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.

Sedum roof, this was on top of a garage.

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.

There was meant to be a bee in this 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.

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.

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.