The Candy Board

My bees have had a pretty ropey year and although I've fed them syrup till they're no longer taking it I'm not entirely convinced they have enough to get through the winter ahead. We're expecting the worst winter in 60 years according to long range weather forecasting although it's not unknown for the Met Office to be a little out I'd rather err on the side of caution so in case of any shortfall in the bee's food stores I've decided to add a Candy Board to each hive

A Candy Board, also called Sugar Board, is basically a wooden frame full of sugar that goes in the hive directly above the bees. If they run out of food and start to climb upwards they can find it and start eating. Obviously pouring a few kilos of sugar into a square wooden frame is just going to leave you with and empty frame a messy floor  so you need to add a little water to make the sugar cake together, put a wire mesh to hold it all up and add something to hold the wet sugar as it sets. They're fairly simple to make really, there's quite a good 'How To' here or you could just read on.

First up was making the wooden frame. A Commercial brood box has the same outer dimensions as a National brood box which is 46.5cm square. I decided to use some 45x75mm wood for the project, it doesn't really need to be that thick, 22mm will do in fact but I wanted them to be very solid so they'll survive a few winters and I figured the extra thickness might reduce heat loss too. There's a few ways you could put the frame together I opted to cut the ends of the sides diagonally at 45 degrees and screw them together. Time to break out the mitre saw that's been kicking about in the shed for a few years. It's meant to be bench mounted really and previously I've used it on the ground standing on it to hold it steady but this time I bolted the base to a piece of scrap wood and clamped that in the workbench which kept it still and made it so much easier (safer!) to use.

Guess the patio needs a clean then

I also rubbed the blade with a wax candle to stop it sticking to the wood and the top bar of the saw to keep it moving smoothly too. A little while later (okay a little while, a coffee break, and another little while later), I had 12 isosceles trapezoids, a tired arm and a couple of blisters. I also got some wire mesh, the holes need to be big enough for the bees to get through unimpeded, I opted for 13mm mesh just because that's what the shop had.

Pretty much finished. Not.

Turns out holding the frames square to pre drill and screw the corners together was a tricky business but eventually I had 4 square wooden frames held together by three screws per corner.

Squares

 That done the frames needed wire mesh stapling into place, and a hole drilling into one side of each. The mesh was stapled to the inner vertical sides of the frame so they didn't interfere with the fit of the candyboard to the hive. The hole has two purposes one is it allows ventilation and the other to allow the bees a second entrance for in case the lower exit gets blocked, by for example a load dead bees or snow or whatever. I used a 10mm drill bit for that. It just needed to be big enough to let one bee out and given that a bee space is 9mm wide that should be adequate for an easily defensible entrance.

Empty Candy Boards

With the woodwork done they just needed the food adding. I bought 15kilos of sugar so I could put 5 in each board. There's recipes for the filling all over the net, one here, it seems to come down to one cup of sugar per five pounds of sugar and a spoonful white or apple cider vinegar if you like. I had some left over 2:1 syrup that the bees hadn't taken so I opted to use that instead of adding water. Normally you place newspaper of something similar over the mesh to hold the syrup as it sets then later the bees chew through it to reach the sugar. However I had read on another blog that this could mean there were bits of paper and pulp in the left over sugar which a thrifty beekeeper might want to use to make 1:1 syrup in the spring, so instead I used some plastic wrap on the bottoms of the boards so I could pop the sugar in to dry then remove it before adding the boards to the hives -should make it a little more accessible to the bees if they need it too.

7 kilos of sugar and a little syrup

Using a huge stainless steel pan I dropped in 7 KG of granulated white sugar to start and added some syrup and started to stir. It was really hard work. I added more syrup as I progressed till the sugar was all a little damp then I started adding it to the boards.  The rest of the sugar I mixed in smaller batches before adding to the boards.

Small gap near the entrance/exit.

There needs to be a small gap in the sugar near the entrance/exit hole for ventilation and so the bees can get in and out of it if they need to. Some people leave in wooden blocks or a plastic box whilst the sugar sets, I just pulled the stuff back so there was a small gap. I did the same in all three boards -although in the picture below you can't actually tell.

Pollen supplement

I'd read a few people talking about adding pollen supplement to their candyboards so I bought a kilo of Candipolline Gold from Fragile Planet. Looking at the website it says it's a made of sugar, milk and egg proteins and and sterilised bee pollen -sterilised with gamma rays no less. Wasn't it Gamma radiation that turned Dr Banner into the Hulk? Well if I have angry green bees in spring I guess I'll know why... I wrapped each patty in plastic except for the side that's exposed to the bees, I'm not sure if the plastic is totally necessary but all the images I've seen have the plastic still on so I figured I'd follow suit.

Candy Boards, filled and waiting to go

Next up they just had to dry. I decided to pop them on the hives when I opened them to do the Oxalic Acid treatment  as I don't want to be messing them about too much when it's cold. When the sugar had dried it was set like rock. As well as providing emergency food if needed the huge block of sugar should also act as a humidity sink helping keep it nice and dry in the hives over winter.

Candy boards on the hives

A fortnight later I put the boards onto the hives. After a little smoke to push the bees down into the the frames I place the boards directly on top of the brood boxes with the entrance/ventilation holes facing the same direction as the hive entrances. Hopefully they won't be needed and the sugar that's left in Spring will be used to make syrup but if the bees do find themselves short on supplies over winter it's there for them.

Now, much to their relief no doubt, I get to leave the bees alone for a few months.

Trickling Acid

Most of a hive's Varroa mite population, well 85% of them, usually live within the developing brood leaving only 15% of the population on the adult bees. When there's no brood all the mites should be on the adult bee population and this makes them vulnerable to treatments applied directly to the bees. The treatment I'll be using is a solution of Oxalic acid and sugar syrup.

For the past six weeks or so the night time temperature over here has mainly been below 5 degree Celsius with a some nights of temperatures below freezing. This should mean that by now the queens have stopped laying eggs and the last of the brood should have hatched by now. With hopefully no brood in the comb the mites should all be rather vulnerable. Obviously if there are brood in the hive then the mites will be safely ensconced in the comb and the acid won't affect them.

Off to work we go

Today was a balmy 9 degrees C, armed with a smoker, hive tool a couple of syringes and a bowl of oxalic acid solution I'd warmed in a water bath I went to meet the bees. They were making the most of the slightly warmer weather and whilst I had expected them to be making cleansing flights but I also noticed they were  bringing in pollen from somewhere too.

Are you ready for your treatment?

Including the space between the end frames and the follower boards there's 12 seams per hive. Hive3 with it's caught swarm had about 4 seams worth of bees and was unsurprisingly the weakest colony. They were also the most edgy with a lot of bees flying out to meet me and inspecting the syringe. Hive1 had eight seams and Hive2 was packed with 12 seams of bees. The guidelines are based on a National brood box and suggest 5ml of solution is dribbled down each seam of bees. As I use a commercial which is a little bigger I did a little guesswork and used about 6-7ml per seam. It's a simple enough procedure, you just open the hive and run a syringe along each seam gently squeezing out the solution as you go. Once completed the hives are closed up and you're done.

Seams of bees

Autumn Feeding: Done.

It's that time of year when, much to their relief, the bees are largely left to their own devices. It's a little nippy to be opening hives and pulling out frames and there'll probably be very little of no brood in there by now as night time temperatures are approaching zero.

They've had their Autumn feed of 2:1 syrup but success was varied. Hive1 seems to have taken about 2 gallons of syrup, Hive2 has taken about half a gallon. Both those colonies had Adam's Feeders that hold 2 gallons at a time.

Adam's Feeder of 2:1 syrup

I only have two Adam's Feeders so Hive3 got a rapid feeder in an empty super. They took first 2 litres and another litre after I refilled it but then lost interest -or more likely it got too cold for them to take any more syrup.

Rapid Feeder on Hive3
The blurry dark things are bees.

This winter I plan to put a sugar board (or candy board if you prefer) on each hive to supplement their winter stores and see then through to spring. Apart from that I still have to do their oxalic acid treatment probably in early December then I'm done till Spring.

Had a look at the bees in Pearson Park Wildlife garden a few weeks ago too. At some point this year they'ed dropped from three hives to one so they've not been having a great year either but when I last checked they were back up to two.

National Hive and WBC hive in Pearson Park

In the picture above which was taken in October you can see they've got the National hive with a super on, and the WBC hive too. The wooden structure to the right is the stand from the  Top Bar Hive which evidently didn't make it. It may be that they uited the bees to make a stronger colony earlier in the season then split them again later -although comb from the top bar hive would've had to be either cut out and attached to new frames or just discarded.

Season's End

Not blogged for a while, been working on a few other things and, well, there's not been much going on beewise really.

They're prepping for winter! ..sortof..

On the 16th August I had the final of the three visits from the Regional Bee Inspector as part of the European Union Pilot Surveillance Programme for honey bee health. There was a patch of diseased brood in Hive1 but a matchstick test showed it wasn't one of the dreaded Foulbroods. The bees seem to heave dealt with that themselves now.

Hive	Combs of Brood	Combs of Bees	Notes
Hive1	3	7	Some signs of phoretic mite disease
Hive2	6	13
Hive3	1	4	Very few eggs

Colony inspection from August 2013

And here's how it's looked across the year for hives 1 & 2.

Combs of bees and brood across three inspections

Hive 08/09/2012 14/04/2013 16/08/2013 Hive1 18 combs of bees 7 combs of brood 2.5 combs of bees 0.5combs of brood 7 combs of bees 3combs of brood Hive2 13 combs of bees 6.5 combs of brood 3 combs of bees 0.5combs of brood 13 combs of bees 6combs of brood

The figures from the first and third visits should be very simlar so as you can see Hive2 is doing pretty much as expected really but Hive1 is at below half the strength they should be for this time of year. I've had a look in the hives today, they should all be winding down on egg production and storing up food for winter right now and I should be thinking of combining Hive1 and Hive3 but they're still busy raising brood and laying eggs, Hive2 in particular had a huge number of eggs in it today.

Brood rearing in all three hives

Fresh eggs, in late September

The only hive with a super on it was Hive2. Most f the frames were still empty and a couple had a little honey in but not a lot. Here's a photo of the fullest frame of honey today:

Barely enough to sweeten a mug of Roibos

They're obviously not going to be finishing this anytime soon so what I've done is removed the super and placed it above the crownboard on another empty super. Hopefully the bees will remove what little honey there is in there and store it in the brood box instead. When I tried this before to consolidate two supers it went a bit odd and they stored a shedload in the super they were meant to empty, can't see that happening this year though.

Nothing in the brown one,
not much in the green one.

Something quite noticeable is the lack of drones in any of the hives. art of winter preparations is for the bees to expell them from the hive. It's a little harsh but that's nature's way.. they'ed only use up stored food over winter otherwise. amongst the brood in hive2 I spotted one drone cell, don't fancy his chances much though. They've got some stored honey and pollen in all three hives, unsurprisingly Hive2 is leading the way with it's larger workforce.

Honey being stored on a brood frame

I put the mouseguards on the hives a couple of weeks. I actually saw a mouse type rodent thing last week. It ran like the clappers when I was the chicken run. Unless it's met the cat it's probably somewhere in the garden still but there was no signs of mouse damage in the hives -it's probably been too busy robbing the chickens to try the hives so far.

I'll not be looking in the hives much again now. At some point I'll have a quick look in Hive1 and 3 and depending on the numbers I might unite them, other than that the only time I expect to be looking under the crownboards again is for the oxalic acid treatment when we're into winter. The main beekeeping work from now will be feeding them syrup.

Reuniting the Artificial Swarm

Well my Artificial Swarm (AS) was making progress but then I made a mistake and to put it bluntly it all went a bit tits up. The AS technique I'd used involves a Snelgrove board which has six doors paired above and below the central board on three sides,  you manipulate these to filter flying bees back to the colony below. After the first four of five days there should be two doors open, as time goes on you close and open doors so the hive entrance(s) move around the board but you only ever have two doors open one to the colony below and one to the colony above.

The AS seemed to be going well, a queen cell had hatched in there and I figured things were looking peachy. I couldn't find her but that wasn't a surprise she would be quite small and still had to mate anyway. However last week whilst having a look to check on her elusive majesty's progress I found two doors open into the artificial swarm. I suspect one got opened by accident rather than left open in fact but the result seems to have been that they got robbed out. Mature bees from the parent colony below them, Hive2 and the nucleus seem to have gone in and taken all the stored food. Being made up of young bees the AS probably didn't do much by way of defending itself and with no mature bees to bring in new food there was a risk of starvation. I went through all eleven frames seeing lots of slow moving (presumably tired and hungry) workers and drones aimlessly wandering on empty comb and a few dead bees on the crownboard and Snelgrove board.

I was surprised to see some dead drones who appear to have mated and made it back to the hive what was left of their sexual organs protruding from their abdomens. I'm assuming they mated elsewhere and returned to the hive rather than mated in the hive with the queen who hatched who'd be their sister. Normally a queen bee flies further to mate than drones which should ensure she doesn't mate with her brothers yielding inbred bees. These two dead bees are actually very small for drones being about the same size as workers.

If these were human this image wouldn't be safe for work

I closed up the box and made up some thin sugar syrup which I then poured into a frame of empty comb so the workers could immediately start distributing it amongst themselves then closed up the hive. I couldn't see any sign of the queen, she may have been in there or she may have been killed during the robbing or lost as a result of manipulating th Snelgrove's doors. I later put a small feeder in an empty super above the AS to give them something to eat and decided to unite them back to the parent colony.

There's a few different ways to unite different bee colonies and the aim is to minimise fighting between them. I initially chose the newspaper method which is probably the most common and probably one of the simplest. Basically you slip a sheet of newspaper above the stronger of the two colonies and put the weaker one on top of that. In theory the bees will nibble through the newspaper and by the time they're through will have made enough contact with the bees in the other colony to consider them part of the same colony. Once united you then open the boxes and choose your eleven best frames to remain and remove the rest or go with a double brood colony.

Two colonies meeting over (and under) a newspaper

After 5 days the bees didn't seem to be taking any interest in the newspaper so I decided to speed things along by going to plan B. Plan B was what I think I'll call the Peppermint Technique. It's quicker than newspaper but probably more disruptive for the bees. Rather than waiting for the bees to gradually make contact by nibbling through paper you spray them with a peppermint spray and put the frames and bees from the one hive directly into the other. The spray obscures their scent and gives them something to do as they lick it off. By the time they've finished licking the spray the two colonies are used to each other.

The former David A. Cushman whose encyclopedic beekeeping website remains a handy resource notes he used to use a water spray with a Fox's Glacier Mint dissolved in it for this purpose. I made up some 1:1 syrup and mixed in a few drops of peppermint essential oil, I then decided it was too thick to spray and watered it down a lot.

I went out to the hives with a spare brood box to house the frames I'd be removing and my peppermint spray. I whipped off the artificial swarm it it's box and discovered I'd been a little quick to give up on Plan A. the bees had started chewing through the newspaper. Ah well next time I'll remember: more patience and less work.

Like myself, the bees were unimpressed with my colleague's choice of reading material

Going through the original brood box I removed 6 frames to the spare and the five remaining ones I pulled out and misted on both sides with the peppermint solution. I pulled five frames from the AS -the ones with the most bees on and stored syrup and misted them too before popping them in the original brood box. Bees left on the unused frames were shaken off and misted with peppermint then I put a crownboard on top of the brood box and a contact feeder with some 1:1 syrup in it to give them something to do and replaced the roof.

Combined colony and spare frames.

I now have 11 spare commercial sized frames some drawn and some not. I'll need to pop them into storage safe from wax moth at some point. Although I'm going to need some of them when I move the captured swarm from the nuc to a full sized brood box.

I've got me an Etsy shop

I'm in e-commerce now. Or at least I will be if I make some sales. I've opened a shop on Etsy, Hivemind Heavy Industries and the URL is http://www.etsy.com/shop/HullBees. I'll be adding a banner at the top of this page at some point.

Hivemind Heavy Industries online at Etsy

I've sold a few things on eBay before but Etsy has lower fees, it's a trade off though as eBay has more market coverage.

In other news I've expanded my repertoire to include cherry flavoured lip balm. I did try to make some nice round glossy labels but they're pretty much impossible to get right. Main problems assumnig they're actually cut right and the manufacturer's template is right is printer drift. I was managing about seven good labels on a page of 48 and decided to give up and go back to square ones.

Cherry Flavoured Lip Balm

Artificial Swarm is making progress

Just over a week ago I did an artificial swarm on Hive2 using a snelgrove board. Today I had a look in the top brood box to see what was going on.It was a little awkward due to the height and my frame perch didn't quite fit the side of my brood box. You might notice from the pic I've got handles on 4 sides of the box, the specification only calls for a slight recessed grip but it seemed a good idea to me. Afterall these things get heavy.

Going throught the frames I was able to see there were no eggs and no uncapped brood. That was good news as it meant I hadn't accidentally put the queen in there when I made the artificial swarm. If I had done she'd've been continuing to lay eggs in there. I also found a lot of queen cells. Also good news as it meant the young bees in there had spotted the absence of queen and started making a new one, I cut out all but two of the queen cells then removed the frame one of them was on leaving the other in place.

Supercedure Queen Cell

The queen cell I left in the AS should hatch and hopefully mate. Then I opened Hive2 to have a nosey. Those bees are getting a bit feisty, but at last they've started to work the super. I spotted a few supercedure cells in this hive too so I guess the bees aren't too hapy with their current queen's performance, I'm not ecstatic about the temprament of the hive either so after cutting out all the supercedure cells I found I put in the frame with a cel from Hive1. All being well that new queen will hatch, mate adn replace the original queen ..well that or the bees will kil her. Gonna have to wait and see..

Loved Again Vintage

So once again I have stuff on sale. There a new tea shop called Loved Again Vintage at 24 Princes Avenue, Hull, sat between Union Mashup and Lounge. As well as teas and cake etc it also sells a range of vintage clothing and items ranging from clothing to crockery and furniture. If you'd like a cup of Earl Grey whilst you buy a Bakerlite radio this is the place to go. You can also book it for parties in the evenings.

Loved Again Vintage

 I've hired a shelf to put various my propolis products, lip balm and polish on. Initially I put everything I had complete with information cards onto a shelf with a couple of frames of drawn comb.

Propolis items

It wasn't the most aesthetically pleasing arrangement of goods but they've since rearranged it so it looks more aesthetically pleasing, and tucked the excess items into a drawer -it's now a lot less clutered than the above photo and more in keeping with the rest of the shop. I've also since added my batch of lip balm which seems to have generated quite a lot of interest.

No, it's not my hand.

Currently they're stocking Propolis Tincture, Propolis Salve, Propolis and Tea Tree Salve, Beeswax Polish, Beeswax and Honey Peppermint Lip Balm and some empty 20ml amber dropper bottles.

Edit 16/4/2014: Loved Again Vintage was a pop-ip shop/cafe and has now popped off so is no longer around.

Lip Balm

Another day another product..

A couple of years ago a housemate suggested I make lip balm but at the time I wasn't interested in making my own range of cosmetics, afterall for me beekeeping is about woodwork, heavy lifting, huge numbers of potentially dangerous insects and burning stuff not faffing about with skincare products. However this year I made some propolis salve and found it was actually quite fun and it seems to have generated a lot of interest, the other day a friend sent me a link to a lip balm recipe. I gave it a quick look, it required beeswax, honey, almond oil and peppermint oil and didn't look particularly difficult. Well I had some beeswax sat doing nothing, I'd actually been flogging it very cheaply to a seamstress as I didn't have much use for it myself, I had some honey, the indian shop round the corner seems to sell every kind of edible oil you can think of and a few you wouldn't. I just needed some tiny tins and peppermint essential oil. After a few minutes on the internet I had them ordered and after a day's wait for delivery I was in business.

It wasn't too hard to make and didn't require much equipment. A glass jug to make it in, somethng to stir it with, a heatsource and some scales. I also used a syringe to measure it out. By happy coincidence 10ml of my lip balm weighed 10g. There's a lot of different tins to choose from but I opted for some round aluminium screwtops.

Fifty tins, filled, labelled up and ready to go.

As with the Propolis Tincture and Salve labelling was tedious. Each tin needed a label on the front and the back and then I added a price sticker too. I got almost right through Social Distortion's first album in the time it took to label them up. As before I used my bee picture and the same font as the alve and tincture so it looks good sharing shelf space with my other products.

Beeswax & Honey Peppermint Lip Balm

Propolis Tincture & Salve

Don't worry folks, this entry has a mercifully low text to picture ratio!

Pretty much everyone and his dog knows bees make honey, a lot of people are also aware they make wax and a smaller number of people know bees make bees, but there's a couple of other things they make too. One of them is Propolis.

Properwhat now? Propolis is a natural resinous substance rich in antioxidants gathered by honey bees. It's made from tree sap and resin and has very powerful anti-bacterial and anti-fungal properties and has been used in folk medicine for centuries. It's believed to be a natural treatment for a huge number of health problems and conditions including acne, bacterial infections, burns, canker sores, colds, cold sores, diabetes, giardiasis, herpes, inflammation, influenza, peptic ulcers, hay fever and to stimulate the immune system and prevent tooth decay. Seriously? Yup, apparently so. Whilst modern medicine is still evaluating it for various applications it's already seeing use in dentistry. Hippocrates recommended it for sores and ulcers, it also got a mention in Pliny’s Natural History (about 78 AD), Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica (sometime between 50 and 70 AD) and John Gerard’s Generall Historie of Plantes (1597).

There's a few different products you can make with propolis and I decided to go for a tincture. You can sell the tincture as it is or use it as a component for other things. Actually you can sell propolis as a powder or  in edible capsules or formed into tablets but I didn't fancy that. After all it's likely to be contaminated with a few solids like bits of hive and bee that people don't hugely want to be ingesting so I figured dissolved and filtered ina tincture was the way to go.

Propolis is really sticky stuff which would make it hard to work with but if you freeze it it becomes brittle. I kept in the freezer for a few weeks before using a coffee grinder to grind it up into a fine powder. I did that because I wanted to increase it's surface area so it would dissolve more readily in my solvent. There's a few things you can dissolve propolis in but I needed something safe for people to take internally and put on their skin, and also something that wouldn't require me to get involved with the legalese of high proof alcohol -which is pretty pricey stuff anyway. I opted for British Pharmacopoeia grade Propylene Glycol which is considered food safe. Propylene has a few different uses in food and other areas such as anti freeze. I got mine from an online veterinary supply shop -apparently it's used as a medication for farm animals.

5 litres of Propylene Glycol BP

The glycol/propolis suspension was then put in my airing cupboard above the hot water cylinder for a few weeks. It's warm enough in there to help the propolis dissolve but not hot enough to be detrimental to the propolis. To stop it settling too much I gave it a shake a couple of times a day to mix up.

After a few weeks I filtered the now dark mixture through a coffee filter, hellishly slow process that, to get my tincture. A nice uniform dark brown liquid which to me still tastes like Jägermeister but less sweet. 

Magic Bee Medicine!
I probably can't legally call it that :(

The tincture is to be sold in small bottles with dropper lids. I had two sizes of bottle which held 17ml or 20ml. The easiest way to do that was to use a syringe to measure it out. This stuff is usually used with a few drops dissolved in water or directly into the mouth if the taste doesn't bother you too much.

We don't want spillage.

With the bottles filled it was time to come up with some labels. I decided to use the bee currently in the top right corner of this blog. I drew it last year and I'm getting a lot of mileage from it. Whilst it's not really a food I decided to label it in line with food regulations with contents, metric weight , ingredients list, contact address and country of origin, best by date and a batch number on two labels. I also thought that the label would look a little nicer and more olde worlde with the corners trimmed instead of square. I think it looks pretty neat but it made peeling the labels off the backing paper a pig of a job. I'd made eighty odd bottles and with two labels on each it seemed to take an age. Looks good though :)

Final product.

So that was tincture made, the other product I wanted to make was a salve which can be applied to the skin for various conditions cuts and grazes. Once you have the propolis tincture it's actually fairly easy to make the salve. Its just added to molten petroleum jelly and mixed till it sets. I wanted to make a fair amount of salve so I was going to need a lot of petroleum jelly. Took me a while to locate but it turns out horsey people use petroleum jelly by the bucketful. I've no idea what they do with it but I'm guessing those equestrian types must have some fairly crazy parties!

I thought we'd try something different tonight dear.

Molten Petroleum Jelly

Molten Petroleum Jelly with Propolis Tincture
Nice colour.

Once the petroleum jelly was melted I let it cool a little then added the propolis tincture. The tincture sank to the bottom so I had to stir it as it continued to cool to make sure it was evenly mixed throughout. Then I transfered it to a glass measuring jug and poured it into plastic tubs which were on a scale so I could measure the weight of salve. I later found it was easier to melt the petroleum jelly in the jug in the oven then mix the tincture in it too. The tubs I had held 50g of the salve so popping a tub on the scale and hitting the zero button I decanted 50g of the stuff into each, actually I went just over but that's okay it's short measures people don't like.

Ooops went over.

First batch of Propolis Salve

Next job was to label the tubs up. I decided to label it similarly to the tincture, same font, same picture and so on but with square corners. After all they're white labels on white plastic tubs.

My bees all look the same

I made fifty two tubs of propolis salve and just for the sake of variety made thirty tubs of Propolis and Tea Tree Salve by adding some Tea Tree Essential Oil to the mix.

Another finished product.

I also had a few tins of polish left too but I wasn't keen on my old bee picture in the label so I made up some small stickers of the newer picture and stuck them over the old one. I think it looks a lot better and it gives my different products a uniform look, a brand if you will.

Beeswax Polish -now with new improved label!

I never envisioned I'd be making skin and healthcare products but beekeeping certainly takes you down some unexpected paths. All that filtering, measuring, mixing, melting and cooling things was a little Breaking Bad. Well now I have a product I just need to market it.

Vertical Artificial Swarm

At last the brood boxes are brimming with bees and there's more in the comb waiting to emerge. When worker bees start hatching numbers increase exponentially. This means that a colony that was looking rather weak can quite quickly get congested and when colonies are congested they're more likely to swarm.

Healthy brood

Burr comb between frame tops, think they're short of space.

Before bees swarm they'll start making a new queen and by the time she hatches the old queen will have done one with a load of your favourite workers. If the beekeeper is vigilant enough and has good enough eyesight he or she should be able to spot queen cells being made during regular inspections and take steps to minimise the risk of swarming. Initially the bees make what's called a 'play cup' or 'queen cup' a round structure sticking out of the comb designed hold an egg horizontally as opposed to stuck to the vertical back wall of a normal cell in the comb.

Empty cup

Finding one of these cups isn't always a sign of imminent swarming. The bees make them and don't always use them hence the name 'play' cups. Sometimes the bees will put and egg into one, then later they'll pull it out and put it somewhere else. I don't know why they do that and have my doubts that anyone else does either -although I suspect they do it just to worry beekeepers. If one of these cells has a hatched larvae swimming in royal jelly in it then you know for sure the bees are making a new queen. If it's half way up the comb like the play cup in the image above it's a supersedure cell meaning the bees are raising a new queen to replace the existing one, if it's at the bottom of the comb it's a swarm queen and half your workforce is looking to abscond. I found two cups at the bottom of a frame in hive1 and  2 in the middle of comb on Hive2. Perhaps Hive1 are thinking about swarming and Hive2 are thinking of revolution.

There's different ways to reduce swarming, you can give the bees more space by adding supers or a second brood box, some people use a second queen excluder below the brood box to stop queens leaving or clip the queen's wings to stop her flying. I've already given both colonies supers but they're not using them just yet, probably dont want to squeeze through the queen excluder.

Whilst those measure should reduce likelihood of swarming the most important method is to make the bees think they've already swarmed. There's different ways to create an artificial swarm and they generally involve splitting a colony. I decided to do a vertical artificial swarm because it means you still have the same number of hives whereas other methods mean making up more hives and I don't have any spare roofs or the space for another two complete hives anyway - plus there was a Snelgrove board included with my original hive.

Snelgrove was a jolly clever bekeeper and entemologist from Somerset. In 1934 his book Swarming Its Control And Prevention was published. It's since been republished fifteen times, most recently in 1998. I haven't read it but there's a good article about it and Snelgrove's technique here. Apparently he'd based his technique on a theory of swarming that was incorrect, despite that his technique was and remains effective and is still in use to this day. His method uses a piece of kit named after it's inventor. The Snelgrove board is, unsurprisingly, a board. It has a square hole in the middle covered by a metal mesh on on each side, and has six doors in the edge arranged in three pairs above and below the board. A photo would make it a lot clearer but I didn't think to take one before I stuck it in the hive this afternoon.

The artificial swarm needs a second brood box and enough frames to fill it and the Snelgrove Board. I'd made a couple of brood boxes previously and a few spare deep frames to go in it and bit's of frames. Just had to make up 7 new frames using a mix of old stuff I'd had sitting about and new gubbins I'd ordered in. Recently a neighbour flogged me a Black & Decker workmate WM825, she'd had it sat in the box unopened for about a year. It's bit Hank Hill and but made assembling the frames easier and I managed to avoid pushing any nails into my thumb this time.

Knocking some frames together

The short version of Snelgrove's artificial swarm technique as I understand it is you take all but two frames from the brood box and put them into a new brood box leaving the queen in the old box with some workers and replace the removed frames with undrawn foundation. The other brood box with it's frames of brood, eggs and worker bees goes on top of the brood box and any supers that are in place seperated by the Snelgrove board. The doors are then opened and closed in sequence over the following ten days to filter forager bees back into the box below. When the door is opened any mature foragers flying out of it will return to the hive entrance they're already used to at the bottom of the box so after a little time all the mature foragers should drift into the bottom brood box where the queen is.

Foragers leaving the side entrance of the Snelgrove Board

The queen and older workers find themselves in a suddenly roomy area with no young bees and very little stores which is pretty much how they would be if they'ed just swarmed, whilst the young bees find themselves with brood, eggs and food stores but no queen or mature foragers which again is how they would be if their Queen had just swarmed. The older bees and queen go about the business of rebuilding  and replenshing new comb whilst the younger bees get a wriggle on and start making themselves a new queen. Later on you can either separate the boxes into two different colonies or remove one of the queens and reunite both boxes to make one stronger colony with a younger queen.

Hive1 with Snelgrove Board and second brood box above the super

Well that's the theory anyway. Unfortunately I couldn't find the queen of Hive1 at all today so I pulled out the frames I wanted making sure the queen wasn't on any of them so hopefully she's still in the original box. I hope the bees do what I'm expecting but they don't always.

I also inspected the other hives today. The swarm I caught are doing well I'm thinking I may build them into a third colony instead of trying to keep them in a nucleus, I managed to locate and mark the queen last week, she's layaing plenty of eggs so the nuc may be full in a few weekds time. The bees in Hive2 are a little tetchy at the moment so I'm thinking I might try and requeen them with a little royalty from Hive1 if things go to plan. Of course that's a pretty big 'if'. I've given both hives supers but so far neither one is making any use of them, to try and encourage them in Hive2 I rubbed some unripe hiney from burr comb on the frame tops. Hopefully that should get their attention.