Barring the odd martial arts contest over the past few years my Sunday mornings have been spent sleeping in after making the most of a Saturday night. This Sunday after an evening of pubbing, clubbing and a night of not really enough sleep I awoke to the noise of my phone bleeping an alarm which was swiftly followed by my cat jumping on the bed to investigate this rare Sunday morning occurance. Pretty as she is she's a bit prone to mood swings which regularly result in someone bleeding (me, guests, vets, passers by, housemates, basically anyone she can reach..) so her arrival was an extra incentive to get up despite my banging head and a hankering for sleep.
Shortly afterwards with a hangover and a Ramones CD for company I set off for a village out near Doncaster where I was going to take the BBKA Basic Assessment. It's basically a practical and oral examination of beekeeping skills and knowledge. The syllabus for the assessment is pretty huge but it's all stuff anyone who's successfully kept bees for a year should know really. It covers everything from hive hardware, bee life cycle, behaviour and diseases to honey extraction and labelling. You can take the assessment after you've kept bees for at least 12 months. You can keep bees all your life and never actually take it but it does give you a little credibility as a beekeeper and is often a condition to be met if you ever want to keep bees on an allotment (assuming you're lucky enough to have an allotment association who will actually let you). I chose to do it after an email from the Beverley Beekeepers Association mentioned that time was running out for people wanting to take it. After a phone call, a few emails and a cheque for fifteen quid -yep an actual cheque, an olde worlde money transfer! I was down to go meet an assessor at 11am on the Sunday. Two other people would be doing the assessment at the same time. After a brief email conversation with the assessor he kindly lent me a bee suit to use for the occasion. I don't use one at home opting for either a cheap thin smock from fleabay or a hood and veil over a fleece and some old jeans. There are pros and cons to using a bee suit, a major pro is there's less chance of bees getting into it or stinging you through it as it goes over your clothing, a major con is they cost about £170 and if you go for a white one you look like your playing astronauts in your back garden. Despite having discovered fairly early on that bees are able to sting through denim and that skinny jeans means there's enough of a gap for a bee to drop into your welly I've held off buying one so far.
Guided by voices, well the voice of my satnav, I reached the village. Having found the street I had a little trouble finding the house till I spotted the Honey For Sale sign and an old WBC hive in the garden. Once the other two candidates arrived, one from Bradford and one from somewhere in the countryside we got back into our vehicles and followed the assessor to his apiary. He had 14 hives tucked away in a very hidden location invisible from the road -it's a good idea to have your apiary hidden these days because there are people out there who'll happily steal your bees, equipment and honey. The assessor had 8 different assessments and we picked them at random without knowing what was on each.
We did the assessment one at a time so I waited in the car till it was my turn. Whilst Joey Ramone sang Bonzo Goes to Bitburg I was gemming up on the life cycles of the three bee castes. At one point I looked out of the window and saw the biggest dragonfly I've ever seen. According to a few online resources the biggest dragonflies we have are 80mm long but I'm sure this thing's long green body exceeded that -perhaps it was particularly large owing to a diet of my assessor's honeybees.
When it was my turn to do the practical portion I put my phone onto silent and turned off vibrate -an urgent buzzing sensation from your pocket isn't really what you need when you have an open hive in front of you, I popped on the borrowed suit, my wellies and some latex gloves then had to light my smoker. The assessor gave me some hessian for this, I've never used that before but after a false start it lit and smoked as expected. We had a short walk from our vehicles to the bees and when we got there I was surprised to find the whole place carpeted. OK it was a slightly muddy collection of carpet pieces but it was an effective weed barrier which I'm guessing was probably it's purpose.
Having lit my smoker the next part of the assessment was to identify the hive parts. Starting from the ground up I pointed out the stand, hive floor with small landing board, reduced entrance, brood box, queen excluder, super, roof and added that there was probably a crown board under the roof. The next thing to do was open the hive and see what was in the brood box -spoiler alert: it was bees. After a little smoke near the entrance and the roof I removed the roof and laid it on the floor. Sure enough there was a crown board on the super. We weren't going into the super tho so I removed that and put it on the inverted roof. This was a National hive which has a brood box internally smaller than my own Commercial which meant the frames were smaller and lighter than I'm used to working with. The normal way to examine a frame of bees is to lift it by the lugs at either end and manipulate it by these, however a commercial has very short lugs making this a bit impractical so I tend to use a tool called a frame grip to manipulate them. This was actually the first time I did a manipulation without the grip since attending the course in 2010.
I went to remove the first frame opting, as I always do, for the one furthest from me which as I was standing at the back of the hive was the one nearest the entrance. However the assessor stopped me and said that whilst there was nothing wrong with doing that it was actually easier to start from the back of the hive as the older flying bees returning to the hive would initially go onto those first few frames and if they weren't there would be more likely to start buzzing about and it was the older bees who'd be more aggressive. So I started at the back of the hive instead. The first thing I noticed was these bees were far better behaved than mine. The assessor bred his own queens and seems to have done a pretty good job of getting very placid bees.
Working through the hive whilst answering questions I pointed out workers, capped brood, uncapped brood, pollen, uncapped honey, capped honey and something looking a little like a grain of cat litter. This was actually chalk brood, a virus that affects uncapped brood effectively mummifying them. I didn't see the queen but that wasn't a surprise, I also had trouble finding any eggs, think I managed to see two in the whole hive. The assessor said he reckoned the queen would be slowing down laying towards the end of the season -although having just checked my colonies all three still have plenty of new eggs, perhaps it's down to environmental differences after all mine are fairly protected from wind and in a city which will be slightly warmer than the out apiary in the countryside.
After closing up the hive we drove back to the assessors house for the next two parts of the assessment, assembling a frame and the question and answer session. A couple of weeks ago I'd emptied my burnt out smoker fuel into a bucket to discover five minutes later it'd re ignited and melted my bucket (note to self: buy a metal bucket) so when we got to his house I decided not to leave the smoker in the car as I had visions of it relighting and returning to find my vehicle a charred molten mess. I pulled the smoker out and left it out of sight on the tarmac of the road where it couldn't do too much damage.
I was first to assemble a frame, basically knocking five bits of wood, a sheet of wax and 11 gimp pins together. Being a hot day the foundation was quite soft which didn't really help but I managed to put a serviceable frame together. The last questions were mainly about diseases, viruses and other pests particularly American Foulbrood and European Foulbrood both of which if found a beekeeper is required by law to notify the local bee inspector about. If your hive is found to have AFB the bees and boxes need destroying by fire to stop it affecting other colonies, if your hive has EFB it may be treatable in the early stages - any beekeepers in a local association will have insurance against this. Other things we legally have to contact the local Bee Inspector about are the discovery Small Hive Beetle and Tropilaelaps mites -at present it's believed neither are in the UK but they'll arrive at some point.
I won't get the assessment result for about 6 weeks so don't really know if I've passed or not yet but the assessor said he didn't see that any of us had had any problems with it so fingers crossed. I then drove the fifty odd miles back home with my car windows open because the smell of a recently used smoker isn't something you want to be sharing a car with, especially if you're feelig a little fragile from a heavy night out.
It was actually a fairly useful experience in that as well as being tested we got to discuss things which meant a learning opportunity. The assessor said he didn't usually use smoke on his bees but kept it handy in case it was needed. When I did my hive inspections today I used very smoke at all and began my inspection from the back and found all three colonies far easier to work with than they usually were so it was worth doing just for that really :)
4/8/2012 Edit: I passed. Found out a lot earlier than expected. Haven't told the bees yet but they should be relieved to hear I apparently know what I'm doing.
The blog of an urban beekeeper, in Hull, former UK City of Culture.
Monday, 30 July 2012
Sunday, 22 July 2012
Encouraging Solitary Bees
This weekend there was a food festival in Hull. I eat food, so does prettymuch everyone I know, so I went along with a couple of friends for a rather fine burger, a pint of Blonde and a little Pimms complete with cucumber. Popping into Wilkinson's on the way home I spotted some insect boxes. They're actually extremely easy things to make yourself and I have a couple kicking about somewhere in the garden. These were fairly aesthetically pleasing tho so I threw caution to the wind, dashed the expense and purchased a Bee & Ladybird Box. Basically it's a few short hollow bamboo canes and a block of wood with smalled holes drilled in it. The hollow canes are for various solitary bees to nest in, and the holes are for ladybirds. Ladybirds are carnivorous so they should be good for the garden -barring a little home made pepper spray if the aphids are getting out of hand I generally let nature to control the pests for me rather than throwing chemicals all over my garden.
It's made from some kind of softwood so I decided to waterproof the roof and back of the box with a little bitumen paint. Then as per the brief instructions found a location for it on a south facing wall. It's actually quite near the hives. I was a little apprehensive abut using a hammer drill so close to the bees but it turned out they weren't bothered by it -although they later took exception to the new lawn mower I've recently acquired and planted a sting in the sleeve of my Zombie Ghost Train tshirt. Grr.. Anyway will it be used or won't it? Time will tell.
 |
| Hostel for solitary bees and ladybirds |
It's made from some kind of softwood so I decided to waterproof the roof and back of the box with a little bitumen paint. Then as per the brief instructions found a location for it on a south facing wall. It's actually quite near the hives. I was a little apprehensive abut using a hammer drill so close to the bees but it turned out they weren't bothered by it -although they later took exception to the new lawn mower I've recently acquired and planted a sting in the sleeve of my Zombie Ghost Train tshirt. Grr.. Anyway will it be used or won't it? Time will tell.
Monday, 16 July 2012
Queens and Queen Cups
Well the weather is being a little wierd at present, cold and rainy one day then hot and sunny the next. I'm not too keen on the rainy days but the frogs seem to be enjoying them. On the hot days the bees can be seen sallying forth from the hives as they make the most of the weather and the frogs are cool off in the pond under waterlilly leaves.
I recently lost a swarm from Hive2 which was a bit of a blow and after a few weeks with no new eggs being laid I found egg laying had been resumed which told me there was a successfully mated Queen living in there. Last week I was lucky enough to spot her royal madge ambling along on the honey comb. She wasn't too shy so I took a couple of cameraphone shots. She still doesn't look that different to the other tens of thousands of bees which is why beekeepers often put a splot of paint on her back to make her easier to spot.
Something beekeepers check for during inspections are whether or not the bees are making new queens. If the bees make a new queen they may swarm and we don't want that to happen for two main reasons:
it can scare the crap out of people living nearby and it costs a
sizeable chunk of the workforce. n the otherhand if you have an apiary somewhere away from people and a few bait hives dotted about at a decent height you could use swarming as a way to increase your bee stocks. In the city it's definitely something to be avoided.. so there's a few things to look out for during inspections that tell us when the hive is getting swarmy..
During the course of their normal activity the bees build what is called a Queen Cup or Play Cup. This is a round structure protruding from the honeycomb looking a lot like the cup of an acorn -or cupule for any arborists reading this. During the inspections if I see these I have a look inside to make sure they're empty and then break them with a poke from the hive tool, once broken the bees will sort out the comb and hopefully return it to normal.
As the Queen wanders about laying eggs she'll occassionally reaches a queen cup and lay an egg in it. If the bees aren't wanting to make a new Queen at that point they'll just pull the egg out, however if they do want a Queen they'll start flooding the cup with Royal Jelly.
Royal Jelly is a substance secreted from glands on the honey bee's hypopharynx. I have no idea how royal jelly is farmed but I'm told it's used in pricey skin care products based on the theory that it prevents ageing -of course it's never actually been proven to do that but some people will believe pretty much anything -are you gullible? Send me £10 and find out! I suspect if people knew it was actually gunk secreted from an insect's head they might be less willing to rub it into their skin. I also think anyone with half a brain would be a little skeptical about the anti ageing properties of a substance made by creatures that only lives about 6 weeks. If you do want to stop your skin from aging my suggestion would be to stop slathering insect baby food on your face and drink some water instead. Ground breaking eh?
When the bees have decided to raise a Queen and added Royal Jelly the larvae hatches and has a bit of a feast ahead of it whilst the workers add wax to the cup turning it into a full sized Queen Cell. There's two kinds of Queen Cell, Supercedure Queen Cells and Swarm Queen Cells. A Supercedure cell is created about half way up the honeycomb and the bees make these when they decide to replace the existing queen. She might be getting a little old, not laying enough eggs, not producing enough Queen Substance or perhaps she's eightysix years old and people are starting to wonder if she's ever going to let someone else have a go. The workers make a few Supercedure Cells and the strongest Queen should hatch first slaughtering the others before they've seen light of day. For that purpose the queen bee has a sting which can be used repeatedly unlike the workers. She'll them head up the colony, sometimes alongside the existing Queen.
Sometimes the bees will decide the Queen about to hatch first isn't the one they want and will reseal the end of the cell as she's trying to cut her way out so a preferred Queen can hatch out and take over. Swarm Queen Cells are generally made at the bottom of the comb and when your bees are making these it means they're preparing to swarm. They'll cut the existing Queen's food intake so she loses weight so she can fly again and at some point possibly before the replacement has hatched she'll fly away with a large contingent of bees leaving the depleted hive queenless till a swarm Queen hatches and gets mated to replace her.
There's actually a third kind of Queen Cell, but we don't like to see those very often as it generally means someone (as in the beekeeper) has messed up (as in killed the queen). The bees make Emergency Queens when they need a new Queen in a hurry. When making supercedure and swarm queens the bees can take a while to evaluate and choose the best eggs for the job, when it comes to emergency cells they don't have the luxury of time and choose the eggs less carefully sometimes even selecting a young grub to turn into a Queen. It's generally held that a Queen from an emergency cell probably won't be of the same quality as a more conventionally selected queen.
As an addendum the the previous post about visitors to the hive here's another visitor I found a few weeks ago. I'm not sure if it'd been in the hive or not but when I noticed it it was sat on a piece of brace comb I'd removed and was very reluctant to vacate it. I believe it's an adult Birch Shieldbug (Elasmostethus Interstinctus).
I recently lost a swarm from Hive2 which was a bit of a blow and after a few weeks with no new eggs being laid I found egg laying had been resumed which told me there was a successfully mated Queen living in there. Last week I was lucky enough to spot her royal madge ambling along on the honey comb. She wasn't too shy so I took a couple of cameraphone shots. She still doesn't look that different to the other tens of thousands of bees which is why beekeepers often put a splot of paint on her back to make her easier to spot.
 |
| Spot the Queen. |
 |
| She's easier to see in this one. |
During the course of their normal activity the bees build what is called a Queen Cup or Play Cup. This is a round structure protruding from the honeycomb looking a lot like the cup of an acorn -or cupule for any arborists reading this. During the inspections if I see these I have a look inside to make sure they're empty and then break them with a poke from the hive tool, once broken the bees will sort out the comb and hopefully return it to normal.
 |
| Queen Cups |
As the Queen wanders about laying eggs she'll occassionally reaches a queen cup and lay an egg in it. If the bees aren't wanting to make a new Queen at that point they'll just pull the egg out, however if they do want a Queen they'll start flooding the cup with Royal Jelly.
Royal Jelly is a substance secreted from glands on the honey bee's hypopharynx. I have no idea how royal jelly is farmed but I'm told it's used in pricey skin care products based on the theory that it prevents ageing -of course it's never actually been proven to do that but some people will believe pretty much anything -are you gullible? Send me £10 and find out! I suspect if people knew it was actually gunk secreted from an insect's head they might be less willing to rub it into their skin. I also think anyone with half a brain would be a little skeptical about the anti ageing properties of a substance made by creatures that only lives about 6 weeks. If you do want to stop your skin from aging my suggestion would be to stop slathering insect baby food on your face and drink some water instead. Ground breaking eh?
When the bees have decided to raise a Queen and added Royal Jelly the larvae hatches and has a bit of a feast ahead of it whilst the workers add wax to the cup turning it into a full sized Queen Cell. There's two kinds of Queen Cell, Supercedure Queen Cells and Swarm Queen Cells. A Supercedure cell is created about half way up the honeycomb and the bees make these when they decide to replace the existing queen. She might be getting a little old, not laying enough eggs, not producing enough Queen Substance or perhaps she's eightysix years old and people are starting to wonder if she's ever going to let someone else have a go. The workers make a few Supercedure Cells and the strongest Queen should hatch first slaughtering the others before they've seen light of day. For that purpose the queen bee has a sting which can be used repeatedly unlike the workers. She'll them head up the colony, sometimes alongside the existing Queen.
Sometimes the bees will decide the Queen about to hatch first isn't the one they want and will reseal the end of the cell as she's trying to cut her way out so a preferred Queen can hatch out and take over. Swarm Queen Cells are generally made at the bottom of the comb and when your bees are making these it means they're preparing to swarm. They'll cut the existing Queen's food intake so she loses weight so she can fly again and at some point possibly before the replacement has hatched she'll fly away with a large contingent of bees leaving the depleted hive queenless till a swarm Queen hatches and gets mated to replace her.
There's actually a third kind of Queen Cell, but we don't like to see those very often as it generally means someone (as in the beekeeper) has messed up (as in killed the queen). The bees make Emergency Queens when they need a new Queen in a hurry. When making supercedure and swarm queens the bees can take a while to evaluate and choose the best eggs for the job, when it comes to emergency cells they don't have the luxury of time and choose the eggs less carefully sometimes even selecting a young grub to turn into a Queen. It's generally held that a Queen from an emergency cell probably won't be of the same quality as a more conventionally selected queen.
As an addendum the the previous post about visitors to the hive here's another visitor I found a few weeks ago. I'm not sure if it'd been in the hive or not but when I noticed it it was sat on a piece of brace comb I'd removed and was very reluctant to vacate it. I believe it's an adult Birch Shieldbug (Elasmostethus Interstinctus).
 |
| Birch Shieldbug sitting on bracecomb. |
Thursday, 12 July 2012
More Visitors to the Hive
Recently I've been seeing a few more creatures around the hive. Honey Bees being a part of our ecology naturally interact with other flora an fauna. Whilst they get pollen and nectar from various plants they also tend to get eaten by a lot of things and drop various edible bits along the way.
Previously I found some Common Carder Bees had set up colonies in the ground below the nuc. Unfortunately not long after posting about them and how I was hoping to watch them over the summer it rained and they seem to have died off :(
This evening I found this large black bumble bee investigating the ground below the hives. Annoyingly it refused to keep still to oblige me with a photograph so 3 seconds of video will have to suffice. There's quite a few species of bumble bee and I've no idea which this one was. It seemed to be examining the ground below the hives and had a bit of a buzz against the mesh floors but didn't enter the hives -I doubt the guards would have let it in if it'd tried anyway. I suspect the Common Carders and this Bumble Bee were attracted by the scent of the hive with it's wax comb, developing brood and the queen's pheromones wafting about.
A few years ago I made a pond
and once it was stable I introduced some Common Frog
tadpoles with a view to them controlling
slugs which were over running the garden. It seems to have worked and
having added a second pond and more spawn and tadpoles from other sources to deepen the gene
pool the frogs are still here 6 years later.
Recently I noticed a couple of them sitting about below the nucleus, I haven't seen one catching bees yet but they certainly do eat them. It's be quite handy if they ate the dead bees below the hives but unfortunately they only eat moving things, offer them as many dead bees as you like and they'll sit waitng for a live one to fly over. I gather toads will eat dead bees from the ground though so perhaps I should look into acquiring some of those. Note: Anyone wanting to do something similar should bear in mind that in the UK it's actually illegal to remove frogspawn (and no doubt toad eggs) from natural habititats so if you want to introduce some to your own pond and there's no chance of them getting there naturally you need to find an obliging pond owner who'll help you out.
Other pond life that eats bees are the Damsel Flies. Here's a photo of a recently emerged one I took last summer. I'm fairly certain this one's a male Red Eyed Damsel Fly, mainly on the strength of it's size although the red eyes are a bit of a giveaway too. I've not seen any dragon flies round my own ponds but if there are any they'll be happy to nosh on a honey bee too.
It's not just the ponds that provide plenty of predators for my poor bees. I've mentioned in a previous post that I'm sure it's not just a coincidence that the birdbox which remained empty for years became occupied by Blue Tits in my second season of beekeeping.
I've recently been finding spider threads near the hives where an industrious spider with an eye for opportunity must've thought it was going to hit paydirt. Well it might've if I didn't keep brushing them away. On my last inspection I found a spider in the roof.
No idea what kind of spider it is, but it's legspan was about 2 inches and it lacks the white cross shape on it's back that would identify it as a Garden Spider.
Recently I found a couple of small insects with long antenna wandering about on the bottom board. There's plenty to eat on there such as dropped nectar, pollen, sugar sypup, wax, bits of bees, dropped varroa and general detritus. I also sometimes see some really small pinkish spider mites running about on the board. In nature bee colonies are meant to live in cavities in trees and no doubt they'ed share their home with other things like woodlice too.
There's also of course the varroa who attach themselves to bees and suck out haemolymph, as well as these there's a few other mite types that live on or in the bees too, a common one being Tropilaelaps although I've not yet noticed any myself.. I'm currently treating the nucleus for Varroa using Apilife Var -a natural product that kills varroa, dissolves plastic and gets bees pretty angry, so it's not unusual for me to find dead varroa under there at the moment. It's recently been discovered -or more likely rediscovered or remembered that pseudoscorpions predate the varroa mite and there are currently studies going on into whether or not they can be used as a biological control within hives.
Other creatures that interact with honey bees but so far haven't been a problem for me include mice (hence the need for winter mouseguards), badgers, woodpeckers, slugs and wax moth.
In the UK our bears were long ago hunted to extinction along with boars and wolves -I can't help wondering what the third world makes of that when we're lecturing to them about their elephants and rhinos... So whilst bears would rob hives, it's very unlikely your bees will ever even see one unless your apiary is next to a zoo. There is a popular belief that bees have an inherent dislike of bear shaped things which some argue effect the choice of colour a beekeeper ought to wear whilst working their hives. For example it's often suggested that dark or black clothing and in particular gloves may trigger an angry response from a colony mistaking the dark beekeeper for bear, albeit a very skinny (hungry?) one. For that reason a lot of beekeepers wear lighter coloured or white protective kit. Any goths out there attracted to the idea of a hobby that involves being surrounded by smoke might want to bear that in mind, although I suspect the sunlight and heavy lifting may put them off anyway. Of course some people think that's nonsense and choose their wardrobe with impunity. I tend to wear black jeans and a green smock when working my hives. Having used both black and yellow rubber gloves and had bees sting through both my own theory is that bees simply don't like people riffling through their hives and don't really care what colour you're wearing for the occassion.
 |
| Common Carder Bee |
Previously I found some Common Carder Bees had set up colonies in the ground below the nuc. Unfortunately not long after posting about them and how I was hoping to watch them over the summer it rained and they seem to have died off :(
This evening I found this large black bumble bee investigating the ground below the hives. Annoyingly it refused to keep still to oblige me with a photograph so 3 seconds of video will have to suffice. There's quite a few species of bumble bee and I've no idea which this one was. It seemed to be examining the ground below the hives and had a bit of a buzz against the mesh floors but didn't enter the hives -I doubt the guards would have let it in if it'd tried anyway. I suspect the Common Carders and this Bumble Bee were attracted by the scent of the hive with it's wax comb, developing brood and the queen's pheromones wafting about.
 |
| "I wasn't eating your bees, honest guv." |
 |
| On his(?) way to chomp on some eusocial insects. |
Recently I noticed a couple of them sitting about below the nucleus, I haven't seen one catching bees yet but they certainly do eat them. It's be quite handy if they ate the dead bees below the hives but unfortunately they only eat moving things, offer them as many dead bees as you like and they'll sit waitng for a live one to fly over. I gather toads will eat dead bees from the ground though so perhaps I should look into acquiring some of those. Note: Anyone wanting to do something similar should bear in mind that in the UK it's actually illegal to remove frogspawn (and no doubt toad eggs) from natural habititats so if you want to introduce some to your own pond and there's no chance of them getting there naturally you need to find an obliging pond owner who'll help you out.
 |
| Red Eyed Damsel Fly on a Water Soldier, also a discarded nymph skin to the right. |
It's not just the ponds that provide plenty of predators for my poor bees. I've mentioned in a previous post that I'm sure it's not just a coincidence that the birdbox which remained empty for years became occupied by Blue Tits in my second season of beekeeping.
I've recently been finding spider threads near the hives where an industrious spider with an eye for opportunity must've thought it was going to hit paydirt. Well it might've if I didn't keep brushing them away. On my last inspection I found a spider in the roof.
 |
| "Thought I'd have a bee for tea." |
No idea what kind of spider it is, but it's legspan was about 2 inches and it lacks the white cross shape on it's back that would identify it as a Garden Spider.
 |
| This little guy was about 4mm big. |
Recently I found a couple of small insects with long antenna wandering about on the bottom board. There's plenty to eat on there such as dropped nectar, pollen, sugar sypup, wax, bits of bees, dropped varroa and general detritus. I also sometimes see some really small pinkish spider mites running about on the board. In nature bee colonies are meant to live in cavities in trees and no doubt they'ed share their home with other things like woodlice too.
There's also of course the varroa who attach themselves to bees and suck out haemolymph, as well as these there's a few other mite types that live on or in the bees too, a common one being Tropilaelaps although I've not yet noticed any myself.. I'm currently treating the nucleus for Varroa using Apilife Var -a natural product that kills varroa, dissolves plastic and gets bees pretty angry, so it's not unusual for me to find dead varroa under there at the moment. It's recently been discovered -or more likely rediscovered or remembered that pseudoscorpions predate the varroa mite and there are currently studies going on into whether or not they can be used as a biological control within hives.
Other creatures that interact with honey bees but so far haven't been a problem for me include mice (hence the need for winter mouseguards), badgers, woodpeckers, slugs and wax moth.
In the UK our bears were long ago hunted to extinction along with boars and wolves -I can't help wondering what the third world makes of that when we're lecturing to them about their elephants and rhinos... So whilst bears would rob hives, it's very unlikely your bees will ever even see one unless your apiary is next to a zoo. There is a popular belief that bees have an inherent dislike of bear shaped things which some argue effect the choice of colour a beekeeper ought to wear whilst working their hives. For example it's often suggested that dark or black clothing and in particular gloves may trigger an angry response from a colony mistaking the dark beekeeper for bear, albeit a very skinny (hungry?) one. For that reason a lot of beekeepers wear lighter coloured or white protective kit. Any goths out there attracted to the idea of a hobby that involves being surrounded by smoke might want to bear that in mind, although I suspect the sunlight and heavy lifting may put them off anyway. Of course some people think that's nonsense and choose their wardrobe with impunity. I tend to wear black jeans and a green smock when working my hives. Having used both black and yellow rubber gloves and had bees sting through both my own theory is that bees simply don't like people riffling through their hives and don't really care what colour you're wearing for the occassion.
Monday, 9 July 2012
Avenues Open Gardens
This month was the Avenues Open Gardens.A two day event when a number of people living in Hull's Avenues area open their gardens up so Jane and Joe Public can wander in and have a look round. It's been happening every year since 1976 and somehow I've always managed to miss it but just for a change I managed to make it both Sundays this year. It's actually a lot more interesting than it sounds, honest. The gardens ranged from immaculate to cluttered, from the tasteful to the eccentric with pretty much everything in between including a little working railway, a brick built pizza oven, sculptures, every kind of patio, a small bridge, pagodas, pergolas and ponds -including, I was peased to see, a large number of wildlife ponds some of which held congregations of frogs and in one garden 150 Marmite jars, perhaps someone on a seriously high salt diet lost their recycle bin or something? One property had a sedum roof on it's garage which I popped up the ladder to have a look at. Unlike the one's on my beehives this was a fairly shallow affair which let rain water run off the sides rather than retaining it like mine. The owner said the sedum was supplied in a matting format so I'm guessing it includes some kind of water retention layer at the bottom. I think I may revisit mine and look at futher reducing their size and weight at some point.
As well as the gardens to look at people were selling things ranging from garden and allotment related products like plants and jam to teas, coffee, cupcakes and vegetable sushi, books, pictures and assorted brick-a-brack.. There were a few musical offerings to be heard over the two days mainly ukulele players -you can't move in West Hull for ukulele players, I've even been known to give one a twang myself. Most of the day I had the B-52's "Rock Lobster" stuck in my head thanks to some ukulele players on a balcony at the first house we visited, a work in progress with a huge but unfortunately opaque green pond, till another set of ukulele toting locals managed to displace it with a cover of "These Boots Are Made For Walking."
The Open Gardens as well as helping instill a sense of community, and letting people show their gardens and view those of people they don't know also raises money for various charities. Previous recipients have included the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, Amnesty International, Victoria Avenue Fountain Fund, MIND, East Hull Comunity Farm, Sengwar Aid, Hull Ukulele Group and the Horn of Africa Appeal. Quite a diverse range of local and less local organisations.
You're probably thinking "Yes but what does this actually have to do with bees?" Well I did see a lot of bees collecting nectar. At one point I spotted a bumblebee collecting nectar from a foxglove which I thought would make a great photo so I whipped out my phone and took a picture.
Unfortunately the bee chose just that moment to fly away, I think the little black bit near the top right is it's rear end flitting out of shot. Photography fail. One garden had an old white painted hive amongst some raspberry bushes too.
There where actually two beekeeping related points of interest in the Open Gardens. One was the Friends Of The Earth Bee Campaign "The Bee Cause" which had something going on in the Pearson Park Wildlife Garden, I didn't actually get time to have a look at that so I'm afraid you'll have to follow the link to learn about that, the other was a nearby apiary (I notice whoever wrote that article seems to think mead is made from beeswax, nice bit of research there BBC Humberside, article uncorrected since 2008) just a few streets away from me on Marlborough Avenue. That makes three apiaries in under a mile with my hives, these and the two in Pearson park.
I popped in towards the end of the first Sunday to have a quick look at what was there. At the back of a rather nice, if slightly signage heavy garden -signs on pretty much everything telling you when it was found, built, rebuilt, planted, cut down or restored, was a building possibly an old stable or something and a chap from the Beverley Beekeepers was talking to some people about bee keeping (of course). A friend I'd been walking with had seen them earlier in the day and commented they weren't as aesthetically pleasing as my green shed & fence paint daubed boxes, and well.. she was right TBH. However I don't think the bees are particularly bothered by such things and they're tucked away behind a building anyway rather on display in the garden like mine so I guess aesthetics aren't that important. Perhaps the visual diversity makes it easier for the bees to identify their hives. The chap was explaining he makes all his own equipment from recycled or reclaimed wood. Thinking about it a super is a fairly easy thing to make really, I may try making my own if I need any more of them. I also noticed that most of his boxes didn't use mortise tenon joints on the corners like the ones I make. Perhaps I can get away with not using them and have an easier job next time I feel tempted to dig out my saw and hammer for a little wood butchery,
Something interesting, to me anyway, that he mentioned was when he was talking about bee feeders. At present I use contact feeders and Brother Adams feeders in Autumn but what he said he uses is plastic milk bottles with pin holes in the underside for the bees to draw syrup through. Part of his logic for this was you can see if they're empty or not unlike a white contact feeder and there's no chance of bees drowning like with a Brother Adam's feeder.
As you can see there's a lot of supers on some of these hives -that means a lot of honey bring produced. One of them had five in place. Shows how some bees are busier than others when it comes to storing honey, you can see in the image above one hive has only one super on it at the moment, maybe they're a new colony or maybe those bees haven't got the same work ethic as their more productive neighbours. With my own hives I;'ve noticed the bees in Hive2 seem to be harder workers than those of Hive1.
Most of these hives used what's called a brood and a half for brood. This means the part of the hive the queen bee has access to lay eggs in is one deep box (the larger box at the bottom) and one super (the shallower box directly above it). In the above picture you can see a thin light brown line about half way up the hive, that will be the queen excluder so everything above that is used only for storing honey. Using a brood and a half means you can house a bigger colony on the downside it also means more work with two brood boxes per hive to inspect. I could be wrong but I think the brood boxes are deep nationals which have an internal volume of about 41 litres, I'm not sure of the volume of the super but I'd guess it's around 18 litres so these brood and a half hives have about 59 litres of volume for the bees to raise brood in. My own commercial brood boxes hold about 48 litres. Whilst Nationals are meant to be something of a standard in England it seems that people are now deciding the regular national brood box with a volume of about 36 litres is actually too small hence the existence of the deep national boxes used here and the practice of adding a shallow for more brood space.
To look at the entrances and floors of my hives I use an angled mirror glued to a stick which whilst looking suspiciously pervy works rather well. Turns out great minds think alike as looking at this apiary I noticed a number of mirrors placed to show the hive entrances to viewers inside the building. I also spotted what's looks like a wasp trap, the thing in the top left looking like a light bulb. Not photographed was a nucleus strapped to the top of a pole in the apiary placed there to catch swarms.
When I got home I decided to delineate the edge of my lawn with buried bricks, I'd seen it in a few gardens and it looked a lot better than I expected. Not being particularly big on procrastination I acquired a load of used bricks that evening and by ten had done one edge. I stopped when it got too dark to work. Today I resumed work which meant the edge nearest the bees. There's a few things bees dislike, specifically horses, fish, sweat and the sound of an idiot with a mallet banging bricks into the ground a foot from the hive. It wasn't long before I was being harried by honey bees so I decided to pop on a veil and jacket whilst I worked near the hives. As I got further from the hive I figured I could ditch these and carry on working. I was, of course, wrong. About five minutes later one bee came whizzing over and planted a sting in the leather of my gardening glove and as I made my retreat another stung me on the scalp. I think I may be building a bit of immunity to bee venom now as it hardly hurt at all -although I was pretty quick in scratching the sting off, as you would be... I couldn't find the sting site so liberally applied toothpaste to the area and after taking an antihistamine decided to leave them to calm down for a couple of hours before resuming work.
 |
| Sedum roof, this was on top of a garage. |
The Open Gardens as well as helping instill a sense of community, and letting people show their gardens and view those of people they don't know also raises money for various charities. Previous recipients have included the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, Amnesty International, Victoria Avenue Fountain Fund, MIND, East Hull Comunity Farm, Sengwar Aid, Hull Ukulele Group and the Horn of Africa Appeal. Quite a diverse range of local and less local organisations.
You're probably thinking "Yes but what does this actually have to do with bees?" Well I did see a lot of bees collecting nectar. At one point I spotted a bumblebee collecting nectar from a foxglove which I thought would make a great photo so I whipped out my phone and took a picture.
 |
| There was meant to be a bee in this picture |
There where actually two beekeeping related points of interest in the Open Gardens. One was the Friends Of The Earth Bee Campaign "The Bee Cause" which had something going on in the Pearson Park Wildlife Garden, I didn't actually get time to have a look at that so I'm afraid you'll have to follow the link to learn about that, the other was a nearby apiary (I notice whoever wrote that article seems to think mead is made from beeswax, nice bit of research there BBC Humberside, article uncorrected since 2008) just a few streets away from me on Marlborough Avenue. That makes three apiaries in under a mile with my hives, these and the two in Pearson park.
I popped in towards the end of the first Sunday to have a quick look at what was there. At the back of a rather nice, if slightly signage heavy garden -signs on pretty much everything telling you when it was found, built, rebuilt, planted, cut down or restored, was a building possibly an old stable or something and a chap from the Beverley Beekeepers was talking to some people about bee keeping (of course). A friend I'd been walking with had seen them earlier in the day and commented they weren't as aesthetically pleasing as my green shed & fence paint daubed boxes, and well.. she was right TBH. However I don't think the bees are particularly bothered by such things and they're tucked away behind a building anyway rather on display in the garden like mine so I guess aesthetics aren't that important. Perhaps the visual diversity makes it easier for the bees to identify their hives. The chap was explaining he makes all his own equipment from recycled or reclaimed wood. Thinking about it a super is a fairly easy thing to make really, I may try making my own if I need any more of them. I also noticed that most of his boxes didn't use mortise tenon joints on the corners like the ones I make. Perhaps I can get away with not using them and have an easier job next time I feel tempted to dig out my saw and hammer for a little wood butchery,
Something interesting, to me anyway, that he mentioned was when he was talking about bee feeders. At present I use contact feeders and Brother Adams feeders in Autumn but what he said he uses is plastic milk bottles with pin holes in the underside for the bees to draw syrup through. Part of his logic for this was you can see if they're empty or not unlike a white contact feeder and there's no chance of bees drowning like with a Brother Adam's feeder.
 |
| Bee hives made from reclaimed wood. |
As you can see there's a lot of supers on some of these hives -that means a lot of honey bring produced. One of them had five in place. Shows how some bees are busier than others when it comes to storing honey, you can see in the image above one hive has only one super on it at the moment, maybe they're a new colony or maybe those bees haven't got the same work ethic as their more productive neighbours. With my own hives I;'ve noticed the bees in Hive2 seem to be harder workers than those of Hive1.
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| Brood and a half hive |
Most of these hives used what's called a brood and a half for brood. This means the part of the hive the queen bee has access to lay eggs in is one deep box (the larger box at the bottom) and one super (the shallower box directly above it). In the above picture you can see a thin light brown line about half way up the hive, that will be the queen excluder so everything above that is used only for storing honey. Using a brood and a half means you can house a bigger colony on the downside it also means more work with two brood boxes per hive to inspect. I could be wrong but I think the brood boxes are deep nationals which have an internal volume of about 41 litres, I'm not sure of the volume of the super but I'd guess it's around 18 litres so these brood and a half hives have about 59 litres of volume for the bees to raise brood in. My own commercial brood boxes hold about 48 litres. Whilst Nationals are meant to be something of a standard in England it seems that people are now deciding the regular national brood box with a volume of about 36 litres is actually too small hence the existence of the deep national boxes used here and the practice of adding a shallow for more brood space.
 |
| Wasp trap in top left, mirror middle left. |
To look at the entrances and floors of my hives I use an angled mirror glued to a stick which whilst looking suspiciously pervy works rather well. Turns out great minds think alike as looking at this apiary I noticed a number of mirrors placed to show the hive entrances to viewers inside the building. I also spotted what's looks like a wasp trap, the thing in the top left looking like a light bulb. Not photographed was a nucleus strapped to the top of a pole in the apiary placed there to catch swarms.
When I got home I decided to delineate the edge of my lawn with buried bricks, I'd seen it in a few gardens and it looked a lot better than I expected. Not being particularly big on procrastination I acquired a load of used bricks that evening and by ten had done one edge. I stopped when it got too dark to work. Today I resumed work which meant the edge nearest the bees. There's a few things bees dislike, specifically horses, fish, sweat and the sound of an idiot with a mallet banging bricks into the ground a foot from the hive. It wasn't long before I was being harried by honey bees so I decided to pop on a veil and jacket whilst I worked near the hives. As I got further from the hive I figured I could ditch these and carry on working. I was, of course, wrong. About five minutes later one bee came whizzing over and planted a sting in the leather of my gardening glove and as I made my retreat another stung me on the scalp. I think I may be building a bit of immunity to bee venom now as it hardly hurt at all -although I was pretty quick in scratching the sting off, as you would be... I couldn't find the sting site so liberally applied toothpaste to the area and after taking an antihistamine decided to leave them to calm down for a couple of hours before resuming work.
Friday, 6 July 2012
If you can't stand the heat.. get out.
Had a nice sunny day today. I got home after a short but very hot drive listening to a little Social Distortion and decided to see how the bees were doing with the heat. Must've been pretty hot in the nuc as the front was covered in bees.
The main hives have their mesh floors open so they get plenty of
ventilation, they also have the extra insulation of the roof gardens.
The nuc however has the correx board under the mesh floor all the time
unless I temporarily remove it to check for dropped vorroa. The idea is a nuc
maintains a small population of bees whilst in a hive I'm trying to
build up numbers as fast as possible so they can gather more honey therefore they have different ventilation requirements. In the picture below you can see the landing board of Hive1 in the background only has 2 bees on it whilst the nuc's front and landing board are pretty covered.
Sometimes huge numbers of bees decide to loiter outside the hive so much
so that there isn't room for them all and they end up hanging from each
other, this is called 'bearding.' I don't think this lot qualify as bearding just yet tho.
The nuc also has no current roof insulation and a covering of some grey flashband roofing tape which when was very warm to touch. Whilst there was a crownboard below it and ventillation grills on the sides of the roof it would obviouly still be very warm in the hive. Luckily I'm a fairly smart cookie and when I built the nuc I also made an insulating crownboard. It's got 52.25mm of spaceboard sandwiched between two thin layers of plywood. That spaceboard gives the equivalent of a 27cm thick layer of glass wool -according to the manufacturer anyway, so I'm sure it'll do a pretty good job of keeping out the heat of the sun. I didn't want to lose the little ventilation the nuc has though and having just one small entrance and the mesh floor usually closed this is a concern. To aid ventillation I left the existing crownboard with it's small feeding hole in place and put two small laths on it to hold the insulating layer off it by a few millimeters which should allow so air to exit via the feed hole. If the bees don't like it they'll just close it up. With the insulation in place I then popped the roof back in place on top of it.
I'm possibly not all that smart a cookie as I didn't think of including a removeable centre portion to the insulation so I could add winter fondant, if I decide to overwinter these bees I'll probably need to make another version.
Thinking of cooling things The bees have finally started using one of the wildlife ponds as a water source instead of the grotty birdbath. The pond nearest the hives has an artificial (plastic) log floating in it. It's actually for terrapin tanks so the little creatures can climb out of the water, I added it as I figured young frogs and froglets could sit on it. The bees are now using this as their landing site.
BTW you can now click on my images to see them a larger size
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| Getting some air, and shade on the front of the nuc |
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| Bees from the nuc hanging |
The nuc also has no current roof insulation and a covering of some grey flashband roofing tape which when was very warm to touch. Whilst there was a crownboard below it and ventillation grills on the sides of the roof it would obviouly still be very warm in the hive. Luckily I'm a fairly smart cookie and when I built the nuc I also made an insulating crownboard. It's got 52.25mm of spaceboard sandwiched between two thin layers of plywood. That spaceboard gives the equivalent of a 27cm thick layer of glass wool -according to the manufacturer anyway, so I'm sure it'll do a pretty good job of keeping out the heat of the sun. I didn't want to lose the little ventilation the nuc has though and having just one small entrance and the mesh floor usually closed this is a concern. To aid ventillation I left the existing crownboard with it's small feeding hole in place and put two small laths on it to hold the insulating layer off it by a few millimeters which should allow so air to exit via the feed hole. If the bees don't like it they'll just close it up. With the insulation in place I then popped the roof back in place on top of it.
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| Insulation from the summer sun |
I'm possibly not all that smart a cookie as I didn't think of including a removeable centre portion to the insulation so I could add winter fondant, if I decide to overwinter these bees I'll probably need to make another version.
Thinking of cooling things The bees have finally started using one of the wildlife ponds as a water source instead of the grotty birdbath. The pond nearest the hives has an artificial (plastic) log floating in it. It's actually for terrapin tanks so the little creatures can climb out of the water, I added it as I figured young frogs and froglets could sit on it. The bees are now using this as their landing site.
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| Drink your fill! Tastes like pond water tho. |
Tuesday, 3 July 2012
Expansion
I had a plan to add a third colony this year. To that end I'd made a nucleus hive to house it in, moved aside some greenery and plonked down one and a half paving slabs and couple of breeze blocks to sit it on. All I needed then was a load of bees to inhabit it. However I wasn't going to be buying more bees.
When people think of what a bee colony makes they generally think of honey and wax, someteimes they'll also think of propolis and royal jelly too but there's something else they make which whilst a little obvious people often overlook. It's bees d'oh! Queen bees take a little bit of planning, work, resources and luck but all being well over the summer a colony should be churning out between 1000-2000 new workers per day. So I figured I'd just make up a third colony from those I had.
There's a few ways to do this. Whilst it's actually pretty simple to move some bees, brood and eggs into another box that will give you a colony with no queen. A queenless colony will die out as existing bees age and die without being replaced by new ones. In fairness the bees will probably knock up an emergency queen from existing eggs in that case but she may not be as good quality a monarch as one selected normally.
My initial idea was to follow a fairly simple plan. Basically add a second brood box to my strongest hive with new frames of foundation for the bees to draw out and the queen to lay more eggs in. At some point I would then place two drawn supers and two queen excluders between the two brood boxes. The bees in the brood box without a queen seperated from the pheromones of the existing queen should then, in theory, make a new queen form one of the many eggs they have to choose from.
I selected Hive2 for this and added one of the brood boxes I'd made last year. I fed them up with syrup as they would need a lot of energy do draw all that comb and eventually gave the queen full run of both broods so she could lay more eggs and raise me more bees to populate the nuc. She certainly managed to make the that. I acquired two queen excluders from an auction, all was going to plan except one thing. The weather was being really unhelpful. We had acold wet Spring so there was no forage for the bees. With no forage the bees weren't going to be drawing supers anytime soon.
Luckily at the last auction I went to I'd picked up a set of 10 cell punches with which I was able to devise a plan B. :)
A cell punch is a short metal tube about an inch long and sharpened at one end and with a plastic collar at the other. The other part of the punch is a wooden plug. Removing the wooden plug you use the sharp end of the cyclinder to cut out a complete cell with an egg in it from the comb.
You then put the wooden plug bit back in the cylinder in the sharp end to push the cell to the plastic collar. Having done that you then secure the punch complete with wooden plug, cell and egg vertically with the cell opening downwards. The whole assembly then goes into a queenless hive. The idea is that the bees find this vertically oriented call, somehow overlook that it's made of brass and plastic rather than wax and start stocking it with royal jelly and do the necessary wax work themselves. This method is called cell punching. an is meant to be one of the simpler ways to raise queens.
I knocked up a frame for the cell punches using some bits of frame, a wooden lath and some of those nails that have a plastic bit to hold cables.
Well that was the plan anyway. I knew the plan. You now know the plan. Perhaps I should've told the bees the plan.
I populated the nuc with 4 frames of brood and food from Hive2. I used seven of the punches to cut seven cells containing eggs from another frame which I returned to Hive2. Why seven? I'd never done this before and didn't want to take too long between removing the eggs and placing them in the nuc. I then put the frame of now populated punches in the centre of the nuc. After this I shook out the bees from two more frames from Hive2 into the nucleus and smoked these down into the nuc brood box before adding a crownboard, feeder and replacing the roof. The reason I added extra bees was because whilst there were bees on the frames I'd just added any flying bees that left the nuc to forage would return to Hive2 -yes bees remember where they live.
I later checked the cell punches expecting to see some nice big queen cells but it was a non starter, the bees hadn't been keen so they'ed pulled out the eggs. I repeated the process and next time found the bees had decided to make one of them into a queen.
I decided to place that queen in Hive1 in the hope that she would displace the existing queen. I put some tin foil round her for protection -otherwise the bees would sense the developing alien queen and kill her themselves. This still didn't work though. When I later checked to see if she'd hatched I found the workers had managed reach the side of the cell and kill the developing queen. So my first foray into queen rearing by cell punching was something of a failure. I later realised if I'd just left the new queen cell in the nucleus she'd've hatched in there and I could've later replaced the queen of Hive1 with her. I'm pretty sure I've learnt a little there and have no doubt I'll trying again at another point
Whilst contemplating a third attempt at cell punching I found the now somewhat crowded Hive2 had started making queen cells. I selected a frame with 2 supercedure queens cells on it and popped that into the nucleus instead of the cell punch frame. It also had some brood and eggs on to boost the numbers in the nuc which willl have been dwindling whilst they failed to gain a queen. For good measure I also gave them another frame of capped brood. When I next inspected the hive I found an empty queen cell
You can see the flap at the bottom where the queen made her exit. The other queen cell was on the other sde of the frame but I couldn't see any sign of it so I assume the new queen hatched then killed her opponent by stinging her in the cell and the workers tore down the cell. Just had to wait and see if she managed to mate next. Two weeks later I still haven't seen the queen but that's ok as there are single eggs are beng laid in the empty cells and I can see uncapped brood developing so I know there's now a mated queen in there even if I've not seen the little lady. Success. I now have a third colony complete with queen.
Later in the year I'll need to decide whether I want to use her to replace the queen of Hive1 or see if the whole colony can survive the winter in the nuc, or I may just unite this colony with whichever is weakest going into winter. Whether or not I replace the queen of Hive1 is largely going to depend upon whether or not I ever see the elusive little madam. I'd like to replace her because the bees of Hive2 are calmer than hers and also I've recently noticed Hive2 is filling the super faster than Hive1. When you replace a queen what as the existing bees age and die off naturally the new queen's offspriing are hatching and maturing to replace them. Given life expectancy of a summer worker bee it takes about 6 weeks to replace the whole colony. By changing the queen you can replace aggressive bees with more placid ones of the same breed or if you really want to you can completely change the race of your colony.
When people think of what a bee colony makes they generally think of honey and wax, someteimes they'll also think of propolis and royal jelly too but there's something else they make which whilst a little obvious people often overlook. It's bees d'oh! Queen bees take a little bit of planning, work, resources and luck but all being well over the summer a colony should be churning out between 1000-2000 new workers per day. So I figured I'd just make up a third colony from those I had.
There's a few ways to do this. Whilst it's actually pretty simple to move some bees, brood and eggs into another box that will give you a colony with no queen. A queenless colony will die out as existing bees age and die without being replaced by new ones. In fairness the bees will probably knock up an emergency queen from existing eggs in that case but she may not be as good quality a monarch as one selected normally.
My initial idea was to follow a fairly simple plan. Basically add a second brood box to my strongest hive with new frames of foundation for the bees to draw out and the queen to lay more eggs in. At some point I would then place two drawn supers and two queen excluders between the two brood boxes. The bees in the brood box without a queen seperated from the pheromones of the existing queen should then, in theory, make a new queen form one of the many eggs they have to choose from.
I selected Hive2 for this and added one of the brood boxes I'd made last year. I fed them up with syrup as they would need a lot of energy do draw all that comb and eventually gave the queen full run of both broods so she could lay more eggs and raise me more bees to populate the nuc. She certainly managed to make the that. I acquired two queen excluders from an auction, all was going to plan except one thing. The weather was being really unhelpful. We had acold wet Spring so there was no forage for the bees. With no forage the bees weren't going to be drawing supers anytime soon.
Luckily at the last auction I went to I'd picked up a set of 10 cell punches with which I was able to devise a plan B. :)
 |
| Cell Punches |
A cell punch is a short metal tube about an inch long and sharpened at one end and with a plastic collar at the other. The other part of the punch is a wooden plug. Removing the wooden plug you use the sharp end of the cyclinder to cut out a complete cell with an egg in it from the comb.
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| Cutting out an egg |
I knocked up a frame for the cell punches using some bits of frame, a wooden lath and some of those nails that have a plastic bit to hold cables.
 |
| Frame adapted to hold cell punches |
Well that was the plan anyway. I knew the plan. You now know the plan. Perhaps I should've told the bees the plan.
I populated the nuc with 4 frames of brood and food from Hive2. I used seven of the punches to cut seven cells containing eggs from another frame which I returned to Hive2. Why seven? I'd never done this before and didn't want to take too long between removing the eggs and placing them in the nuc. I then put the frame of now populated punches in the centre of the nuc. After this I shook out the bees from two more frames from Hive2 into the nucleus and smoked these down into the nuc brood box before adding a crownboard, feeder and replacing the roof. The reason I added extra bees was because whilst there were bees on the frames I'd just added any flying bees that left the nuc to forage would return to Hive2 -yes bees remember where they live.
I later checked the cell punches expecting to see some nice big queen cells but it was a non starter, the bees hadn't been keen so they'ed pulled out the eggs. I repeated the process and next time found the bees had decided to make one of them into a queen.
 |
| One new Queen Cell |
I decided to place that queen in Hive1 in the hope that she would displace the existing queen. I put some tin foil round her for protection -otherwise the bees would sense the developing alien queen and kill her themselves. This still didn't work though. When I later checked to see if she'd hatched I found the workers had managed reach the side of the cell and kill the developing queen. So my first foray into queen rearing by cell punching was something of a failure. I later realised if I'd just left the new queen cell in the nucleus she'd've hatched in there and I could've later replaced the queen of Hive1 with her. I'm pretty sure I've learnt a little there and have no doubt I'll trying again at another point
Whilst contemplating a third attempt at cell punching I found the now somewhat crowded Hive2 had started making queen cells. I selected a frame with 2 supercedure queens cells on it and popped that into the nucleus instead of the cell punch frame. It also had some brood and eggs on to boost the numbers in the nuc which willl have been dwindling whilst they failed to gain a queen. For good measure I also gave them another frame of capped brood. When I next inspected the hive I found an empty queen cell
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| Recently vacated queen cell |
Later in the year I'll need to decide whether I want to use her to replace the queen of Hive1 or see if the whole colony can survive the winter in the nuc, or I may just unite this colony with whichever is weakest going into winter. Whether or not I replace the queen of Hive1 is largely going to depend upon whether or not I ever see the elusive little madam. I'd like to replace her because the bees of Hive2 are calmer than hers and also I've recently noticed Hive2 is filling the super faster than Hive1. When you replace a queen what as the existing bees age and die off naturally the new queen's offspriing are hatching and maturing to replace them. Given life expectancy of a summer worker bee it takes about 6 weeks to replace the whole colony. By changing the queen you can replace aggressive bees with more placid ones of the same breed or if you really want to you can completely change the race of your colony.
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