Removed the 2012 Honey Crop

Seems like only last week when I was removing my first honey crop by torchlight whilst being stung in the face by bees inside my smock. This year went a lot smoother. Last year I'd had a national brood box on the hive as a super and the bees had been unable to escape through the clearer board, this year I had 2 shallow supers on each hive which being smaller were far easier to move.

Have I mentioned 2012 was a poor year for honey? Yes? Okay, well I had 2 supers on each hive. The bees were struggling to fill them (super = a box bees store honey in that the beekeeper removes), and on the rainy days had been eating the honey themselves so I decided to try and get them to move all the honey from the less full supers to the fuller ones. It'd mean less work for me as then I'd only have to extract from two boxes instead of four. To facilitate this I'd placed a crownboard between the supers and left small hole for the bees to access them. This should've effectively meant they were outside of the hive, bees will usually rob any honey they find outside their hives. Didn't work tho. To my surprise and contrary to popular expectation they seem to have had a work spurt and actually put more honey in the top supers. They still weren't close to full but they were better than they had been.

To remove the super you want you first need to pop a clearer board under it. A clearer board is effectively a bee valve, bees can pass down into the box below but hopefully can't get back up to the one above -in theory anyway. You can probably clear more than one super at a time but the bees streaming into the box below can get a little congested so I decided to do one layer at a time. Some people make clearer boards that leave a 2" gap below so there's room to manouver for all the bees pouring down, some have no gap at all. I made my boards with a 1" space below which I suspect is adequate for clearing one super at a time.

Hive2 with clearer board on it then left with Super replaced above it.

In the early afternoon I placed clearer boards under the top supers then returned three hours later to removed the bee free supers. They weren't entirely bee free but I was able to shake and brush off the stragglers. There were still a lot of bees still on the undersides of the clearer boards themselves so I placed them exit side up at the fronts of their respective hives. The scent from the hives and their queens attacts the bees so they gradually wandered back in.

The frames of these two supers varied from completely full to almost empty. Honey is basically nectar that the bees have dehumidified. When it's ripe it has a water content of about 17%, if it's not ripe and has a greater water content say over and can ferment. It's that low water content that means honey can last years -assuming it's properly stored anyway. The easy way to tell if honey is ripe or not is to let the bees decide. Once a frame of honey is ripe the bees will cap the cells. When a frame is about 75% capped it's probably ready for extraction.

Capped Honey

If the honey isn't capped then you have to check if it's ripe or not. There's 2 ways to do it. One is to use a clever sciency gadget called a hydrometer, you smear some honey onto the device and it takes a measurement of the moisture content. The low tech way is to gove the unsealed frame of honey a sharp shake and see if any falls out. Like I said low tech.

Uncapped honey. See the difference? Easy isn't it.

Some of the frames, like the one above, were nowhere near full containing just a little uncapped honey but they withstood the sharp shake test. The next day I repeated the process to remove the other supers which had the lion's share of the honey -it's heavy stuff to lug about in bulk.

Of course having effectively robbed the bees of a huge amount of winter food you need to give them something back so I popped a feeder of 2:1 sugar syrup on each hive -well it was really 1kg sugar:630ml water as last year I found 2:1 syrup crystalised.

Contact feeder full of syrup.

When you have bees living in your garden something you don't want is a load of honey sat in your house. It only takes one forager to find it and pretty soon you'll have thousands of bees and probably a contingent of wasps in your house fighting each other and stealing the stuff. I knocked up a couple of plywood crownboards to cover the stacks, sat the supers on hive floors with sealed entrances and left them in the dining room to await extraction.

4 Supers ready for extraction.

Wasps At Last

It's been a difficult year for bees, as but they're not alone in that, it's also been a tricky one for wasps. The wet summer has made things difficult for Queen wasps to establish new nests, assuming they'ed survived hibernation and the aphid populations they prey on are down too. Up until today I'd only seen one wasp in my garden all year. Today marked their arrival at the hives. There was nothing like the numbers from last years population boom but there were a few buzzing around. After a little look at an online wasp identification guide I'm pretty sure they were Common Wasps or Vespula Vulgaris if you're feeling pedantic.

Common Wasp with a dead bee

I doubt numbers will be getting high enough for me to have to put traps out but we'll see how it goes. The ones I saw today were content to pick up dead bees from the ground. They have no use for some parts of the bee such as the head, legs and and wings. I filmed one butchering a dead bee.

Whilst my the camera phone work is a little shaky  you can see at the start it removes the bee's head, next it chews off a wing. After rolling over the bark chipping you can see it making short work of a couple of legs. After this it evidently decided it didn't like being watched and took the bee behind a blade of grass and a bark chipping to finish work in a little privacy before flying off taking the thorax and the abdomen.

I think it's fair to say as a society we're a little prone to over reaction when it comes to wasps. The usual reaction upon seeing a wasp is flap about or try to kill it, both of which bump up your chances of being stung. However as you can see I was holding a camera phone about 4 inches from this one whilst a couple more buzzed about out of shot and I didn't get stung, bitten, murdered or otherwise molested by any of them.

An Inspector Calls

Back in June I got a letter from the National Bee Unit. No they heven't been reading my blog, it was an invitation to participate in the European Union Pilot Surveillance Programme for honey bee health. I was one of 200 beekeepers in England and Wales selected to participate at random from the BeeBase database. I don't know how many bee keepers are in the database but bearing in mind my ID number is 42501 I'd assume there's quite a few.

The study is being done by the European Commission and intends to accurately identify risk factors associated with colony losses across the 17 participating meber states. As a new beekeeper I'm quite probably one those of those risk factors.. Participants in the programme are to be visited three times by a Bee Inspector (yes there really is such a job), once in Autumn 2012, again in Spring 2013 and finally in Summer 2013. Initially the Inspector will take away 300 bees from each colony and if any disease is found during the inspection further samples of symptomatic bees and larvae are to be taken as well as any unusual beetles or mites observed in the hive. So I need to look inside my colonies and pick out my 300 least favourite bees. If you want to know more about it the Programme guidelines are online in a 34 page PDF file.  I was happy to agree to be part of the pilot programme because it's hopefully going to be a useful piece of data gathering and also because a visit from a Bee Inspector is a good way to get some pointers on what you're doing right or wrong. Plus a seasoned eye looking over the colonies may even spot some things I've missed.

The Inspector phoned me to arrange a time and date for the visit.I picked 3pm on Saturday 8th September having forgotten that was the Hull Freedom Festival -gotta start writing things down. He turned up pretty much bang on time and started with an explanation of what the pilot is for. Basically it's to try and work out why bees are dying off by keeping tack of survival rates and beekeeping practices. We went through a questionnaire about the bees. Questions about how long I' had my bees, where do I keep them and so on, had I introduced any imported Queens or swarms this year, had I collected any swarms, was I using any chemical treatments, any incidents of unusually high bee mortality, what kind of bee were they, what other insects have I found in the hives and a few other things.

After this is was time to run though the hives and gather some bees. The Inspector carried his tools in a rectangular plastic bucket in a bleach solution to avoid spreading disease between apriaries. He used a different type of hive tool to me, mine's a standard hive tool whereas his was a a flat "J" type tool. It's called that because it has a "J" shaped hook at one end for levering frames out. It certainly appeared to do a better job of levering out frames from my nucleus which is a little tight than my standard hive tool and frame grip combination so I may invest in one at some point.

I lit my smoker and puffed some cardboard and corn cob husk smoke towards the front of the hive to let the bees know we were coming. Didn't actually use the smoker again after that. It seems the less smoke the better really.

The first thing he did was collect a few dead bees from the ground in front of the hives. There weren't a great deal of them though and it's not particularly easy to acces the ground in front of the hives really so he said he might not have been able to gather a useful sample of these.

We started with the nucleus. He observed the queen is still laying and the bees appeared healthy. He managed to locate the queen whom I've never actually managed to find before. She was grown from a supercedure cell from Hive2 where the queen is a long creature with a slightly reddish abdomen but this queen was, I felt, relatively small as queens go and the exact same colouring as the rest of the bees. Despite looking a little small she's still laying really well so I gues the rule of thumb about fat queens being betterisn't a hard and fast one. The Inspector lined a nucleus he'd brought with a bin liner and shook all the bees from one frame into it. He then put samples of these bees into small plastic containers containing a transparent  liquid. Yep they died but it's for the greater good of the species afterall. The big bag was then emptied of the rest of bees over the nuc and shaken out at the front to get any last bees out.

Next up was Hive1. I think of these as being more aggressive than the other 2 colonies but with minimal smoke they were very manageable. Once again the inspector found the queen and shook out a frame (without her on it) into another bin liner and took more samples. Once again no problems were found with the colony. Plenty of brood were developing still and the supers were heavy with honey.

Last up was Hive2. The hive I'd found sacbrood in previously. In my next inspection after spotting this I'd tweezered out all the sacbrood infected larvae I'd been able to spot. I saw a couple of larvae with sacbrood the inspection after that and I pulled those out too. On this inspection we didn't see any sacbrood at all so I think the bees have managed to get on top of it as I'd hoped. The queen of Hive2 is the only queen I regularly spot, she doesn't seem shy and has often been happy to loiter about on a frame as I take a photo or two.  However she must've been in a bit of a royal strop today as we didn't see her at all. As we couldn't find the queen the Inspector took Hive2's sample from the bees on a shallow frame in the super. Once again the bees and brood looked jolly healthy and brood pattern appeared normal too.

The short term benefit for myself as a participant is that bees from each of my colonies are being screened for diseases free of charge. There'll be a two more visits and set of samples taken next year which will also be analysed and at some point I'll be able to see results from the analysis on the BeeBase website. For the bigger picture my techniques (importing bees or not, use of chemicals etc etc), the health of my bees and overwinter survival rates will be collated along with the same information gathered from a total of 3,571 apiaries across Europe.

Consolidating Honey

Having had a dry Spring and a wet Summer honey harvests across the UK are down by a huge percentage, the figure I've seen bandied about is 60%, and quite a few people in the forums are reporting no harvest at all. The season should be pretty much over by now except for any migratory beekeepers moving their bees to the moors for heather honey. However the temperature has been about 23 degrees celcius in Hull and the bees have been flying so what's actually going on is anybody's guess. There is a temptation to leave the supers (the parts of hives honey to be harvested is stored in) on the hives to let the bees carry on adding to them whilst the weather lasts but there's two reasons not to. One is after removing the honey crop the bees need time to stock up their own stores for the winter, be it from nectar or syrup they'll still need time to dehydrate it. The other reason is that ivy flowers late and we really don't want ivy honey, it crystalises in the honeycomb making it hard to remove and it smells pretty bad too.

Nine frames in a shallow Super, July 2012

In the brood box where the queen lives and lays her eggs beekeepers want as many cells as possible so the more eggs can be laid and more bees reared. In a Commercial like mine there are 11 frames giving 22 surfaces (one each side y'see) of cells to lay in. In a super we want more honey and less wax. Whilst a National Super can hold 11 frames it's more normal to use 10, 9 or even 8 frames instead. The bees then draw out the cell walls making them deeper so they store more honey in them with less space given over to vertical bee space, foundation and cappings. Unless you have frames already drawn out to the desired width it's normal to start with 11 frames per super and then remove excess frames as the middle ones get drawn out to fill the space in the box, otherwise there's too much dead air in there which the bees need to keep warm.The bees generaly draw out the frames in the middle first as the bees cluster in the centre of the brood box below and the warm air rising makes wax easier to work.

Almost fully capped frame of honey

A lot of people out there seem to think bee hives are always full of nice ready to eat honey, however that's not the case the only place I know of with ripe ready to eat honey all year round is a supermarket and if you buy the cheap stuff it's probably cut with syrup anyway but I digress... The honey needs to be ripened by the bees reducing it's water content over time, if it's not ripe then once you've extracted it the water content will be too high and it'll ferment. It's easy to tell when honey is ripe as the bees will seal the cells of ripe honey with wax. The capping over honey is white and smooth, unlike the thin brown cappings over deveoloping bees. Once a frame has 75% of it's cells capped the honey in it can be harvested. You can remove individual frames if you like but it's easier to just wait till the whole super is 75% or more capped and then remove the whole lot.

I had actually been expecting a huge honey crop this year as the mild winter meant more bees survived the winter than expected so the colonies were more populous in Spring than usual. More workforce equals more work right? Unfortunately after a winter that was a blessing the Spring and Summer were a mixed up meteorological mess and plants weren't flowering at the expected times and weren't producing enough nectar to suport our huge spring colonies, then the Summer rain meant bees couldn't go out foraging anyway. After starting the season smiling beekeepers were suddenly having to emergency feed their colonies to stop them starving ..and I gather quite a few did starve, it was a significant enough problem to prompt  reporting in the mainstream media as well as prompting DEFRA to issue starvation warnings. I also managed to lose a prime swarm from Hive2 which was unfortunate and temporarily reduced their workforce. Going by what I'm seeing reported in other parts of the country Hull seems to have done better over the summer weatherwise than other parts of the UK and I was able to to put two supers on both hives. There were a couple of false starts when I had to remove the supers and feed the bees again but eventually the season started moving forwards.

Hive1 has been happily filling up 2 supers both of which I'm planning to remove very soon, probably this weekend. Hive2 however managed to nearly fill one super but the other is only about 20% full and I really don't see the bees being able to comlete it in time for harvesting before winter preparations or the arrival of ivy nectar. So I hatched a simple plan to consolidate the honey from the nearly empty super with that of the almost full one -or into the brood box if the other super gets fully capped. At the top of the hive under the roof is another lid, the crownboard. The crownboard has a few holes in it for feeding and a few other things. When not being fed it's common to close the holes up, to the bees if you leave the feeding holes open just enough for them to get through they will consider anything above the crownboard to be outside the hive, and any honey outside the hive is fair game as far as they're conerned. So I moved the nearly empty super above the crownboard and hopefully as I'm typing this the bees of Hive2 are busily robbing the honey it contained and storing it in the Super I'll be harvesting, failing that they should be storing it in the brood box for themselves to use over Winter.

Hive2 with a crownboard between the two supers

The bees propensity (good word that, think I'll try to use it more) for stealing honey from anything above the crownboard is actually quite useful for beekeepers. After extracting honey with a spinner the beekeeper is left with frames of honey comb which have honey residue still stuck to the wax, these can be stored 'wet' but there's always the change the honey will attract pests so many prefer to store them 'dry' with this removed. The simplest way to dry your wet frames is to pop them back into your hives above the crownboard and let the bees removed every last drop for you.

Pearson Park Wildlife Garden

I've mentioned the Pearson Park Wildlife Garden previously in this blog. It continues to be a work in progress and still has very little by way of web presence -very little by way of any publicity at all really I suspect if I didn't pass the entrance on an occassional run I wouldn't've noticed it existed myself.

Welcome to the Just Outside the South Corner of Pearson Park, Wildlife Garden

The Yorkshire Wildlife Trust actually has two web pages for it here and here neither of which really inspire a visit unfortunately. There's also a Facebook Page which has various green links pictures and requests for volunteers, created in September 2011 it has 136 likes at the time of writing so evidently it's not really being pushed at the moment. Oh there's also some pretty good pictures of the denizens of the garden (and the park) on the Wild at Hull blog.

Free herbs for all!

One reason to visit the garden is to pick up some free herbs. They have an impressive herb garden you can pop to and snip a little of whatever you need from. I didn't see much by way of signage though so you'll have to be able to recognise what you want.

There's things wriggling in that water

The project also has a pond which is quite large, albeit very shallow. I'm not entirely sure what uses the pond but I think I've seen dragonflies in the area and there's definitely damselflies. I'd assume there's a frog population too and I've been told there's newts in the main pond in the park so I'd expect there to be a few in here too.

A pile of wood. Things sleep in it. Not just rats. Hopefully.

There's various piles of stuff for wildlife to sleep/nest or hibernate in ranging from woodpiles to pallets of various bits of stuff like twigs, bamboo canes, paper, sand and other stuff which whilst about as pleasing to the eye as a quick poke with a pencil should be useful for the wildlife. There's also some bundles of tied twigs and sticks which probably have some practical purpose other than giving the place a slightly sinister Blair Witch feel. There's also seating areas, bird baths, bird tables, bird boxes, bat boxes and a vegetable plot tucked out of the way. A little fenced off area with a tended lawn houses a rain guage and a Stevenson Screen which I would assume houses some temperature and humidity measuring kit. I think the place would be better off losing that really and having a bit more nature space but it's probably got some educational purpose or something.

By now you're probably thinking "This is another WTF about the bees posts.." well I was getting to that. Slowly. I've previously mentioned that the wildlife garden acquired a colony of Carniolans in a WBC hive in 2010. Whilst these originally slavik bees are particularly good at overwintering they perished in the freakishly long and snowy 2010/2011 winter. As a breed they actually have quite a reputation for swarming so they're possibly not the best choice for a city apiary. However they soon got some more bees, I don't know what type but when I encoutered a girl there emptying dead bees from the WBC she'd said they were hoping to catch a local swarm so probably buckfasts or some mongrel derivative. This year they've made it through very easy winter and also rather difficult sprin.

WBC, National and Topbar Hives

For reasons unknown to me they seem keen to mix it up a little in their apiary.  After getting some more bees into their WBC hive (the one on the left with the slanty sides and sloping roof) they added a kenyan top bar hive (the dark brown tabley looking one on the right) and this year's new addition is a National Hive (middle one like a tin topped tea chest). The National is meant to be something of a standard hive in England at present. It uses frames interchangeable with the WBC and I'd guess it was added to house an artificial swarm from the WBC, although I could be wrong -haven't actually asked anyone afterall. The kenyan top bar hive (actuall invented in the UK and not Kenya, but popular there) seems to have been turned and the entrance moved. When I looked at it in the winter it had the entrance at one end facing forwards like the WBC but now the entrance is in the middle of the side.

Drone Fly, declined to look at the camera.

Ther herb garden seemed popular with various polinators such as the drone fly above, a range of bumble bees, the park's resident honey bees, hover flies and just to add a little confusion for any budding entymologists and photographers hoverflies pretending to be bees. Given the distance I've no doubt my own bees forage here too and there's a pretty good chance my Queens have mated with drones from these hives.

Some kind of Bumble Bee, bumbling. As they do.

Honey Bee, working hard in the herb garden.

A bee happily working a red flower, except she thinks it's black
because bees can't see red. So there.