Tag Archives: swarms

The memory of swarms

I’m writing this waiting for the drizzle to clear so I can go to the apiary and make up some nucs for swarm control. Without implementing some form of swarm control it’s inevitable that my large colonies will swarm ¹.

Swarming is an inherently risky process for a colony. Over 75% of natural swarms perish, often because they do not build up strongly enough to overwinter successfully.

As a mechanism for reproduction swarming is somewhat unusual in that the intact colony is split into two not fully functional ‘halves’ ².

By not fully functional I mean that neither the swarmed colony, nor the swarm are guaranteed to survive.

The swarmed colony lacks a queen, but has ample stores.

The swarm has a queen but has only the stores carried in the bellies of the workers.

The swarmed colony needs to rear a new queen. The swarm needs to find a new nest site, move there, build comb, rear brood, forage etc.

That seems like the very opposite of intelligent design, but it’s the way evolution has made things work. This being the case it involves a whole range of compromises and quick fixes that make it work.

One of these involves the memory of worker bees, which is what this post is about.

Two-stage swarming

A range of events within the hive – which for reasons that will become obvious I will term the original nest site – trigger the urge to swarm. I discussed some of these when covering swarm prevention. Swarming is then essentially a two-stage process.

The two stage process of swarming

The first stage is the swarm leaving the original nest site and establishing a bivouac nearby. This is the classic cluster of bees hanging from a branch.

The bivouac sends out scout bees to search the nearby area for potential new nest sites. After ‘discussion’ (comprehensively covered by Thomas Seeley in Honeybee Democracy) between the scouts they reach a consensus of the best site.

The second stage is the relocation of the bivouacked colony to the new nest site. For example, this could be the church tower, a hollow tree or a bait hive. This site is likely to be within a few hundred metres of the original nest site, but can be further away.

All of which should raise some questions in the minds of beekeepers who are familiar with the “less than 3 feet or more than 3 miles” rule.

Have these bees not read the rules?

If you want to move a hived colony of bees you’ll often be told, or have read, that you need to move them either less than three feet or more than 3 miles.

Worker bees have a foraging range of about 3 miles. Within this range they have an uncanny ability to return to the hive location using features of the landscape to orientate themselves. The ‘final approach’ uses scent from the hive entrance.

Therefore, if you move a colony 3 feet they’ll still find the general location using landscape features, and then orientate to the hive entrance using scent.

If you move a colony 10 miles away everything is new to them and they’ll embark on some orientation flights to learn the new landscape features.

But if you move the colony a mile they’ll use the landscape features to return to the site of the original hive … to find it gone 🙁 ³

Swarms break all these rules.

The bivouac is (in my experience) always more than 3 feet from the hive entrance. If the scout bees make the choice (e.g. selecting a bait hive to occupy), the swarm always relocates to a new nest site less than three miles from the site it left ⁴.

And a beekeeper who drops a bivouacked colony into a skep can move it wherever she wants, even back to the same hive stand it recently vacated.

If the swarm followed the rules, the majority of the workers would return from the bivouacked swarm to the original nest site.

At least they would if they had orientated to the original nest site in the first instance.

Are the bees naive?

About half of a workers life is spent as a forager collecting water, pollen or nectar. But before they venture out of the hive, the first half of a worker bees life is spent building comb, nursing larvae or cleaning cells.

Therefore, one possibility is that the bees present in a swarm have no knowledge of the hive location because they’ve never before left the hive.

We know that the proportion of workers that leave the colony when it swarms is about 75%. This has been determined in a number of independent studies and is remarkably consistent, irrespective of the size of the colony that swarms.

If 75% of the workers leave the colony when it swarms it is mathematically impossible for the swarm not to include older foragers (assuming the laying rate of the queen is steady).

In fact, we don’t need to resort to any underhand mathematics as the age classes of bees in a swarm have been measured. I’ve discussed this before when comparing natural and artificial swarms.

Age distribution of bees in swarms

The median age of adult bees in the hive is 19 days. The median age of bees in a swarm is 10 days. Therefore swarms do contain younger bees, but not exclusively so.

One of the reasons for this bias towards younger bees must be to do with the relatively short lifespan of foragers. Many of the older bees in the swarm will have perished long before the new brood laid by the queen emerges.

Permanent amnesia?

The bivouacked swarm doesn’t dwindle in size as the older foragers drift back to the original nest site. Other than a few hundred scout bees, the majority of the bivouacked swarm huddle together to protect the queen, buried somewhere in the centre, from the elements.

They don’t fly or forage … they’re waiting for the signal from the scout bees that a new nest site has been located.

And, once they relocate to the church tower, the hollow tree or a bait hive, the older foragers stay in the new nest location. It’s as though the bees in a swarm that previously knew where the original nest site was have amnesia.

And this makes sense. If they did return to the original nest site the swarm (whether bivouacked or relocated) would shrink in size and it’s chances of surviving would be severely diminished. Other than a full belly of honey a swarm can rely on nothing. They need as many bees as possible to take on all the roles needed to establish a new colony – comb builders, nurses, foragers etc.

But have they really forgotten the original nest site?

Temporary amnesia?

It turns out that swarms do retain a memory of their original nest site.

In 1993 Gene Robinson and colleagues demonstrated that a swarm shaken out from its new nest site preferentially returns to the original nest site, rather than to an equidistant alternate ⁵.

This ability must rely on the memory of the foragers in the swarm. Therefore it is likely to be lost in a relatively short time (days, not weeks) ⁶.

Firstly, the foragers will be busy reorienting to the new nest site, effectively overwriting the memory of the original nest location. In good weather this takes just a couple of days.

Secondly, these ageing bees don’t have long to live, so there will be ever-decreasing numbers of them to lead a shaken out swarm back to the original location.

Rain stops play

Sometimes the bivouacked colony never relocates to a new nest site. Either the scouts never achieve a consensus or – more likely – bad weather forces the swarm to hunker down.

When you hive a bivouacked swarm you will often find a small crescent or two of new wax on the branch they were clinging to. If the bees get trapped by bad weather I think the comb building continues. It’s not unusual to find comb in hedgerows near apiaries where bees that have got trapped have ended up trying to make a new nest.

Natural comb …

What does the memory – or lack of it – of swarms mean for practical beekeeping?

The (temporary) amnesia of swarms means you can collect a bivouacked swarm and move it wherever you want. A swarm that relocates to your bait hive can also be moved, but don’t wait too long. Within just a few days of a swarm arriving the bees will have reoriented to their new location. I always try and move bait hives to their final location within three days of a swarm appearing.

Notes

The drizzle stopped and I spent the entire day finding queens and making up nucs.

Note to self … a super-strong colony with no queen cells, wall-to-wall brood and no very young larvae or eggs probably has a faulty queen excluder 🙁

Second note to self … Sod’s law dictates that the colony with the faulty queen excluder probably has supers filled with drone comb 🙁

Queen includer

By definition the queen excluder should be an impassable barrier for the queen.

“Why not put one under the brood box ¹ to prevent the loss of a swarm?”, asks the beginner beekeeper.

Framed wire QE …

A perfectly logical question, and one to which you will hear ² a variety of answers. These include the adverse effect on pollen collection, the possibility of an undersize virgin getting through anyway (with the loss of a swarm) and the distressing consequences it has for drones in the hive.

The late David Cushman covers these and other reasons.

Just because you probably shouldn’t, doesn’t mean you can’t … and this is what happens when you do.

Hot and bothered

I recently discussed my current thoughts on using a bee shed for teaching purposes. In it I made the point that it can get unbearably hot in a beesuit on a warm day.

Phew!

A couple of weeks ago I spent a sweltering hour or so inspecting the seven colonies in our larger shed.

It’s midsummer. It was a hot sunny day and the shed thermometer was reading over 32°C.

Some of the colonies were on double brood and had at least three supers on. Those that didn’t were recently installed and were a bit “temperamental”. These are research colonies and they came from a collaborator ³.

One colony should have recently requeened and I wanted to find, mark and clip her before the colony built up again.

I worked my way through the single boxes first. I found the queen in each of them except the one that had requeened.

Typical 🙁

My excuse was that I was half-blind with sweat. However, it’s not unusual to not find the queen when you actually need to ⁴.

I didn’t dally, I still had the 5-6 box towers to get through.

The tower of power

In my dreams

Finally I was left with colony #6. This had been strong from the start of the season and was now probably the strongest hive in the apiary. The double brood box was bulging with bees with at least 18 frames of brood in all stages.

The supers were very heavy.

At the beginning of the afternoon I’d intended to find the queen and prepare the box to be split once the flow was over (any day now). However, after more than an hour in stifling conditions I was struggling and starting to hallucinate about ice cold beer.

Inevitably I couldn’t find the queen 🙁

With sweat stinging my eyes and dripping off my nose onto the inside of the veil I could barely see the comb, let alone the queen. I did find eggs, so I knew she was present (or had been 2-3 days ago) and there were no obvious signs of swarm preparation. The colony was very busy, but the queen definitely still had space to lay.

I decided to pop a queen ~~includer~~ excluder between the brood boxes with the intention of returning 3-4 days later to look for eggs as an indicator of where the queen was.

I packed up, returned home and slaked my thirst.

Oh no they’re not … Oh yes they are …

Two days later my PhD student calls me from the apiary to tell me that colony #6 is swarming.

“Oh no they’re not … I checked them a couple of days ago and all was well”, I replied smugly.

But of course I visited the apiary to check anyway.

They were swarming 🙁

Oh yes they are!

Unlike a ‘typical’ swarm this appeared to have no centre or focus (where I’d usually expect to find the queen). The bees were spread over a wide area, hanging in a large clump under the landing board and on the edges and corners of the shed.

They weren’t clustering in any real sense of the word, but they also weren’t re-entering the hive.

I had a prod about around the entrance looking for the queen, gently removing handfuls of bees. The bees were very calm as you usually expect of swarms ⁵ and I could move them aside in my search.

But there was no sign of her.

Bees fanning at the hive entrance .. obviously a different hive as I had my hands full with the swarm.

However, there were a number of bees fanning busily at the hive entrance. Each was facing the entrance with the abdomen pointing up and away from the hive and the Nasanov gland exposed at the tip of the abdomen.

The Nasonov pheromone is a mix of terpenoids that attracts workers. It is left as an attractant by honey bees on nectar-rich flowers and – when produced by fanning bees at the hive entrance – it is usually a good indication that the queen is inside. An artificial version forms the commercial ‘swarm lure’ you can buy.

What’s (probably) in the box?

By now I could make a fair guess at what had happened.

I assumed the queen was somewhere in the double brood box, either because she was clipped and had returned there or because she was trapped above the queen excluder.

Or, of course, both ⁶.

They’d presumably swarmed because I’d missed a queen cell. D’oh!

I therefore expected to find both a queen and one or more queen cells in the box … and I needed to quickly make a decision about how to resolve the situation.

Swarm control rescue

Pagdens’ artificial swarm …

Swarm control usually refers to a hive manipulation that prevents the colony from swarming. For example, the classic Pagden artificial swarm.

Despite the fact that this colony had swarmed ⁷, if I could find the queen I could divide the colony like a Pagden artificial swarm and (hopefully) rescue the situation.

I removed the supers and put them to the side. I assembled a new floor and brood box with 10 mixed frames ⁸ and substituted this for the original floor and double brood box.

I took the double brood box outside ⁹, separated the two boxes and went through them carefully.

The upper box contained the queen … above the queen excluder. I put her on the frame she occupied back into the new empty brood box in the shed.

The lower box had a handful of queen cells along the edge of a partially drawn foundationless frame. I’d missed these in the previous inspection. I’ll blame it on the heat, but I may need to visit Specsavers …

I added a queen excluder to the new brood box and carefully placed the supers back on top. All the flying bees, which includes the foragers, would return to the original location within a day or two so the supers were there if the flow continued.

All’s well that ends well

I inspected the colonies a few days later. The queenright colony in the original location in the shed was busy, the queen was laying the well ¹⁰ and there was still nectar coming in.

I carefully went though the queenless colony to see if there were any additional queen cells and knocked all back except one which I know was charged (i.e. contained a developing larvae).

With a bit of good weather there should be a new mated queen in the box by mid/late August. If there isn’t I’ll unite the colony back with the one containing the original queen.

Lessons learned

As always there are lessons to be learned. The lessons this time are reasonably obvious:

Expiring from heat exhaustion is no reason to cut corners when inspecting a colony. I wasn’t aware that I’d cut corners, but the queen cells were reasonably obvious and would have been more than play cups at inspection ¹¹. Perhaps I should have left it for a cooler day? But perhaps they would have then swarmed anyway … ? Beekeeping might appear like a gentle pastime (and it can be), but it can also be very hard work.
Moving a strong colony away from its original location usually helps reduce the bee numbers, so making inspections easier. This was undoubtedly helped by the absentee swarming bees as well ¹².
Be prepared. Keep spares in the apiary so you can deal with the unexpected without making a return trip. I always try and keep a bait hive in the apiary and happily steal any or all of it to deal with these sorts of situations. You can always replace the bait hive at your leisure. Inevitably a busy swarm season can deplete your spares and it’s always worth remembering that the bees will cope with all sorts of sub-standard accommodation for a short period. A piece of ply as a roof, a crownboard as a floor (assuming it has a hole in it!), two stacked supers rather than a brood box, no crownboard (perhaps because it’s being used as a floor), an incomplete box of frames etc. Improvise if you need to … the bees will not mind.

Queen includers

Instead of a queen excluder, Thorne’s sell a “swarm trap” that consists of a box to fit over the hive entrance which has both a queen excluder and an exit for drones. They market it as being “developed with the hobby beekeeper in mind who finds weekly inspections to remove queen cells almost impossible“.

Swarm trap

I’ve not seen one in use so cannot comment on it. However, in my opinion there’s “no gain without pain” … if you are going to keep bees you need to appreciate that the principles of the hobby involve the need for regular inspections. It would probably be better to just purchase local honey rather than relying on this type of swarm trap for missed inspections.

Some beekeepers place a queen excluder under a brood box after hiving a captured swarm onto undrawn foundation. This helps prevent the colony from absconding while the bees draw some comb. After that the queen will start laying and the risk of the swarm disappearing is much reduced.

I’ve never used a queen excluder like this as I don’t routinely collect swarms. Those I acquire generally arrive under their own steam in a bait hive. Since these already have one drawn comb a mated queen can start laying without delay.

I don’t ever remember having a swarm from a bait hive abscond. Casts (a swarm with an unmated queen) also seem to stay if they have chosen their destination and moved there voluntarily.

The alternative way to encourage a hived swarm to stay put is to give them a frame of open brood. I have done this but prefer not to ¹³ as I treat all swarms with a miticide soon after they are hived to reduce Varroa levels. To ensure this treatment is really effective I want to be certain there is no sealed brood in the hive.

Bait hive location

We’re fast approaching the time of the season when colonies will attempt (and manage) to swarm. Swarming is the way bees increase their colony numbers.

Inevitably, because it means the loss of many of the foragers – the honey-gathering workers – beekeepers try and prevent or control swarming. Prevention is better than control, but it can be difficult or impossible to achieve.

Inevitably, a very large number of swarms are therefore lost.

The swarming process has been well-studied by eminent scientists like Martin Lindauer in the early 50’s and Tom Seeley more recently.

Swarming in a nutshell

The colony ‘decides’ to swarm. They rear one or more new queens in queen cells. On the 9^th day after the egg is laid the cells are capped. Then or shortly afterwards the colony can be expected to swarm, with the original queen and up to half of the workers leaving with her. Swarming tends to happen on a warm, calm, sunny day (but not always). Casts may follow.

The swarm leaves the hive and settles nearby, in a tree or on a fencepost. Usually this initial ‘staging post’ is a short distance (perhaps 5-20 metres) from the hive. Scout bees fly from this swarm, surveying suitable locations in the area to set up a more permanent residence.

Swarm of bees

Actually, the scouts have been hard at work already. Once the swarm issues from the hive they set about persuading all the other scouts that they’ve found the ideal location. This ‘persuasion’ is the topic of the excellent book Honeybee Democracy by Tom Seeley.

Once a consensus is reached (which might take hours or a few days) the swarm leaves its temporary staging post and flies directly to the final location … a hollow tree, the church tower or above your neighbours soffit. There they set up home.

Most swarms do not survive. They get caught in a storm before relocating, they succumb to disease or they eventually starve to death. Since most strong colonies can – unchecked – be expected to swarm every year, the fact we’re not inundated with colonies indicates that most die.

One beekeepers loss can be another beekeepers gain.

Swarms can also be an annoyance to non-beekeepers. ‘Normal’ people. This always surprises me because a swarm is a stunning site and usually totally unthreatening and unaggressive ¹.

Nevertheless, they can be an irritation, both when swarming or if they become established in the church tower or a hollow tree. And, without Varroa treatment they will act as a source of disease for other colonies in the locality through robbing and drifting ².

So, rather than just let swarms disappear over the hedge or horizon, far better to capture them, put them in a hive and manage them properly ³.

There are essentially two ways to achieve this. Get them when they’re at their temporary staging post, drop them into a box and subsequently hive them. I’ve discussed this process before.

Captured swarm in 8 frame poly nuc …

Alternatively, set up one or more bait hives and entice a swarm to choose this location rather than the church tower or a hollow tree. Again, I’ve discussed how to set up a bait hives several times before.

Bait hives in a nutshell

Honeybee Democracy contains the definitive guide to the desirable characteristics of a bait hive. Conveniently it’s a dark box the size of a National brood box (~40 litres) with a small entrance (~12.5cm²) at the bottom. It helps a lot if it also smells of bees. This can easily be achieved by placing an old black brood frame up against one wall. Fill most or all of the rest of the box with foundationless frames ⁴ and place it in a suitable location.

Bait hive …

Which is – finally – what this post is all about.

Location, location, location

Seeley studied the desirable characteristics of both the bait hive and the location in which it is sited. By location I really mean height from the ground and orientation. However, he and others have also investigated how far from the original temporary staging post the swarm are prepared to fly to occupy a ‘des res’.

So, once you’ve prepared your bait hive(s), the three features of the location you need to think about are their a) orientation, b) height above ground, and c) distance from your bees (or other apiaries ⁵).

The first two are straightforward as Seeley describes in Honeybee Democracy. In the mid-70’s he conducted a series of experiments which showed that bees prefer bait hives that a) faced South and b) are located higher (5m from the ground) rather than lower (~1m) ⁶.

Most of the studies in Honeybee Democracy use artificially prepared swarms. Seeley would place these on a post and then observe where they relocated to … essentially he was circumventing the natural process of swarming by ‘starting’ them from the staging post. Many were conducted on an island where there were limited options to relocate to … and at limited distances.

These studies weren’t ideal to determine how far a swarm will relocate from its temporary staging post.

This is important in deciding whether to place bait hives in, near or distant from established hives.

Go forth and multiply, or vice versa

It might be logical to expect swarms to choose distant final destinations rather than nearby ones. For example, this might ensure less competition for forage. That would suggest that bait hives should be situated a long way from your own – or other – apiaries.

However, it turns out that when bees multiply they usually choose not to go forth very far. Although there is some contradictory evidence, it appears as though swarms prefer to relocate to nearby sites, rather than distant ones.

Seeley and Morse (1977) demonstrated that swarms chose a nearby (~20m) site rather than a distant site (~400m) 80% of the time ⁷.
Jaycox and Parise (1981) showed that swarms always chose sites less than 200m from the artificial swarms prepared for their study ⁸.
Schmidt (1995) demonstrated that artificial swarms chose to relocate from as little as 0.5m to at least 1 km (average ~400m, i.e. much further away than the other studies) ⁹.

Why they prefer to set up home near to the original colony is unclear. At least one paper speculates it leaves the option to rob a genetically-related (and possibly less defensive) colony more easily.

Pragmatism and practical beekeeping

I set up bait hives every year. I’ve never failed to capture swarms. I’ve also – inadvertently – had swarms occupy stacks of stored brood boxes or supers. The entrances have faced almost every direction, with South East and South probably being the most often occupied.

However, this is a biased survey … I usually use the same site that worked in previous years.

Under offer …

Although I’ve located bait hives high up on the top of greenhouses or sheds, the majority are on normal hive stands. This is pragmatism, not because they are more attractive to the bees at knee height ¹⁰.

I simply don’t want to climb a ladder to retrieve them 😉

Finally, I put them where I can see them and check them. I locate one in the corner of each apiary, as far from my other hives as possible, but probably never more than 10m away.

Pleasure and practical beekeeping

I also always have a bait hive in the garden where I can observe it on a daily basis. It’s great to see the first scouts appear, to watch their numbers increase day upon day, to keep an eye on the weather for a hot calm day … and to try and predict when the swarm will arrive.

Scout bees are not aggressive. They fly in a characteristic manner, checking the bait hive and the immediate vicinity from all directions.

If the numbers of scouts builds up to dozens or hundreds and they all disappear … either they’ve chosen somewhere else or the swam has been captured.

Or they’re guiding the swarm to your bait hive at that very moment.

Wait a few minutes. A swarm arriving is one of the really great sights in beekeeping 🙂

2017 in retrospect

The end of the year is a good time to look back at the highs and lows of the season. What worked … what didn’t work … what on earth happened to our weather in June?

Early June 2017 …

June is an important month here in Fife. Early season colony buildup should be pretty much complete, most colonies will have had some sort of swarm control measures in late May, virgin queens may well be present in many hives, the OSR is over and colonies need to consolidate for the main summer flows.

But instead it just rained.

Rainfall in Fife was 225% the 40 year average, access to apiaries was problematic due to flooding and queens could only get out to mate if they were wearing ‘water wings‘.

Big mistake

Many colonies needed to be, or should have been fed, during June. Mine had reasonable levels of stores as I’d not taken much early season honey. I therefore chose not to feed them. In retrospect I think this was a big mistake.

Although not monitored carefully, I suspect brood rearing slowed, so reducing the colony size to effectively exploit the July/August flows. It was my worst summer honey crop in years.

Lesson one … If this happens next season I’ll continuously feed thin syrup to keep the queen laying strongly.

Doing the splits

Notwithstanding the incessant rain, swarm control – and the inevitable associated queen mating – went pretty well. I generally use splits of one form or another and most queens got out to mate, albeit a little slower than I’d have liked. If swarm control is needed for colonies in the bee shed we can’t do vertical splits (because of the way entrances are organised) and instead just take a nucleus colony away and let them rear a new queen.

Only ‘pretty well’ though because I suspect I lost a cast from a vertical split that went calamitously wrong. I’d left the queenless half far too strong and inadvertently also left multiple developing queen cells.

D’oh!

This wasn’t going to end well 🙁

I did manage to capture and hive another cast from the same colony, but the first virgin queen and well over half the workers were long gone.

So, lesson two (which I’ve been taught many times before 😥 ) is to be decisive when there are multiple queen cells in a split. Either knock them back appropriately (which I’ll explain next year) or split the box up into multiple nucs. Don’t dither. Don’t prevaricate and don’t – as I think I did this year – simply forget to check.

All the gear, some idea

I blatantly poached how to build foundationless frames with bamboo skewers from the internet. I claim zero originality here. It isn’t my idea. However, I’m pleased to say it was a great success. Simple wooden starter strips were also a roaring success. It’s very satisfying when you realise you don’t need to spend £1 per frame on foundation.

Nearly completed …

I’ve used quite a few Abelo poly hives this season. They’re a strident colour – blue and yellow – but reasonably well made. Colonies checked this winter are doing well in them, with bees right up to the side walls on sub-zero days. This suggests to me that they are well insulated.

An Abelo/Swienty hybrid hive …

There are some aspects of these hives I have yet to be fully convinced by; upper entrances, the crownboard, high condensation levels and a small Varroa tray. I’ll review them more fully when I’ve been using them for at least a full year.

Old invasives …

The bête noire of most beekeepers, the Varroa mite, has featured heavily throughout the year. In print, though thankfully not in my colonies. I’ve tried to emphasise the need to treat appropriately, using the right miticide at the right time. Since most approved (and even some unapproved 😉 ) miticides are all pretty effective, the timing of treatment is probably the most important point.

2016 temperature data and OA treatment …

In three recent posts I presented the importance of midwinter treatment, how to prepare the oxalic acid-containing miticide and how to administer it. These should probably be read in conjunction with an earlier article on when to treat, which I’ll come back to in a minute. Finally, as far as Varroa is concerned, I discussed potential ways to optimise the timing of the winter treatment by watching the weather. I suspect that most beekeepers treat too late in the winter.

If you have yet to treat this winter … get a move on!

… and new ones

The new invasive that got some coverage was, inevitably, the Asian hornet. Having first arrived in 2016 I think we’ll be subjected to annual incursions until it gets established here. Constant vigilance is going to be needed to help postpone what might be inevitable. Just because it is inevitable doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try and delay it’s permanent arrival.

Devon beekeepers got some first-hand experience of how vigilant you need to be to both spot and photograph Asian hornets in September. Martin Hocking has written about his experience in the Devon Beekeeper (pp172 and also in November’s Bee Craft) which should be required reading for beekeepers, with a follow up article about his experience in December (see pp196). There’s an open meeting on the 20^th of January at Harberton Parish Hall, TQ9 7SD where the threat posed by the Asian hornet – and how to mitigate it – will be discussed.

Although rarely mentioned this year, Small Hive Beetle now appears to be established in the Calabria region of Southern Italy. Data updated in late September and November indicates that positive wild colonies and sentinel nucleus colonies are still being found, indicating that attempts to eradicate the beetle have failed. Infested colony numbers are perhaps a bit lower than previous years, but since there’s no readily-available data on the level of surveillance, it’s not clear whether this shows that control is having an effect, or if people are just not looking as hard.

www.theapiarist.org

Posts have been made every Friday of the year, with a few additional ones when something important happened (Asian hornets or I was ‘advertising’ a Convention I was speaking at … OK, my talk wasn’t important, but the Welsh Beekeepers Convention was 😉 ).

Regular as clockwork …

The Friday posts are intentional. It’s when most of us have time to read stuff. The regularity was not and, frankly, it’s a bit of a surprise I’ve achieved it. However, there it is. No promises it’ll continue like that. You can register to receive email notification of new posts in the right hand panel.

Visitor numbers to the site are markedly increased from last year. Page views per visit are down fractionally, but not significantly. It’s clear that more are finding the site as it becomes better indexed by the search engines, and as pages are referenced by other sites.

24 months on www.theapiarist.org …

My attempts at generating a presence on Facebook was an abject failure. I simply don’t have time to do anything other than automagically post updates from here on Facebook (as I do on Twitter, which I’m a bit more familiar and competent with … follow me on @The_Apiarist). Apologies if you tried to ‘Friend’ me (or whatever) on Facebook. I’ve cancelled all the email updates as I simply couldn’t keep up. Or, when I tried, I didn’t know how to! I belong to the pre-FB generation, or the one before that.

Beekeeping is international, with different problems – but many shared ones – globally. I’m grateful to the visitors from 161 different countries and the European Union 🙂 Less than 50% of the readers are from the UK, despite the UK-centric bias I inevitably exhibit (°C, colour, no mention of queen castles or slatted racks, precious little discussion of Langstroth hives etc.). Southern hemisphere beekeepers don’t even do things at the same time of the year, so many of the posts aren’t even topical for readers in Australia, New Zealand and South America. Whatever, I’m grateful people took the time to visit and read stuff.

And the winner is …

I don’t publish visitor numbers, but I do comment on the popularity of particular pages. For several years a post on my honey warming cabinet has been the most popular. It was originally posted ‘way back’ in 2014. Frankly, it was useful, but not particularly challenging or exciting.

But it’s all change this year. Aside from the homepage, the archive and blog pages, all of which people arrive at to to get the most recent posts, the honey warming cabinet post was a distant fourth in the 2017 rankings.

Above it were posts on vertical splits and making increase, feeding fondant and – particularly pleasingly and top this year – when to treat colonies with miticides against Varroa. I say particularly pleasingly as the When to treat? post is a serious article on an important subject, underpinned by scientific arguments. The timing of the late summer treatment is probably one of the most important events in influencing the health and overwintering success of the colony. This post was almost twice as popular as any other post this year which – because it originally appeared in early 2016 – suggests it is finally being widely cited and accessed by beekeepers.

When to treat? Finally getting read when it should be.

And what does the future offer?

Frankly, as I write this in mid-December with a streaming cold, a box of tissues and slathered in Vicks VapoRub (really, it’s not a pretty sight) I don’t know. I have two priorities at the moment; getting the new bee shed properly setup and (with my researcher hat and lab coat on) starting studies of Chronic Bee Paralysis Virus. Both will get coverage here.

Bee Shed 2 … the windows still need some work …

In terms of the website I’m acutely aware there’s no proper indexing or rational list of articles on particular subjects, perhaps other than Varroa. I hope to bring some order to the chaos, allowing me to not repeat myself, to develop some themes more fully and to not repeat myself 😉 . I also know I have a load of unwritten stuff on queen rearing.

Winter time is also DIY time … dabbling with wood, perspex, Correx and Elastoplasts. Something will surely result from this, in addition to the blood loss and bad language.

If there are things you’d particularly like to read drop me a note. I’m interested in the science underlying beekeeping and have little patience with some of the dogma and That’s the way we’ve always done it stories. I’ve already written about the importance of training and the responsibilities of beekeepers. I’ve got some more on these areas planned as I think they’re too often ignored by beekeepers in the UK.

With Best Wishes for 2018. May your colonies be docile, your supers unliftable, your queens well-mated and your swarms (again) in my bait hives 😉

Happy New Year

That’s all folks

That’s all Folks

It’s late August and the end of my least successful beekeeping year ever. That sounds very negative, so perhaps it should be qualified. It’s the end of my least successful beekeeping year in terms of honey production.

However, in terms of the satisfaction I’ve got from my beekeeping, it’s been a pretty good year. Let’s examine these two things separately, dealing with the bad news first.

Tell ’em about the honey, mummy^†

My production colonies only generated about 25lb each of Spring honey. Some of this was clearly oil seed rape (OSR) as there were fields just about in range, but much of it was essentially mixed hedgerow and tree nectar, and none the worse for that. This was all extracted in late May or early June and is now stored, set, in buckets. Later in the year, once the temperature drops, I’ll prepare soft set honey for sale or distribution to friends and family.

25lb is firmly at the bottom end of the averages over the last few years though – in fairness – It’s only my second Fife Spring, so I don’t have much recently to compare it with. Colonies were doing well when I first inspected them, but in some cases that wasn’t until early May. The active beekeeping season is only 4-5 months long here (latitude 56.3° N).

June started well, with clear weather and high temperatures.

And then it started to rain. And continued for almost the entire month.

Lime can yield well in July …

None of my full-size colonies needed feeding, but most reduced their brood rearing. July nectar flows were poor. The lime yielded a small amount of very high quality honey, but for whatever reason – poor weather, colonies not strong enough, patchy flows – pretty-much nothing else. The summer honey was extracted in mid-August and is already disappearing fast.

I didn’t take any colonies to the heather as I was abroad for a chunk of July when I’d need to be preparing and shifting them to the moors. And, in all likelihood, they probably weren’t strong enough anyway.

And that was it … like last year, all over much sooner than expected.

There’s some balsam in central Fife along the River Eden that might give some late-season nectar and there’s ivy (but that is some way off flowering yet) but I usually let the bees keep anything they collect once the summer honey is extracted.

Flowering ivy

And the good news is

Beekeeping isn’t all about honey. There’s also tremendous satisfaction to be gained from working with the colonies, improving your stock and feeling that – although perhaps not in complete control – you’ve got a pretty good grasp of what’s happening and how things are going.

In this regard, 2017 was a success.

I know I lost one swarm (actually a cast from the queenless half of a split). I got a call to say that the apiary was thick with bees but they’d long gone by the time I extricated myself from meetings and got home. In itself this wasn’t a success. However, I learned my lesson and managed to hive a second cast that issued from the same colony a day or two later. I also had success with my bait hives.

With a couple of exceptions my vertical splits went well, with the resultant queens both laying well and heading well-behaved colonies. The couple that didn’t work developed into (drone) laying workers and were dealt with successfully by uniting.

In retrospect, considering the weather in early/mid-June I’m astounded any queens managed to get out and mate. By late July colonies headed by these newly mated queens were developing well, with frame after frame of brood exhibiting a pretty respectable laying pattern.

That’ll do nicely …

Throughout the season I had a pretty good idea what was happening in most of my colonies. There were no big surprises … “Oops, a virgin queen, where did she come from?”, or “Grrrr … no queen, no eggs and no swarm cells, I’m stumped”.

Colonies behaved in a thoroughly predictable manner. Strong ones were caught before they swarmed, split and were merged back to a double brood box. Nucs developed pretty well, though they needed close attention and some emergency feeding through June. No drama, no panic.

The end of the summer season, other than the truly woeful honey yield, has left me with a good number of nicely behaved and generally very strong colonies. As always there’s one exception, but I’ll unite that weakling late this week if things haven’t picked up.

All the gear, no some idea

Split board …

Gradually equipment standardisation is starting to pay dividends. I ran out of almost nothing (I certainly didn’t run out of supers 🙁 ) and managed to mix’n’match as needed to leave colonies secure, watertight and with the proper bee space when needed. Homemade split boards ended up being pressed into service as floors and it’s clear I’ll have to make some additional kewl floors this winter.

Bamboo-strengthened foundationless frames were a great success. Furthermore, I prepared a second batch mid-season and never got round to using them, so have plenty to start the season next year. Result! However, it’s sobering to realise that one of the reasons they weren’t used was that the nectar flow simply wasn’t strong enough to get them drawn properly.

Finally, whilst we’re on the subject of equipment, I’ve used about half a dozen Abelo poly hives this year in addition to the usual Swienty boxes with homemade floors and roofs. First impressions of the Abelo boxes are pretty positive and I’ll write something up later in the year on them.

Season’s end … or the start of the new season?

Late summer and autumn is an important time in the beekeeping year. Some even consider it the start of the next season, as success in the subsequent year is very dependent upon the preparation in the preceding autumn.

Feed’n’treat …

All my colonies are scarfing^‡ down large quantities of fondant at the moment. They’ll all get another few kilograms as the autumn progresses. Unless there’s good reason to, it’s unlikely any colonies will be inspected again until Spring.

Varroa treatment is ongoing and the mite drop from most colonies is reassuringly low. I count the mites from each colony over a two week period. Over the first 5 days, some dropped just single figures …

All colonies are coordinately treated to maximise decimation of the mite population at a time when bees have a tendency to drift more and/or rob adjacent colonies – both being well-documented routes by which Varroa can be transmitted between hives. I’ve also helped a neighbouring beekeeper (with colonies within range of my own apiary) by loaning out my Sublimox so that, together, the mite population at a landscape-scale is reduced.

This is simple common sense. I don’t want my (nearly) mite-free colonies infested from neighbouring apiaries and I also don’t want the colonies I do have with appreciable mite levels (~50+ after 5 days treatment) to infest others.

2018

It’s far too soon for much serious thought about 2018. However, I already know there are going to be some major changes to my beekeeping. The local Council have just announced that they will shortly (Spring next year) build a new road literally through the middle of my bee shed and apiary … finding a new location and getting things rebuilt is my major focus at the moment.

And finally … it’s harvest time and raining again …

Mainly dry …

^†Tell ’em about the honey, mummy was a catchphrase from a TV advert for Sugar Puffs breakfast cereal. The advert aired from 1976 to ’85 and featured the Honey Monster and Henry McGee (from the Benny Hill show).

Henry is the one on the right.

They don’t make advertising like that any longer. For obvious reasons.

^‡Scarf is American slang meaning to ‘eat voraciously’. It’s probably a bastardisation of the word scoff. Scarf has other meanings and I strongly suggest you don’t look these up.

Colophon

That’s All Folks

The phrase That’s all folks dates back to 1930 when it was used on the closing screen of a Warner Bros. Looney Tune cartoon.

Over the years many different characters used this line on both Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons. Mel Blanc (1908-’89), the actor who voiced (stuttered) the most famous version … Th-th-th-that’s all folks! has the engraving That’s All Folks on his gravestone.

There’s a 1949 Merrie Melodies cartoon called The Bee-Deviled Bruin with the Three Bears, a colony of bees and a shortage of honey for breakfast. Typical slapstick ensues. It ends with “That’s all folks”.