Slow Start

This time last year the hives were bursting with bees, Hive2 had two brood boxes on it and I was preparing to split off a second colony. Not quite the same story this year unfortunately. Today's inspection showed the buildup is still very slow. Hive1 had 5 seams of bees and Hive2 only three. York Beekeepers Association have put back their 2013 auction to June because of the lateness of the season start so if my colonies haven't built up numbers by then  I'm toying with the idea of uniting them and purchasing a new colony.

In Hive2 the queen has been laying and despite her patchy start seems to have managed a fairly normal brood pattern. Ideally there should be a large oval area of capped brood with young uncapped brood on the edge and eggs around them.

Hive2 are getting their act together albeit a little slowly.

There's a few gaps in the capped brood but they've mostly got healthy looking brood in them whilst some have eggs in them. The uniformity of the pattern is used as a reflection of the quality of the queen, whilst that pattern was good there was still not a lot of it. I'm not entirely sure how long I ought to wait and watch before decided to requeen or not but as long as she's laying eggs if she starts failing the bees will take matters into theirs own hands (well okay claws) and replace her themselves.

Scarlet Lady

Marking the queen made her far easier to spot, and it doesn't appear to have done her any harm. Bees breathe through holes in their sides called spiracles and their exoskeleton has a waxy coating making it an impermeable surface unlike animal skin which is a selectively permeable membrane so the bit of paint shouldn't really effect her like it would affect a human.

The only red thing in the hive

The bees have been busy bringing in some yellow pollen too which you can see in the above pictures. I'd fed both colonies recently but neither had taken much syrup down so I removed the feeders today and poured the now mouldy syrup away. the brood pattern in Hive1 was pretty poor due to sacbrood. Last year I had this in Hive2 and after removing the infected larvae it seemed to clear up. There's no treatment for it but it's something the bees should be able to take care of themselves normally. Sacbrood is generally seen as something some bees are genetically susceptible to and the usual solution is to replace the queen. It might be that a stronger queen has brood less susceptible to it or it may just be the break with no brood that causes the virus to die back. As this colony hasn't had it previously I'm inclined to think its presence is due to the small size of the colony so if, or hopefully when, their numbers increase they should be able to cope with it.

Patchy brood pattern

I didn't actually see the queen in Hive1 today at all. There were a few eggs though. I also spotted a large drone wandering along the comb, probably the first of the season in my colonies. Also watched a couple new bees emerging from their cells. All in all not a great start to the year really. Both colonies building slowly and Hive1 dealing with sacbrood. On the plus side both colonies have stored food, new bees are emerging and they're not preparing to swarm yet.

Queen of the Sun

I recently stumbled across a documentary film about bees. Queen of the Sun is a 2010 documentary film distributed by Collective Eye -an interesting non profit company that specialising in documentaries on a number of subjects. Queen of the Sun seems to have garnered some recognition, it's Wikipedia entry mentions a few awards it's received and shortlists it made.

You can buy it from Amazon, of course, or the direct from from the film's dedicated website. The more naughty people out there can probably find a Torrent file to download it illegally with bitTorrent -but of course the downside is you'll burn in hell for undermining the entertainment industry. I think there's about 22 seeds at the time of writing, not that I'd do that of course.. It doesn't seem to be on Usenet at the moment.

The film opens with well let's call her an eccentric lady, a less charitable person might call her a whackjob but we'll go with eccentric. She's dancing apparently topless but for a load of bees on her upper body and lower face. I don't have boobs but if I did I don't think I'd want to be stung in them. Truth is that when bees swarm they're fairly placid and when people do those bee beards or in this case bee beard and bee bodice they attach a caged queen bee to themselves and the bees swarm to them. Still don't think I'd fancy it. I'm also inclined to think it's buggering your bees about unnecessarily. There's a shot of her at the end of the credits too, just in case you missed it at the start.

The first speaker is a Biodynamic Beekeeper called Gunther Hawk, some of the footage of him was also used in the 2009 documentary film The Vanishing of The Bees. Gunther co-wrote Bees in 1998 and in 2002 wrote Toward Saving the Honeybee so evidently he's been around bees for a long time. He also created a honey bee sanctuary, Spikenard Farm, which is shown in the film and appears to be still functioning today. He was trying to frame the honey bee crisis as a learning opportunity. He was shown pulling a huge frame of bees from a very large hive armed with a smoker and hive tool but no protective gear on -this seemed to be a common thing amongst the beekeepers shown through the film.

Next up was an organic queen and bee breeder by the name of Kirk Webster. His contribution to setting the scene was pointing out that without bees we'd be living on bread, oatmeal and a couple of nuts. Then we had Carlo Petreni, an Italian chap and founder of the Slow Food, the Slow Food UK website is worth a look. He tells us there'll be no agriculture without bee. Michael Pollan, author of a number of books I've not read including The Omnivore's Dilemma. He tells us bees pollinate about 40% of our food. By now the watcher is possibly a little confused about how much of our food is actually pollinated by bees but probably pretty sue that losing them wouldn't be a great thing for us.

Next up as another eccentric chap in France who's shown working his hives clad in only loose white trousers, some beads and a pair of sandals. Yep he's beekeeping topless, and  very nearly trouserless too going by how thin his kegs seem to be. He talks about the love he feels for his queen bees and goes on to stroke the bees with his moustache telling the camera they enjoy this. I'm not entirely sure how he knows this but they don't sting him in the face to prove otherwise.

There's some information about the history of bees and honey in relation to human spirituality and nutrition. There's a stop start animated sequence representing an archaeologist finding honey buried with Tutankhamen. The the chap tells us that honey contains a lot of silica, which is in all things then it gets a little hippie with the silica content linking man to everything else or something. I think my hippy filter kicked in at this point and I zoned out for a few moments. Coming back into reality with a bump we're told how a chap called Rudolf Steiner, father of biodynamic agriculture, had foretold industrialisation would damage bees. Whilst he appears to have been right the food industry marched on with industrialisation anyway. He was also right in 1923 when he suggested it'd be a bad thing for central Europe if the National Socialists came to power in Germany, which goes to show just because you're right doesn't mean people are going to listen.

Various practices are offered as causes of Colony collapse Disorder with Bayer being named as one of the pesticide manufacturers responsible for the current mess. In a literary nod to Cervantes an Italian chap compares beekeepers fighting pesticide companies to trying to fight windmills. The film goes on to discuss negative aspects of monoculture using the California almond harvest as an example. Apparently it takes three quarters of the USA's honeybees to pollinate the almond trees which are grown in a massive monoculture which nature itself would be unable to sustain. Gathering so many bee colonies together allows diseases to spread rapidly between them and when they leave the almond harvest they take any diseases they've acquired home with them. How antibiotics used on bees find their way to people -although in the UK we're not allowed to use them ourselves anymore. Artificial insemination of bees and genetic considerations are also touched upon. The various theories on Colony Collapse Disorder aren't yet proven, and certainly weren't when the film was made, but they're presented as if they are known facts -although I personally suspect monoculture and pesticides are the biggies.

The film has previously been criticised for it's lack of balance and presenting theories as facts but something I'd draw issue with is some of the speakers. There's a variety of them ranging from biodynamic beekeepers to physicists and biologists with a range of credibility for example I'm not certain what qualifies a physicist to talk about beekeeping over any other beekeeper for example, and a guy who brushes his bees with a his moustache strikes me as a little unwise. Some of the speakers make claims that are simply wrong, for example an Australian chap states bee venom and rattlesnake venom are the same the only difference in quantity. A little googling shows me they're actually chemically very different substances. And of course there's the various beekeepers dislike of protective equipment. Away from the various speakers there's footage of a few unusual hives including a large egg shaped one, and some other large hives I wasn't familiar with. There's also some someone using  lift to nadir a Warré hive and some great video of young varroa mites. Unfortunately the whole thing has an air of new ageism which may well appeal to die hard hippies and crusties out there but it really made me cringe in places and may serve to undermine it's message.

Moving up in the World

Beehives are usually kept on some sort of stand. This is to keep the hive out of the damp, make it harder for certain pests to get into the hives, facilitate airflow  below the hives and to allow the beekeeper to work the bees more comfortably. There seems to be a range of different height stands in used to suit different purposes and people, they range from a few centimetres to about four feet in the case of the White house bees.

As I start my third season I decided mine needed to be higher, after all inspecting 2 hives worth of frames means picking up and putting down 22 frames and they can get heavy. My plan was to replace the individual breeze blocks with stacks of four laid on their largest face for stability. However when I got to B&Q I found it worked out cheaper to buy a smaller number of blocks twice the size of the original ones so that's what I did. They're actually Autoclaved Aerated Concrete (AAC) blocks for anyone feeling particularly pedantic today. They're lighter than regular concrete blocks, there's a few other reasons people use them for building but none of them are particularly relevant to my using them here. These were 21.5cm wide and 27.5cm high, nice round figures chosen by the building industry there.

Hives and AAC blocks

Having acquired the AAC blocks I needed to move the hives out of the way. I removed the garden boxes and roofs to lighten the hives, as the season is getting off to a very late start this year the brood boxes were very light anyway. Leaving the crownboards and floors in place, aided and abetted by an extra pair of hands I moved the populated brood boxes onto a wooden hive stand and started arranging the new blocks.

Hive2 sat on top of Hive1

Whilst I was deciding how to arrange the blocks foraging bees were returning and finding their hives weren't where they expected them to be were buzzing about exactly where I was arranging the blocks. Being so large the blocks were stable on their thinner longest side so I popped the hives back in place, replaced the roofs and garden boxes then stepped back to admire our handy work. The blocks stacked this way were 55cm high, plus the wooden beams. At this point I realised they were a few inches too high. Whilst I'd be easily able to inspect the brood boxes once I started adding supers I'd probably run into difficulty.

Too high damnit!

The hives were actually very light to move what with colonies being smalls at present and very little stores so far so I figured I could move them by myself. To avoid a cloud of returning bees forming where I was trying to work again I waited for the temperature to drop so foragers would have returned to the hives before I moved them again. Removing the hives and turning the blocks on their sides dropped the height of the blocks to 43cm, almost the height of a super. Just right. I hope. I'll have to see how it is for a year before I decide.

The right height!

I currently only have 2 hives as the nuc died out whilst Spring was masquerading as Winter. However I plan to create a new nuc colony at some point so shuffling the old blocks and adding a half an AAC block previously liberated from a skip I put the new nuc at the same height as the other two colonies. By this time next year I should have decided if they're the right height or not.

Finished, for a while anyway.

The Masons

On 19th March a friend decided to do some work on her garden. One of the things she did was drill some holes in a fence post to see if anything would nest in them. She had expected maybe some garden spiders to occupy them but looking today she noticed some of the holes were blocked .

Top and bottom holes have been blocked up by something

She spotted some insects buzzing in and out of the holes and like any sensible person reached for her smart phone to photograph them and sent me the images in this post. They turned out to be black bees with orange fur on their abdomens. When I saw the initial picture I thought they were Common Carder Bees, they certainly look similar but the behaviour was wrong as Common Carders are ground nesting and have more fur on their backs. Bearing in mind the mud plugging up holes it didn't take me tto long to realise they were some sort of Mason Bee. A little internet research eventually helped me identify them as Red Mason Bees.

Red Mason Bee

The original pictures were 8 megapixels and taken on a Samsung Galaxy S2. I asked what size the holes were as they were evidently right for these bees. She said they were maybe wide enough for a pencil and maybe a finger deep. You can make your own mason bee box, or buy one but evidently some slightly random holes in a fencepost are adequate.

"This looks like a nice place to raise some kiddies"

One of the holes was blocked with mud and the other with what looked like chewed wood. I initially wondered if some sort of wasp might have made a home in one as they seem to make use of chewed wood but apparently mason bees do too so perhaps the difference in material was just down to what the bee found available first.

Different materials have been used to block these holes

Red Mason Bees are actually a type of solitary bee but they can often bee seen in what appear to be groups when they're nesting in close proximity to each other or collecting mud from the same place but they're actually working individually just drawn to the same resources. Not as familiar to people as honey bees they're very important fruit pollinators particularly for apple trees.

"Found me a Hobbit Hole!"

They're called Mason or Masonry Bees as they tend to nest in holes in masonry as well as wood, enlarging them as required. This can lead to some damage to buildings but isn't usually something to worry about. The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings recommends blocking holes before bees nest in them and placing nest boxes elsewhere to entice them away from buildings if there are concerns about their impact.

I'm not sure if it's down to the choice of materials or the size of the holes or something else entirely but whilst they've been busy in my friend's garden I notice the solitary bee box in my garden appears to be languishing unused at the moment. It may be relevant that my friend has some raspberries growing in her garden and nearby are some cherry and crabapple trees.

Apartments Vacant

This Season's Colour

I've mentioned previously that locating the single queen bee amongst a thousands of other bees is a tricky business. At some point some bright spark realised that what really helps is to put a splot of paint on her back and then just look for the dot. The dot of paint is also used to record what year the queen is from. To keep track of this there's a 5 colour cycle based on what number the year ends in.

Year ends in	Colour
1 or 6	White
2 or 7	Yellow
3 or 8	Red
4 or 9	Green
5 or 0	Blue

So as examples the queen of the colony I bought at auction in 2011 was marked blue showing she was from 2010, the one I had delivered for the apparently queenless first colony was marked with white showing she was from 2011. There's only five colours in the range because a queen bee isn't likely to live longer than that, assuming she's not been acidentally squashed by the beekeeper or lost in a swarm the bees will replace her when she starts to fail anyway.

A blue marked 2010 Queen

I hadn't really thought about marking my queens before but when I got my smoker, hive tool and a few other bits from an eBay seller back in 2011 the package included a Queen Clip and an odd looking thing called a Queen Marking Cage and Plunger which has spent the past 2 years languishing in a box in my shed. This year I decided to give it a whirl. At the start of the season the colonies are at their smallest as they've been dying off over winter and the new workers haven't emerged to replace them yet. It's a lot easier to find the queen when there's less bees to lose her in.

I can't be 100% certain that both my queens are from last year rather than the previous one so what colour I mark them isn't necessarily going to be correct. I decided to go with red rather than use yellow for last year. If they swarm and someone else catches them the red marking will be a little misleading but with only 2 colonies to think about at the moment it's not really a problem for me and my main concern is being able to locate them. As time goes on and they're replaced by supersedure or requeening I'll be able to mark their replacements correctly. In hindsight maybe I should've used a colour outside the range to reflect their unknown age.

Umm so today I'm a make up artist for royalty.. never saw than coming. :-/

There's specific insect paints around, believe it or not, but having done some reading people are using paints ranging from enamel to Tip Ex. I opted to use acrylic paint because it's water based, less toxic than a lot of other paints around, low on smell and most importantly I have a box full of the stuff. The paint goes on the large round chitin plate on the back of  the bee's thorax. The 2010 queen I got with a colony from York in 2011 was marked a little heavy handedly, if you look at the picture above you can see paint on her wings but she still managed to head up a colony so I guess she wasn't too concerned about that herself.

The first thing to do was locate their Majesties. Whilst they'ed not been particularly shy in the last two inspections today they proved very elusive. After inspecting every frame with brood on it I was unable to find either queen. Queens aren't keen on light and tend to hang about where there's brood, knowing that a beekeeper can reconfigure the frames narrowing down the places she's likely to be -particularly in a small colony. With a couple of empty frames removed I paired up the frames with brood separating each pair by an inch or so. After a few minutes I checked the inner faces of the paired brood frames and sure enough there she was.

Queen bee in a clip

The next job was to catch her I did this using the queen clip. After trapping the queen and a few attendant workers I then had to isolate her. A couple of workers crawled out through the slots in the clip making things a little easier for me, but it was basically a case of encouraging them out but not the queen being careful not to squish Queeny B with the springloaded clp..

Marked queen in marking cage

After this came the Marking Cage. Removing the plunger and holding the clip open above the open hive so I wouldn't lose her if I dropped her I gave the clip a couple of taps till she fell into the tube and replace the plunger so she couldn't escape. It now occurs to me that I could've probably made things easier if I'd just caught her in the tube in the first place. Ah well we live and learn. The marking cage is a transparent tube with a fabric net at one end, the plunger that goes into it has a soft sponge top. The idea is that you gently push the queen to the netting then dab the paint on her back whilst she held there.

Red paint. They'll all be wearing it this season.

After the paint was applied I pulled back the plunger giving her some room to walk about in the tube whilst the paint dried before popping her back into the hive. To reintroduce her I let her walk out onto the topbars and make her own way into the colony.

The Queen going home again..

Going through the hives it was evident Hive1 is building numbers faster than Hive2. The theory goes that you can stimulate the bees to build up more brood by feeding them thin syrup so this weekend I think I'll put the rapid feeders on and see if the queen of Hive2 steps it up a notch on the egg laying front. Hopefully the paint will stay on them and their colonies will accept them back. Later this season if I find queens in the hives without the red splot then I'll know they've been superseded.

Auction Season

Last weekend was the April 2013 Whitby Goth Weekend. But I had higher things on my mind as for bee keepers in this neck of the woods it's auction season, the time of year when beekeeper's swarm to various town and village halls, beer tokens at the ready to buy and sell a variety of beekeeping related gubbins ranging from the very useful such as actual live bees to the marginally less useful such as VHS video tapes (of bees) and pretty much everything in between. On Sunday the 28th it was the Beverley Beekeepers Association 2013 Auction. This year I took a friend along, she'd never been to an auction before and when you get right down to it what girl doesn't secretly want to be spirited off to a local beekeeping auction?

As with last year I rolled up a few minutes after the bidding had started and too late to get a seat. Maybe next year I'll get there in time for a viewing, but I'll not put money on it. The first thing I noticed looking at the array of woodware with the occasional plastic or shiny steel item was the heather press which seemed to be at all the previous auctions I've attended was absent. Maybe it's found a home at last.

Auction stuff, don't think the extractor sold.

This year I was after three things a strainer, a Snelgrove board and some food grade plastic buckets. There wasn't a strainer in the printed item list I'd brought with me but the auction seems to get a lot of submissions on the day so I figured one might appear. ..and not long after wandering in, a conical stainless steel tap strainer came up. Basically it's a device that hangs from the tap of your honey extractor or other container and honey coming out passes through leaving bits of wax and the odd bee leg or whatever behind. I picked it up for a fiver, they cost about £20 new so I was quite pleased with that. There's some glue from a paper label on it and a little what might be wax so I'll have to get some stainless steel cleaner or possibly a little caustic soda to it at some point. I can't just bung it in the dishwasher because it there's any wax on it will melt in the water and adhere to the machine.

Stainless Steel Conical Strainer, every home should have one.

Thanks to being late we were standing to the side of the stage but I spotted some spare seats in a hallway and brought a couple over seating ourselves with an excellent view of the proceeding albeit a little close to the Megamouth MP3 Pulse portable PA. Whilst the feedback wasn't quite at Jesus and Mary Chain levels it was enough to elicit the odd wince amongst the assembled. Moving the speaker a few feet to one side of the auctioneer fixed that.

My second purchase was two supers with castellated spacers. Purchased in the spirit of optimism. I'm hoping to need them for the huge honey harvest everyone is hoping for this year but nobody is really expecting. I'm not sure what they're made of but they're quite light, going by the weight and the colour I think they may be cedar.

Possibly Cedar supers, two for a dozen beer tokens.

When I last fed the bees I later noticed there'd been some syrup leaking from the contact feeders I was using. Not surprising given the temperature changes we've been having recently. I don't hugely want my queens to die under a cascade of sugar syrup so when some rapid feeders came up I bid on some picking up a lot of four for twelve quid. They're a simple idea. It's a donut shaped bowl you pour syrup into, bees climb up the inside of the hole and access the syrup. Their access to the reservoir is limited by a plastic cup over the central column to minimise drowning incidents.

Rapid Feeders

There was a break whilst the bees were auctioned outside, was a little windy out there so didn't stay out long to watch that myself, instead I took the opportunity to reconnoitre the items on the floor and note down what I was going to bid on. I pointed out  a few things to my friend explaining what they were and picked up a solid wood floor to that'd been creosoted or something leaving me with a black thumb. Well there's probably a lesson for me there. I spotted two lots of buckets to bid on but no Snelgrove boards at all. There was a few interesting bits and bobs like a hive trolley for lugging hives around without putting out your back, a box of some rather worrying rubber objects that later turned out to be candle moulds, a handful of honey extractors, a rather swish honey refractometer.

Bariatric Kick Scooter!

There was a lot of beehives in varying condition ranging from very used to brand new. I suspect a couple had probably been made locally for sale at the auction. Unfortunately I doubt my own woodworking skills would have impressed anyone.

Rather fetching green and black national hive on a stand

An old galvanised steel settling tank sat in one corner. You can't use these anymore as some bright spark realised that an acidic substance like say honey could leach zinc from the metal so now they have to be made from food grade plastic or stainless steel,  but it was still an interesting looking lump of beekeeping history nonetheless. This one had strainer in the top part and a layer of plastic had been placed below it presumably to protect it.

An interesting lump of beekeeping history, and some plastic.

There was an item looking a like a cross between a ski pole and a walking stick. It was a honey creamer used to make set honey -the opaque non runny type. I have a vague plan to try making some this year. I didn't bid on that though, figure I'd wait and see if I get enough honey to experiment with first.

Self righting walking stick

After the bees were auctioned and I had a mug of tea (white no sugar if you're wondering) the auction returned inside. I was outbid on both lots of buckets but after the auction the chap who'd won a batch of seven for the rather good price of £6 offered them to me for the same which I took him up on. Now I have my all important buckets just need the bees to do their bit so I can fill them now :) I haven't photographed the buckets as I'm fairly certain most readers have a rough idea what a bucket looks like. These ones are food grade white plastic, metal handles and white lids. I've mentioned food grade plastic a few times, the name suggests it's some sort of edible plastic but it isn't. Normal plastics can leach unpleasant things like phthalates into food they're in contact with or in other cases may break down easily releasing carcinogens and other nastiness into your food and drink. Food grade plastic is free of these things and of any surface contaminants too -which actually means food grade plastic coming into contact with something toxic is no longer food grade.

Back to the auction.. a stainless steel double strainer came up. This is two strainers with the coarser one fitting into and above the finer one. The whole thing goes into the top of a honey bucket supported by it's adjustable arms and honey poured in passes through first the 1.5mm mesh then the 0.5mm mesh. There was a new one going for twenty quid from the local supplier who was selling kit in an adjoining room so with that as a fallback and a guide price I stared bidding and got it for twelve of little gold coins, looks like it may be unused.

Take the strain

Something I'd noticed in the auction listing was a lot labelled propolis kit. I don't get much propolis from my bees, there's ways to harvest it but I don't do it, not at the moment anyway It's touted to have useful health properties which are currently being investigated and is used in tinctures, salves and so on, curiously it's also used to make polishes for violins. Even more curiously propolis tincture tastes suspiciously reminiscent of Jägermeister, the world's favourite Kräuterlikör. I spotted the lot near where I was seated. There was some containers of propolis, a bag of plastic tubs, some very old leaflets about the stuff, a litre of Propylene Glycol, some 30ml dropper bottles, an unused syringe and what appears to be a small wooden club. I think the little club might be for breaking up frozen propolis. Having read a little about propolis products I decided if there wasn't much interest I was going to bid on this curious lot. Turned out there was only myself and another person interested and I got it for under a tenner.

Propolis and chemical stuff.

I reckon there's about 1.25 Kilo's of propolis in the various containers. Most of the bottles had a small amount of thick black propolis tincture in them. I have no idea of the composition of the tincture but it's very thick and I'd guess quite old. Other things I picked up were thirty 1lb jars for three quid and a batch of plastic frame runners. There was a few DEFRA leaflets around so I picked up some bedtime reading on Tropilaelaps, Varroa, Foulbrood and the Asian Hornet. Afterwards we adjourned to Lempicka Cafe in Beverley for a very late lunch.

I didn't manage to get a Snelgrove board, but that's not a huge worry as I have one and can make a second myself if I really need to. It was quite a successful day. An email following up the event said about £4400 of business was done. The atmosphere at the auction was pleasant and the auctioneer kept things moving nicely -turns out he's the chap who keeps bees a few streets from me, small world.