Both hives now queenright

I inspected both hives yesterday. The super (or 'honeybox' if you like) on Hive1 is a good two thirds full so I've ordered a new one to add because they're going to need more space for honey -that's a good thing. On the other hand it means I'd better learn how to extract and deal with honey soon which I hadn't expected to need to know till next year. The super on Hive1 is actually a national sized brood box in fact which is a lot bigger that a proper super, and now there's loads of honey in there it's seriously heavy. Luckily I'm fit as a butcher's dog 8-) so I can still lift the thing but I really wouldn't want to carry it far.

Anyway I was half way through checking the frames in the brood box (brood box = the bottom box of the hive, the bit where the eggs get laid and bees get raised)  when I spotted the queen. As anyone will tell you the queen bee looks different to the other bees and she's bigger. But let's be honest folks: she doesn't look *that* much different and she's not *that* much bigger and spotting the one *slightly* different bee out of 50-60,000 other bees isn't easy.

That's one of the reasons bee keeper's tend to catch the queen and put a blob of paint on her back. It's far easier to spot the one with a splot of blue or red paint on her than it is to spot the slightly bigger and possibly possibly paler or maybe darker one. The colour you use depends on the year here's a chart of what colour to use for what year. The colours are green, blue, white, yellow and red. Yes somebody thought a blob of yellow paint would make a particular bee easier to spot amongst a few thouand bees running around wax of various shades of yellow.I've never seen a queen bee in this hive before, except the one I put in in her cage end even her never since that day, so I grabbed my queen catcher (plastic clip cage thing) and snapped a picture of her with my, by then, slightly sticky camera phone and here it is:

Hive1 Queen Bee

This was the first colony I bought and had turned out to be queenless so I'd added a white marked queen I'd purchased later. You'll notice that this queen doesn't show any white paint. I'm pretty sure that's not her. What probably happened was the queen I added got released by the bees, started laying eggs then the bees decided to raise a new queen of their own and either she or they then killed her. They're nice like that (more on honey bee politics in a later post.)  That's often the way it goes with requeening tho: the bees know what they want from their queen whereas a queen supplier will ship out every mated queen they have. As you can see she is a little bit different to the rest but imagine trying to spot her amongst this lot:

National frame with commercial adaptor

-and that's one of 11 frames with two sides each, so you're looking for her in that x22. I didn't find the queen in Hive2 today but I was relieved to find eggs are now being laid so I know there is one in there. I had suspected they'ed raised a new queen and was wondering how long it'd take for her to get mated. No new brood in there though so she's only started laying within the past 3 days. Whilst I was in Hive2 I pulled out one of the national frames which was full of honey and replaced it with a new commercial frame.

Holy Crownboards?

There's much discussion (and yep I mean arguements) on the various beekeeping forums about whether or not hives should have holes in their crownboards for ventilation. The crownboard is a basically a ceiling for the hive that goes underneath the roof. Some of the old beekeeping books say  you need those holes for ventilation, some say you don't and some don't mention it at all. Back in the day wooden beehives all had solid wooden floors, since the fairly recent arrival of the varroa mite there's been a shift to wire mesh floors which the mites can fall through -that's usefull because it lets you work out how many mites are in the hive and so on, also any mites that drop out aren't bothering your bees anymore. Of course replacing a solid wooden floor with a wire mesh means you've suddenly added a load of ventilation to your hive.

Crownboards often have holes in them for a couple of reasons, to let bees in or out or to allow access to a feeder. After looking at the various arguements for and against leaving the holes open these holes I thought the bees probaby have a far better idea of what they want than a lot of people arguing on the internet so I'd let them bees decide for themselves.

I stapled a mesh to a little frame and popped it over the hole. A few hours later the bees had propolised it into place, If the bees don't want ventilation they'll block it up, if they do they'll leave it open. Simple as that. Also if they want more or less ventilation they can block up or unblock more of the mesh  as they choose. Not really rocket science is it? Three days later here's the mesh:

Grille over crownboard hole

The bees had reduced the hole slightly but not hugely. I've seen how much propolis this hive can lay down in a short time so I know they could have closed it if they wanted to, probably in winter they will. I'm not entirely sure what the bees on top of it are doing but they seemed happy enough. I still have the other crown board hole open near the front of the hive -so the bees can access a reserviour of used wax and propolis but more on that in another post.

For anyone wondering what propolis is: it's basically bee glue. The bees make it from tree sap and it's sticky as hell. It's used by them to block up holes and gaps in the hive and works really well. They also use it for things like entombing dead mice in the hive if one's managed to get in and then been killed.

The weekly hive inspection

Saturday was hive inspection day. You're meant to inspect them every 7 to 9 days over the swarm period (or "Summer" as I like to call it). Mainly you're looking for signs that they're going to swarm, specifically new queen cells being made at the bottom of the frames in the hive. What are frames? They're the removeabe wooden frames that the bees make their comb in. Before the advent of removeable frames back in 1851 to extact the honey meant killing all your bees.

So in todays inspection I opened up hive1. They've been busy drawing comb and storing honey in the super, the whole hive was pretty full of bees. In the brood box I couldn't see the queen at all -I've never actually seen a queen in this hive so far. But I'm pretty sure they have one because apart from all the stages of brood being present I could also see lots of eggs. Bee eggs look a bit like a really tiny grain of rice. See for yourself:

Bee eggs!

The eggs take about 3 days to hatch so seeing them in the hive means the queen was present at least three days ago. Whilst there's eggs in the hive if something happens to the queen (like a clumsy beekeeper drops a hive tool on her head or squashes her under a box or something) then the bees will make a new queen from one of these eggs. There was no sign that they're making a new queen so I'm happy with that.

As I mentioned in an earlier post bees get their protein from plants in the form of pollen. They're sort of vegetarians. I say sort of because if there's a problem with any larva or pupae the bees will pull them out and 'recycle' the protein. Anyway back to this pollen: They carry the pollen in pollen baskets, some long hairs on their back lower legs. Here's a rather blurred picture of a bee returning with full pollen baskets:

Bee with pollen

Once in the hive the pollen is stored in comb for use later. They use pollen to make bee bread. No, I didn't just make that up. They take some pollen and knead honey into it to make bee bread.

Stored pollen

When bees are out collecting pollen they only ever collect from one type of flower at a time and store each pollen type seperately. The different pollens from different plants vary in colour, and if you have nothing better to do you can get a pollen colour chart and work out what pollens your bees are bringing in. I won't be doing that, I'm sure the bees know what they're doing. People tend to assume bees pull most of their food from ground level flowers like bedding plants and so on but they also use trees. Living where I do there's plenty of mature trees for them to plunder.

Whilst in the hive I pulled out the last national size frame (the bees came on 5 of these originally) brushed the bees off it, removed the padding I'd put around it to make it up to commercial frame size and placed it in the super (the bit were the bees make their honey) and popped a new commercial frame in the brood box. So now all the frames in there are the right size at last. I haven't started swapping out the frames in hive2 yet may do that next year. It's a lot easier once all the bees are on the right size frames for the hive though.

I also had a look in hive2. The hive that I believe recently raised a new queen. I couldn't see a queen in there. Last week I moved a frame of brood and eggs from hive1 to hive2. If you move eggs into a queenless hive they start making a new queen pretty sharpish but they don't appear to have done this with the added frame so I think they do have a queen now but she hasn't started laying yet. Hope she gets a wriggle on. In Hive2 they've started drawing out the honeycomb in the super I added too. I'm still feeding this colony as they're needing to make lots of wax. It's generally accepted it takes 8 kilos of honey to make one kilo of wax so I figure I don't want to put them under too much strain whilst they're still getting established.

Wasps

Spotted some wasps flying near the hive today, and a dead one on the floor in front of  them. Wasps are happy to steal honey from a hive, being carnivorous they'll probably happily eat bees, steal eggs and larvae too. There's also some larger hornets will decimate a colony in next to no time but I don't think we have them in England yet thanks to our climate and the channel. Wasps are physically stronger than bees and in a one on one fight the smart money is on the wasp. However a healthy honey bee colony should be able to fight off a random wasp -albeit at the cost of a couple of bees, but enough wasps can overpower them and even kill off the whole colony. What beekeepers do to keep their bees safe from wasps is put out a wasp trap near the hive, although I've always wondered how many extra wasps are drawn toward the hive by the bait in the trap. There's other things you can do too like reduce the size of the hive entrance to make it easier for the bees to defend and not spill syrup and honey all over the place so the wasps aren't so attracted in the first place. I may put a small trap out there myself whilst hive2 is queenless but I'd rather not as wasps play their own part in our ecology. Whilst bees get their protein from pollen wasps get theirs from eating other insects and whatever bits of meat they can find. That makes them pretty useful around the garden as they eat the bugs that're dining on your plants, as well as pollinating them.

Vespula Vulgaris (I think)

Addendum (23/7/11) Turns out there's more wasps than usual this year to the point that the National Bee Unit (part of FERA) have published an advisory about wasps for beekeepers. coincidentally today after inspecting the hives I saw quite a few wasps and saw some attacking individual bees so I guess the common and german wasp does kill adult bees. I stood and watched for a while, killed six of them with a stick then made some small wasp traps.

The Bad Beekeeper's Club

For me mornings are that time of day when you either wake up late to a screaming alarm and have a mad rush to get to work more or less on time or, at the weekend, that time when you stumble home worse for wear after a heavy night out and crawl into bed. For other people the morning is, I'm told, time to watch some TV. Aside from not having time in the morning I don't own a TV anyway, it's the 21st Century, things have moved on since 1926 and I replaced it with an XBMC pc years ago. Anyway the upshot is that I don't watch breakfast television. If I did I might have had a clue who Bill Turnbull is. But I don't. So I didn't.

Turns out Bill Turnbull is or possibly was a breakfast television presenter. Yes, as if this blog wasn't already exciting enough I'm waffling on about a breakfast TV news reader. It turns out he's also a beekeeper. And it turns out he's written a book. About beekeeping. It's called "The Bad Beekeeper's Club" and it's rather good -except for the bit with Chris Tarrant in it, although as I recall from my television owning, TV License paying days bits of anything with Chris Tarrant in it tended to be a bit pap. Anyway the rest of the book is rather good. It's not another 'how to keep some bees' guide but an autobiographical piece about his beekeeping experiences. Basically it's exactly like this blog, only better written, more interesting and by a bloke who knows a lot more about bees than me.

A Right Riveting Read. Really.

Pleasure, pain, sweat, smoke, killlings, knife wielding bikers, dangerous dogs and amusing anecdotes it's all in there. Ok so it's no World War Z but it's still a good read, if you're interested in bees that is.

Waiting on a queen

Hive2 was queenless but had queen cells in it. On my next inspection I saw that two of these had hatched and the others looked like they had been torn down by the workers. I also think I saw a very small virgin queen on one frame so all looked to be going well on the road to a queenright hive.  However I still didn't see any eggs or uncapped brood. I checked the hive again a week later, still no eggs or brood. I did some searching online apparently it can take 30 days for the queen to get mated and start laying. I know there's drones about for her to mate with because I have the other hive with it's company drones and I happen to know there's someone else keeping bees a few streets away and two hives in a wildlife project on the edge of Pearson Park so I'm pretty sure she'll be able to mate if we get some good weather.

After 30 days there may be no young bees left in the hive to tend the brood -although to be fair that didn't seem to have been a problem when hive1 was queenless for so long before requeening. Anyway I decided to pull a frame with uncapped brood and eggs from hive1 and place it in hive2. I picked out a commercial frame covered in capped stores to give the bees in hive1 in exchange for their brood. Thinking about it later I realised this was a mistake. What I'd done was effectively increase the hive2 population whilst at the same time decreasing their food store. What I should've done was put a new commercial frame into hive1, remove one the emptier national frame from hive2 and put it in the national box currently supering hive1. I'll know for next time

Here's a picture of some bees by the way. They're on a piece of wood I used to cover the holes in the crownboard whilst not in use. I'm told that both my colonies are buckfast bees, however I've noticed some of them (one in top left and bottom middle) look a little dark to me so I may be wrong but I suspect their queen may have met a black bee drone or two on her mating flight.

Bees

Progress/Problem in Hive2

I was feeding both hives up untill I supered hive1 then I stopped feeding it a week later. I figured hive1 could use the feed to help them draw new comb on the frames I'd put in. However I continued feeding hive2 whilst they built up their numbers. And build up their numbers they did. One day whilst replacing the feeder (got stung in the face! Ouch! Mental note to self: wear veil when feeding bees.) I realised that there were rather a lot of bees in the roof space above the crownboard. They weren't doing much just hanging about. It wasn't a massive leap of logic to realise the Brood box was full to capacity so I figured I'd better super the hive asap.

Oh in hive2 the bees had drawn all their comb really fast and made drone comb under the shallow frame as I'd hoped -this was the first time I noticed how different the two colonies were as hive1 was really dragging it's heels on drawing comb.

Anyway I ordered a national shallow, with frames and foundation -yeah I decided to go with shallows for actual honey production. I'll swap out the national frames somehow at some point but I'll figure that out later. I waited. I waited. I waited some more. The super took over 2 whole weeks to arrive. When it did arrive I got home from work and knocked the box together in a hurry, in the pouring rain. Was in such a hurry I managed to get one of the side's outer pieces on upside down -D'oh! Hasn't affected it's functionality all tho really, it's still beetight and still holds the frames level with the right amount of room below. When the rain finally let up I started treating the wood with green shed and fence paint like the rest of the kit, I had to keep stopping as the rain kept restarting. Eventually I put some cardboard on the dining table and brought the thing inside to paint it there. I gave it one layer then gave it a few hours to dry. The rain had finally gave up as darkness fell so I brought the box out gave it a second coat and popped it in an outbuilding to dry overnight. Then with a chiminea to keep me warm I assembled the shallow frames and inserted foundation finishing at 11pm which meant I could super the hive in the morning. Great!

So that's what I did. Unfortunately when I opened the hive I was unable to spot the huge fat queen with her big blue splot at all, I was also unable to see any eggs or uncapped brood. What I did see were these:

Queen cells

Four queen cells. They were halfway up the frame. I also noticed that my brood box which had been overflowing into the roofspace was now looking a little more roomy. I could be wrong but I reckon the bees probably realised they were too crowded and booted out the queen along with a cast swarm. There was no uncapped brood or eggs but still lots of capped brood on the frames. If only that super had arrived a little quicker, but it can't be helped and the bees seem to be handling it anyway.