Labelled.

I had planned to make my own labels for this years honey crop and after a couple of hours tinkering with GIMP  I came up with a design I was happy with.

Dual monitors, it's the way forwards.

I printed it out and discovered there was a problem with my printer as the bright yellow in the image was a dull green and the black came out green tinted too. Also my labels were just a few millimetres too big to go comfortably on my jars. I could probably sort out the printer -probably a blocked nozzle or duff ink cartridge, it doesn't see much use after all. But I'd still have to source some new labels the right size for my jars, find a template and redesign the labels to fit the new format so I decided to to just buy some instead.

Thornes do a huge range of customised labels and to be honest they're not that expensive, especially compared to about £30 quid for a new set of ink cartridges for my HP Photosmart 3310. With a little help from my housemate I finally settled on a fairly tasteful image of a slightly blurred garden picture in greens and browns with a white WBC hive on one side. The labels are customised to show whatever text you want which is important as there's laws about honey labelling requirements.

If you're selling honey the label has to have the word Honey on it, a contact address for the manufacturer, the weight in metric, the country of origin and a Best Before date. Honey can actually go for years without spoiling -when I say years we're talking about honey being found in ancient Egyptian tombs and still being edible, granulated to hell no doubt but edible nonetheless ..but our society likes it's best by dates it's not like salt expires either but there you go. Oddly the country of origin has to be seperate from the contact address. Anyway I opted for the label to say Raw Garden Honey and used some spare room to point out it's unprocessed and unfiltered.

Ready made labels

When the labels arrived they actually look a lot better than the output of my photosmart printer with a plasticy surface that I suspect mean the ink isn't going to run if it gets wet in a kitchen, and probably means the labels are relatively easy to remove later. Whilst I was ordering labels I decided to get a pack of granulation labels too. They're not totally necessary but, as I mentioned earlier, honey has a hellishly long shelf life and with time it granulates. The granulation label just goes on the back of the jar and tells people why it happens and what to do about it.

Granulation label

Having removed one jar for personal use I still had 41 jars to label. It's safe to say labelling jars isn't the most exciting part of beekeeping so I'll spare you a blow by blow account of that and you can thank me later.

41 jars and 82 labels later

One was jar actually a short measure so I gave it to a mate -can you imagine a better xmas present than a 3/4 full jar of honey? Exactly. Me neither. So now I've got 40 jars of 370g Raw Garden honey to shift. Doing the math it seems that the general consensus that beekeepers break even by their second honey crop and make profit by the third is about right. Bit of a shame I gave away all the first year's crop really but still pretty good considering it's been a bad year for bees with record low honey crops. I've already had some interest from people wanting to buy jars so I'm hoping it should go fairly quickly.

December Cleansing

Very little to report on the beekeeping front, as you'd expect at this time of year so this going to be a mercifully short entry. Over in Hull we've had freezing nights, freezing days and frozen ponds. Today it was still a little on the cool side at not much over 6 degrees but the bees were flying. Cleansing flights and disposing of the dead was the order of the day.

Crap photo.

In the above pic the bees on the ground are dead ones that've been ejected from the hive and the yellow stuff on the green painted wood is ..well it's actually bee poo. Bees hold it in till it's warm enough to go out and do their business outside -well bearing in mind the hive is their bedroom/kitchen/day room it's not too surprising.

Looking a little further afield than the back garden it's been recently discovered that honey bees have a bite and use it to inject an anaesthetic to paralyse their victims. Whilst it won't disable a large foe like say the agrochemical industry it's enough to paralyse a waxmoth larvae for about nine minutes giving the bees time to haul it out of the hive. The paralysing chemical is 2-heptanone and Vita who I gather sponsored the research are looking to develop it as a local anaesthetic.

In other news my name was in this month's the BBKA News, well my name and a thousand other people who also passed the BBKA Basic Assessment. I was the only one from Hull though.

Honey Warming Cabinet

After extracting honey it needs to be 'ripened'. This means kept at a little under 40 degrees Celcius so any bits of bee or hive relate detrius and air bubbles trapped in it can rise to the top, it also makes the honey easier to decant into jars. So far I've done this by leaving my buckets of honey for a week or so in the airing cupboard. It kind of works but doesn't really give you that much control of temperature and I doubt comes close to the temperature I'd prefer. What's needed is a Warming Cabinet. Like the name suggests it's just a cabinet that keeps the contents warm. They're readily available and if you have £180 burning a hole in your pocket you can have one delivered, or for a lot more have one custom made. However they're actually relatively easy to make, you just need an insulated box, a heat source and some kind of temperature control. Most homes in the UK have an insulated cabinet or two in the form of a fridge or freezer.

One recent November Sunday whilst heading to Pave for a latte with my new housemate, Beth, I spotted a small fridge lying face down on the pavement. After dark we popped back out with my trusty Black & Decker Tough Truck in tow -well actually I was carrying it rather than towing it because those tiny wheels make quite a racket on pavement. We located the prone unit, hoiked it onto the trolley and rolled it home accompanied by gentle roar of stupidly small wheels.

Fridgemaster MRTZ98/1. Grotty version.

Turned out it wasn't a fridge at all but a freezer. A confusingly named Fridgemaster MTRZ98/1 freezer to be precise. Does it matter? Yes. Why? The shelves in this unit are made up of metal tubing that forms part of the cooling system. Freezers and fridges use some pretty nasty gases in their cooling systems. Whilst Freon is no longer used it's quite likely this freezer used HFC-23 or Isobutane as a coolant. HFC-23 is a major greenhouse gas and I'm fairly certain that if someome released a freezerful of the stuff into the environment and then wrote about it in a blog complete with photographs they'ed be looking at a hefty fine, assuming the powers that be are doing their job for a change. Isobutane on the other hand isn't as bad for the environment but it is very explosive, and when it's not being used as a coolant makes a good propellant too.

Tubey shelves. Could be a problem.

Looks a bit grotty inside too.

Whilst pondering how I was going to remove the shelves without releasing the coolant I had a look at the rear of the freezer and discovered I didn't really need to worry about it at all because some idiot had already cut the compressor from the back of the unit releasing whatever coolant was in there out into the street. So whilst scrap metal tatters bring us a few litres of greenhouse gas closer to climate change apocalypse or random explosions there was one less thing for me to worry about. Shame the planet's in such a mess but whilst people prioritise pocketing a little profit over maintaining the fragile ecosystem that keeps them alive we're doomed.

Crime scene :-o

Having ascertained there was no coolant to worry about I started chopping out the shelves. I'd lent a mate my hand axe so wound up using the blunt edge of a machete to buckle the shelves so I could drag them out and hacksaw the two tubes off where they entered the back of the unit. The step at the bottom of the freezer where the compressor and other absent gubbins had been housed meant I couldn't just stand my honey buckets on there. One way round that was to turn the freezer upside down which would've been fine but it looked a bit tatty, well okay more tatty that a disused freezer hauled in off the street normally looks I mean, or to lay the unit on it's back so the back wall became the floor and the door a lid. Less vertical space would've probably made it easier to acheive a uniform heat within the unit too, but there wasn't room in my outbuilding to store it like that -too much bulky beekeeping stuff taking up space. I opted to cut free the bottom shelf and put that back in place to stand the buckets on. The heat source will go in the space below that.

Rocket science this is not.

Having got a fairly well insulated box to use I next needed a heating element. There's plenty of cheap and readily availabe heatsources around in the form of lightbulbs. Energy saving bulbs are currently ousting the old energy inefficient ones that make good heatsources but I'm fairly sure it'll be a while before I can't find any. I was planning to use a 40W bulb but the closest I could find in my local Sainsburys 24hour shoppe was a 42W bulb giving the equivalent of 50W light. I figured that should still work.

If I was to attach a bulb to a power suplpy, turn it on and leave it in a closed plastic freezer I don't really know how hot it would get and I don't want to start a fire or damage the honey so I needed to add some kind of heat controller. There's a few options people use for these including aquarium and immersion heater thermostats, I opted for a room thermostat as unlike the other two it's intended to read air temperature rather than liquid temperature. A lot of room thermostats only go up to 30 degrees which is a little low for what I need but a little searching on fleaBay I was able to find a Towerstat branded one that appears to go up to 40 degrees. I attached a baynet bulb socket I had sat in a toolbox for years and the flex from my tragically deceased coffee machine. I then had a rethink and decided to add a second lightbulb to speed things up a bit. The lights will be turned on till the thermostat reaches the desired temperature at which point they'll be turned off again till it drops and the thermostat reactivates them.

Heat sources and temperature controller

With a pair of light bulbs sat there kicking out heat there would be a pretty uneven heat distribution within the cabinet (I've stopped calling it a freezer now) so there needs to be some sort of airflow within the cabinet to mix it up a little. I added a couple of old 80mm computer fans attached to the 12V transformer from an old Netgear Wireless N access point.

They're not my biggest fans

The plan was pretty simple, drill a hole throught the freezer side, push a cable through and attach a two way adapter inside the cabinet and put a plug on the outside end. Plug the bulbs and fans into the two way. I didn't have a two way socket adapter knocking about so used a three way instead. I used some No-More-Nails type glue to attach the thermostat to the freezer wall as well as the three way and used a few nails to fix the bulbs to a wooden block from a pallett I'd liberated from a skipsome time ago. The fans were cable tied to the shelf with the left one moving air up and the right one moving air down.

All the gubbins in place.

Whilst I'm no physicist the fan placement and orientation should keep the air moving in a more or less clockwise flow and stop hot spots developing near the bulbs. After a little reshuffling of the outbuilding contents I was able to find a place for the cabinet to live, then I cut the cable from the back to the right length to reach the socket and attached a plug. The warming cabinet was complete and just needed testing. I turned it on set a temperature, watched the lights go on and heard the fans whirr. The important bits seeemd to be working, I just needed to check it'd reach and maintain a target temperature. Setting it to the thermostat's highest temperature I took an Indoor/Outdoor Thermometer, popped the probe into the freezer, closed the door and sat the digital bit on the top. I then went inside and made a Latté with my replacement coffee machine, a Cookworks Espresso Coffee Machine, this is probably the slowest coffee machine in the world. You could make brew and drink a cup of tea in the time it takes this machine to make a frothy coffee, hell you could probably go to India and pick the leaves yourself if you fancied travelling. After my coffee break I went out and checked the thermometer. It was 39.5 degrees Celcius in the cabinet and about 7.5 degrees outside. Success. I turned it off unplugged it and propped the door open in case the glue I've used outgasses as it cures.

It'll work even better with that door closed

One more bulky item added to my beekeeping inventory. As I already had most of the parts lying about or picked them up for free in my travels the whole thing cost me well under a tenner. Probably won't need it till September 2013 at the earliest.

Cyser or "How d'ya like them apples?"

In December 2011 I was given a tub of windfall apples in exchange for a tin of beeswax polish and decided to try making Cyser, apple mead. I looked at Cyser recipes on the internet and the one in Andy Hamilton's Booze For Free before piecing my own together. It seems there's as many different ways to make cyser as there are worms in apples.

Windfall apples from Newbald

Initial Ingredient List
4.5KG Apples
150g Sugar
10 Sultanas
2 Cloves
1360g Honey
Another 680g Honey to add later
1.5 Litres Water
1 Teaspoon Pectolase
1 Teaspoon Yeast Nutrient
1 Sachet of Wine Yeast

First thing I did was put the apples through a juicer. It took a while to chop up and juice the apples and twice I had to stop and clean the machine out as the pulp clogged it up and and it started to whine.

Juicing apples exactly how subsistence farmers in days of yore did.

Eventually when they'ed all been converted to liquid I added 2 cloves and 10 sultanas and boiled the lot for 10 minutes -mainly to kill anything living in the apples, some of them had been quite lively having spent a while on the ground. It tasted a little tart so I added 150g of sugar to the mix.

I decided against boiling the honey (some people do, some people don't, some people says it damages the honey, some people say it doesn't) and heated up half a litre of Tesco's spring water whilst the four 340g jars of Tesco's cheapest Clear Honey loitered in a bath of hot water. Once the honey was good and runny I poured it into the water using topping up the jars with more water to rinse out the last dregs and adding that to the pan too. Gave it a stir till the honey looked to have dissolved.

Next up I poured the honey and water mixture into the demijohn and added an orange I'd chopped up and mashed. I didn't want to wait all day for the apple and sugar solution to cool so I ladled that in and after adding the pectolase and yeast nutrient I sat the whole thing in a sink half full of cold water to cool. An hour later it'd cooled and there was about an inch of air space at the top. This bit of air is called headspace by brewers, and my lack of it turned out to be a problem later. I gave it a quick stir with a sterilised chopstick, added the yeast, waited 15 minutes then gave it another stir like the sachet said to before putting the airlock on.

Freshly racked and looking a little opaque

24 hours later fermentation was happily underway but unlike the meads and cranberry melomel with this fermentation a load of froth was produced and the pulp had risen to the top of the demijohn pushing liquid and froth out through the airlock so after a quick clean up and rinsing out of the airlock I decanted some of the liquid into a a milk bottle with a foodbag rubberbanded to the top and sat it and the demijohn in a plastic tub in case it happened again. Looking at a couple of brewing website the froth is apparently called kraeusen, I was happy to call it froth but there ya go. Anyway it should only present a problem for the first few days but, as I read, if the pulped fruit blocks the airlock the pressure from the buildup of CO2 can crack the demijohn.

Cranberry Melomel on left and Cyser on the right.

Four days later the majority of the pulp had sunk into the  liquid so I was able to pour the contents of the milk bottle back into the demijohn. I had a little taste of the dregs in the milk bottle and  and can honestly say it was pretty sweet, however that gave no real indicator of the final flavour as the stuff was still full of sugar the yeast had to consume.

Whilst the fermentation is going on bubbles can be seen in the water in the airlock. A fortnight after starting the fermentation the bubble had slowed quite a lot so I decided to rerack it, removing the liquid from the bits of apple and the lees (dead yeast). You're meant to do this with a siphon but having had a try and finding the siphon kept dropping lower into the demijohn than I wanted (need to get or make some kinda clip to hold it in place) I wound up pouring it through a couple of coffee filters sat in a sieve in a funnel in the demijohn. Not the best way to do it as ideally there should be minimal aeration..but it worked.

After an hour of painstakingly slow filtering it began to flow through the filter faster and I realised one of the coffee filters had a hole in it. D'oh! I figured the heavier stuff will still have been near the bottom of the bottle and not gone through the hole in the filter. So I whipped out the filters and in replaced them with a sheet of kitchen roll, one of those thick one's that claims to act more like muslin than paper -a claim it seemed to live up to. The liquid came through this much faster than the coffee filters and I was able to finish that in a matter of minutes. I was left with a kitchen roll full of yucky looking thick yellow apple pulp and a demijohn of uniformly pale orange liquid.

I left this alone for a couple of months before re-racking again then gave it another two months and sampled the cyser again. Things had really changed in there. This time it was really dry. The yeast had had a great time turning sugars to alcohol leaving it a little dry for my palate so I figured I'd need to backsweeten it later. There seems to be two different ways to back-sweeten. One involves waiting till the fermentation has stopped then adding syrup or honey as required, the other is to just add the syrup or honey and hope the yeast will die off due to the rising alcohol content before consuming all you've added. I went for the second way, as it sounds easier' after all I could back-sweeten it again later if need be. I added the last two jars of honey filling the space left from previously being reracked and put the bung and airlock back on.. Looking at the air lock I could see fermentation was still going on as bubbles slowly made their way through. Eventually the bubbling stopped and I sampled it again, too dry! This makes me wonder if Tesco's cheapest honey is maybe cut with some kind of sugar syrup which the yeast was better ale to break down than the sugars found in real honey. Anyway I was going to have to backsweeten it again, on the plus side the alcohol content was up.

Harris Quickfine filter. It's not quick.
But it does filter rather well.

At this point I'd acquired a Harris Quickfine Filter from an auction. It's a filter system that's unfortunately no longer made but going by the wine making forums is one of the best filters around but also the slowest. You make up a small bucket of whatever you're brewing add 3 chemicals then pour this into a cloth filter which you top up as it runs through till you've filtered everything. It's painstakingly slow. We're talking leave it overnight kind of slow. Came out good and clear though. :) Potent stuff too going by the sample I tried, I really to need to get one of those gadgets for measuring alcohol content.

If your wee looks like this, drink more water

As I mentioned I'd decided to backsweeten it again, but I didn't really have space in the demijohn for it so I split the cyser between two containers and added some 1:2 sugar:water syrup -yep same stuff I feed the bees in spring. Popped airlocks on both vessels in case fermentation restarted then left it a while. The glass demijohn contains a sweeter cyser than the plastic one -more sugar syrup in that one.

Cyser backsweetened an split across containers

A month or so later I filtered it a last painstakingly slow time and decided to bottle it. Having acquired an automatic bottle filler I decided to use that. After a few trial runs with sterilising solution and then water to get it clean and figure out how it worked I soon had the cyser bottled and ready for corking.

Racking to bottles. Woohoo!

I started the project in December 2011 and bottled it in July 2012. In November 2012 I opened the first bottle. I may have been a little heavy handed with the final backsweetening giving me more of a desert drink but certainly enjoyable.

Also in December 2011 I started making a Cranberry Melomel. This ran more or less parallel with the Cyser fermentation, you can see the dark red demijohn full of Melomel in the fourth photo down in this post. Like the Cyser I reracked this a few times slowly running it through the Harris Quickfine. Here's a picture of it somewhere along the line, looks a little nicer than the the demijohn of gore it started out as.

Cranberry Melomel

The end product is a very pale pinkish liquid and tastes fantastic. Whilst I'll be tweaking my Cyser and Mead recipes in future this one is spot on. The flavour is meant to change over time and I still have most of the mead, cyser and melomel ageing in bottles at the moment. The mead and cyser look identical but following the fizzy mead cork popping fiasco I'd moved the mead back into demijohns and eventually reracked the remainder into green bottles, otherwise I'd now have no idea which was which.

Cranberry Melomel and Cyser.

Winter Feeding

Well with night time temperatures approaching freezing it's too cold to feed the bees syrup so it's time to drop some  insulation and a block of fondant icing onto each hive, leave the bees to it and hope for the best. I popped the insulation on a few days ago and instead of making this years fondant decided to buy some ready made. Fondant is that heavy white icing you get on cakes. In theory you can buy it from local bakeries so I went out to get some. After visiting a few shops it became apparent that most high street bakeries don't actually do any baking onsite -bit of a con but that's the high street. I wound up buying some Dr Oetker branded fondant from a local Sainsbury's. Hope it's not got too much additives in it but the ingredients list looked a little longer than the three items I used to make the stuff last time.

Winter fodder for micro livestock

After pressing the fondant into some food boxes I drizzled a few drops of Vitafeed Gold on each block just for good measure, slipped on a veil and some gloves and went out to feed the bees. Upon opening up the feed hole in the Nucleus crown board I was overwhelmed by a lack of bees 8-O It was about 9 degrees Celsius at the time so I'd expected active bees to come streaming out as soon as I opened up. Looking into the hole I could see a few bees making their way up the comb face to see what was happening but not the numbers I'd been hoping for so I'm wondering if maybe they won't be surviving the winter.. I popped on the fondant block replaced the insulation and roof then after feeding the other hives I went back to the nuc and had a look under the fondant. I was pleased to see more bees had gone to it and were making a start on the fondant, but I suspect this little colony may be a bit touch and go.

When I opened Hive1 I got the reaction I was expecting. Lots of worker bees who were already under the feed hole came ambling out to see why some fool had opened it. I placed the fondant block on hoping not to squash any bees and replaced the insulation and the roof then moved onto Hive2. It took a few seconds before workers started investigating the opened feed hole but they got there. I'm thinking Hive1 seems to be the strongest at the moment which corresponds with the Bee Inspector's visual survey of the hives back in September.

Hive	Combs of Brood	Combs of Bees	Diseased Brood
Nucleus	2.5	5	0
Hive1	7	18	0
Hive2	6.5	13	0

Colony inspection from September 2012

A comb is one side of a frame so the 5 frame nucleus has a total of 10 combs and the main hives have 11 frames which is 22 combs apiece. As you can see the nuc was about half full of bees and a quarter full of brood. It's not entirely impossible that it's still about half full but the cluster is positioned towards one end of the nuc rather than directly below the feed hole. Afterall the nucleus is ventilated only by it's entrance rather then through the open mesh floor which I keep closed, so there be some reason to do with airflow affecting their position within the hive. At the time of inspection Hive1 was slightly more populous than Hive2 and going by response to my opening the feed hole that still seems to be the case. As I mentioned in a previous post Hive2 had had some Sacbrood but since physically removing the affected larvae it hadn't recurred by te time of the inspection.

I popped back outside with the stethoscope to give the colonies a listen. I'd expected the nuc to be noticeably quiter than the main hives but that wasn't the case as far as I could make out, fingers crossed for them. Next weekend I'll be looking under the roofs and insulation so see how quickly they're taking the fondant and depending on how fast it's going down I may feed them again this.

In a normal cold period the bees do very little but generate heat slowly consuming their stores. However we've had occassional warmer days so they've been going out to forage which uses more energy than just keeping the cluster warm would use. Unfortunately on those odd days there probably hasn't much if any nectar out there for the foragers to bring back so all that happens is the stores get depleted for no return.


As I've mentioned before wasp activity has been very limited and late in season this year. I have seen a couple round the hives and spotted a couple near the nuc entrance which moved me to put  a trap out but it didn't catch anything. On Monday I spotted a very large shiny wasp investigating my house wall.

Saxon Queen

Around here you tend to see German Wasps and Common Wasps but they both have a set of 4 yellow markings at the base of the thorax whilst this one had 2. After looking at far too many pictures of wasps and identification charts I've come to the conclusion she was a Saxon Wasp or Dolichovespula saxonica if you're so inclined. These are usually found further South, according to my know-it-all mate Google and whilst Saxon Wasps are a particularly large species the long abdomen on this one suggests to my entemologically untrained eye that she was a queen. Saxon wasp colonies die off every year with only the queen surviving so I'm guessing she's abandoned her sisters so to find a place to make a cocoon and hide out. I left her to it and I'm really hoping she's not going to surprise me with a nest under the bed in Spring.

Edit 9/11/12 Checked to see how the fondant's going down yesterday and it's barely been touched. You might think that sounds bad but it actually means the bees in the cluster have adequate food stores so they've not had to go looking for more food. I'll be leaving the fondant in place for them though just in case.

Possibly one to avoid

Whilst there's not much happening on the beekeeping front I thought I'd take time out to post an article about an item I've seen in various places on the net aimed at potential beginner beekeepers.

As seen on eBay..

..and as seen on Amazon
Both sites also sell regular hives too

I've seen it on eBay, I've seen it on Amazon, I've seen it on a few other sites too, but I've not seen it on any actual beekeeping websites which may ring an alarm bell or two. It's usually called Wooden Bee Hive Garden/Small Starter Wood Beehive For Beginners Honey Bees. Well it certainly is a small hive, it's what beekeepers would call a Nucleus rather than a hive, specifically a five frame Nucleus. That's just less than half the number of frames in a standard National brood box. A 5 frame Nuc can be a useful thing, you use them to start new colonies, transport bees, even overwinter small colonies but it's usually a transitional housing. At some point assuming your bees thrive they'll need more space which will mean moving into a bigger hive or somehow expanding the nucleus. Unfortunately you can't expand this box, aesthetically pleasing as it is, and lengthwise it also seems to be slightly smaller than a National Hive which may make transferring bees from one of these boxes into a larger hive later difficult problematic.

It's actually a bit sneaky trying to bill it as a beginners hive and any beginners trying to use one will soon find problems. There's no feeder for you to feed up your bees if there's a dearth of nectar (as happened this year) or help them into or out of winter, there's no eke either which with a crown board (advert doesn't mention a crown board either) would let you use a rapid or contact feeder instead. There's also no mention on any of the adverts of the floor so chances are it's a solid wooden floor. Whilst a Nuc has different ventilation requirements to a full sized hive an open mesh floor with sliding bottom board is useful if you hope to have some idea of varroa levels within the hive. Without monitoring them the unchecked mites will probably kill off your colony -I suspect finding a box of dead bees at the bottom of your garden may not be the most encouraging experience for the beginner beekeeper.

Whilst the 'hive' isn't as beginner friendly as it claims to be the blurb accompanying it hive seems to be missleading and nonsensical. Rather than suggesting beginners go out and purchase some bees (which will probably come housed in a nuc of their own anyway) the sellers claim the hive is designed to attract "non-swarming bees."

It goes on to say how bees are attracted to holes in wood, which is true enough. Beekeepers often leave out baited boxes or baited nucs to attract swarms, some may even have luck with unbaited ones. I've had a baited nuc on my shed roof for about 4 months which didn't catch a single swarm. Including my own there's at least 11 honey bee colonies within a quarter mile of my property and colleagues have told me about 2 clustering swarms spotted in the area -add that to the colony I lost and that's at least three swarms who've ignored my baited box. I know the bait attracts bees because I've foragers investigating the box. Evidently having the right size box for bees sat there, even with an attractive bait, won't necessarily get you any passing bees.

But anyway, let's give a little more thought to those non-swarming bees. Bee colonies swarm to reproduce, if they reached the evolutionary cul-de-sac of no longer swarming they would die out. But let's ignore very basic biology and pretend these magical fantastic non swarming bees do exist and didn't die out about 120 million years ago.

Why are a bunch of non-swarming bees looking for a place to live? Well, what do you normally call a bunch of bees out looking for a place to live? It's not a gaggle, a gang, a herd or a murder.. it's a.. wait for it.. it's.. it's called a swarm -that's the word. Swarm. So basically the claim is that these boxes will attract a swarm of non-swarming bees. Sounding a little unlikely isn't it, and that's whilst you're pretending they exist.

Some adverts have a print out of what appears to be the hive's instructions.

Instructions, errata and honey crop claims

The first thing I noticed is they say a queen bee life span is up to 3 years. That's just wrong. It's generally acknowledged that without mishaps a queen can live up to 5 years hence the colour scheme for marking queen bees having 5 colours used in a 5 year cycle. Beekeepers are a thrifty bunch (to put it mildly) and if they only needed three colours of insect paint then they wouldn't bother with another two.

The intructions claim you can get 20-30lbs of honey from one of these hives which can be harvested in August. That's based on a National Deep frame potentially being able to hold up to 5-6lb of honey and multiplied by 5. However that's assuming every frame contains nothing but honey. No brood, no eggs and no pollen. If in August your colony has no eggs, brood or pollen they're probably in trouble. Some beekeeper's do get National deep boxes completely filled with honey, however they're using another deep box to house the brood.

There's also the question of where do you put the bees when you've removed every single frame from the nuc -I mean hive, to presumably crush and strain the comb? I suppose it could be done by removing and cutting out a frame at a time then replacing the sticky wet empty frames as you go but that's going to get you some seriously angry bees.

The boxes aren't entirely useless to existing beekeepers. They certainly look nicer than a lot of nucs on the market and properly sited (high up) and baited they may actually attract swarms of real-proper-swarming bees. They'd probably have use as a temporary home for a split or raising a new queen too -well actually perhaps not the latter as that usually requires feeding now I think about it. But for beginners? Well buyer beware.

Oh and if despite all the above you still decide to get one don't leave it sat on the grass like in the picture above, it might look rustic but damp kills bees.

End of the Second Season

With the arrival of Hull Fair, the city's annual environmental nuisance and source of chronic traffic congestion as our inept city council close off a major thoroughfare to accomodate it, comes the cold weather. There's been a few nights of freezing temperatures marking the end of feeding the bees up with syrup. Their next feed will be a thick slice of fondant icing.

Worker taking last bits of syrup from the mesh of Contact Feeder

There's still been some strangely warm days, like today when the bees are still foraging. As you can see from the picture below they're still bringing in some yellow pollen. I think it might be from ivy.

They're still bringing in pollen

A couple of weeks ago I popped my mouse/wasp guard reduced entrances on Hive1 and Hive2 reducing the entrances to six or seven round holes in an aluminium frame. The smaller entrance makes it easier for the bees to keep out wasps and the metal is there to stop mice gnawing their way in. This week there's still been a few wasps hanging about the hives, I suspect they're going to have a difficult winter after such an unfriendly season.  Some colonies will use huge amounts of proplis to reduce their hive entrances to a few holes but it seems to vary from colony to colony, mine evidently prefer to leave it to me. The reduced entrances does cause some congestion at the hive entrance but beats wasps and mice getting into the hive.

Queuing outside the Mouse Guard at Hive1

You can see some of the paint on the landing board has been rubbed or worn off. Think I might give it a quick dab on a cold dry day when they're not flying. I haven't yet made a mouse guard for the Nucleus yet but I really ought to get that done at some point. when I built it what I could've done was use a few nails in the entrance to form vertical bars leaving gaps too small for mice, but I didn't get round to that.

The nucleus entrance is still pretty busy.

Soon I'll be popping some top insulation on the hives, possibly feeding them some fondant too. After that's done and dusted I don't expect to be looking under the crownboards again till sometime in Spring.

Honey Extraction

A few days after removing the honey from the bees it was time to extract it. Last year I crushed the comb and strained out the honey. Whilst that works it does mean losing the comb so the bees had to remake it this year. Not a problem if you're also harvesting the wax but if you're more interested honey yield it's better to try and reuse the comb next season. Around 1850 an Italian chap invented a machine allowing him to do just that, and it's a machine we're still using. The honey extractor uses centrifugal force to remove honey from comb which has had the capping cut off. I acquired one last year and it's been sitting in a huge box in my roof space since then. It's essentially a large bin made of food grade plastic with a big tap at the bottom and a rotating plastic cage spun by a hand crank. When extracting honey you want to make the honey more runny so I turned the heating right up.

Uncapping honey with a capping fork.

The bees make a wax cap over cells containing ripe honey. This capping needs cutting off. There's various tools to do this with including heated serrated blades, machines with spinning abrasive brushes and heat guns. I decided to try using a heat gun as it seemed the least messy. Well I say heat gun what I mean is my house mate's hairdryer. She was all packed up for her move to London Metropolitan and it was sat on a box on the landing so I decided to borrow it. Unfortunately it failed completely. The idea is the hot air melts the cappings over the honey so they recede to the cell walls. What actually happened was the honey below the cell cappings dissipated the heat from the cappings but the walls of adjacent empty cells melted. Having learned that wasn't going to work I put the dryer back and chose Plan B. Plan B was a capping fork. In fact the capping fork would've been Plan A if I hadn't seen Yazz's hairdryer out a decided to give it a whirl. Anyway a capping fork is a fork about 2 inches across with a number of sharp round needle-like tines. To uncap honeycells you just slide the tines under the caps trying not to push too far into the honey and lift them free. It's also used to pull developing bee larvae from brood cells when checking varroa levels.To uncap the shallow frames took quite a while, but as I'd never actually done it before so there's probably some room for improvement in technique and speed gains to make.

Honey Extractor and a couple of food
buckets I'd readied optimistically

The extractor took two frames at a time so I was uncapping them as they went into the machine then extracting from them before uncapping the next two. There's two kinds of spinners: tangential and radial. With a tangential extractor the frames are held so a whole side is facing outward from the cage, in a radial extractor the frames are held with the tops facing outwards. With both types the honey is flung outwards to the extractor sides and flows to the bottom where the tap can be opened to decant it. Mine is a tangential extractor so I popped in a couple of frames sideways and turning the handle soon had the frames spinning. I couldn't see any honey flying out but when I checked the comb was empty so I then did the other side. You actually have to spin the frames slower at first so the weight of the spinning honey on the side you're not extracting doesn't make the comb collapse then after extracting the second side you turn the comb round again and spin the first side a second time faster to get the last drops.

Two Shallow Frames in the Extractor

It took a little experimentation to get the speeds right and initially I was evidently spinning the combs too fast as the empty cell walls were bearing an imprint of the cage. I started extracting with the emptier shallow frames and whilst I couldn't see any progress happening initially as I'd started extracting from the emptier frames at one point realised there was an inch of honey sat in the bottom of extractor. Shortly after that I opened the honeygate and started decanting it into buckets every few frames.

Letting go the golden flow
-the other golden flow!

Honey is pretty viscous stuff so after extracting all the frames I had and pouring it into buckets I closed the honeygate (door the honey comes out of) and turned the extractor almost upside down over a bowl for a whole day for the last of the honey to slowly dribble out, I gave this to my housemate as a little leaving gift as she was going to soon for the rest to have settled. This years crop was 17 kilograms, more than last years  but less than hoped, after the dual setbacks of losing a swarm and the unusual weather.

I'd never used an extractor before and I have to admit it was really easy to do. I also think I managed to extract more of the honey that I'd managed by crushing and straining it last year. The honey still had to settle in the buckets so air bubbles and bits of wax and whatever else was in there could rise to the top for skimming off. I don't have a warming cabinet for that so I just left them in a warm room to settle. Meanwhile I was left with a load of sticky honeycomb. Some beekeeper prefer to store their comb wet as it apparently deters wax moth -yeah wax moth doesn't like honey but lives in honeycomb, on the other hand wet comb attracts prettymuc everything else including bees and wasp wanting to rob it -I've even heard of wasps gnawing holes through the wooden sides of stored supers to get at the honey left inside.

Wet Honeycomb

In the same way you can depend on a light fingered chap in tatty sports casual to have away with the knackered fridge freezer you've hauled into the front garden and don't want to pay the council to remove the bees' habitual honey thieving can be put to good use. As I've mentioned before any honey not within the hive itself is considered fair game -just like the copper pipes in an empty house for the afore mentioned light fingered fellow. I previously tried to use the bees thieving tendencies to manipulate them into consolidating all their honey into the one one super by putting a crown board below the more empty super and so moving it out if the hive proper but that failed. After a little research (yeah OK a couple of minutes googling then) I discovered that a bit of space between the crown board and the honey to robbed means less of the queen's pheromones reach the wet supers making them seem less part of the hive and so more likely to get robbed out. I added an empty super with placed two wet supers above it on each hive. Five days later I checked to find them picked clean and dry as a bone.

Dry Honeycomb -cleaned by bees

Last thing to do was jar up the settled honey. Despite having had over a week to settle including some time in a sink full of warm water it was really tricky to remove the bits of wax from the top of the honey. I removed a lot but a little managed to get past me. Not a problem as I'll be selling it as raw, unfiltered and unprocessed but next year I'll probably give some thought to filtering. Just need to label the stuff come up with a price and I'm done!

My 2012 crop.

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.