Tag Archives: winter

Oxalic acid (Api Bioxal) preparation

This post updates and replaces one published three years ago (which has now been archived). The registered readership of this site has increased >200% since then and so it will be new to the majority of visitors.

It’s also particularly timely.

I will be treating my own colonies with oxalic acid in the next week or so.

Mites and viruses

Varroa levels in the hive must be controlled for successful overwintering of colonies. If you do not control the mites – and by ‘control’ I mean slaughter 😉 – the viruses they transmit to the overwintering bees will limit the chances of the colony surviving.

The most important virus transmitted by Varroa is deformed wing virus (DWV). At high levels, DWV reduces the lifespan of worker bees.

This is irrelevant in late May – there are huge numbers of workers and they’re only going to live for about 6 weeks anyway.

In contrast, reduced longevity is very significant in the winter where more limited numbers of overwintering bees must survive for months to maintain the colony through to the Spring. If these bees die early (e.g. in weeks, not months), the colony will dwindle to a pathetic little cluster and likely freeze to death on a cold winter night.

Game over. You are now an ex-beekeeper 🙁

To protect the overwintering bees you must reduce mite levels in late summer by applying an appropriate miticide. I’ve discussed this at length previously in When to treat? – the most-read post on this site.

I’d argue that the timing of this late summer treatment is the most important decision about Varroa control that a beekeeper has to make.

However, although the time for that decision is now long-gone, there are still important opportunities for mite control in the coming weeks.

In the bleak midwinter

Miticides are not 100% effective. A proportion of the mites will survive this late summer treatment ¹. It’s a percentages game, and the maximum percentage you can hope to kill is 90-95%.

If left unchecked, the surviving mites will replicate in the reducing brood reared between October and the beginning of the following year. That means that your colony will potentially contain more mites in January than it did at the end of the late summer treatment.

Late summer mite treatment and no midwinter treatment.

Over several years this is a recipe for disaster. The graph above shows modelled data that indicates the consequences of only treating in late summer. Look at the mite levels (in red, right hand vertical axis) that increase year upon year.

The National Bee Unit states that if mite levels exceed 1000 then immediate treatment is needed to protect the colony. In the modelled data above that’s in the second year ².

In contrast, here is what happens when you also treat in “midwinter” (I’ll discuss what “midwinter” means shortly).

Two optimal treatments

Mite numbers remain below 1000. This is what you are aiming for.

For the moment ignore the specific timing of the treatment – midwinter, late December etc.

Instead concentrate on the principle that determines when the second treatment should be applied.

During the winter the colony is likely to go through a broodless period ³.

When broodless all the mites in the colony must, by definition, be phoretic.

There’s no brood, so any mites in the colony must be riding around on the backs of workers.

A phoretic mite is an easy mite to kill ⁴.

A “midwinter” double whammy

A single oxalic acid based treatment applied during the winter broodless period is an ideal way to minimise the mite levels before the start of the following season.

Oxalic acid is easy to administer, relatively inexpensive and well-tolerated by the bees.

The combination – a double whammy – of a late summer treatment with an appropriate miticide and a “midwinter” treatment with oxalic acid should be all that is needed to control mites for the entire season.

However, “midwinter” does not mean midwinter, or shouldn’t.

Historically, winter mite treatments were applied between Christmas and New Year. It’s a convenient time of the year, most beekeepers are on holiday and it’s a good excuse to avoid spending the afternoon scoffing mince pies in front of the TV.

Or with the ~~outlaws~~ inlaws 😉

But by that time of year many colonies will have started brooding again.

With sealed brood, mites have somewhere to hide, so the treatment will be less effective than it might otherwise have been ⁵.

Why go to all the trouble of treating if it’s going to be less effective than it could be?

The key point is not the timing … it’s the broodlessness of the colony.

If the colony is broodless then it’s an appropriate time to treat. My Fife colonies were broodless this year by mid-October. This is earlier than previous seasons where I usually have waited until the first protracted cold period in the winter – typically the last week in November until the first week in December.

If they remain broodless this week I’ll be treating them. There’s nothing to be gained by waiting.

Oxalic acid (OA) treatment options

In the UK there are several approved oxalic acid-containing treatments. The only one I have experience of is Api-Bioxal, so that’s the only one I’ll discuss.

I also give an overview of the historical method of preparing oxalic acid as it has a bearing on the amount of Api-Bioxal used and will help you (and me) understand the maths.

OA can be delivered by vaporisation (sublimation), or by tricking (dribbling) or spraying a solution of the chemical.

I’ve discussed vaporisation before so won’t rehash things again here.

Trickling has a lot to commend it. It is easy to do, very quick ⁶ and requires almost no specialised equipment, either for delivery or personal protection (safety).

Trickling is what I always recommend for beginners. It’s what I did for years and is a method I still regularly use.

The process for trickling is very straightforward. You simply trickle a specific strength oxalic acid solution in thin syrup over the bees in the hive.

Beekeepers have used oxalic acid for years as a ‘hive cleaner’, as recommended by the BBKA and a range of other official and semi-official organisations. All that changed when Api-Bioxal was licensed for use by the Veterinary Medicines Directorate (VMD).

Oxalic acid and Api-Bioxal, the same but different

Api-Bioxal is the VMD-approved powdered oxalic acid-containing miticide. It is widely available, relatively inexpensive (when compared to other VMD-approved miticides) and very easy to use.

Spot the difference …

It’s very expensive when compared to oxalic acid purchased in bulk.

Both work equally well as both contain exactly the same active ingredient.

Oxalic acid.

Api-Bioxal has other stuff in it (meaning the oxalic acid content is a fraction below 90% by weight) and these additives make it much less suitable for sublimation. I’ll return to these additives in a minute or two. These additives make the maths a bit more tricky when preparing small volumes at the correct concentration – this is the purpose of this post.

How much and how strong?

To trickle or dribble oxalic acid-containing solutions you’ll need to prepare it at home, store it appropriately and administer it correctly.

I’ve dealt with how to administer OA by trickling previously. This is all about preparation and storage.

The how much is easy.

You’ll need 5ml of oxalic acid-containing solution per seam of bees. In cold weather the colony will be reasonably well clustered and its likely there will be a maximum of no more than 8 or 9 seams of bees, even in a very strong colony.

Hold on … what’s a seam of bees?

Three seams of bees

Looking down on the colony from above, a seam of bees is the row visible between the top bars of the frames.

So, for every hive you need 5ml per seam, perhaps 45ml in total … with an extra 10% to cover inevitable spillages. It’s not that expensive, so don’t risk running out.

And the strength?

The recommended concentration to use oxalic acid at in the UK has – for many years – been 3.2% w/v (weight per volume) in 1:1 syrup. This is less concentrated than is recommended in continental Europe (see comments below on Api-Bioxal).

My advice ⁷ – as it’s the only concentration I’ve used – is to stick to 3.2%.

Calculators at the ready!

The oxalic acid in Api Bioxal is actually oxalic acid dihydrate. Almost all the powdered oxalic acid you can buy is oxalic acid dihydrate.

The molecular formula of oxalic acid is C₂H₂O₄. This has a molecular weight of 90.03. The dihydrated form of oxalic acid has the formula C₂H₂O₄.2H₂O ⁸ which has a molecular weight of 126.07.

Therefore, in one gram of oxalic acid dihydrate powder (NOT Api Bioxal … I’ll get to Api Bioxal in a minute! Have patience Grasshopper) there is:

90.03/126.07 = 0.714 g of oxalic acid.

Therefore, to make up a 3.2% oxalic acid solution in 1:1 syrup you need to use the following recipe, or scale it up as needed.

100 g tap water
100 g white granulated sugar
Mix well
7.5 g of oxalic acid dihydrate

The final volume will be 167 ml i.e. sufficient to treat over 30 seams of bees, or between 3 and 4 strong colonies (including the 10% ‘just in case’).

The final concentration is 3.2% w/v oxalic acid …

(7.5 * 0.714)/167 * 100 = 3.2% ⁹.

Check my maths 😉

Recipe to prepare Api-Bioxal solution for trickling

Warning – the recipe on the side of a packet of Api-Bioxal makes up a much stronger solution of oxalic acid than has historically been used in the UK. Stronger isn’t necessarily better. The recipe provided is 35 g Api-Bioxal to 500 ml of 1:1 syrup. By my calculations this recipe makes sufficient solution at a concentration of 4.4% w/v to treat 11 hives.

There’s an additional complication when preparing an Api-Bioxal solution for trickling. This is because Api-Bioxal contains two additional ingredients – glucose and powdered silica. These cutting agents account for 11.4% of the weight of the Api-Bioxal. The remaining 88.6% is oxalic acid dihydrate.

Using the same logic as above, 1g of Api-Bioxal therefore contains:

(90.03/126.07) * 0.886 = 0.633 g of oxalic acid.

Therefore, to make up 167 ml of a 3.2% Api-Bioxal solution you need to use the following recipe, or scale up/down appropriately:

100 g tap water
100 g white granulated sugar
Mix well
8.46 g of Api-Bioxal

Again, check my maths … you need to add (7.5 / 0.886 = 8.46) grams of Api-Bioxal as only 88.6% of the Api-Bioxal is oxalic acid dihydrate.

Scaling up and down

8.46 g is not straightforward to weigh – though see below – and 167 ml may be too much for the number of hives you have. Here’s a handy table showing the amounts of Api-Bioxal to add to 1:1 syrup to make up the amount required.

Api-Bioxal recipes for 3.2% trickling in 1:1 syrup

The Api-Bioxal powder weights shown in bold represent the three packet sizes that can be purchased.

I don’t indicate the amounts of sugar and water to mix to make the syrup up. I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader … remember that 100 g of sugar and 100 ml of water make 167 ml of 1:1 (w/v) syrup.

Weighing small amounts of Api-Bioxal

The amount of Api-Bioxal used is important. A few grams here or there matter.

If you are making the mix up for a limited number of hives you will have to weigh just a few grams of Api-Bioxal. You cannot do this on standard digital kitchen scales which work in 5 g increments.

Buy a set of these instead.

Digital scales … perfect for Api-Bioxal (and yeast)

These cost about a tenner and are perfect to weigh out small amounts ¹⁰ of Api-Bioxal … or yeast for making pizza dough.

A few words of caution

I don’t want to spoil your fun but please remember to take care when handling or using oxalic acid, either as a powder or when made up as a solution.

Oxalic acid is toxic

The lethal dose for humans is reported to be between 15 and 30 g. It causes kidney failure due to precipitation of solid calcium oxalate.
Clean up spills of powder or solution immediately.
Take care not to inhale the powder.
Store in a clearly labelled container out of reach of children.
Wear gloves.
Do not use containers or utensils you use for food preparation. A well rinsed plastic milk bottle, very clearly labelled, is a good way to store the solution prior to use.

Storage

Storage of oxalic acid syrup at ambient temperatures rapidly results in the acid-mediated breakdown of sugars (particularly fructose) to generate hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF). As this happens the colour of the oxalic acid-containing solution darkens significantly.

This breakdown happens whether you use oxalic acid or Api-Bioxal.

Stored OA solution and colour change …

HMF is toxic to honey bees at high concentrations. Studies from ~40 years ago showed that HMF concentrations below 30 mg/l were safe, but above 150 mg/l were toxic ¹¹.

At 15°C HMF levels in OA solution can reach 150 mg/l in a little over a week. At room temperature this happens much faster, with HMF levels exceeding 150 mg/l in only 2-3 days. In the dark HMF levels build up slightly less quickly … but only slightly ¹².

Therefore only make up OA solutions when you need them.

If you must store your oxalic acid-containing syrup for any length of time it should be in the fridge (4°C). Under these conditions HMF levels should remain well below toxic levels for at least one year. However, don’t store it for this long … use it and discard the excess.

Or prepare excess and share it with colleagues in your beekeeping association.

Don’t use discoloured oxalic acid solutions as they’ve been stored incorrectly and may well harm your bees.

Another final few words of caution

I assume you don’t have a fridge dedicated to beekeeping? That being the case please ensure that the bottle containing stored oxalic acid is labelled clearly and kept well out of the reach of children.

Notes

A quick trawl through the Veterinary Medicines Directorate database turns up several oxalic acid-containing solutions for managing Varroa. These include:

Oxuvar – approved for trickling or spraying, an aqueous solution of oxalic acid to which you add glucose if you intend to use it for trickling.
Oxybee – approved for trickling (and possibly other routes, but the paperwork was a minefield!), contains oxalic acid, glycerol and essential oils and is promoted as having a long shelf life.
VarroMed – approved for trickling, contains oxalic acid and formic acid and can be used throughout the year in one way or another.

I’ve not read the documentation provided with these and so don’t know the precise concentration of oxalic acid they contain. It will be listed as an active ingredient. I have not used these products. As with everything else on this site, I only write about methods or products I am familiar with. I therefore cannot comment on their relative efficacy compared to Api-Bioxal, to Apivar or to careful siting of your hives in relation to ley lines … or 5G phone masts.

Preparing for winter

The beekeeping season is fast receding into the distance as the first frosts of autumn appear and, finally, the wasp numbers start to diminish. By now colonies should be heavy with stores, either collected by the bees or provided by the beekeeper.

Winter is coming … be prepared

There is relatively little actual beekeeping to be done this late in the year.

Colonies do not need to be disturbed unnecessarily. They certainly don’t require the usual weekly inspection … they’re not going to swarm, you’ve already applied your miticide of choice and fed them with fondant or syrup ¹.

Late queen mating

With temperatures during the day in the low to mid-teens (°C) it is still warm enough to open a colony if you need to.

One of the few reasons I’d open a colony in very late September/early October would be to check if a new queen that had emerged at the end of August had successfully mated. If she had, then all is good. She will continue to lay late into the autumn and should produce sufficient winter bees to get the colony through to the following Spring.

When I lived in the Midlands I would regularly get queens successfully mated in early/mid September. It was pretty dependable, and in good years I’d be actively queen rearing through much of August.

Now, back in Scotland, late queen mating is not something I would want to rely on. I’m certain it happens now and again, but only in very exceptional years.

It’s a tough life being a drone in late August … but not for much longer

This year, many of my colonies turfed their drones out a month ago, and queen mating is not going to happen unless there are plenty of drones about.

A quick peek

It takes just minutes to check whether the queen is mated and laying. Although you don’t need to see the queen, it’s worth using just a whiff of smoke so you have the option of searching for her if needed. If you smoke the colony heavily she’ll end up rushing about or buried under a mass of disturbed bees.

Just a whiff …

You will need to remove the feeder (if using syrup) or the queen excluder and fondant block. Place these aside gently and remember that there are likely to be large numbers of bees adhering to the underside, so balance them on the rim of an upturned roof. This is the time you realise the benefit of using framed rigid wire QE when feeding fondant … removing the block on a flexible plastic QE is a right palaver.

The hive should be busy with bees. Gently remove the dummy board and outer frame. This should be full, or in the process of being filled, with stores. There’s no need to shake the bees off. Just stand it aside out of the way.

‘Guesstimate’ the approximate centre of the brood nest, based upon the density of bees in the seams. Gently lever the frames apart a centimetre or so, then release one of the frames adjacent to the gap you’ve created from its neighbours.

Lift the frame and look for sealed brood, open brood and eggs. By knowing the development cycle of workers bees (3E,5L,13P ²) you can determine approximately when the queen started laying ³.

If she started laying …

Snatching victory from the jaws of defeat

… if there are no eggs or larvae by very late September I would assume that the queen had failed to mate.

You need to use your judgement here. If the weather was poor in the first half of September, but excellent since then, it remains a distant possibility that she has only just mated and has yet to start laying.

Look carefully for polished cells where the centre of the broodnest should be.

And cross your fingers.

Polished cells are a sign that the nurse bees are preparing the comb for egg laying. However, in my experience, they do this even if the queen remains unmated, so it is not a reliable sign that all is well.

You therefore need to use your judgement and be realistic.

Miracles do happen, but you can’t depend upon them ⁴.

If the weather has been consistently poor – windy, low temperatures (for queen mating, which really needs ~18-20°C) or wet – then assume the worst and ‘save’ the colony by uniting it with a nearby strong colony.

A colony without a laying queen in late autumn will not survive the winter in any state that will make it a viable colony the following year ⁵.

In Scotland, I routinely unite colonies that do not have a laying queen at the end of August. As described in the last couple of weeks, I do my final colony checks with feeding and miticide treatment.

I know the chances of a queen getting successfully mated after that are effectively zero.

Quick uniting – air freshener

If you need to unite two colonies quickly, without the usual week long wait while they gently mingle after stacking them separated by a sheet of newspaper, you can use a few squirts of household air freshener.

Open the queenright recipient colony, removing the feeder and carefully placing it aside to avoid crushing bees (see above)
Find the unmated/unlaying/uncooperative queen in the broodless box and remove her (permanently I’m afraid)
Spray the top of the recipient colony with a a few squirts of air freshener
Do the same with the underside of the now queenless broodless colony
Stack the latter on top of the recipient colony
Add the feeder back, again giving a squirt or two of air freshener at the interface to stop the bees from fighting

The air freshener masks the distinctive pheromone ‘smell’ of the two colonies, allowing the bees to mingle without fighting.

That’s it.

Job done.

Caveat emptor

Like everything else on this site, I only write here from direct experience. I have successfully united quite a few colonies like this, though nothing like the number I’ve united using newspaper ⁶.

Given time and the choice I’d always use newspaper ⁷.

But this late in the season you might not have time.

A day after uniting with air freshener you can, if needed, revisit the hive and go through the double brood box to reduce it to a single box for the winter.

Does it matter which air freshener you use?

I have no idea.

I use Glade Citrus Sunny Beat as it was the cheapest I could find at the time I needed it ⁸.

Securing the queenright overwintering colony

If you consult the COLOSS records for overwintering colony losses they include a small percentage that are lost to ‘natural disasters’. COLOSS record queen failures and things like that separately, and – in an earlier paper – they define natural disasters as:

… rather loosely defined, as the causes can be very different in participating countries, including fire, storm, flooding, vandalism, bears, martens, woodpeckers, falling trees, suffocation from snow and many more.

The small percentage (0.1 – ~5%) lost to natural disasters vary from country to country, and from year to year.

What is notable about several of these natural disasters is that they should be avoidable.

If your colonies are strong and queenright, and if you’ve fed and treated them to give them the best chance of surviving the winter, it makes sense to do what you can to avoid these natural disasters.

The hive

I use a combination of polystyrene and cedar hives. Sometimes I even combine the two together in a single hive. The majority of my poly hives are from Abelo or Swienty which, for reasons explained elsewhere, are compatible with all the woodenware I own.

The apiary in winter …

I see no difference in the overwintering colony success between poly and cedar hives.

This doesn’t mean there isn’t one.

I’ve only run about 20 colonies for the last decade. That’s ~200 overwintered colonies. If there were wildly different survival rates I would have noticed. Since I haven’t noticed it either means there is no difference or there is a subtle difference but my sample size is too low ⁹.

All my colonies overwinter on open mesh floors, usually with the Varroa tray removed. The hives in the photo above are being monitored for mite drop in early December following oxalic acid treatment.

DIY insulation over a perspex crownboard

In addition, all of my hives have a 50 mm thick block of Kingspan under the roof, integrated into the roof, or integrated into the crownboard. In the bee shed my hives have no roof, and are just capped with a block of Kingspan over the crownboard.

Look, no roof … but insulation present all year round

Make sure the stack of boxes in the hive are stable and secure. If the apiary is exposed, strap everything together securely. A colony might survive a week or two of summer showers with no roof, but will surely perish if exposed for any length of time to cold, wet winter weather.

Apiary security

It is unlikely that you will visit the apiary much in the winter. Once a fortnight is more than enough.

It might therefore be worth considering whether it is sufficiently secure from the attention of unwanted human visitors. Unfortunately, incidents of vandalism occur throughout the season, but a hive kicked over in midwinter has less chance of being detected quickly.

Or of surviving.

Although it should probably be included within the ‘Varmints’ section below, large animals – cows, deer, elk, bear, rhino, kangaroo ¹⁰ – might also inadvertently, or deliberately, overturn a hive.

Safe and secure

Fences, either a couple of strands of barbed wire, an electric fence or a full-blown razor-wire topped security barrier, are usually sufficient to keep large two and four-legged visitors at bay.

COLOSS mention both falling trees and flooding as natural disasters.

Winter storms can and do wreak havoc in some years, though I always associate the summer with storm-toppled trees because they’re in full leaf and therefore offer more resistance. It’s certainly worth looking to see if trees adjacent to your apiary might threaten the hives.

Where did Noah keep his bees? In his Ark hive.

Flooding appears to be on the increase. I have experienced minor flooding in one of my apiaries. None of the hives were threatened, but it made access inconvenient for weeks at a time. Again, it’s worth imagining the worst and preparing for it.

Hives often float, but not necessarily the right way up 🙁

Varmints

Having dealt with the threat of large animals ¹¹ it’s also worth considering the damage some small animals can do to hives.

The two main culprits are woodpeckers and mice. Both can be a menace once the frosts set in, but rarely before that.

Woodpeckers, and specifically green woodpeckers (yaffles ¹²), can learn that beehives contain a wonderful bounty of pupae and larvae. It is learned behaviour. Some green woodpeckers never go near hives, others routinely target them.

In Warwickshire, hives needed to be protected from yaffles. Here in Fife the bird is very much less common and I’ve never had any hives targeted.

Wrapped for winter …

Protection is straightforward. If needed, I simply wrap the hives in a single sheet of DPM (damp proof membrane), pinned in place with drawing pins. The bird need to cling onto the vertical side of the hive to easily burrow through to the brood. The DPM stops them doing this. Leaving bits of the roof or sides of the floor exposed is therefore not a problem ¹³.

Pixie or Dixie?

Mice access hives through overly large entrances. I only have problems with the stupidly cavernous maw of my preferred Everynuc. Mice eat pollen and stores, destroy the brood and wee everywhere 🙁 Thoroughly unpleasant.

Open wide …

A standard mouseguard pinned in place throughout the coldest months of the winter prevents them accessing the hive. Alternatively, on a full-sized colony, the kewl-style underfloor entrances are very effective at excluding rodents.

Kewl open mesh floor showing L-shaped entrance slot

Kewl floor entrance …

That’s not the end of winter-related tasks, but it’s just about all you need to do for your colonies before winter proper starts.

There are some midwinter checks that are needed, but we’ll deal with them nearer the time.

Note

We also have pine martens at one of my apiaries. They are reported to vandalise hives and steal honey (and presumably brood) in late winter. Pine martens are incredibly agile and no fence exists that could keep them out. Time will tell whether they are a problem.

In the meantime, here’s one living up to its name, stealing a pine offcut used to slow down the rate at which they empty the squirrel feeder of peanuts 🙂

2018 in retrospect

How was 2018 for you?

It was a good year here in Fife, with more of everything; more snow, more colonies, more honey (much more honey 🙂 ), more sheds, more wasps, more swarms and more dead Varroa.

Actually, the ‘more dead mites’ isn’t quite correct but I’ll return to that later.

The Beast from the East

There’s not much to say about the winter, but as we moved from February into March Storm Emma (also called the Beast from the East) arrived. The wind whipped the snow across the Howe of Fife (the largely flat centre of the county), dumping large drifts whenever it eddied over hedges or buildings. I had to dig us out of the house and the road from the village was impassable for 2-3 days.

The Beast from the East …

The colonies were all snug, if not warm, and weathered the storm without mishap. The reality is that if colonies are properly prepared for winter there’s almost nothing to do – or nothing you can do – until the weather picks up again in the Spring.

During the early part of the year I finished preparing our new bee shed. The bees were installed at the very end of March, soon followed by installation of a solar lighting system.

As I write this (early December 2018) the old apiary site has recently been bulldozed flat to make way for a new road. The contractors felled most of the beautiful trees in the well-established arboretum that surrounded the apiary.

All that’s left now is a muddy, ugly scar across the landscape waiting to be tarmac’d. Every time I drive past the line from The Last Resort by The Eagles, “Some rich men come and raped the land”, comes to mind.

That’s progress 🙁

On a slightly brighter note, we did save the original shed and it’s recently been reassembled on the new apiary site. This will provide some much needed storage space. The new shed is bigger, but still a bit cramped when used for storage, work and bees.

In like a lion, out like a lamb

Well, almost. March continued cold but the weather had picked up by mid-April. I’d lost just two colonies in the winter, both due to failed queens. By the third week of April I’d started inspections ¹ and colonies were all looking pretty good.

The weather got better and better, the oil seed rape (OSR) flowered and the bees started hammering it. Only one of my apiaries had OSR in range and they did really well.

Capped honey super frame …

By the middle of June the OSR was over and the honey was all extracted. The high glucose content of OSR nectar means it crystallises fast and very hard. It needs to be extracted before this happens in the frames. Some find OSR honey rather bland or an acquired taste. However, I’ve just processed the first couple of buckets into soft set honey and it’s excellent on toast.

The June gap

In terms of beekeeping it was non-stop. June was frantically busy. Even before the the Spring honey was off the crowded colonies had started to make preparations for swarming.

Just as the bees were preparing to move house I was also busy moving into a new house. It was manic. As fast as I put split boards into colonies more queen cells would appear. I started to run out of frames and brood boxes. I managed to hold some colonies back by slicing out great slabs of drone comb. This takes just a few seconds using foundationless frames and gives the bees something to do rather than make swarm preparations.

And in between all this I was interminably packing, driving and unpacking rental vans doing my own move.

I know I lost a couple of swarms – from about 20 colonies in total ² – which left me feeling a bit guilty. At least they left with very low Varroa levels so, for a time at least, they would not contribute to the mite levels in the local environment. To ‘compensate’ for colonies that might establish themselves somewhere unwanted I donned my beesuit and destroyed a huge wasps nest in a neighbours roof space.

I also gratefully received a good-sized swarm in a bait hive.

The ‘June gap’ refers to the dearth of nectar that often occurs at this time of year. This year – despite excellent weather – was no exception. I didn’t feed colonies but many around me did. A few were a bit light but were OK until the summer flow started … which it did in late June or early July.

The flow must go on

Lime, blackberry, clover, rosebay willow herb and goodness knows what else. It was excellent. Coupled with continued good weather, hives got taller and taller as more supers were added. I ran out of supers altogether.

With lots of nectar and great weather for inspections it was my best beekeeping year since I moved back to Scotland.

Laden foragers returning …

The good weather also aided queen mating which helped with requeening and preparing nucs for overwintering. About 75% of my colonies were requeened this year, almost all through splits of one type of another.

And then it was all over

The flow eventually stopped and the extraction was interminable. Not that I’m complaining. Super after super after super looked like this:

Ready to extract …

Wasps were a big problem in late summer. I lost a queenless colony and a nuc to the stripey blighters. Amazingly I managed to save the queen from the nuc ³ and she’s now heading a strong colony through the winter.

After a fortnight or so tidying, stock-taking (uniting colonies, cleaning cleared supers, making up a few additional nucs) and ‘final’ inspections it was time to start Varroa treatment and feeding colonies up for winter.

I’ve deliberately finished the season with fewer colonies than I started, but with more overwintering nucleus colonies for sale or making up losses. The absence of a work/life balance means I want to reduce my personal colony numbers by about a third for the next couple of years (to ~10), with another 6-8 overwintering for work. I’ll still be busy 🙁

Mite news

Mite levels have been extraordinarily low this season. For work we uncapped many hundreds to low thousands of individual pupae ⁴ and found no more than half a dozen mites all season. We’ve seen no evidence of DWV symptoms and irregular mite counts on the Varroa trays have yielded very low numbers.

All colonies were treated by sublimation with an oxalic acid-containing treatment in early September, with three applications at five day intervals. The mite drop was so low (<200 from eight colonies in total in one apiary) that I was concerned that the treatment had failed. I therefore followed it up with Apivar strips in half the colonies. One or two additional dead mites appeared, but that was all.

So, not more dead Varroa, but probably a much greater proportion of the mite population were killed.

The Apiarist in 2018

This is the 300^th post over the last five years. Yes, I’m surprised as well. I missed only one Friday when my hosting service was either not hosting or not providing a service 🙁

A few weeks ago I moved the site to a cloud-based virtual server (Amazon LightSail) which, to me at least ⁵ appears faster and more stable. Processor load is 10% what it was and page response times seem much better. Tell me if it isn’t.

Unique visitor numbers and page reads continue to increase year on year with both up ~33% on last year. What is particularly reassuring is that articles I’ve written on disease management now feature as the most read over the course of the year (though several were written in previous years). The ‘top five’ are:

When to treat? – the importance of correctly timing the early autumn Varroa treatment.
Feeding fondant – quicker, easier and possibly better for the bees.
Oxalic acid preparation – making Api-Bioxal solution properly for trickle treating.
Vertical splits and making increase – manipulations for swarm control and expansion.
Making soft set honey – making all that OSR honey look good and sell well.

“When to treat” monthly page views (5/2/16 to 13/12/18)

The composite page on ‘Equipment‘ also featured amongst this top five, but takes visitors off to all sorts of articles on bee sheds, DIY and hive reviews.

And the future …

This post is already too long. I’ve just checked and see I have 55 posts with working titles and scrawled notes in my drafts folder ⁶. That suggests there’s likely to be something written next year.

Until then … Happy New Year

Convenience or laziness?

It’s cold and dark and all is quiet in the apiary. Hives appear somnolent. Colonies are clustered ¹ and, other than the odd corpse or two on the landing board, I’ve not seen a bee for at least a fortnight.

The apiary in winter …

Based upon previous experience I suspect colonies are – or very soon will be – broodless. I usually reckon that the first extended (2-3 weeks) period of cold weather ² in the winter is the most likely time for the colony to be broodless.

In 2016/17 this was the first week in December.

In 2017/18 it was just a day or two later.

In both instances, when the hives were checked, they had no brood.

What’s all this about being broodless?

If a colony is broodless there are no capped cells in which the Varroa mite can ‘hide’. As a consequence it’s an ideal time to apply a miticide like a trickled solution of Api-Bioxal ³.

There are very good reasons why a midwinter OA treatment is necessary, particularly if you treated early enough in the autumn to protect the overwintering workers from the ravages of Deformed Wing Virus (DWV). High DWV levels reduce the lifespan of bees and contribute to many (possibly most) winter colony losses. I’ve even suggested here that “isolation starvation” might actually be due to Varroa-transmitted viral disease.

Time of treatment and mite numbers

Early autumn treatment protects the winter bees but also leaves the long autumn for the residual mites to continue replicating.

And there will be residual mites. No treatment is 100% effective.

So, paradoxically, if you treated early enough in the autumn to really help protect the winter bees, your mite levels will be higher at the end of the year.

Which also means they’ll be higher at the beginning of next year.

Not a good start to the 2019 season 🙁

Convenience or laziness?

Many beekeepers, for convenience, laziness or historical precedent, choose to apply the winter OA treatment between Christmas and New Year. I suspect that this is often too late. If the queen starts laying again around the winter solstice there will be sealed brood – and therefore unreachable Varroa – by the end of the month.

I’d prefer to have a cold and damp afternoon in the apiary slaughtering Varroa now than the convenience of treating them less effectively during the Christmas holiday period.

The latter might be more convenient … the office will be closed, I’ll be replete with turkey and sprouts and it will be a good excuse to ‘escape’ visiting relatives and yet more mince pies ⁴.

But is it the best time for your bees?

We have the technology

We have a couple of hives with Arnia hive monitors fitted ⁵. These have a temperature probe inserted into the brood nest. Brood rearing temperature is around 34°C. Here is a trace of one colony over the last month.

Arnia hive monitor temperature

The colony temperature was pretty stable (around 33-35°C) until about the 19th of November and has dropped about 10°C since then. Although I’ve not opened the colony I think that this is additional evidence that the colony is broodless ⁶.

Beekeeping by numbers

Keeping bees properly involves being aware of the seasons, the available forage and the state of the colony. This varies from month to month and year to year ⁷.

You can’t mechanically (‘by the numbers’) add supers on the 5^th of May and harvest honey on the 15^th of June. Sure, it might work some years, but is it the best time to do it?

Similarly, you can’t optimally treat a colony for Varroa on the 30^th of December unless the climatic conditions and state of the colony coincide to make that the best time to treat.

It might be, but I suspect that generally it’s a bit late if there is a brood break.

If you’re going to the trouble of preparing the OA treatment, donning the beesuit and disturbing the colony you might as well do it at the right time for the bees.

I’ll be treating in between the predicted sleet showers and sunny periods this weekend.

Time to treat

Isn’t evolution a wonderful thing? This post started with a working title of “Know your enemy” and was on a different topic altogether. I’ll save that for next week.

STOP PRESS

The above was written at the beginning of the week. Now the weekend is closer it’s clear the weather is going to be cold with heavy snow predicted. Unless the forecast is wrong (and how often does that happen?!) I’ll hold off treating until a) it’s over 5°C, and b) the roads are safe.

Survival of the fattest

Winter bees have high levels of vitellogenin, a glycolipoprotein ¹, deposited in their fat bodies which act as a food reservoir for the long winter.

These fat winter bees are essential for the successful overwintering of the colony.

Last week I discussed the major points that need attention for overwintering i.e. strong, healthy colonies with ample food in a weathertight hive.

This week I want to explore the relationship between colony strength, health – specifically with regard to Varroa and deformed wing virus (DWV) – and isolation starvation.

Isolation starvation describes the phenomenon where a small colony of tightly clustered honey bees gets isolated from the honey stores laid down in autumn, resulting – typically during protracted cold periods – in the colony starving to death.

Isolation starvation …

It’s both a pathetic and distressing sight. Bees, with their heads crammed into the bottom of cells searching for food, dying from starvation when literally inches away from capped stores.

Deaths and births

In temperate climates the winter is characterised by low temperatures and little or no forage for the bees. The queen usually stops laying sometime in autumn and starts again around the turn of the year. During the intervening period she may lay intermittently, but generally in limited amounts.

The fat bodied winter bees that are reared in late summer and early autumn are long-lived (about 6 months) and are responsible for getting the colony through the winter. They protect the queen, thermoregulate the hive and they help rear the brood raised in the autumn and through the winter.

In their absence – or if there are just too few of them – the colony will perish.

Winter bees do not all live for 6 months. The usual figure quoted is ~175 days ². Some live shorter lives, some longer … up to 9 months under certain conditions.

Importantly, in studies I’ve discussed at length previously, high levels of DWV reduces the lifespan of winter bees. We know this because, in Varroa-infested colonies, researchers ³ have shown that the winter bees die off faster ⁴.

Live fast, die young

Winter bees with high levels of DWV don’t really live fast … but they do die young. In the studies above the average lifespan of winter bees was reduced by 20% in the colonies that died overwinter.

There are a couple of important things to note here. Dainat and colleagues were not looking at bees in the presence or absence of Varroa, or in the presence or absence of high or low levels of DWV. They simply looked at hives that succumbed in the winter or that survived, then measured DWV and Varroa levels. It’s a subtle but important difference. Their surviving colonies still had Varroa and DWV.

From analysis of hives that died or survived, and having marked known numbers of bees in late summer, they could determine the life expectancy of workers – in their surviving colonies it was ~88 days, in those that died it was ~71 days.

Healthy colonies

The gradual death of bees through the winter coupled with the reduced lifespan of winter bees with high levels of DWV explains why colonies need to be strong and healthy.

The following graphs are based upon modelled data ⁵, but show the influence of colony size and winter bee lifespan.

The first graph – the least important – simply shows the lifespan of bees. The graph plots the number of bees (on the vertical axis) in a population that die at a particular time (on the horizontal axis) after the start of the experiment. The blue bees have a longer average lifespan than the red bees ⁶.

Lifespan of winter bees

In the following graphs remember that the blue bees are healthy, with low levels of Varroa and – consequently – low levels of DWV. The red bees are unhealthy and have high levels of Varroa and DWV.

Using this lifespan data we can look at the influence on the total number of winter bees in a colony (on the vertical axis) over time (horizontal). Imagine that the horizontal axis is the long, dark, wet and cold months of winter. Starting in early September and running through until late March.

Brrrr 🙁

Winter bee numbers in healthy (blue) and unhealthy (red) colonies

It is clear, and of course entirely predictable, that the numbers of bees in the healthy (blue) colony are higher than those in the unhealthy colony at each time point. If the average lifespan is reduced (by disease) more bees will have died by a particular time point when compared with a healthy colony at the same timepoint.

Finally, consider that the shaded section of the graph represents the lower limit of bee numbers for viability. If the number of bees in the colony drops into this region the colony will perish.

Simplistically – and in reality – starting with similar numbers of bees a healthy colony will survive longer than an unhealthy colony.

Strong colonies

Using a similar approach we can also look at the influence of the average lifespan of winter bees on the survival of strong or weak colonies.

The following graph shows the numbers of bees in the colony over time for a strong colony (solid line) and a weak colony (dashed line) where worker bee lifespan is identical ⁷.

Winter bee numbers in strong and weak colonies.

Winter bee numbers in large (strong) and small (weak) colonies with the same average lifespan.

The shaded section of the graph again represents colony oblivion.

Large (strong) colonies take longer to drop below the threshold for viability and so – all other things being equal – will survive longer ⁸.

Mix’n’match

A strong colony with high levels of Varroa and DWV might actually survive less well than a weak but healthy colony.

Strong unhealthy colonies might survive less well than weak healthy colonies.

Large unhealthy colonies might survive less well than small healthy colonies.

In this graph the weak but healthy colony drops below the ‘viability threshold’ after the strong but unhealthy colony ⁹.

Winter bees and brood rearing

This is modelled data, but it makes the point clearly. Large and/or healthy colonies retain more of the all-important winter bees and so survive longer.

Simples.

The differences might not appear marked. However, for convenience ¹⁰ I’ve omitted the influence of winter bee numbers on the ability of the colony to rear brood.

If there are more winter bees, the colony is able to thermoregulate the hive better. It’s therefore able to keep any brood present warm. It’s therefore able to rear more brood.

As a consequence, the differences in bee numbers between the large or small, or the healthy and unhealthy, colonies will be much more striking.

Critically ¹¹ the strength of the colony coming out of the winter is often the rate-limiting determinant for spring build-up to exploit early season nectar flows. Weak colonies develop less well.

Isolation starvation

Finally, returning to that pathetic little cluster of starving bees in the image at the top of the page. What is the relationship between colony health, strength and isolation starvation?

It’s now time to dust off my weak-to-non-existent Powerpoint skills …

Isolation starvation schematic

Again, it’s straightforward. A large (strong) overwintering colony (A above) only has to move a short distance to access stores in midwinter. In contrast, a small (weak) overwintering colony has to move much further.

Consequently, small colonies become isolated from their stores during long, cold periods when the colony is clustered.

Prediction

Many beekeepers will be familiar with isolation starvation of overwintering colonies.

Most would explain this in terms of “very cold weather and the cluster was unable to reach its stores”.

Some would explain this in terms of “the colony was far too small to reach the stores when clustered”.

Very few would explain this in terms of “the Varroa and DWV levels were too high because of poor disease management last autumn. Inevitably most of my winter bees died off early in the winter, leaving a very small cluster of bees that were unable to reach the stores.“.

I suspect the real cause of isolation starvation is probably disease … specifically poor management of Varroa levels and consequently high levels of DWV in the colony.

Colophon

Herbert Spencer

Another post, another poor pun in the title. Survival of the fittest encapsulates the Darwinian evolutionary principle that the form of an organism that survives is the one able to leave the most copies of itself in future generations. Darwin didn’t actually use the term until the 5^th edition (1869) of his book On the origin of the species. Instead, the phrase was first used by Herbert Spencer in 1864 after reading Darwin’s book. Whilst ‘survival of the fittest’ suggests natural selection, Spencer was also a proponent of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, Lamarckism.