait hive entrance.

The bees I’d seen the following morning had been scouts from the second swarm.

Another day, another bait hive, another swarm …

Which had now arrived.

Overestimates and underestimates

As a beekeeper I’m well aware that a puppy-protecting non-beekeeper telling me about Lots of bees and Even more bees probably means Some bees.

The term ‘hundreds’ might mean any number less than 100.

It’s worth noting here that the partner of a non-beekeeper is considerably more accurate than the general public. If I get a message from someone with no experience of beekeeping about ‘hundreds of honey bees. Definitely honey bees!’ I know what they’re actually talking about are 12-15 solitary bees … probably Osmia.

Or wasps.

HUGE is tricky though. It has a sort of indefinable unmeasurable quality of largeness about it.

Thousands would have been easy … a small cast perhaps?

But HUGE … ?

It was huge.

Certainly the biggest swarm I’ve seen in recent years 🙂

I had to open the box to add a full complement of frames. The poly hive was heavy. You could feel the swaying mass of bees hanging from the wooden crownboard over the empty space in the box ⁵. The few frames present were completely covered.

I bumped the bees off the crownboard, lifted it away and the bees formed a very deep layer at the bottom of the brood box ⁶. The new foundationless frames I added projected well above the frame runners supported by the writhing mass of bees and only gently settled into place as the bees moved out of the way and up the sidewalls.

I strapped the box up and moved it to a puppy-safe location.

The following evening I treated both swarms with a vaporised oxalic acid-containing miticide and the morning after that I shifted them to an out apiary.

Look and learn

Only last week I discussed the importance of learning from observation.

Here was another lesson.

What did I learn from these two swarms and what assumptions can I make?

Evidence of fighting between scout bees strongly suggests that there are two different swarms looking for a new home. I’m making the assumption here ⁷ that the two swarms issued from different hives (rather than being two casts from the same hive ⁸) because:
1. I wouldn’t expect scouts from the same hive to fight, even if they were from different swarms. Is this actually known?
2. I’m told the two swarms approached the bait hive from opposite directions (I saw the first one of course, but not the millions of bees in a huge swarm that arrived the following day when I was – literally – buried in meetings).
Scouts are active well before a hive gets busy in the morning – at least one containing a recently hived swarm. I’ve noticed this before. Perhaps the recently hived swarm is concentrating on drawing comb as a priority?
It is important to have sufficient spare compatible equipment available for all sorts of eventualities. I got away with it this time … just. The first bait hive used a planting tray as a lid. The second used some spare bits kicking around in the back of the car and a handful of foundationless frames just out of the steamer.
I must remember to save time after the swarm arrives by preparing the bait hive properly in advance. This includes giving it a full complement of foundationless frames (and the one dark frame) and – if you intend to move it any distance after swarm arrival – making it ready for transport. In my case this includes using an insect mesh travel screen instead of a crownboard, adding a foam wedge to stop frames shifting about during transport and strapping the whole lot up tight.

Foam block …

Natural cavities

The whole purpose of putting out bait hives is to attract swarms. As a beekeeper this saves me collecting them from the neighbourhood or – more frequently – politely refusing to collect them from 40′ up a Leylandii, a chimney or the church tower ⁹.

If something is worth doing you might as well do it properly. The optimal design for a bait hive is well understood (essentially it’s a National hive brood box – Honeybee Democracy again!), so that’s what I offer. Not a nuc ¹⁰.

However, to have two swarms essentially fighting for access to a single bait hive suggests there is a shortage of good natural or man-made cavities to which a swarm could relocate.

I live in a small village surrounded by mainly arable farmland. There are lots of hedges, small spinneys, conifer plantations, old farm buildings and houses about ¹¹.

Rather too much arable if you ask me …

I’ve got a fair idea where bees are kept locally. I don’t think there are any within a mile of the bait hive other than my own colonies (and they did not swarm).

I would have expected there to be several suitable local natural or man made cavities that could ‘compete’ with a bait hive to attract swarms.

Clearly not … or they are already all occupied ¹².

STOP PRESS Both were prime swarms as they had laying queens when I checked them on Thursday afternoon. I should have also added that a bait hive in the same location attracted another swarm in the preceding week. It’s been a successful spot every year I’ve been back in Scotland.

Colophon

Buy one, get one free (BOGOF) seemed an appropriate title for this post. It dates back to 1985 where it was first used in the journal Progressive Grocer (who knew there was such a thing?). Two for the price of one offers have been blamed for spiralling obesity problems and there has been political pressure to ban such offers in supermarkets.

In draft form this post was entitled twofer. As in two for the price of one. Etymologically this is an older term, but surprisingly the OED does not associate it with cricket.

Twofer is regularly used by cricket pundits to mean two wickets in successive balls. However, I decided to avoid the cricket link so as to not upset any of my valued New Zealand readers who might still be smarting from the double-whammy of a cricket World Cup defeat to England and losing the claim to have the World’s steepest street to Wales.

My commiserations 😉

Bait hive guide

Spring this year is developing well. Even here on the chilly east coast of Scotland colonies are looking good and flying strongly when the sun is out. Large amounts of pollen are being taken in and there’s every sign that the hives are queenright and rearing lots of brood ¹.

It’s too soon ² to open the colonies but it’s not too soon to be thinking about the consequences of the inevitable continued expansion over the next few weeks.

Most healthy colonies will make preparations to swarm, often between late April and mid-June. The timing varies depending upon a host of factors including colony strength, climate, weather, forage, build up and beekeeper interventions.

Swarm prevention and control

You, like all responsible beekeepers, will use appropriate swarm prevention methods. Supers added early, ensure the brood box has space for laying etc.

In due course, once the colony gets bigger and stronger, you’ll notice queen cells and immediately deploy your chosen swarm control method e.g. the classic Pagden artificial swarm, the nucleus method I described last week, Demaree, vertical splits or – if you’re feeling ambitious – a Taranov board ³.

Which will of course be totally successful 😉

But just in case it isn’t …

… and just in case the beekeeper a couple of fields away is forgetful, unobservant, clumsy, on holiday, in prison or has some other half-baked excuse, be prepared for swarms.

As an aside, other than just walking around the fields, you can easily find hives near you by searching on Google maps and you can get an idea of the local beekeeper density ⁴ using the National Bee Unit’s Beebase.

You might think you know all the local beekeepers through your association, but it’s surprising the number who just ‘do their own thing’.

Swarms

This isn’t the place to discuss swarms in much detail. Here’s a quick reminder:

The colony ‘decides’ to swarm and starts to make queen cells.
Almost certainly, scout bees start to check out likely sites the swarm could occupy in the future ⁵.
The swarm leaves the hive on the first calm, warm, sunny day, usually early in the afternoon, once the queen cells are capped. The prime swarm contains the mated, laying queen and about 75% of the worker bees ⁶.
The swarm gathers around the queen and sets up a bivouac hanging from a convenient spot (tree, gatepost, bush, fence etc.) near to the hive. They rarely move more than 50 metres. It’s worth emphasising here that the spot they choose is convenient to the bees, but may be at the top of a 60 foot cypress. It may not be particularly convenient for the beekeeper 😉
Scout bees continue to check out likely final sites to establish the new colony, returning to the swarm and ‘persuading’ other scouts (by doing a version of the waggle dance) so that, finally, a consensus is reached. This consensus is essentially based upon the suitability of the sites being surveyed.
The scout bees lead the swarm to the new location, they move in and establish a new colony.

If you’re lucky you will be able to recapture the swarm if the spot they choose for their bivouac is within reach, not above a stream, in a huge thorny bush or on an electricity pylon.

A small swarm …

I say ‘recapture’ because, since the bivouac is usually near the issuing hive, it’s probably come from one of your own hives (unless you are snooping around your neighbouring apiaries ⁷).

But what if you miss the bivouacked swarm? Or if your neighbour misses it?

Those bees are going to look for a suitable location to set up home.

If you provide a suitable location, you can get them to hive themselves without the grief of falling off a ladder, toppling into a stream, getting lacerated with thorns or electrocution

This is where the bait hive comes in. Leave a couple in suitable locations and you can lure your own and other swarms to them.

Freebees 🙂

What do scouts look for?

The scout bees look for the following:

A dark empty void with a volume of about 40 litres.
Ideally located reasonably high up.
A solid floor.
A small entrance of about 10cm², at the bottom of the void, ideally south facing.
Something that ‘smells’ of bees.

What I’ve just described is … a used beehive ⁸.

More specifically, it’s a single National brood box (or two stacked supers) with a solid floor and a roof, containing one old dark frame of drawn comb pushed up against the back wall.

No stores, no pollen ⁹, just a manky old dark comb. The sort of thing you should be turning into firelighters.

That’s all you need.

However, you can improve things by giving the bees somewhere to start drawing comb and siting the hive in a location that makes your beekeeping easier.

Des Res

The first thing swarms do when they move in is start drawing comb. You can populate the bait hive with a few foundationless frames so they’ve got somewhere to start.

Bait hive …

In my view foundationless frames are much better than frames with foundation for bait hives. The scout bees measure the size of the void by flying around randomly inside ¹⁰. If you have sheets of foundation they’ll crash into it frequently, effectively giving them the impression that the void is smaller than it really is. And therefore making it less attractive to the scouts.

You can improve the smell of the hive by adding a little lemongrass oil to the top bar of one of the frames. Don’t overdo it. A drop or two every 7-10 days is more than ample.

If you do use foundationless frames make sure the hive is level. If you don’t the comb will be drawn at an angle to the frames which makes everything harder work later in the season. Your smartphone probably contains a spirit level function that makes levelling the bait hive very easy.

Location

But not if it’s above head height, or you’re teetering on top of a ladder …

It was Tom Seeley who worked out most things about scout bees and swarms (see his excellent book Honeybee Democracy). This included the observations that they favoured bait hives situated high up.

Believe me, it’s a whole lot easier if the bait hive is on a standard hive stand. It’s easier to level, it’s easier to check and it’s easier – in due course – to retrieve.

Bait hive

I’ve previously discussed how far swarms prefer to move from their original hive. Contrary to popular opinion (and perhaps illogically) they tend to prefer to move shorter distances i.e. 20m >> 200m >> 400m. However, there are also studies that show swarms moving a kilometre or more.

Don’t get hung up on this detail. Stick out a bait hive or two and, if there are swarming colonies in range, they’ll find it.

I always leave a bait hive in my apiaries and one or two in odd corners of the garden. In the last few years I’ve never failed to attract swarms to the bait hives, and know for certain that some have moved in from over a mile away as the bee flies (thanks Emma 😉 ).

Mites and swarms

Assuming you don’t have the luxury of living in Varroa-free areas of the UK (or anywhere in Australia) then the incoming swarm will contain mites. Studies have shown that ~35% of the mite population of a colony leaves with the swarm.

But, for about the first week after the swarm sets up home in your bait hive, what’s missing from the new arrivals is sealed brood. Therefore the mites are all phoretic.

Do not delay. Treat the swarm with an appropriate miticide to knock back the mite population by ~95%. An oxalic acid-containing treatment is ideal. Single dose, relatively inexpensive, easy to administer (trickled or vaporised) and well tolerated by the bees.

Varroa treatment …

You have eight days from the swarm arriving to there being sealed brood in the colony

Far better to slaughter the mites now. In a few months their numbers will have increased exponentially and the majority will be in capped cells and more difficult to treat.

Queen clipping – why?

I sometimes have colonies in my (very) small suburban garden … it’s great to be able to watch the bees before leaving for the lab or to observe them early in the season bringing in pollen from the crocuses. It’s also a convenient staging post between my out apiaries and a whole lot easier than carrying heavy boxes around through waist-high field margins. However, I’m aware that my neighbours may not share my enthusiasm for bees. I therefore do my utmost to only keep well-behaved colonies in the garden by selecting for docility as a priority when queen rearing. In addition, I make sure any queens heading colonies in the garden are clipped. Queen clipping is the trimming of one wing, preventing the queen from flying any distance should the colony swarm. In the absence of a queen, a prime swarm leaving the hive will either return to the hive or will cluster with the queen a very short distance from the hive.

Clipped queen …

A colony in the garden swarmed on open queen cells (QC) last Sunday afternoon. The colony had chosen to ignore the super, so filled the brood box with nectar (I suspect I’d added the super too late and the colony had already started to think about swarming). Consequently the colony ran out of space. The QC’s were about 3-4 days old and unsealed. There’d been none present at the previous inspection (remember that colonies usually swarm once the first QC’s are sealed). The colony was half-way through a vertical split (to be described in the future) with the original queen in the top box and the newly emerged virgin in the bottom box. I’d been away and arrived home to find the top box swarming and the air filled with bees. With an unclipped queen they would usually settle in a nearby tree or bush and then send out scouts to find more desirable accommodation.

I might have been fortunate enough to catch this, but they might have settled somewhere inconvenient like the chimney or on the kids trampoline in the garden next door. However, because the queen was clipped, she couldn’t fly and the bees just milled about for 15 minutes … a fantastic sight and sound. Eventually they returned to the hive … but to the bottom box. Shortly after they’d settled I found the queen and a small retinue of workers on the ground about a metre from the hive entrance (see photo above). I quickly went through the top box, shaking bees off the frames and knocked off all the QC’s. I also swapped out a couple of nectar-filled frames for drawn comb. I then ran the queen back into the entrance. With luck the reduced density of bees and increased space to lay will discourage them from swarming again*.

A queen with a clipped wing generally swarms later than an unclipped queen, potentially giving you a few extra days between inspections. However, as the example above shows, you can’t rely on this so seven day intervals between inspections are still recommended. Had I not found the queen she would have probably crawled back to the hive stand, climbed up the leg and ended up under the open mesh floor. Although this is not ideal, it provides another opportunity to recapture her and it’s far preferable to losing the bees altogether or bothering your neighbours with swarms.

Summer storm …

Although the weather was wonderful when the colony swarmed, it rapidly changed later in the afternoon when we were treated to downpour of biblical proportions … any swarm caught out in the torrential rain and hail would have probably fared very badly.

Time to close the hive up …

The image above (the densest cloud formed a wide band from the North East to the South West, almost directly above three of my apiaries) is a composite of three images stitched together in Photoshop. I was desperately trying to get through the last few hive inspections but had to abandon things and seek shelter in the car. The rain and hail didn’t last long, but what it lacked in duration it more than compensated for in volume (both sound and fluid ounces).

Perhaps surprisingly, in the 30 minutes or so before the heavens opened the bees were remarkably well behaved.

* Update on checking six days later (today) the blue marked and clipped queen is back and laying again in the top box. It looks like she’s been getting a lot of attention as the blue paint has almost disappeared. There are no signs of any more queen cells but they’re still not taking much notice of the super. Unfortunately, they are showing signs of robbing another colony in the garden, so I’ll shortly be moving them to another apiary.

In the meantime, I prepared a stack of boxes in preparation of moving house and – within 24 hours – another swarm moved in. I’d missed a finger-wide gap in the stack and the bees occupied a chest-high pile of broods and supers. These look like another generous donation from a neighbour … thank you.