Artificial Swarm is making progress

Just over a week ago I did an artificial swarm on Hive2 using a snelgrove board. Today I had a look in the top brood box to see what was going on.It was a little awkward due to the height and my frame perch didn't quite fit the side of my brood box. You might notice from the pic I've got handles on 4 sides of the box, the specification only calls for a slight recessed grip but it seemed a good idea to me. Afterall these things get heavy.

Going throught the frames I was able to see there were no eggs and no uncapped brood. That was good news as it meant I hadn't accidentally put the queen in there when I made the artificial swarm. If I had done she'd've been continuing to lay eggs in there. I also found a lot of queen cells. Also good news as it meant the young bees in there had spotted the absence of queen and started making a new one, I cut out all but two of the queen cells then removed the frame one of them was on leaving the other in place.

Supercedure Queen Cell

The queen cell I left in the AS should hatch and hopefully mate. Then I opened Hive2 to have a nosey. Those bees are getting a bit feisty, but at last they've started to work the super. I spotted a few supercedure cells in this hive too so I guess the bees aren't too hapy with their current queen's performance, I'm not ecstatic about the temprament of the hive either so after cutting out all the supercedure cells I found I put in the frame with a cel from Hive1. All being well that new queen will hatch, mate adn replace the original queen ..well that or the bees will kil her. Gonna have to wait and see..

Loved Again Vintage

So once again I have stuff on sale. There a new tea shop called Loved Again Vintage at 24 Princes Avenue, Hull, sat between Union Mashup and Lounge. As well as teas and cake etc it also sells a range of vintage clothing and items ranging from clothing to crockery and furniture. If you'd like a cup of Earl Grey whilst you buy a Bakerlite radio this is the place to go. You can also book it for parties in the evenings.

Loved Again Vintage

 I've hired a shelf to put various my propolis products, lip balm and polish on. Initially I put everything I had complete with information cards onto a shelf with a couple of frames of drawn comb.

Propolis items

It wasn't the most aesthetically pleasing arrangement of goods but they've since rearranged it so it looks more aesthetically pleasing, and tucked the excess items into a drawer -it's now a lot less clutered than the above photo and more in keeping with the rest of the shop. I've also since added my batch of lip balm which seems to have generated quite a lot of interest.

No, it's not my hand.

Currently they're stocking Propolis Tincture, Propolis Salve, Propolis and Tea Tree Salve, Beeswax Polish, Beeswax and Honey Peppermint Lip Balm and some empty 20ml amber dropper bottles.

Edit 16/4/2014: Loved Again Vintage was a pop-ip shop/cafe and has now popped off so is no longer around.

Lip Balm

Another day another product..

A couple of years ago a housemate suggested I make lip balm but at the time I wasn't interested in making my own range of cosmetics, afterall for me beekeeping is about woodwork, heavy lifting, huge numbers of potentially dangerous insects and burning stuff not faffing about with skincare products. However this year I made some propolis salve and found it was actually quite fun and it seems to have generated a lot of interest, the other day a friend sent me a link to a lip balm recipe. I gave it a quick look, it required beeswax, honey, almond oil and peppermint oil and didn't look particularly difficult. Well I had some beeswax sat doing nothing, I'd actually been flogging it very cheaply to a seamstress as I didn't have much use for it myself, I had some honey, the indian shop round the corner seems to sell every kind of edible oil you can think of and a few you wouldn't. I just needed some tiny tins and peppermint essential oil. After a few minutes on the internet I had them ordered and after a day's wait for delivery I was in business.

It wasn't too hard to make and didn't require much equipment. A glass jug to make it in, somethng to stir it with, a heatsource and some scales. I also used a syringe to measure it out. By happy coincidence 10ml of my lip balm weighed 10g. There's a lot of different tins to choose from but I opted for some round aluminium screwtops.

Fifty tins, filled, labelled up and ready to go.

As with the Propolis Tincture and Salve labelling was tedious. Each tin needed a label on the front and the back and then I added a price sticker too. I got almost right through Social Distortion's first album in the time it took to label them up. As before I used my bee picture and the same font as the alve and tincture so it looks good sharing shelf space with my other products.

Beeswax & Honey Peppermint Lip Balm

Propolis Tincture & Salve

Don't worry folks, this entry has a mercifully low text to picture ratio!

Pretty much everyone and his dog knows bees make honey, a lot of people are also aware they make wax and a smaller number of people know bees make bees, but there's a couple of other things they make too. One of them is Propolis.

Properwhat now? Propolis is a natural resinous substance rich in antioxidants gathered by honey bees. It's made from tree sap and resin and has very powerful anti-bacterial and anti-fungal properties and has been used in folk medicine for centuries. It's believed to be a natural treatment for a huge number of health problems and conditions including acne, bacterial infections, burns, canker sores, colds, cold sores, diabetes, giardiasis, herpes, inflammation, influenza, peptic ulcers, hay fever and to stimulate the immune system and prevent tooth decay. Seriously? Yup, apparently so. Whilst modern medicine is still evaluating it for various applications it's already seeing use in dentistry. Hippocrates recommended it for sores and ulcers, it also got a mention in Pliny’s Natural History (about 78 AD), Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica (sometime between 50 and 70 AD) and John Gerard’s Generall Historie of Plantes (1597).

There's a few different products you can make with propolis and I decided to go for a tincture. You can sell the tincture as it is or use it as a component for other things. Actually you can sell propolis as a powder or  in edible capsules or formed into tablets but I didn't fancy that. After all it's likely to be contaminated with a few solids like bits of hive and bee that people don't hugely want to be ingesting so I figured dissolved and filtered ina tincture was the way to go.

Propolis is really sticky stuff which would make it hard to work with but if you freeze it it becomes brittle. I kept in the freezer for a few weeks before using a coffee grinder to grind it up into a fine powder. I did that because I wanted to increase it's surface area so it would dissolve more readily in my solvent. There's a few things you can dissolve propolis in but I needed something safe for people to take internally and put on their skin, and also something that wouldn't require me to get involved with the legalese of high proof alcohol -which is pretty pricey stuff anyway. I opted for British Pharmacopoeia grade Propylene Glycol which is considered food safe. Propylene has a few different uses in food and other areas such as anti freeze. I got mine from an online veterinary supply shop -apparently it's used as a medication for farm animals.

5 litres of Propylene Glycol BP

The glycol/propolis suspension was then put in my airing cupboard above the hot water cylinder for a few weeks. It's warm enough in there to help the propolis dissolve but not hot enough to be detrimental to the propolis. To stop it settling too much I gave it a shake a couple of times a day to mix up.

After a few weeks I filtered the now dark mixture through a coffee filter, hellishly slow process that, to get my tincture. A nice uniform dark brown liquid which to me still tastes like Jägermeister but less sweet. 

Magic Bee Medicine!
I probably can't legally call it that :(

The tincture is to be sold in small bottles with dropper lids. I had two sizes of bottle which held 17ml or 20ml. The easiest way to do that was to use a syringe to measure it out. This stuff is usually used with a few drops dissolved in water or directly into the mouth if the taste doesn't bother you too much.

We don't want spillage.

With the bottles filled it was time to come up with some labels. I decided to use the bee currently in the top right corner of this blog. I drew it last year and I'm getting a lot of mileage from it. Whilst it's not really a food I decided to label it in line with food regulations with contents, metric weight , ingredients list, contact address and country of origin, best by date and a batch number on two labels. I also thought that the label would look a little nicer and more olde worlde with the corners trimmed instead of square. I think it looks pretty neat but it made peeling the labels off the backing paper a pig of a job. I'd made eighty odd bottles and with two labels on each it seemed to take an age. Looks good though :)

Final product.

So that was tincture made, the other product I wanted to make was a salve which can be applied to the skin for various conditions cuts and grazes. Once you have the propolis tincture it's actually fairly easy to make the salve. Its just added to molten petroleum jelly and mixed till it sets. I wanted to make a fair amount of salve so I was going to need a lot of petroleum jelly. Took me a while to locate but it turns out horsey people use petroleum jelly by the bucketful. I've no idea what they do with it but I'm guessing those equestrian types must have some fairly crazy parties!

I thought we'd try something different tonight dear.

Molten Petroleum Jelly

Molten Petroleum Jelly with Propolis Tincture
Nice colour.

Once the petroleum jelly was melted I let it cool a little then added the propolis tincture. The tincture sank to the bottom so I had to stir it as it continued to cool to make sure it was evenly mixed throughout. Then I transfered it to a glass measuring jug and poured it into plastic tubs which were on a scale so I could measure the weight of salve. I later found it was easier to melt the petroleum jelly in the jug in the oven then mix the tincture in it too. The tubs I had held 50g of the salve so popping a tub on the scale and hitting the zero button I decanted 50g of the stuff into each, actually I went just over but that's okay it's short measures people don't like.

Ooops went over.

First batch of Propolis Salve

Next job was to label the tubs up. I decided to label it similarly to the tincture, same font, same picture and so on but with square corners. After all they're white labels on white plastic tubs.

My bees all look the same

I made fifty two tubs of propolis salve and just for the sake of variety made thirty tubs of Propolis and Tea Tree Salve by adding some Tea Tree Essential Oil to the mix.

Another finished product.

I also had a few tins of polish left too but I wasn't keen on my old bee picture in the label so I made up some small stickers of the newer picture and stuck them over the old one. I think it looks a lot better and it gives my different products a uniform look, a brand if you will.

Beeswax Polish -now with new improved label!

I never envisioned I'd be making skin and healthcare products but beekeeping certainly takes you down some unexpected paths. All that filtering, measuring, mixing, melting and cooling things was a little Breaking Bad. Well now I have a product I just need to market it.

Vertical Artificial Swarm

At last the brood boxes are brimming with bees and there's more in the comb waiting to emerge. When worker bees start hatching numbers increase exponentially. This means that a colony that was looking rather weak can quite quickly get congested and when colonies are congested they're more likely to swarm.

Healthy brood

Burr comb between frame tops, think they're short of space.

Before bees swarm they'll start making a new queen and by the time she hatches the old queen will have done one with a load of your favourite workers. If the beekeeper is vigilant enough and has good enough eyesight he or she should be able to spot queen cells being made during regular inspections and take steps to minimise the risk of swarming. Initially the bees make what's called a 'play cup' or 'queen cup' a round structure sticking out of the comb designed hold an egg horizontally as opposed to stuck to the vertical back wall of a normal cell in the comb.

Empty cup

Finding one of these cups isn't always a sign of imminent swarming. The bees make them and don't always use them hence the name 'play' cups. Sometimes the bees will put and egg into one, then later they'll pull it out and put it somewhere else. I don't know why they do that and have my doubts that anyone else does either -although I suspect they do it just to worry beekeepers. If one of these cells has a hatched larvae swimming in royal jelly in it then you know for sure the bees are making a new queen. If it's half way up the comb like the play cup in the image above it's a supersedure cell meaning the bees are raising a new queen to replace the existing one, if it's at the bottom of the comb it's a swarm queen and half your workforce is looking to abscond. I found two cups at the bottom of a frame in hive1 and  2 in the middle of comb on Hive2. Perhaps Hive1 are thinking about swarming and Hive2 are thinking of revolution.

There's different ways to reduce swarming, you can give the bees more space by adding supers or a second brood box, some people use a second queen excluder below the brood box to stop queens leaving or clip the queen's wings to stop her flying. I've already given both colonies supers but they're not using them just yet, probably dont want to squeeze through the queen excluder.

Whilst those measure should reduce likelihood of swarming the most important method is to make the bees think they've already swarmed. There's different ways to create an artificial swarm and they generally involve splitting a colony. I decided to do a vertical artificial swarm because it means you still have the same number of hives whereas other methods mean making up more hives and I don't have any spare roofs or the space for another two complete hives anyway - plus there was a Snelgrove board included with my original hive.

Snelgrove was a jolly clever bekeeper and entemologist from Somerset. In 1934 his book Swarming Its Control And Prevention was published. It's since been republished fifteen times, most recently in 1998. I haven't read it but there's a good article about it and Snelgrove's technique here. Apparently he'd based his technique on a theory of swarming that was incorrect, despite that his technique was and remains effective and is still in use to this day. His method uses a piece of kit named after it's inventor. The Snelgrove board is, unsurprisingly, a board. It has a square hole in the middle covered by a metal mesh on on each side, and has six doors in the edge arranged in three pairs above and below the board. A photo would make it a lot clearer but I didn't think to take one before I stuck it in the hive this afternoon.

The artificial swarm needs a second brood box and enough frames to fill it and the Snelgrove Board. I'd made a couple of brood boxes previously and a few spare deep frames to go in it and bit's of frames. Just had to make up 7 new frames using a mix of old stuff I'd had sitting about and new gubbins I'd ordered in. Recently a neighbour flogged me a Black & Decker workmate WM825, she'd had it sat in the box unopened for about a year. It's bit Hank Hill and but made assembling the frames easier and I managed to avoid pushing any nails into my thumb this time.

Knocking some frames together

The short version of Snelgrove's artificial swarm technique as I understand it is you take all but two frames from the brood box and put them into a new brood box leaving the queen in the old box with some workers and replace the removed frames with undrawn foundation. The other brood box with it's frames of brood, eggs and worker bees goes on top of the brood box and any supers that are in place seperated by the Snelgrove board. The doors are then opened and closed in sequence over the following ten days to filter forager bees back into the box below. When the door is opened any mature foragers flying out of it will return to the hive entrance they're already used to at the bottom of the box so after a little time all the mature foragers should drift into the bottom brood box where the queen is.

Foragers leaving the side entrance of the Snelgrove Board

The queen and older workers find themselves in a suddenly roomy area with no young bees and very little stores which is pretty much how they would be if they'ed just swarmed, whilst the young bees find themselves with brood, eggs and food stores but no queen or mature foragers which again is how they would be if their Queen had just swarmed. The older bees and queen go about the business of rebuilding  and replenshing new comb whilst the younger bees get a wriggle on and start making themselves a new queen. Later on you can either separate the boxes into two different colonies or remove one of the queens and reunite both boxes to make one stronger colony with a younger queen.

Hive1 with Snelgrove Board and second brood box above the super

Well that's the theory anyway. Unfortunately I couldn't find the queen of Hive1 at all today so I pulled out the frames I wanted making sure the queen wasn't on any of them so hopefully she's still in the original box. I hope the bees do what I'm expecting but they don't always.

I also inspected the other hives today. The swarm I caught are doing well I'm thinking I may build them into a third colony instead of trying to keep them in a nucleus, I managed to locate and mark the queen last week, she's layaing plenty of eggs so the nuc may be full in a few weekds time. The bees in Hive2 are a little tetchy at the moment so I'm thinking I might try and requeen them with a little royalty from Hive1 if things go to plan. Of course that's a pretty big 'if'. I've given both hives supers but so far neither one is making any use of them, to try and encourage them in Hive2 I rubbed some unripe hiney from burr comb on the frame tops. Hopefully that should get their attention.

Another Solitary Bee House

I saw a Red Mason Bee investigating a flowerbed the other day, it paid no interest to the solitary bee and ladybord box I hung up last summer. I did a little google research and decided that perhaps the bees just don't like it. Maybe the holes are the wrong size, maybe they just don't like bamboo -it's not exactly a native plant afterall. I guess what's aesthetically pleasing to people isn't necessarily what bees want. My friend who'd drilled holes in some fenceposts was now host to 5 or 6 sets of mason bee brood so I decided to do the same. Except I don't have a wooden fence.

What I did have was a plank of treated wood and some wooden blocks left over from pallets I'd dismantled. They were going to be firewood for a friend but I decided to repurpose them as a bee hotel. Using some zinc plated nails I attached the blocks to the plank. With a 9mm drill bit and a smaller one maybe 3mm I drilled a load of holes in the blocks. Mason bees don't like holes over 1cm in diameter apparently, they also don't like raggy edged holes. The smaller holes were an afterthought really, I've got no idea what random insect life if any will want them.

I figured it was going to need a little protection from the rain so I cut an old slate roof tile to size. Googling how to cut roof slates found me umpteen pages telling me it's very easy to cut slates to size. You just use a slate cutter. Unfortunately I don't have a stale cutter. Instead I used a craft knife and a wood saw, it was hard work. Really hard work. But I got a piece the size I wanted. I used some pond liner adhesive to attach it -partly because it's none toxic to wildlife but mostly because I didn't feel like going half a mile to the hardware shop to get some other glue.

I knocked a couple of nails into the sides to hang it by and attached it it to one of the nails left in the wall from my impromptu bee barrier. Ideally it should be a meter up a southfacing wall but my southfacing wall has a lot of plants growing against it and I also thought cats might damage it or at least annoy any insects living in it by using it as a step when they jump off the wall. The west facing wall it's attached to is near the bee hives and also gets a lot of sun.

Solitary Bee House -hopefully

After this photo was taken I moved it a few feet to the left so it gets more sun. As it's basically made of junk and rubbish and all it's cost me is a few nails and a little time to make I won't be too offended if the bees don't occupy it..

To Catch A Swarm

About a year or so ago my cat had fleas. :( I treated the cat and called the council's Pest Control to spray the house - it's a waste of time trying to deal with them yourself, and not that pricey to just pay someone who knows what they're doing. Anyway we got talking about bees and they asked if I'd be interested in collecting swarms of honey bees if they had any reported. I said I would and gave them my number.

Yesterday I got a call about a honey bee swarm over in Bilton. It was in a hedge in an elderly chaps garden,  and would I like to collect them? Yes I would. would I charge for it? Nope, afterall assuming I didn't mess up I was going to come away with a little colony of bees. Saves them a job, saves the old chap some money, saves the bees lives, avoids a few millilitres of pesticides being used and gets me some bees. Everyone's a winner :) I got my stuff together, rang the chap, the bees had been there for 8 days so far.. Aided by Satnav I went to see the bees.

I've never actually collected a swarm before but I've read a lot about it and watched a lot of youtube videos on the subject so had a pretty good idea how to go about it. Basically you put a box above the cluster of bees and smoke them up into then put them in your hive, or you put the box or a sheet below and cut whatever branch they're on and pop them into your hive.
 

Looks simple enough

They were clustered on a fence about a foot above the ground so I decided to put the box above the bees and smoke them up into it. Unfortunately these bees didn't know as much about swarm catching as I thought I did and instead of going up into the box they ran down to the bottom of the fence.

Lying down and using my phone's built in torch (what will they think of next?) I had a look under the fence. I was slightly puzzled because there suddenly seemed to be a lot less bees. Looking at the small cluster I found they'ed been making comb. There was about three inches of pure white comb with stored nectar. I cut this out then resumed my examination of the shrinking bee colony. There was a few inches gap between the fence and the back of the neighbour's shed. They were in that gap. I realised that the bees I'd seen first, in the photo above, were only part of the cluster so the good news was more bees. Not being able to reach them was a little inconvenient though. Eventually I came up with a plan. I'd like to say a cunning plan but it was probably an obvious one really.

Putting the nucleus with five drawn frames vertically against the fence, propped up with stones from the garden wall and topped with the roof I aimed a few puffs of smoke behind the fence.

Blowing smoke behind the fence

I got quite a roar from the swarm clustered back there. Yup more bees than I'd thought. I gave them a lot more smoke. I wanted to drive them forward through the gaps in the fence and into the nuc. They were starting to come through the gaps. Puffing smoke through the fence all around the nuc there was nowhere else for them to go -plus there was the pull of the drawn comb, some honey in it and the lemongrass oil.

"We're in this box! Come on!"

Eventually I was able to see workers  at the edge of the nuc nosanoving. Nosawhating now? Oh sorry. Bees have a scent gland called a Nosanov Gland at the tip of the abdomen. It makes a scent they use to let other bees know where the colony is. You can see there's an upside down bee in the picture above with her abdomen at a funny angle and her wings a blurr as she wafts scent. When I couldn't see any more bees looking down the gaps in the fence I lifted the nuc roof and found a mass of bees in it at the end that'd been towards the fence. Setting that down I pulled back the nuc and stood it upright. There were more bees in there and on the frames tops nearest the roof cluster.

Removing the middle two frames I took the roof and turned it over, with the cluster above the gap left by the removed  frames, and gently dealt it a sound wallop with the base of my fist then another. Glad I made the thing so strong now. That knocked all the bees but two into the nuc. I brushed out the pair of stragglers and carefully replaced the two frames. After a little smoke and application of the bee brush I put the crownboard and roof on and tied the whole thing up with a pretty blue bow.

In the box.

Well okay so it was a ratchet strap not a bow. I stood the nuc with it's entrance open close to the site the bees had been gathered and left it till about half past ten in the evening. That meant adding another trip to Bilton and back to my day but it gave any foraging bees or others who were still flying time to come and rejoin the colony in the nuc before I took it away. I let the chap know I was gong to come back when it was cooler and darker to take them away and he pressed me to accept a tenner for my fuel which I did. I returned after dark, blocked the entrance and slowly drove the colony home.

I'd seen and heard some big noisy drones whilst hiving the colony but hadn't see the queen at all during the exercise and there were no eggs in the comb they'ed built. There's always a chance they didn't have one, and if they did there's the chance I somehow squished her or that the bees got annoyed during the operation and killed her themselves. However when I got my stethoscope to the hive today I heard a high pitched noise which I think was a virgin queen piping so I suspect I managed to get her and just have to wait and see if she manages to mate now. That means leaving them alone for a fortnight. I may give them a feeder depending on the weather but there was already some food in the frames I gave them and I was able to see foragers coming and going today. When I open the hive in a fortnight I'll have to check for disease and varroa mite levels. It was a little trial and error and could have gone more smoothly but I think it went quite well, didn't even damage a plant.