As winter draws closer..

Been a while since my last entry. Fact is as the temperature drops and winter approaches there's less  for the beekeeper to do. The bees give up the urge to swarm, in theory anyway, and things start to calm down for the winter, so now there's no more need to open up the hive and check every frame for a few months. Ideally having made a shedload of honey the bees should be all set for a winter of happpily eating honey and staying warm. However what happens to honeybees in hives is some bloke comes along and steals most f the honey they've made. Oh dear. Hard life for a honeybee.

Luckily beekeepers are bright enough to know to feed the bees up for winter. What we feed them is syrup. The syrup is made from ordinary granulated sugar the sort you'd buy from Tesco for the coffee club at work -or if you're a bit thrifty from Wilkinsons who sell the same stuff for a little less.

The syrup for winter is thicker than the syrup given in the spring and the recipe varies depending who you ask. some will tell you it's 2KG of sugear to 1 litre of water, others will say it's 2 lb of sugar to 1 pint of water, and about umpteen other slight variations on a more or less 2:1 theme. To make it you just get a humongous pan, measure out the sugar and water then heat it up till it's melted then wait around whilst it cools.

One pan of winter syrup.
(Possibly not the most exciting picture ever placed on the internet.)

The syrup then goes into a feeder of some description. There's a lot of different feeder types. Ask a handfull of beekeepers about the merits and shortcomings of the different types and they'll all quite happily give you conflicting information all the while insisting they're right and nobody else knows what they're talking about. Beekeepers are like that.

Aaaaaaaanyway the feeders I've opted to use are called Brother Adam Feeders. You're probably thinking "Who the hell is Brother Adam?" He was a benedictine  monk born in Germany in 1898, at the age of 11 he went to live at Buckfast Abbey. In 1916 whilst mankind was busy trying to wipe itself out with World War I the humble Honeybee was being wiped out across the UK by a tracheal mite called acarapis woodi. It was probably a pretty crap time to be a honeybee. Brother Adam started a breeding program to develop a bee that was resistant to the mite as well as relatively easy to handle and with a good honey yield. His end product was the Buckfast bee which we're still using nowadays. They contain DNA from Italian, English, French, Turkish, Greek and African honeybees.

Brother Adam  is attributed with inventing a kind of feeder. some people swear blind that he didn't and it's just named after him. Although it strikes me that a guy who spent 77 years in beekeeping and was bright enough to develop a strain of bees to suit our climate and survive a devastating disease which wiped out most of the nations original honeybees was quite probably bright enough to make a wooden box and drill a hole in it. The Adam's Feeder is essentially just that. A box with a hole in the middle. There's a little island bit in the middle that the bees can climb out of from underneath to get to the syrup and a small bowl over this to limit the bees access to the reserviour.

Adam's Feeder

You need to limit bee acess to the reserviour otherwise they'ed drown in the syrup. As you can see from my picture a bee managed to get into the syrup before I had chance to pop a cover onto it. Don't worry tho, I rescued her. The reserviour is waterproofed by being treated with varnish, although some people prefer paint, and other's molten wax -whatever rocks your boat, and the whole thing sits on top of the hive. The bees climb up into the island in the bowl get some syrup and take it back down into the hive to store, no doubt grumbling all the that some idiot stole all their honey and now they're having to faff about with sugar syrup. Waterproofing these two took a while as there was a few knots in the wood which no matter how many coats I tried kept leaking when I tested it with water before putting them on the hives. I the end I turned them on their sides and poured varnish into the knots then left them to dry. Seems to have done the trick.

Bees using Adams Feeder

When the feeder is almost empty you remove the plastic bowl and let the bees have full rein of the reserviour. In theory they then pick it completely clean, what I've found is that the sugar crystalises a bit a the bottom and the bees have trouble removing it but the wet stuff they manage with just fine. When you take the bowl off the bees come boiling up out of the island it's like a little bee volcano. With this feeder you can add more syrup to top it up without having to remove it from the hive making it prety handy for bulk feeding..

The Destructors

Bees have problems. Probably the biggest one in the UK at present is the Varroa Destructor, an asian mite that lived amongst asian bees who were able to control the mite within their colonies. Mankind in his wisdom or lack thereof  has managed to transport the mites over much of the world to places where the honeybees have no defence against them. Our bees tend to ignore these rather large mites that cut whacking great big holes in their chitin and dine on their body fluids. Well actually they don't completely ignore them, they chew their own wings off if they get too bothered by them. Either way it's not good.

I wasn't able to get a picture of one using my camera phone and microscope so here's a link to a google image search for Varroa Destructor. As you can see they're rather large as mites go in comparison to their hosts, and look a little like crabs. For a comparison it's a bit like if you were being parasitised by medium sized cats.

There's a few ways to treat a honeybee colony for varroa and most people use a mix of measures. The most ubiquitous one is replacing bee hive floors with a wire mesh so any falling mites leave the hive. You can brush icing sugar into the hive which is supposed to loosen the mites' grip on the bees causing them to drop off. You  then put a monitoring tray below the hive and count the number of mites that fall. I tried this and saw exactly no mites at all. Either it didn't work or ants, wasps or whatever gobbled up the mites before I saw them. It did make the bees look amusing as they  buzzed round the garden covered in icing sugar like little angry ghosts. another way to check a colony for mites is to use a capping fork to pull out a load of drone larvae, the mites prefer the drone larvae, then you can count the mites on the larvae. I did this too and saw no mites either.

After the open mesh floor the next step is some kind of chemically type thing to kill the mites and not the bees. In different countries there's different substances you're legally allowed to use. I opt to use something called Apilife Var -it's a mix of thymol, Eucalyptus Oil, Menthol and Camphor. It certainly smells strongly and probably clears a blocked nose faster than Vicks. The theory is is suffocates the mites but doesn't harm the bees.

Apilife Var

It comes as two black biscuit type things in a yellow foil. You break the biscuits into 4 pieces and put them in the corners of the hive brood box. Whilst they're made from natural products the wrapper does say to avoid letting it make contact with human skin. Bees are actually livestock so whenever treated with a medicine such as Apilife Var the beekeeper has a legal obligation to keep a record of the batch number of the product.

Apilife Var in brood box

It seems to work rather well and I was soon seeing dead mites dropping onto the monitoring board beneath my strongly medicinal smelling hives. Whilst it may not harm the bees it seriously annoys them. To get the above picture of the broken biscuit in the hive corners I had to smoke the bees and photograph it quickly because it doesn't take long before the bees start attacking the stuff. They shred it and throw it out. Because of this you have to repeat it four times  on a weekly basis.

You can't get rid of the varroa from a colony completely so what beekeepers try to do is keep the varroa population at a level that doesn't impact the bees too heavily. There was an article on a BBC program this year about a chap who seems to be making headway in developing bees that will groom each other and pull off the mites -as the asian bees do, but it's probably going to be a long time before we have self grooming bees.

A Foray Into Carpentry

Something every bee keeper needs, other than a bucketful of stinging insects, is spare stuff. You need spare supers for the honey season and you need spare brood boxes for various swarm manipulations as well as housing more bees if you expand. Thanks to the auctions, eBay and Fragile Planet I have 6 supers and doubt I'll need more for a long time, however I don't have any spare brood boxes and as I use Commercial ones which are (currently) less popular than the Modified Nationals most of the nation favours there's less places to buy the things from and they're not cheap.

So I figured I'd make my own. My woodworking skills are very limited, I can more or less operate a hammer and a saw, but that's prettymuch it. A brood box is basically a box with the floor missing, so how hard can it be? I did two terms of woodwork at Driffield School, during that time they taught us bugger all. Well that's not quite true, they taught us how nails work, what glue does and that cellulose sealer smells funny. I'm pretty sure I already knew the first two and I've yet to find a use for knowing the third.

The first thing I needed were some hive plans. For the princely sum of £1.70 I was sent an A4 sheet of card printed on both sides. It might sound a bit steep for a piece of card printed on both sides but the fact is it should save a half decent carpenter a lot of money. You know what they say: give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day, teach him to make his own beehives and he can eat fish every day until he loses a thumb in a carpentry accident. Anyway if you want to make one yourself here's my own one sentence commercial brood box plans: Using 22mm thick wood make a box with no bottom measuring 465x465x270mm on the outside, cut a 10x11mm rebate along the inside top edges of two parallel sides. That's it.

The sides are meant to be joined by mortise and tennon joints. Mortise and tennon joints seem very useful things to know how to make. Unfortunately I didn't have a clue how to make them -still not sure which is the mortise and which is the tennon (or is it tenon?). Youtube to the rescue! In 4 minutes 50 seconds this guy taught me more than two terms of woodwork in a rural secondary school ever did. I also needed to know how to cut rebates, that was another mystery solved courtesy of youtube with a little help from wikipedia, turned out I needed something called a rebate plane or rabbeter plane.

Next thing I needed was some tools. I already had a drill, hammers, tape measures, nails, glue, woodfiller, a pencil and one of those right angle measuring things the name of which I forget -T square perhaps? It looks like a capital "L" and I pulled it out of council skip years ago. I needed a work surface, a vice, a tennon saw and a coping saw. However I wasn't buying a workbench and I'm not forking out for a proper vice. After a few minutes on eBay and I'd ordered the cheapest coping and tenon saws the world's marketplace had to offer and two mini vices. The two mini vices were cheaper than one proper vice and didn't need bolting to my worksurface. I also ordered a grandiosely named "Professional Duplex Rebate and Fillister Plane" for the princely sum of £17.50. The plane turned out to be a counterfeit Stanley No.78 Duplex Rabbet Plane -someone's taken a mould of one and is knocking out copies, it even had the Stanley model number embossed on the body so I was able to locate a pdf of the instructions for it. As for a worksurface I figured I'd use one of the hive stands from the auction.

Next up was some wood to make the thing from. Cedar is the best stuff to use, but hey if I wanted the best I wouldn't be banging this thing together myself would I? I've bought ply and recycled pine supers from Fragile Planet and they seem fine so I figure, as long as I treat the outside, pretty much any wood would do. So I went with whatever the local shop had -pine possibly? The sides are meant to be 270mm high and 22mm wide and I couldn't find that anywhere. However it turns out that all the wood in my local wood shop is displayed with incorrect measurements. So a 25mm piece of wood is 22mm thick -I have no idea why, maybe it's some tradesman secret to stop amateurs being able to build anything properly?

My first mistake was using a battery powered jigsaw to cut the lengths of wood to size. A battery powerred jigsw is great if you're in a hurry, but don't mind waiting 8 hours for the bloody thing to charge up. Mine was B&Q's cheapest offering from a few years ago and doesn't have an edge guide making it almost impossibleto cut a straight line with it. Still if you're in a hurry, can wait 8 hours and don't mind a slant to all your cuts then it's the business.

Improvised Workbench

Anyway I needed planks of wood 270mm height but the closest I could get was two pieces adding up to 286mm high, after a little thought I planed in a 16mm rebate in each where they met then used glue and screws across the rebates to join them together. I'd not used a plane before, it turned out to be pretty simple but fairly hard work. I suspect it was really such hard work because my worksurface was about 10" from the ground and wobbled like crazy. There's probably knack to using a plane so it doesn't keep getting clogged up but I didn't figure it out.

Cutting a Mortise or maybe a Tennon

After making the sides the right size I then had to cut the mortise and tenon joins. At this point I discovered that the cheapest tenon saw eBayers could import from Hong Kong was a little dangerous, with a blade given to unexpectedly folding during use. After straightening the thing for the third time I gave up and opted to use an old garden saw I've had kicking about in the shed for the past decade. I also found that the cheapest coping saw in the world evidently came with some the worlds cheapest blades which kept twisting and snapping during use. A trip to Mac's Tool's on Newland Avenue got me a pack of new blades for just under 2 beer tokens.

The box went together fine although the joints weren't too pretty what with the lengths being a little out thanks to the convenience of power tools. Used a bit of glue and some 2" aluminium nails leftover from restoring the original hives to reinforce the joints. Added a little wood filler on the gaps where the joints looked shoddy -as I won't be using the box till next summer at the earliest I figure that any VOCs in the filler or glue will be long gone by then. Treated the outisde with Shed & Fence paint and ended up with a functional brood box, not bad for £9 worth of wood, £1 of screws, and possibly another £1 worth of glue and filler.

First Homemade Brood Box

I figured I could probably do better than that, and could probably use a second spare brood box anyway, so I popped back to the local wood shop and got another two planks of wood, once again ignoring their measurements and measuring them myself. The wood and screws weighed in at £11 this time, not sure why but they've let me have some off cuts for free in the past so I can't complain. This time I decided to cut them manually using my ancient garden saw.

Think I'm starting to the hang of this

Without the wonders of technology I managed to cut the edges nice and straight. Clamped the pieces to the long edge of a hive stand, stabilised it with a couple of breeze blocks and started planing. It took a couple of hours and I finished in darkness but managed to get them all done in an evening.

Second Homemade Commercial Brood Box

After a wait for some decent weather I glued the joints, drilled guide holes through the mortises or maybe the tennons -whichever the bit that sticks out is called anyway, then banged in some galvanised clout nails . I did use a little bit of wood filer here and there but not a lot. I reckon the result is far neater than my first attempt in fact.

Prior to this I'd knocked together some flatpack supers and made up some clearer boards and follower boards, not very challenging stuff. Both brood boxes are functional, bee tight and hold the frames as intended without letting the wind whistle through. I'm pretty certain that with a decent work surface, meaning one that's more than 10" off the ground that doesn't wobble like a weeble in an earthquake, it'd be a far easier job to do and to get more accurate cuts and angles. I could have got a flat packed Commercial Brood box from Thornes delivered for £49.88 (or assembled for £63.51). This little project cost me £40 on tools and about £24 on materials so for two boxes I've saved quite a bit and obviously I still have the tools for later use.

Extracting Honey

Having removed the honey the next step it to extract it. Initially I built a honey extractor using a design someone else posted on the internet based on a wire cage built around a paint mixer attached to a drill. It kind of worked but was seriously dangerous once loaded with frames so I stopped using it pretty sharpish. If you see the design on a Google search I'd suggest you ignore it completely, I don't think the person who posted it had even actually tested it ..but that's the internet for you.. So I went with the old fashioned method of extraction: Crush and Strain. It's simple. You cut the honeycomb from the frame, crush it up then strain it through a filter to remove the wax.

I set up a little production line on the kitchen floor. Take the frame from the super, cut out the wax, pop it in a bucket, place the sticky frame in another box. Squeeze and squash the honey comb in the first bucket, put the sticky wet mess into a steamer pan over the second bucket. Doddle.

Crush and Strain Honey Extracting

As I hadn't originally planned to use this method to extract the honey I'd gone and used wired foundation so whilst crushing the combs I was pulling out bits of wire. It's also a shame I had to mash up the wax foundation at all really as I'll need to replace that next year, luckily I wasn't going to use the deep sized stuff again anyway. Still it worked okay, next year I'll probably look into an extractor, long time away tho.

Straining honey and wax

I didn't have a sieve or strainer big enough for the job but I did have a steamer with a couple of layers that had fairly small holes -or in honey filtering terms: great big holes. Initially I lined the steamers with cheesecloth for extra filtering but that quickly got clogged so I soon dragged that out. I figure for a first batch this lot will be fine, it's not like I'll be flogging or showing the stuff -yep some people really do that.

Straining both crops

I noticed that the honey from the super of Hive2 was much lighter in colour than that of the deep super in Hive1. I don't really know why but figure this was because the deep frames in Hive1 had been used to raise brood and been walked all over by the bees for months whilst the shallow super on Hive2 wasn't in place for as long. Also because they were added at different times perhaps there's a colour difference related to the nectars that were available at different times in the season and maybe even the age of the honey. The darker honey has a much stronger flavour than the pale and was easier to pour too.

Settling in buckets

After extraction the honey needs to settle for a while so air bubbles and anything in there that floats can rise whilst anything else heavier than honey which got through the filter can sink to the bottom.

Buckets of Honey

There you have it. About 11 kilos of honey altogether. Looking at the darker one on the right you can see it has a lot of air bubbles at the top which will need skimming off before I put it into jars. I popped them into the airing cupboard to ripen for a few days whilst I dug out some jars.

Honey

The bucket of light coloured honey was about 2" full and filled half the jars I'd managed to save over the year so I decided not to jar up all the darker stuff yet as that bucket is about 2/3 full., instead I just did a couple then popped the bucket back in the airing cupboard whilst I figure out what to do with the stuff. You may not be able to tell from the photo but it looks a little cloudy with air bubbles and no doubt other random particles that made it through the steamer holes. Next time I'll have to use a mesh filter

I think it went quite well considering I wasn't really expecting to have any honey to extract this year and was completely unprepared :) I've still got most of the bucket of darker honey in the airing cupboard and have put the jars into there too so it can clear a little more. The next thing I've got to do is figure out what I'm actually going to do with 11 kilos of honey...

Taking the Honey

Today I decided to remove the supers (the bits with the honey in) and start treating the bees for varroa mites. Most modular beehives use an extra box called a 'Super' which sits above the brood box where the queen lays her eggs. A thing called a Queen Excluder goes between the super and the brood box which lets the workers go through to draw comb and store honey but doesn't let the queen in to lay eggs. So at he end of the season you should finish up with a brood box ful of bees and a super (or stack of supers) above this full of honey for you to take.

Before you can take the super you need to get the bees out of it. There's various ways to do this: leaf blowers, unpleasant smelling chemicals or a variety of clearer boards that incoporate bee escapes that let the bee travel in one direction but not the other -effectively bee valves. There's umpteen types and I opted to use rhombus escapes because someone on the internet said they were fast -and as everyone knows if someone posts something on the internet then it must be true. I ordered a couple of plastic rhombus bits from Thornes and popped to B&Q for some wood then knocked up two clearer boards.

Rhombus Clearer Boards

Basically the bee goes in the round hole at the top, wanders out the pointy end on the underside then can't find the pointy end to go back the other way.. Simple. Except bees aren't really that stupid and after a while they find their way back up so you can't leave the board on for long really. I came home at lunchtime and placed the clearers below the shallow supers then went back to work. I came back just after 4pm and found both shallow supers empty. Great. they work. and they work quickly! I took off the supers, jolly good.

Hive1 also had a 'National Deep' (brood box from a national hive) which I was also using as a super, albeit a great big one. I popped the clearer under it then waited a few hours before returning. This was a mistake. I hadn't realised that whilst shallow supers have a bee space below the frames national deeps do not as they depend upon the floor of the hive to create that space. Effectively any bees in the deep box that weren't above the round hole in the clearer had just been sealed up for three hours. Oops. That didn't put them in the best of moods.

I decided to get the super removed this evening anyway by using a bee brush (yeah there really is such a thing, it's meant to be made of pig hair though, not actual bees) to brush each frame clean of stinging insects and transfer it into another box. Actually I initially decided to try the leaf blower method using my housemate's hair dryer set on cold. She graciously lent me her dryer for the purpose, it's a Revlon if anyone was wondering, so I popped it on an extension lead and promptly found it didn't actually shift any bees. So yeah, the bee brush was Plan B really. I removed the clearer board, turned it upside down and laid it with an edge to the hive entrance so the bees would walk back in -yes this actually works, but back to the honey theiving.

I pulled out each frame one at a time brushed all the bees off it and placed it in a spare brood box. By the time I was half way through it was dark. Bees don't fly much in the dark, but they doo crawl. They do crawl a lot.They did crawl all over me. It was about this point that I discovered demin although hardwearing won't actually turn away a bee sting. Got one in my upper thigh Straight through the material. I could also hear a buzzing near my ears which told me there was a little bee party going on somewhere on the hood of my schmock. Not long after this I got an inkling that one had actually got inside my hood. Well I say I got an inkling. What I really got was a sting in the face. Right lower corner of my jaw which rugged as it is was no match for the barbed end of a bee. I recall exclaiming "By Jiminy, that most certainly smarts!" -or words to that effect. I downed tools ran to the house peeling of my gloves, wriggling off my schmock and veil which was actually buzzing quite a lot by then, flipped off the cap that I use to protect my shaven noggin under the rather thin hood and tore off the chavvy fleece I wear underneath as a bit of extra sting insurance. I grabbed the Aspivenin and toothpaste I keep handy for just such incidents and ran into the kitchen. Noticed a few bees in there so went upstairs to the bathroom. Bees in there too. Think I was probably carrying them round the house in fact. I went into another room with a mirror, no bees at last, and applied the Aspivenin.

Basically an Aspivenin sucks. Literally. It sucks the venom out of bites or stings. And it works :) After three minutes with the green syringe arrangement dangling from my face I removed it (the aspivenin, not my face) and applied a liberal finger of Arm & Hammer tooothpaste. The glycerin in the toothpaste dries out the area which apparently stops the venom working or something. I don't get the science behind it but it does work.

Anyway long story short, went back outside with a bicycle rear light to see by. Bees can't see red y'see. I found the gloves cap, schmock and fleece. Brushed a bee out of the cap then spent a good five minutes checking the schmock and fleece for bees and removing those I found before putting them back on and finally finished removing the frames of honey. I had to brush and transfer each frame three times to get the bees off and once I got them into the house I still had a handfull of bees to usher back outside..

As if the bees weren't angry enough by this point I started their varroa mite treatment tonight too. For this I use a product called Apilife Var. It's a few essential oils on a crumbly material which you pop in the hive and it magically kills the mites. Well apparently it suffocates them according to the blurb, believe what you like but either way they get dead. Oh it also seriously annoys the bees.When you're putting it in the hive you get a rush of angry bees charging at your hand. Yay. Once that was done I dropped a feeder onto the hive and having, already plonked one onto Hive2, filled them both with a 2:1 sugar:water syrup I'd made up and had been letting cool as I charged about getting stung, smearing myself with toothpaste and borrowing hair dryers. Now I have a shallow and a deep sat between two crownboards on the dining table waiting for extraction, I'll deal with them another day.

The Hornet Mimic Hoverfly and Other Visitors to the Hive.

Not had an update for a while as I'm working on a couple of bee related projects that I'll making a larger post about in the near future. August is really the time to harvest honey and start mite treatments, but as it's remained warm and the bees have still been flying I've left the supers on and plan to remove them next week, in early September. The deep national super is really heavy and the shallow super on Hive2 is about half full. This week I noticed that the bees in Hive1 have largely ignored the box of used wax I put below the roof whilst those of Hive2 have almost emptied theirs. The queens are still laying eggs in both hives and the bees haven't been trying to make queen cells so I guess they're happy at the moment. There's a lot of stored food in both hives, in fact Hive2 has 2 complete frames of nothing but honey all ready for the winter.

National Deep Frame full of Honey

This evening, in the garden, I saw what appeared to be a cross between a horsefly and a hoverfly  on steroids. Eventually it took off and from it's flight it was evidently some kind of big (ugly) hoverfly. A Google search later and I'd identified it as a Hornet Mimic Hoverfly or Volucella Zonaria. Apparently their larvae live in wasp nests alongside the wasps and eat the detritus found in them. They're common in the South of England but not the North East. I've certainly never seen one before so I'm going to go ahead make an uneducated assumption it's the result of climate change and/or this year's bumper wasp population boom. Really ugly thing but quite harmless. I didn't get a picture of it but here's one of a wasp investigating the outside of Hive1.

Vespula Vulgaris investigating Hive1

Actually during this weeks hive inspection I noticed a wasp fly into Hive1 whilst it was open and a bumble bee checking out Hive2 when that was open. Cheeky buggers. I also found  small spider in the roof space of each of the hives.

Musical Interlude

Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros: Johnny Appleseed

"If you're after getting the honey - hey

Then you don't go killing all the bees"