Tag Archives: social distancing

Top of the Posts

The last post of the year is one that almost no-one will read because they’re too busy unwrapping presents, overeating and enjoying seeing friends and family.

Or perhaps not 🙁

A socially distanced Christmas is an oxymoron, but is also unfortunately what many responsible people will be ‘enjoying’ this year.

I’m writing this as the government imposes ever-tighter restrictions in England, and the Scottish government imposes further preventative measures. Our long-suffering NHS is beginning to struggle …

Entirely predictable, completely necessary, but nevertheless disheartening.

At times like these it’s reassuring to have something else to focus on, a reminder of good times passed, and the promise of better times in the future.

The winter solstice

Long before Christmas became an orgy of overindulgence, before snowmen, robins, reindeer and religion, there were pagan festivals associated with the increase in day length.

The Romans celebrated dies solis invicti nati (“day of the birth of the unconquered sun”) just after the winter solstice, on the 25^th of December ¹. The winter solstice itself – the date with the shortest amount of daylight – varies a bit from year to year. This year, in my location, it was on the 21^st of December when the day was just six hours and 47 minutes long ².

Before the Romans, there’s evidence that the winter solstice was significant to much older civilizations. Maeshowe, a 5000 year old Neolithic chambered cairn on Orkney, has an entrance corridor directly aligned with the setting sun of the winter solstice.

With the benefit of atomic clocks and a proper understanding of the solar system we now know that the winter solstice can fall anytime between the 20^th and 23^rd of December. The back wall of Maeshowe is illuminated by the setting sun for a few days either side of the winter solstice. Do not let this detract from the wonder of Maeshowe or the, similar but even older, Newgrange in Ireland.

And, for beekeepers, the winter solstice is also of significance as many choose to treat their colonies with oxalic acid in the holiday period after the winter solstice, and before they return to work in early January ³.

An opportunity for tasseographers?

But as I’ve discussed before … that may be too late. My bees in Fife, broodless in late October, are now rearing brood again. There’s ample evidence ⁴ for that on the Varroa trays left on the floor underneath the hive stands.

Scores on the doors

So, having already reviewed the 2020 beekeeping year last week, what was notable on The Apiarist this year?

The combined effect of furloughing ⁵, isolated living and copious amounts of caffeine (on which, more later) – coupled with my natural tendency to prattle on a bit – meant that the average length of posts increased by 40% to ~2500 words.

Eight years of The Apiarist … and a 12,000-fold increase in visits

This extra effort didn’t go unnoticed, with a greater than 50% increase in both visitors and page reads.

Regular readers should realise I’m mixing correlation and causation here.

The increases in both readers and reading might really be because everyone is locked down and bored witless 😉

Comments

On average, most visitors only read a couple of pages and, of those, only 0.3% leave a comment. However, I’m very grateful to those that do. It allows me to clarify points that were garbled and to elaborate on topics dealt with in too little detail.

Or to answer a completely unrelated question 😉

As an aside, the server cunningly filters out spam comments from real ones. I periodically check it’s not being overzealous but cannot ⁶ look at all of them.

If you submitted a comment and it was missed it was either because it was:

too short
abusive ⁷ or full of irrational ranting ⁸
advertising fake RayBans ⁹

The posts from 2020 that generated the most discussion were:

Weed and feed – simultaneous mite treatment and autumn feeding of colonies
Oxalic acid (Api-Bioxal) preparation – preparing solutions for trickle treating
A June Gap – a discursive commentary in mid-season ¹⁰
Darwinian beekeeping – keeping bees with Varroa, at least for a while
The gentle art of beekeeping – requeening a psychotic colony in midsummer

I almost always respond to comments, often simply by redirecting the reader to a previous post (or promising to cover the topic in more detail sometime in the future). Consequently, old posts still get read quite frequently.

Speaking of which … what were the most popular posts of 2020 and the most read posts of the year?

The most frequently read posts of 2020

I’m going to ignore the Google-promoted mid-June post I mentioned last week. That post, A June Gap, was notable for being read thousands of times on the day it appeared (and on the couple of days afterwards). Since then it’s been accessed just a few hundred times and has effectively disappeared without trace from current reading stats.

It’s what a statistician would call an ‘outlier’.

Other than that, these were the most read posts that were written in 2020:

Swarm prevention (17/4/20) – an overview of why colonies swarm and how beekeepers can delay (and sometimes even prevent) swarming, before implementing swarm control. Also notable as it received far fewer comments than the majority of posts written this season.
Queen cells … quantity and quality (22/5/20) – how many queen cells should you leave during swarm control? I also discussed the ‘features’ of a good queen cell.
Oxalic acid (Api Bioxal) preparation (13/11/20) – an update of a post from several years ago about the preparation of Api Bioxal solution for trickle treating colonies in the winter. This post also discussed the differences in the historic oxalic acid concentration used in the UK, and those in the published instructions with Api Bioxal.
Principles of swarm control (24/4/20) – an overview of how swarm control works, or should work if you do things correctly. As the title indicates, this post discusses the principles of the process and how it applies in several common methods of swarm control.
The nucleus option (1/5/20) – how to make up nucleus colonies.

So, with the exception of the rehash of some recipes, an emphasis on the principles and mechanics of swarm control. This is something that many beekeepers struggle with, but can be reliably achieved by understanding what triggers the process coupled with an appreciation of the makeup of a colony and the development cycle of queens and workers.

The most frequently read posts of all time

In which ‘all time’ actually means since late 2013 when the first posts appeared online.

Queen cells … don’t panic (15/6/18) – what to do when you discover queen cells during a regular inspection. This was little read when it first appeared, but became very popular this summer. I presume the 100’s still reading it every week this October/November are in Australia and New Zealand ¹¹.

Queen cells … don’t panic

When to treat? (5/2/16) – in terms of presentation this post is showing its age. I’ll probably update it next year. However, the content remains as valid now as when it was written, emphasising the importance of protecting the winter bee population to successfully overwinter a colony. I think this is the most important lesson that new beekeepers need to learn.
Honey pricing (4/10/19) – what they don’t tell you during your “Begin beekeeping” course, and often won’t tell you afterwards. Do not undervalue your honey. Every super or bucket produced is worth hundreds of pounds ¹².
The nucleus method (22/3/19) – my favoured swarm control method. Totally foolproof if conducted properly. It was the only method I used this year and was 100% successful.
Vertical splits and making increase (19/7/15) – how to do an artificial swarm using less equipment and less space. Another post that is, presentationally at least, showing its age and likely to be updated next year (if I remember 😉 ).

So, with the exception of the post on honey pricing, more articles on swarming and mite control.

You’d almost think that these topics were a particular problem for beekeepers 😉

Honey and coffee

I’m particularly pleased to see that the honey pricing post is popular. This is an important topic and beekeepers, like the general public, too often assume that supermarket prices are representative, or what they are competing with.

We should be aiming to produce a top quality product. It is made from the nectars available in ~8 square miles of land surrounding your hives. Aside from the fact it’s absolutely delicious, it’s also unique – a snapshot of a time and a place ¹³ – and should be priced accordingly.

Don’t compare it with £1 a pound supermarket rubbish, containing a “Product of EU and non-EU countries”. That could mean anywhere or anything (and increasingly actually means adulterated with rice or corn syrup).

A much better comparison would be with the price premium of a top quality wine or malt whisky.

I’ll be returning to honey pricing and provenance again in 2021.

Of over 40,000 ‘clicks’ on ~2,000 links embedded in the posts, 1% were to Buy me a coffee. I set this up in June after the old server fell over due to overwork, and I was forced to upgrade.

Flat white …

I am particularly grateful to the ~100 supporters who have ‘bought me a coffee’ to fuel late night writing marathons. It is you are largely responsible for the 40% increase in the length of posts this year ¹⁴.

Thank you 🙂

Readers, readers everywhere …

Perhaps unsurprisingly, because of a shared language, the top 6 countries (of 193 in total) in the visitors list were the UK (53%), USA (24%), Ireland (4%), Canada (3%), Australia (3%) and New Zealand (1%). These figures make sense, but aren’t particularly trustworthy as you can be wherever you want with a properly configured VPN.

Finding your way to here

New posts are automagically promoted on my (otherwise totally neglected) Facebook page and via Twitter. Of the two, Facebook generates about four times more traffic than Twitter.

I don’t use either for two-way communication. I’m old skool and prefer email ¹⁵, so don’t bother trying to reach me using either.

Don’t try using Pinterest either (does this even have a messaging function? I told you I was old skool 😉 ), which also generates quite a bit of traffic.

Subscribers receive an email whenever a new post appears, and if you submit a comment you can opt in to receive an email update when I (or someone else) adds further comments to a post. I restrict comments to the two years after a post appears. Therefore, if you sign up for comment emails they’ll stop when commenting on a particular post is closed.

Like page reads and site visitors, subscriber numbers have also increased significantly (~50%) this year … Welcome!

Remaining traffic arrives at this site from search engines like Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and Yahoo. Increasingly these encrypt the search terms so I only see about 10% of them and they don’t seem to be as amusing as they used to be.

Finding your way from here

When you visit a website the server records where you came from, both geographically and in terms of the last webpage visited.

When you follow a link in one of the posts the server also records which link you followed to leave the page ¹⁶.

Other than links elsewhere on this site, the most popular destination was the equipment suppliers E.H. Thorne’s.

The regular links I make there are an example of pragmatism, not promotion.

There are many other good quality equipment suppliers. However, there aren’t any others 10 minutes down the road from me 😉 A combination of convenience and my dislike of P&P charges means the relatively few things I purchase these days come from Thorne’s.

2021, a fresh start

Of the links to Thorne’s, the most often followed was to this honey creamer … if you want one, mine is for sale 😉

One careful owner etc.

I’m in the process of planning for the season ahead. This includes reviewing things that are “surplus to requirements” and having a bit of a clear out.

There are going to be some very major changes to my beekeeping in 2021 (and 2022) which will involve an emphasis on making bees, rather than making honey.

But that’s for a future post.

Social distancing, online beekeeping talks and hand washing are going to remain the norm for 2021. Less than 1% of the UK population have received their first dose of the vaccine in the first fortnight after the vaccines became available. At that rate (and it will speed up) it will be 11 years until the population is all vaccinated ¹⁷.

Enjoy your holiday/break from furlough/family-free time/oxalic acid dribbling (delete as appropriate).

I hope you’ll visit again in the New Year …

Happy Christmas 🙂

Time to deploy!

It’s early April. The weather is finally warming up and the crocus and snowdrops are long gone. Depending where you are in the UK the OSR may start flowering in the next fortnight or so.

All of which means that colonies should be expanding well and will probably start thinking of swarming in the next few weeks.

So … just like any normal season really.

Except that the Covid-19 pandemic means that this season is anything but normal.

Keep on keeping on

The clearest guidelines for good beekeeping practice during the Covid-19 pandemic are on the National Bee Unit website. Essentially it is business as usual with the caveats that good hygiene (personal and apiary) and social distancing must be maintained.

Specifically this excludes inspections with more than one person at the hive. Mentoring, at least the really useful “hands-on” mentoring, cannot continue.

A veil is no protection against aerosolised SARS-CoV-2. Don’t even think about risking it.

This means that there will be a lot of new beekeepers (those that acquired bees this year or late last season) inspecting colonies without the benefit of help and advice immediately to hand.

Mistakes will be made.

Queen cells will be missed.

Colonies will swarm ¹.

Queen cells …

It’s too early to say whether the current restrictions on society are going to be sufficient to reduce coronavirus spread in the community. It’s clear that some are still flouting the rules. More stringent measures may be needed. For beekeepers who keep their bees in out apiaries, the most concerning would be a very restrictive movement ban. In China and (probably) Italy these measures proved to be effective, although damaging to beekeeping, so the precedent is established.

Many hives and apiaries are already poorly managed ². I would expect that additional coronavirus-related restrictions would only increase the numbers of colonies allowed to “fend for themselves” over the coming season.

Which brings me back to swarming.

Swarmtastic

The final point of advice on the NBU website is specifically about swarms and swarm management:

You should use husbandry techniques to minimise swarming. If you have to respond to collect a swarm you need to ensure that you use the guidelines on social distancing when collecting the swarm. If that is not possible, then the swarm then should not be collected. Therefore trying to prevent swarms is the best approach.

Collecting swarms can be difficult enough at the best of times ³. And cutouts of established colonies are even worse.

In normal years I always prefer to reduce the swarms I might be called to ⁴ by setting out bait hives.

Swarm recently arrived in a bait hive with a planting tray roof …

Let the bees do the work.

Then all you need do is collect them once they’re all neatly tucked away in a hive busy drawing comb.

This year, with who-knows-what happening next, I’ll be setting out more bait hives than usual with the expectation that there may well be additional swarms.

If they’re successful I’ll have more bees to deal with when the ‘old normal’ finally returns. If they remain unused then all I’ve lost is the tiny investment of time made in April to set them out.

Not just any dark box

I’ve discussed the well-established ‘design features’ of a good bait hive several times in the past. Fortunately the requirements are easy to meet.

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

I ignore the last of these. I’d prefer to have an easy-to-reach bait hive to collect rather than struggle at the top of a ladder. If I wanted to do some vertically-challenging beekeeping I’d go out and collect more swarms 😉

So, ignoring the final point, what I’ve described is the nearly perfect bait hive.

Those paying attention at the back will realise that it’s also a nearly perfect description of a single brood National hive.

How convenient 🙂

All of my bait hives are either single National brood boxes or two stacked National supers. The box does need a solid floor and a crownboard and roof. If you haven’t got a spare solid floor you can easily build them from Correx ⁵ for a few pence.

Bait hive floor

Alternatively, simply tape down a piece of cardboard or Correx over the mesh of an open mesh floor ⁶. In some ways this is preferable as it’s convenient to be able to monitor Varroa levels after a swarm arrives.

Do not be tempted to use a nuc box as a bait hive. You can easily fit a small swarm into a brood box, but a really big prime swarm will not fit in a 5 frame nuc box.

Big swarms are better 🙂 ⁷

More to the point, bees are genetically programmed to search for a void of about 40 litres, so many swarms will simply overlook your nuc box for a more spacious nest site.

What’s in the box?

No, this has nothing to do with Gwyneth Paltrow in Se7en.

How do you make your bait hive even more desirable to the scout bees that search out nest sites? How do you encourage those scouts to advertise the bait hive to their sister scouts? Remember, that it’s only once the scouts have reached a democratic consensus on the best local nest site that the bivouacked swarm will move in.

The brood box ideally smells of bees. If it has previously held a colony that might be sufficient.

Bait hive …

However, a single old, dark brood frame pushed up against one sidewall not only provides the necessary ‘bee smell’, but also gives the incoming queen space to immediately start laying ⁸.

You can increase the attractiveness by adding a couple of drops of lemongrass oil to the top bar of this dark brood frame. Lemongrass oil mimics the pheromone produced from the Nasonov gland. There’s no need to Splash it all over … just a drop or two, replenished every couple of weeks. I usually soak the end of a cotton bud, and lay it along the frame top bar.

Lemongrass oil and cotton bud

The old brood frame must not contain stores – you’re trying to attract scouts, not robbers.

The incoming swarm will be keen to draw fresh comb for the queen to lay up with eggs. Whilst you can simply provide some frames and foundation, this has two disadvantages:

the vertical sheets of foundation effectively make the void appear smaller than it really is. The scout bees estimate the volume by walking around the perimeter and taking short internal flights. If they crash into a sheet of foundation during the flight the box will seem smaller than it really is.
foundation costs money. Quite significant amounts of money if you are setting out half a dozen bait hives. Sure, they’ll use it but – like putting a new carpet into a house you’re trying to sell – it’s certainly not the deal-clincher.

No foundation for that

Rather than filling the box with about £10 worth of premium foundation, a far better idea is to use foundationless frames. Importantly these provide the bees somewhere to draw new comb whilst not reducing the apparent volume of the brood box.

If you’ve not used foundationless frames before, a bait hive is an ideal time to give them a try.

There are two things you should be on the lookout for. The first is that the bait hive is horizontal ⁹. Bees draw comb vertically down, so if the hive slopes there’s a good chance the comb will be drawn at an angle to the top bar.

And that’s just plain irritating … because it’s avoidable with a bit of care.

Bamboo foundationless frames

The second thing is that the colony needs checking as it starts to draw comb. Sometimes the bees ignore your helpful lollipop stick ‘starter strips’ and decide to go their own way, filling the box with cross comb.

Beautiful … but equally irritating 🙂

Final touches

For real convenience I leave my bait hives ready to move from wherever they’re sited to my quarantine apiary (I’ll deal with both these points in a second).

Wedge the frames together with a small block of expanded cell foam so that they cannot shift about when the hive is moved.

Foam block …

And then strap the whole lot up tight so you can move them easily and quickly when you need to.

Bait hive location and relocation

Swarms tend to move relatively modest distances from the hives they, er, swarmed from. The initial bivouac is usually just a few metres away. The scout bees survey a wide area, certainly well over a mile in all directions. However, several studies have shown that bees generally choose to move a few hundred yards or less.

It’s therefore a good idea to have a bait hive that sort of distance from your own apiaries.

Or even tucked away in the corner of the apiary itself.

I’ve had bees move out of one box, bivouac a short distance away and then occupy a bait hive on a hive stand adjacent to the original hive.

It’s ~~probably~~ definitely poor form to position a bait hive a short distance from someone else’s apiary 😉

But there’s nothing stopping you putting a bait hive at the bottom of your garden or – whilst maintaining social distancing of course – in the gardens of friends and family.

If you want to move a swarm that has occupied a bait hive the usual “less than 3 feet or more than 3 miles” rule applies unless you move them within the first couple of days of arrival. Swarms have an interesting plasticity of spatial memory (which deserves a post of its own) but will have fully reorientated to the bait hive location within a few days.

So, if the bait hive is in grandma’s garden, but grandma doesn’t want bees permanently, you need to move them promptly … or move them over three miles.

Or move grandma 😉

Lucky dip

Swarms, whether dropped into a skep or attracted to a bait hive, are a bit of a lucky dip. Now and again you get a fantastic prize, but often it’s of rather low value.

The good ones are great, but even the poor ones can be used.

But there’s an additional benefit … every one that arrives self-propelled in your bait hive is one less reported to the BBKA “swarm line” or that becomes an unwelcome tenant in the eaves of a house ¹⁰.

As long as they’re healthy, even a bad tempered colony headed by a queen with a poor laying pattern, can usefully be united to create a stronger colony to exploit late season nectar.

Varroa treatment of a new swarm in a bait hive…

But they must be healthy.

Swarms will potentially have a reasonably high mite count and will probably need treating within a week of arrival in the bait hive ¹¹. Dribbled or vaporised oxalic acid/Api-Bioxal would be my choice; it’s effective when the colony has no sealed brood ¹² and requires a single treatment.

But swarms can bring even more unwelcome payloads than Varroa mites. If you keep bees in an area where foulbroods are established be extremely careful to confirm that the arriving swarm isn’t affected. This requires letting the colony rear brood while isolated in a quarantine apiary.

How do you know whether there are problems with foulbroods in your area? Register your apiary on Beebase and talk to your local bee inspector.

My bait hives go out in the second or third week of April … but I’m on the cool east coast of Scotland. When I lived in the Midlands they used to be deployed in early April. If you’re in the balmy south they should probably be out already ¹³.

What are you waiting for 😉 ?

Bees in the time of corona

I usually write a review of the past year and plans for the year ahead in the middle of winter. This year I reviewed 2019 and intended to write about my plans when they were a little better formulated.

Inevitably, with the coronavirus pandemic, any plans would have had to be rapidly changed. It’s now not clear what the year ahead will involve and, with the speed things are moving at, anything I write today ¹ may well be redundant by publication time on Friday.

Nothing I write here should be taken as medical advice or possibly even current information. I teach emerging virus infections and have studied RNA viruses (like DWV, coronavirus also has an RNA genome but it is a fundamentally different beast) for 30 years but defer to the experts when hardcore epidemiology is being discussed.

And it’s the epidemiology, and what we’ve learned from the outbreak in Italy, that is determining the way our society is being restructured for the foreseeable future.

Talking the talk

I gave three invited seminars last week. It was good to see old friends and to meet previously online-only contacts. It was odd not to shake hands with people and to watch people seek out the unoccupied corners of the auditorium to maintain their ‘social distancing’.

All of the beekeeping associations I belong to have cancelled or postponed talks for the next few months. Of course, there are usually far fewer talks during the beekeeping season as we’re all too busy with our bees, but those that were planned are now shelved.

Not me …

I expect that forward-thinking associations will be looking at alternative ways to deliver talks for the autumn season. If they’re not, they perhaps should as there’s no certainty that the virus will not have stopped circulating in the population by then.

I already have an invitation to deliver a Skype presentation in mid/late summer (to an association in the USA) and expect that will become increasingly commonplace. Someone more entrepreneurial than me will work out a way to give seminars in which the (often outrageous ²) speaker fee is replaced by a subscription model, ensuring that the audience can watch from the comfort of their armchairs without needing to meet in a group.

There is a positive spin to put on this. My waistline will benefit from not experiencing some of the delicious homemade cakes some beekeeping associations produce to accompany tea after the talk 😉 … I’m ~~dreaming~~ thinking in particular of a fabulous lemon drizzle cake at Fortingall & District BKA 🙂

It will also reduce the travel involved. For everyone. It’s not unusual for me to have a 2-3 hour journey to a venue ³ and, much as I enjoy talking, the questions, the banter and the cake, driving for 2-3 hours back can be a bit wearing.

At risk populations

Everyone is getting older … but beekeepers often have a head start. In the UK the average age of bee farmers is reported to be 66 years old. In my many visits to beekeeping associations I meet a lot of amateur (backyard) beekeepers and suspect that the majority are the wrong side of 50 ⁴.

And that’s significant as Covid-19 is a more serious infection for those over 50.

Infection outcomes are also worse for men, and the majority (perhaps 65%) of beekeepers are men. The rates of infection appear similar, but men – particularly elderly men – often have less good underlying health; they are more likely to smoke and have less effective immune responses.

Enough gloom and doom, what does this mean for beekeeping?

Mentoring

If you took a ‘beginning beekeeping‘ course this winter you may struggle to find a mentor. If you’ve been allocated one (or someone has generously volunteered) think twice about huddling over an open hive with them.

Actually, don’t huddle with them at all … the veil of a beesuit is no barrier to a virus-loaded 5μm aerosol.

Mentoring is one of the most important mechanisms of support for people starting beekeeping. I benefitted hugely from the experienced beekeepers who generously answered all my (hundreds of) idiotic questions and helped me with frames of eggs when I’d inadvertently ‘lost’ my queen and knocked back all the queen cells.

Without mentoring, learning to keep bees is a lot more difficult. Not impossible, but certainly more challenging. Beekeeping is fundamentally a practical pastime and learning by demonstration is undoubtedly the best way to clear the initial hurdles.

But thousands before have learnt without the benefit of mentoring.

However, if you can wait, I suggest you do.

If you cannot ⁵, you need to find a way to compensate for the potential absence of experienced help ‘on hand’.

All of us are going to have to learn to communicate more effectively online. Camera phones are now so good that a quick snap (or video) sent via WhatsApp may well be good enough to diagnose a problem.

Get together (virtually!) with other beginners at a similar stage and compare notes. Discuss how colonies are building up, early signs of swarming and when hives are getting heavier.

Bees in the same environment tend to develop at about the same rate. If your (virtual) ‘bee buddy’ lost a swarm yesterday you should check your colonies as soon as possible.

Getting bees

Thousands of nucs, packages and queens are imported to the UK every year. I’ve no idea what will happen to the supply this season. It might be unaffected, but I suspect it will be reduced.

If you’re waiting for an “overwintered nuc” and your supplier claims now not to be able to supply one ⁶ all is not lost.

Under offer …

Set out one or two bait hives. With isolation, movement restrictions, curfews and illness ⁷ it’s more than likely that some nearby colonies will be poorly managed. If you use a bait hive you can attract a swarm with almost no work and save an overworked beekeeper from having to do a cutout from the roofspace of the house the swarm would have otherwise selected.

At the very least, you can have the pleasure of watching scout bees check out the hive in the isolated comfort of your own garden.

Keeping bees

I think the last few days have shown that the future is anything but predictable. Who knows where we’ll be once the swarming season is here. You can practice swarm control with social distancing in your out apiary unless there are movement controls in place.

In that case, you cannot get there in the first place.

Let us hope that it doesn’t come to that.

What you can do is be prepared. Give the bees plenty of space when the first nectar flow starts. Two supers straight away, or three if your knowledge of local conditions suggests two may not be enough.

Clip one of the wings of the queen. This doesn’t stop the bees swarming (almost nothing does) but it does stop you losing the bees. Although I cannot be certain that queen clipping is painless – because I’m not sure that bees feel pain (evidence suggests they don’t) – I do know that clipped queens have as long and as productive lives as unclipped queens.

There she goes …

Clipped queens buy you a few days grace. The colony tends to swarm when the new virgin queen emerges rather than when the queen cell was capped. That can make all the difference.

The colony swarms but the queen spirals groundwards and usually then climbs back up the hive stand, around which the swarm then clusters. Sometimes the queen returns to the hive, though it doesn’t always end well for her there in the subsequent duel with the virgin now in residence.

1002, 1003, 1004, 1005, er, where was I? Damn!

Not lost swarm

Honey sales

Selling honey is not without risk of virus transmission, in either direction. When I sell “from the door” it often involves an extended discussion about hay fever, local forage, bumble bees and the weather. All of that can still continue but both parties will have to speak a bit louder to maintain social distancing.

Selling through shops might be easier … if the shops stay open. Farmers markets, village fetes and country fairs (fayres?) are likely to all be cancelled or postponed, at least temporarily.

There’s a neighbourhood initiative here selling high quality local produce, ordered online and collected at a set date and time. Similar things are likely to be developed elsewhere as customers increasingly want to support local producers, to buy quality food and to avoid the panic buying masses fighting over toilet tissue ⁸ in the supermarkets.

Peter Brookes, Panic Buying, 7-3-20, The Times

An initiative like Neighbourfood might make even more sense if there was a local delivery service to reduce further the need for contact. No doubt these things exist already.

The unknown unknowns

I’ve discussed the unknown knowns previously. These are the things you know will happen during the season, you’re just not quite sure when they’ll happen. Swarming, Varroa management, winter feeding etc.

To add to the uncertainty this year we will have the unknown unknowns … things you didn’t expect and that you might not know anything about. Or have any warning about. Social distancing, quarantine, school closures and potential lockdowns all fall into this category.

Preparing for things that cannot be predicted is always tricky. All we can do is be as resilient and responsible as possible.

My beekeeping season will start in late April or early May. I’m self-sufficient for frames and foundation and can switch entirely to foundationless frames if needed. I have enough boxes, supers, nucs etc ⁹ to maintain my current colonies.

I’m actually planning to reduce my colony numbers which I’ll achieve by uniting weak colonies or selling off the surplus. With a bit more free time from work (and I’m working very remotely some of the time) I intend to rear some queens when the weather is good. These will be used to requeen a few tetchy colonies for research, though it’s increasingly looking like we’ll lose this field season as the labs are effectively closed.

I’m not dependent on honey sales other than to offset the costs of the hobby. If I cannot buy fondant for autumn feeding I’ll just leave the supers on and let them get on with it.

This is why we treat …

Which leaves only the treatments for Varroa management as essential purchases … and if I cannot mail order Apivar then things have got very serious indeed 🙁 ¹⁰

In the meantime, I’m planning some more science and beekeeping posts for the future. This includes one on a new collaborative study we’re involved in on chronic bee paralysis virus which, like Covid-19, is classed as causing an emerging viral disease.

Colophon

Love in the time of cholera

The title is a rather contrived pun based on the book Love in the time of cholera by the Columbian author Gabriel García Márquez. There are no other similarities between this post and the Nobel laureates work … cholera isn’t even a virus.

Cholera, which has characteristic and rather unpleasant symptoms, might be an excuse to panic buy toilet rolls.

Covid-19, which has equally characteristic and unpleasant (but totally different) symptoms, is not 😉