A Warm Winter and a Cold Spring

The season is off to a slow start. With the blurry transition from Winter to Spring we're getting a few days of tshirt weather and a few nearly freezing nights. Actually the National Bee Unit recently sent out an advisory email warning of high varroa levels and low food stores but mine seem to have plenty of food left. Varroa levels are high this year because of the mild Winter. Beekeepers tend to treat the bees for varroa in Winter when there's no brood for the mites to hide in the comb with leaving the mites vulnerable but as last Winter was warm (as Winter goes) many hives had brood so the Varroa weren't exposed to the treatment -that or it simply wasn't cold enough for long enough for beekeepers to use Oxalic acid. Food stores are low in some colonies because spring was so cold and bees haven't been able to forage. Warm winter, cold spring. Bad combination.

Firing up the smoker

I treated the bees for mites with Oxalic acid in February this year, it's likely there may have been some brood in the hives so I may need to do a different varroa treatment at some point. This week when we had a warm day I decided to give the bees a quick inspection. Apart from the colony that died out two other colonies had shrunk considerably so I moved them into nucleus hives so they have less space to try and keep warm. This has left me with a lot of spare frames of stored syrup which I'm not entirely sure what to do with. I suspect they'll probably be fine to keep for a long time in case I need to feed a colony up though -although it'd be bad practice to move them between apiaries.

Isolation Starvation

This is a photo of the colony that died. The very last remains of the cluster are over on the right of the comb where they died, over on the left of the frame you can see capped food stores which would've kept them alive if they'ed been able to reach. In the middle you can also see some capped brood they'ed been raising before it got too cold. They also had whole frames of food stores left in the hive towards the ends. For now I've blocked the entrance to the hive and left it sat in place. With the entrance open the other colonies would rob it out. The previous two Winters I've put candy boards on the hives but this year decided not to as a bit of an experiment -I don't think many beekeepers in the UK use Candy boards really. Think I'll probably make them a regular part of my Winter routine.

A developing Drone the workers have removed

On the stronger hives I swapped out the floors for clean ones to remove the last of dead bees left in the hives. One colony has a lot of brood already and had started raising Drones. Examining their hive floor there was the usual dead workers, bits of pollen what looks like wax scales and a large pale drone larva that had been pulled from the comb part way through its metamorphosis. I have no idea why the workers had decided to cull him but as they'ed only pulled one I decided not to lose any sleep over it. Drones come from haploid eggs meaning they only have half the chromosomes of a female bee. This means recessive genes are expressed whereas with a diploid egg there may be a dominant gene so mutations amongst male bees are more common than female. My guess is some sort of genetic mutation in this drone caused the females to cull him. Over the years I've seen a couple of red eyed drones before and once a white eyed drone, if there's a lot of mutation though it may mean changing the queen.

Coccinella septempunctata, the larger one is probably the female.

 It's not just the honey bees gearing up for the Spring. I spotted a pair of Seven Spot Ladybirds in deep conversation taking in the sunlight. Fascinating ladybird fact: Some ladybird species mate for up to 9 hours. Who'd've thought it?

Bumble Bee foraging from a Dandelion

Dandelions are in full flower at the moment providing a nectar source for social and solitary bees. Gardeners tend to combat Dandelions but they're a useful early food source for pollinators.