2012 Beverley Beekeepers' Auction

Yesterday was the annual Beverley Beekeepers auction, in Woodmansey Village Hall. At last year's I got my first colony of bees. Beekeepers really like their auctions. and having never been to one prior to taking an interest in the honey bee this was my fourth. I didn't need anymore bees but I did need another queen excluder pretty soon for my attempts to raise another queen, I'd also seen there was going to be a mead filter up for grabs and I could really use one of those.

Auction Stuff!

The auction started at 12 o'clock with time for viewing for a couple of hours before that. It's a good idea to go along and see what's there and decide what you want to bid on before the auctions starts. But I didn't do that. I'd been out clubbing the night before, was out till late, up till stupidly late and didn't wake up till nearly 12. Oops. Skipping breakfast, elevensies and lunch I charged out into the pouring rain briefly pausing only to pick up some money from an ATM and then hightailed it to Woodmansey. Did I mention the pouring rain BTW? When I say rain we're talking rain of Genesis proportions, I mean chapter six not Phil Collins and Mr Gabriel. If Noah was around he'd've been rushing to load up that Ark with not enough of every animal to leave a viable gene pool. And a pool is prettymuch what the village hall car park was.

The auction had started by the time I got there but it looks like all I'd missed out on bidding on was a shedload of honey jars. There was a bigger turnout than last year's, strange given that last year was a nice warm day and yesterday was cold and wet. I bid on a bag of 67 plastic metal ends. 67 is a nice round number, although you're probably thinking "WTF is a plastic metal end!?" Well a metal end is a metal spacer you attach to the ends of frames in a hive to space them out. Nowadays they're made of plastic but the name has stuck. After that I bought a cup of tea as a late liquid brunch and took a couple of pictures of general auction stuff as this blog has been a little text heavy of late. Looking at the various items I noticed there was a heather honey press standing there. There's been a heather press at every beekeeping auction I've been to. I'm starting to think it's always the same one. It always sells too.

Heather Honey Press, appearing at every auction.

I bid on a box of shallow Manley frame parts and for my fiver came away with 30 top bars, 153 shallow frame sides, 20 national deep sides and 60 bottom bars -not bad for the price of 5 new top bars. Doubt I'll need them all but at just under 2p per item they're there if I ever do. Manley frames aren't self spacing so they're a little out of favour at the moment -of course if by chance you've just bought 67 plastic metal ends that's not going to be a major problem.

£102 worth of new frame parts for a fiver? Don't mind if I do.

The next thing I bid on was a batch of rather aged solid hive floors. I don't plan to use them for my hives but as they were at 4 for £4 I figured they'ed be handy to put things on.Two were made from what looks like floorboard and the other two from plywood. When I scorched them later at home they had a tarry kind of smell so they'ed evidently been treated with some kind of preservative so I suspect they'll be good for a few years. Pretty good deal for a pound a piece even if one had a few woodworm holes in it. Eventually we got to two framed wire Queen Excluders, they were the whole point of my being there so I started bidding. Turned out there were two of us interersted in these and I stopped bidding when they got to about half the price of new ones. Luckily it turned out there were two pairs so I got the second pair. If I'd turned up earlier and had a look at what was available and known there was a second pair I may have bidded differently, well proper prior planning and the other 4 P's spring to mind there.Still I'd got what I needed and rather cheaply too.

Get your loverly solid hive floors pound a piece! Queen Excluders two for nineteen!

After that I finished my cuppa, loaded Facebook on my phone and let the world know I was "Hanging with the cool kids - at Woodmansey Village Hall." They auctioned the live bees in the middle of the day this time but didn't go out into the rain to do it. One advantage of the rain was that anyone buying bees on the day didn't have to wait hours for foraging bees to return to their hives and nucs like we'd had to last year, with the inclement weather none of the bees would be flying. I think they all sold but I was a bit distracted trying to draw a representation of a nun on my phone in a game of Draw Something. When my attention returned to proceedings the next item up was a Baby Burco Boiler. Apparently the auctioneer used to ferment mead in one of these. They're fairly useful things, builders use them to supply gallons of hot water for their constant tea breaks and beekeepers use them to clean frames and stuff. I decided to throw a few bids in as I was never keen on boiling frames in a huge sauce pan of caustic soda perched on my gas cooker. I won the item for £11 which I was fairly pleased with.

Baby Burco

There were a few other bargains, someone got a commercial brood box for the princely sum of £2.50 -better made than the pair I made last summer I might add. Eventually we got to the two mead related items in the auction. The first was an automatic bottle filler. A strange looking thing that was greeting by mumblings of "What's that?" "What is it?" "What's it for?" I didn't really know what it was initially either but the seller had rather wisely printed and laminated a sign saying "Bottle your mead" from which I was able to figure out what it did, didn't really take a Baker Street based Consulting Detective to figure that one out.. Nobody else wanted it so I offered a pound and won. It's not exactly an essential item but for a solitary golden nugget I'll give it a try. After that was the wine filter, helpfully signed "Filter your mead." This was actually a Harris Quickfine kit consisting of two wine filters and two buckets one of which has a hole in the bottom the filter goes in and 6 containers of chemicals which had 'expired' back in 2005 -but lets be honest a tub of perlite is still a tub of perlite even if it's spent 7 years sat in someone's garage, these aren't exactly the most volatile substances known to man after all, half of them were unopened. I paid a fiver for the filter and chemicals. Being almost at the end of the auction I decided to hang about to the finish and got 10 new Jenter punches for my trouble -you use these to make Queen cells so I'm thinking they'll come in handy for my nuc project, made a frame for them today and I'll post about them at a later date. I also picked up a manipulation cloth for another pound. A manipulation cloth is a weighted cloth you put over an open bee hive with a slit in the middle for you to work on one frame at a time, you can acheive the same effect with two tea towels if you like. I'm thinking it'll be useful with Hive1 what with them being a little flighty at the moment.

When I got home I found the Burco Boiler was actually dead as a doornail. Well that's the chance you take with an auction, everything is sold as seen. It'd been PAT tested and evidently wasn't about to electrocute me, although it wasn't about to do anything anything else either. I checked the fuse, that was fine. After a little thought I whipped out my multimeter and a screwdriver took the bottom cover off it and started poking away. There isn't much to these boilers, it's basically a five gallon drum, a switch and a heating element.

Troubleshooting

The multimemeter showed me electricity was reaching the switch but not leaving it. Grabbing some pliers I disconnected the switch and attached the power straight to the heating element, that worked fine. I then removed the switch and noticed the casing was partially open on it. Prizing it all the way open everything looked fine to my electrically uneducated eye. A little more investigation into how it worked and I realised the misaligned casing was stopping two contacts meeting. Popped it back together, turned it on and watched it boil up some water. Nice. It's seen a lot of use and has quite a bit of scale in it so for the time being I'm leaving it tucked out of the way with a 16 litres of supermarket cola in it. I'm thinking the phosphoric acid should eventually dissolve the scale. Interestingly or possibly rather worryingly when I heated up the Cola it smelt exactly like the bathroom surface cleaner I use on the cat's tray. :-s

All in all quite a successful day.

Edit (17/6/2012) the calcification was too much for the cola to deal with so I resorted to some washing machine descaler tablets, five at a time. It's now gleaming inside.

Weather and Warnings of Starvation

I got an email from the National Bee Unit at The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs today. They maintain a great big database of beekeepers and apiary locations so they can keep bee keepers updated with warnings and info as and when they need to. Last year they sent one advising wasps were having a population boom so predation on honey bees was a concern. Today they were advising that due to the recent poor weather there's a chance of bees starving so to check their food and  feed them up.

Rain and cold weather stops bees flying -no flying equals no foraging and no foraging, as any hunter gatherer will tell you, means no food on the mud hut table. There's were some days of glorious sunshine recently when the bees made the most of the time window they have to gather food, however with this fairly freaky random weather there hasn't been a huge amount of food for them to collect anyway. Something I've noticed with this rapidly changing weather is that bees can read the weather better than me.

The above footage was shot after work on 20th April, 2012, I'd got home, it was nice bright and sunny. You can hear how busy the bees are but you can't really make out how many of them there were in the air at the time -but believe me there was a lot! After briefly filming the bees going crazy I decided to take advantage of the good weather and knock up some dummy boards I needed -basically a false frame for the hive that fills up space instead of leaving a gap the bees will have to heat or might build brace comb in. I brought out the wood, a saw, right angle measuring thing whose name I still don't know -I should google it sometime really but I'm still thinking it's probably called a t-square, a pinpush, a few boxes of nails, a craft knife, two hammers and a tape measure. Whilst I was doing this the activity around the hive ground to a complete halt. I thought nothing of it selected Winter Hill by Miss Derringer on my phone and started work. Then it began to rain. It seems the bees had been able to tell it was going to start raining and got under cover about five minutes before it began.

So yes, unpredictable weather and a message from DeFRA warning of starving colonies because of it. When I last checked the hives I was able to see a lot of capped brood in both, this mean that new bees would be hatching out within 2 weeks at most. New bees means a bigger workforce but it also means more mouths to feed and it takes a while for the young bees to graduate to foraging so this meant a greater demand on whatever stores the colonies already had. Well I know Hive2 has loads of stores as I've been feeding them up to build numbers for the nuc but I haven't been feeding Hive1, in fact when the weather was looking particularly good I'd somewhat optimistically plopped a super on top of it. A quick look in the super this afternoon showed not much of the foundation in in it had been drawn out and there were no stores in it at all. There were also quite a few bees wandering about in the super which could well've been a sign that they were low on food. :( Luckily I had 2 litres of spare sugar syrup sat in the fridge, I just needed to remove the Super first.

I whipped out the Queen Excluder, dropped one of the rhombus escape clearer boards I'd made last year and waited an hour for most of the bees to scoot through it. When I went back the bees had gone through the clearer so I removed the super and the clearer, replaced the crownboard stuck a contact feeder full of syrup over the central hole and an empty super on top of that then added the roof and green roof boxes on top.

In other completely unrelated news I've just noticed Blogger has a built in spellchecker. Think I'll be making use of that..

Bees on the box

Been watching some honey bee related programs.

Recently the BBC Two's Natural World series showed an episode called Queen of the Savannah which followed the fortunes of a colony of African honey bees and a herd of elephants. Not having a TV I watched it on the internet, by the time of writing it's probably no longer on BBC iPlayer unfortunately but it's probably still up on youtube -or for those naughty people who aren't adverse to a illegally downloading copyrighted material it can be donwloaded as a torrent from Pirate Bay or for the more careful pirates who use newsgroups instead there's an NZB file for it -not that I'm advocating, endorsing or reccomending illegally downloading copyrighted content of course. Afterall according to the entertainment industry illegal downloading is killing the entertainment industry, some may say it's the mediocre dross being pumped out by the  industry that's doing the real damage ..but that's a whole nother arguement waaaaay outside the scope of this blog.

So back to the Queen of the Savannah. Unlike our bee colonies which will set up a colony at a site and remain there as long as the site remains african honey bees are migratory (which I didn't know) and move to keep up with changes in forage availability. It starts with a queenless colony living in an acacia tree and follows the bees raising a new queen, being harvested by a local honey hunter, swarming, a stint doing elephant guard duty in a bee fence, and eventually migrating to a forest area. It contains some amazing footage of inside the colony filming what goes on on the comb itself, a Queen hatching, the waggle dance (of course), the short battle between two queens and lots of bees going about their housekeeping. What is a little misleading is that the program omits to mention that all that activity takes place in near darkness and the bright light it's filmed in was added for the benefit of the camera. The programme then goes on to the situation of honey bees in Britain and their urban resurgence.

The BBC made another decent documentary about bees back in 2009 called Who Killed The Honey Bee? about the dissapearance of the bees. It follows some of americas large scale beekeepers trying to understand Colony Collapse Disorder and the mysterious dissappearances of millions of bees. It was repeated last year and you can probably find a torrent to download the program with or find it on YouTube. The programme is actually renarrated and re-edited footage from the full length american documentary film Vanishing of the Bees. An interesting film for anyone interested in bees but probably overly long for anyone who isn't, and the narrator sounds like some kind of wierd female robot which grates after about half a minute. Apart form a few beekeeping players and pundits edited out of the BBC documentary this film also mentions the import of cheap dodgy honey blended with various syrups exported from China and marketed as honey in the western world.

*Spoiler alert* in case you were wondering the biggest suspects for Colony Collapse Disorder seem to be pesticides and monoculture.

We Need Space

This year part of my plan is for my two hives to become two hives and a nucleus, a smaller 5 frame hive, which I hope to house a small colony in so I can have a spare queen for emergencies -emergencies of an "Oh Sandra Bullocks I've squashed the bloody Queen" nature. It's also handy to have a decent spare queen in reserve for just in case one of the colonies becomes aggressive or the incumbent Queen decides to start laying nothing but drones or something.

A commercial nuc is a fairly pricey proposition, Thorne do a rather well made and aesthetically pleasing one for just shy of £150 assembled, a couple of firms do a plywood Commercial Nuc for £42. I wasn't about to pay for Thornes offering and figured I could probably make something a little better for forty beertokens so I popped to the local woodshop and got some planks of 22mm, an offcut of thick ply for the roof and some thinner ones for crownboards and made myself a brand spanking new one. My effort is complete with a mesh floor, sliding correx board for underneath, a crownboard with a closeable hole for feeding, a second insulated crownboard for the winter, a cut down queen excluder and two supers. You don't normally use a queen excluder or supers on a nuc but my thinking was I'll need something to hold the roof up whilst I feed them anyway and it'll give me some room for the colony to expand over the summer. Assuming that goes to plan when I remove the supers from the nuc I'll just unite the excess bees with one of the other colonies, and possibly even reap a little more honey. Good plan Batman.

Here's one I made earlier

Being a relatively tall narrow construction with both supers in place there may be a danger of things toppling over. Wouldn't want that. Bees everywhere. No thanks. So to avoid that I gave the floor two wide feet for stablity and put a couple of screw down sash window locks in place to secure the brood box to it. The supers have right angled brackets on the corners to keep them from moving. I've also got the option of weighting or strapping down the feet if I feel the need. The brood box and one of the supers has mortise tennon joints on all the corners as well as 3" nails and wood glue holding them together, possibly a little overkill there, the other super is just screwed and glued together which in hindsight would've been adequate for the other components really ...ah well this thing is probably bombproof now. Like the hives I've put a little cover over the entrance to direct water away and reduce nighttime light pollution.

When the idea of keeping bees first came to me I'd envisioned having a single beehive merrily buzzing away in the corner of my garden. I cleared a little space, dropped some pavers and breezeblocks in place and happily plonked a beehive on top. Excellent. It soon became apparent that one hive was a risky proposition and I should really have two. Luckily after cutting back a tree there was enough room for two to sit together in the corner. Unfortunately there wasn't room for the nuc to go with the existing hives and placing it anywhere else would've meant garden users (and by garden users I mean me) being in the flightpath of the bees. My only option was to make some space next to the existing hives, this meant moving a bush that was growing there but I thought it'd be fairly easy to prune it, dig it up, move it two feet to the right and replant it.

Move a plant 2 feet to the right? How big a job could that be?

Out comes the trusty machette , chop chop chop, in a couple of minutes I'd pruned the plant to just the right size and shape for it's new location. Then I grabbed the spade and got digging. Unfortunately the shrubby bush thing's trunk was right next to Hive1 and the back was against the wall so I couldn't get to two sides to dig it, also it'd been planted about 12 or 13 years ago and it's root system was pretty extensive. I decided to dig a small trench in front of it then undermine it and pull it out, with minimum fuss and minimum attention from the bees. It didn't go as easily as I'd envisioned -very little ever does. Having dug out two sides and underneath I was unable to move the thing. I waterlogged the soil to soften the ground and tried chopping roots on the other two sides as best I could with the spade. At one point an angry bee came whizzing out at me so I smartly stepped away and decided to give it a few minutes before resuming work. After a green tea I put my gloves back on and promptly flung off the left one. There was a bee in it. I removed the bee and carried on digging till it got dark at which point I decided to call it a night and went out to see Southport and Whizzwood play a charity gig. It was Whizzwood's first gig in ten years and it went a lot smoother than my efforts to move the bloody plant.

Next day when the fuzz of the previous evening had cleared and it'd cooled so the bees weren't flying much I resumed my gardening venture. After another hour of chopping at roots and riving the plant I managed to haul it out using a strap secured round the trunk. Progress, woohoo!

Victory is a muddy garden

Dug a new hole, hitting clay about 18 inches down and got the thing replanted, watered it in and refilled in the hole I'd left in it's original position. No doubt it'll take a while to recover having lost so many roots but I suspect it'll pull through. I'll probably sling it some vermicompost at some point.

I then went to the shed to find my spare paving slabs, there should've been five. They weren't there. I forgot I'd turned most of them into rubble during an afternoon of tameshiwari a couple of summers ago (yes, I do have other interests in case you were wondering), the remainder was what I'd placed under the existing hives. Well I still had half of one left over which was going to be fairly useful as I was needed one and a half pavers to go under the hive anyway. Following a trip to B&Q the next day to get the other one I finally got the nuc in place. It's empty at the moment, and probably will be for a while yet so I blocked the entrance with some kitchen sponge so it didn't turn into a home for slugs and other unwelcomes. With the mesh floor open and crownboard feed hole open too I think it'll be ventilated enough that damp won't present a problem whilst Hive2 builds up numbers and eventually makes me a new queen to go in there. The new paver looks a lot brighter than the rest but that'll fade with time and I doubt the bees will notice.

Poor relation over on the right.

If the hive's hadn't already been in place it would've actually been pretty simple to dig out the plant before paving the area instead of trying to work from one corner. I would suggest anyone planning to install a bee hive in the corner of the garden, allotment or wherever avoid the messing about later and start out budgeting for space for two hives and a nuc. If you don't add a nucleus later you'll just have a little more space to work with.

One year on

As of today I've kept bees for one year. It's been an interesting year, for me anyway -regular readers may disagree. It was a year ago yesterday that I drove home from Woodmansey Town Hall with about 15,000 stinging insects in a wooden box in the car boot, the lid secured with a poundshop ratchet strap and a bit of kitchen sponge keeping the entrance closed. Shortly after this I made my first faux pas by culling some queen cells to avoid them swarming, unfortunately it turned out the queen had already left and one of those two developing queens could've been her replacement. In the end I wound up getting a replacement queen from an online supplier, I'm not entirely sure of her lineage or country of origin but the colony survived. The second colony came a month later from a breeder in the York area after a short bidding war at an auction in a tractor museum

Since then I've bought a lot of sugar, made a lot of syrup, experienced a few stings and killed my food mixer making winter bee food. After a little time with Google and Youtube I also managed to make my own brood boxes, a couple clearer boards and most recently a nucleus hive.

Compact Des Res ideal for a young Queen just starting to build a family

Since acquiring the colonies I started regularly checking the weather in my urban neck of the woods having up till then been relatively happy to let it remain one of life's many surprises. In readiness for the honey harvest I got into the habit of saving jars, this lead to a formidable stockpile of things which I realised I'd probably never use and subsequently repurposed. As a result I now have jars of nails and screws in the shed, jars of apple and cranberry sauce in the fridge as well as feta infusing with chilli and basil, eggs pickling and three kinds of kimchi slowly fermenting. Speaking of consumables I've made some forays into the world of brewing with two batches of mead, a melomel and a cyser the latter two of which are still slowly clearing. I've filtered wax, made furniture polish, eaten undeveloped drones, been to no less than three auctions, posted countless picture of my kitchen, and my cooker, inside and out -something I'd never imagined I'd be doing. And of course harvested some honey.

Now the winter is over and the colonies both still alive my plan is to increase from two colonies to three, well two and a half really as I hope to populate my nucleus hive to hold a spare queen in reserve. Can't say if it'll work out for sure, but I'm fairly optimistic. I'm also hoping for a larger honey harvest this year too. That said I'll be fairly happy if I get through this year without losing a swarm or accidentally killing a queen. Fingers crossed.

 Another year of bees in the garden

Beekeeper Eats Own Bees. Queen Is Not Amused.

Last weekend it was warm enough to properly inspect the hives. Turned out Hive2 had almost entirely filled their sacrificial drone comb and sealed almost all the cells so I was able to remove it and pop it in the freezer. This is done because varroa mites prefer to lay their eggs with the larger drone lavae than with workers, by sacrificing these developing drones beekeepers can physically remove large numbers of varroa from the colony and stop new mites hatching -if left unchecked the mites would weaken the colony to the point of collapse. Unlike ourselves bees are cold blooded and prettymuch grind to a halt as they cool down, on colder evenings you can sometimes see a bee or two stranded outside the hive coming to a stop till they warm up again next day -assuming nothing eats them in the night anyway, so freezing them is actually far more humane than it sounds.

Drone comb. After a week in the freezer.

It only needs 24 hours in the freezer to kill the occupants but I gave it week. The little white bits in the picture are uncapped cells containing drone larvae. Once frozen honeycomb becomes very brittle so I was able to break it up to remove the pupae and larvae.

Drone Larvae

The larvae look a lot like maggots. All they do is eat. They're normally very soft and delicate but frozen solid I was able to remove them whilst breaking up the comb. The trick was to work very fast and keep work on the comb a section at a time whilst I put the rest back into the freezer. If they defrosted and it'd been like trying to pick up vanilla ice cream with your fingertips.

Drone Pupae

Like a travelling salesman in a Kafka novella, which I haven't really read, the larvae undergo a metamorphosis. But unlike Gregor they become pupae before insects. With their white bodies and pink eyes they look like some kind of wierd honey bee vampire things. Aside from the protrusion of the cell caps from the comb the huge eyes are the giveaway that these are definitey drones and not workers.

I had a plan to count the varroa mites and drones in the comb to give me an idea how the colony was faring but having removed all the pupae and larvae I didn't actually spot a single mite. However just like faries, gods and Russel's Teapot just because you can't see something it doesn't mean it's not there, although I suspect in some of those cases it may not be. I think they may well have been frozen to the wax I was removing and the young mites may have been too small to spot or not even hatched from their eggs. Not a problem, they're out of the hive anyway. Now what to do with the dead larve and pupae? Well as the article title hints, with all the subtlety of a neon sign, I ate them.

242g of Drone Larvae, Pupae and a little wax

In the western world we don't eat insects. Well that's not really true. It's more accurate to say in the western world we like to think we don't eat insects, but we do. Remember that head cauliflower you bought last week from a large supermarket? Chances are it had a few dead passengers tucked away in it which you unknowingly enjoyed with your cauliflower cheese. Broccoli? Excellent source of vitamin C, iron and aphids. And it's not just the good stuff that includes a few things not on the ingredient list. Fancy a bar of chocolate? Well that'll probably contain some ground up bug life evenly distrubuted through out the whole bar. And have you actually looked at the bugs they have in cocoa growing countries? Moreish? They're proper chitin clad horror stories. Enjoy your Dairy Milk now. 8-D

Other cultures consider insects just another edible item on the great buffet table of life. They're low in fat, high in protein and far more environmentally friendly to farm than for example the pigs and cows which we're more used to seeing pieces of on our plates. Bee brood is about 80% protein whereas beef gets to about 60% -the bee brood is also far lower in fat too and has less ecological impact than the cow. Beef farming is a worryingly inefficient use of arable land. Bees on the other hand don't need any arable land at all. So, gross as the idea may be to our cultural sensibilities they're actually better for us and this great spinning rock we live on than our preferred protein sources. Entomophagy isn't entirely new to me, having previously cooked locusts and meal worms and bought cooked ants and the like from specialist suppliers. I've always thought it odd that whilst we'll decline a cricket that only eats living plants we'll happily pay through the nose for that carrion eating cockroach of the seabed, the lobster. It's all about the image and presentation I guess.

Right let's get off that soap box and back to the kitchen. Time to see what I can do with these dead baby boys :p I pulled out a couple of cookery books, in this case The Eat-A-Bug Cookbook and Creepy Crawly Cusine: The Gourmet Guide to Edible Insects. Three bee larvae recipes in one and one in the other. I opted for the simplest of the lot which is basically fry them in butter with a little salt and pepper for three minutes. Cooking doesn't really get much easier than that. Being drones I don't have to worry about stings or venom, they just don't have them.

Dub dub be dub dub dub
Golden brown texture like sun..

I decided to blanche them first by boiling them for a couple of minutes to remove any wax still adhering to them and as an extra step against bacteria -well we are talking about a pile of dead insects afterall. Then they were drained and fried in three batches with a drop of olive oil, a little Flora Light and a pinch of low sodium salt.

Well the proof is in the tasting so how where they? My housemate and I sampled them and TBH we were quite impressed. There was a nutty taste which reminded me of roasted giant ants -another eusocial insect and relative of the honey bee. Tasted slightly popcorny -possibly due to the flora? A little crunchy on the outside and softer on the inside. I served them up accompanied with boiled potatoes stir fried with chopped spring onion, tomato and black pepper, some baby spinach leaves and a dry beer to wash it down with.

Grub's up.

Feeding Time

Had a look in the hives at last. Still a degree or so on the cool side to be pulling out frames but I've lifted the crownboards to see what's happening. As soon as I removed the roofs I could see both hives had finished their boxes of fondant and Hive2 had actually started building comb in theirs and there was bee larvae visible in it -shame I had to remove this really. I think that was a pretty clear sign that this one very strong colony. It also tells me they may be a bit crowded and may even be getting a little swarmy so I need to think about expansion.

Comb in the empty fondant box

Looking between the frames of Hive1 there were bees in about half the frames. So still some room in there for them to build up numbers and I don't think any particular danger of them swarming at the moment. Having had such a half arsed winter I think far more bees survived than would be expected normally.

This year I hope to expand to three colonies (two hives and a nucleus) so I'm going to need some drawn deep comb for this so I've added a second brood box to Hive2 -one of the ones I'd made last summer. The bees in Hive2 should now start drawing out the foundation in there. At the moment I've got a queen excluder in place as I'm not yet certain which queen I want to breed from. Last week my neighbours told me they saw a swarm in June or July which I think must've come from Hive2 so it may be that the queen of Hive1 will be a better option to raise a small colony in nucleus hive. For now that seccond deep box on Hive2 is effectively a super although I later plan to swap drawn comb from this box with comb containing brood and eggs from the box below so the queen has more cells to lay in and let the colony increase numbers but under my control. Because the bees are going to be drawing a lot of foundation they're going to need feeding.

Whilst no beekeepers ever actually agree, on anything, at all, ever, quite a few people feed their bees in spring to build up their colonies faster than would probably happen if left to nature. I gave both hives contact feeders full of thin syrup , 1ml water to 1g sugar, with some  Vitafeed Gold, a supplement which is suposed to encourage expansion of a colony, prevent nosema and cure dysentery -yep bees can get dysentery and we don't want that.. I've also removed the mouseguards at last.

One with two deep, both with feeders