Schrodinger's Bees

Winter is a period when beekeepers don't do a huge amount of hands on beekeeping. It's a good time to clean up kit, drink some mead, pad out your blog with book reviews and so on but as far as contact with the bees go there's not a lot. Whilst beekeepers do their best to ensure their colonies will survive the winter we do seem to end up a with a Schrodinger's Cat sort of situation. Are the bees in the boxes alive or not? There's a lot that can happen to them over the winter. They could starve if they didn't have enough food stored or warm snaps made them use up what they had too quickly, they might get damp and die, varroa load may be too high or some other pest or illness may have wiped them out.

Anyone alive in there? Knock once for yes, twice for no.

I occasionally pull out a stethoscope and have a listen to my colonies just to be sure they're still alive in there. Hopefully the bees have been living on the honey stored in the comb of the brood box, but that may be running low by now so many beekeepers will feed their colonies a nice lump of fondant icing after xmas. Actually I got an email from Fragile Planet last week advising customers to feed their bees this winter. However I'd given mine some fondant back in November just in case it was needed and as I checked recently I was able to see most of it still there, it may be a little dry but condensation inside the hive should provide water to allow the bees to use it.

Lotta sugar and 3 bees. The brown stuff is a supplement.

Another thing beekeepers do when it's cold is pour acid on their insects. Sounds a bit strange, I know, but it's for the benefit of the colony. It's intended to kill the varroa mites. Normally most of the mites will be safely tucked away in the capped brood along with the bee larvae they're feeding on, however when it's too cold to raise larvae the queen stops laying eggs so the mites hang about on the adult bees instead at which point they're more vulnerable to varroacides, specificall organic acids applied to the bees directly. The January edition of the BBKA News advised waiting for a period of cold weather with an average of 5 degrees Celsius, lasting three weeks so any capped brood will have emerged. Then as the cold snap comes to an end you trickle a 3.2% oxalic acid solution and 1:1 syrup onto the bees between the combs. The bees between the combs are called a seam, and the figure people go by is 5ml of solution per comb. I suspect that's actually based upon the population of standard National hive brood box really and it may be that in a Commercial like mine you should use a little more but I decided to go with 5ml per seam for now. I think I read somewhere that the acid damages the mouthparts of the varroa leading to their demise, many believe it also does some harm to the bees but less than the varroa would do and given the short lifespan of individual bees shouldn't be a significant problem for the colony as a whole. The figure bandied about for efficacy of dribbling oxalic acid onto the bees seems to bea reduction of about 90% in the colony's varroa population.

Do not drink me.

A very weak solution of Oxalic Acid is used for this, other organic acids can be used such as Formic or Lactic Acid, but Oxalic is currently in vogue. It's legal status seems a little confusing to me, the choice of these organic acids as varroacides seems to be based upon them not having a defined Maximum Residue Limit like regular pesticides. I gather these organic acids occur naturally to some degree within bee colonies anyway and unlike other varroacides don't leave a residue affecting the hive products. It's not difficult to make up your own solution, but if you get it a bit wrong it could be a disaster for your bees either by not killing enough mites or by damaging the bees themselves -and do you really know how accurate your kitchen scales are? I doubt it.

If you really want to know more about varroa control DEFRA have a 44 page document available called Managing Varroa that you can download and includes Oxalic Acid treatments. There's other ways to administer organic acids such as spraying or vapourising the stuff. Vapourising seems wonderfully dangerous giving beekeepers the chance to find out first hand how much damage of a lungful of vapourised acid can do to a person, whilst simultaneously being less effective on the varroa. The advantage of vapourising it is it's faster to do than dribbling, although that doesn't take into account time spent waiting for an ambulance and further time spent recuperating after burning your lungs out.

Back to my bees. I've never used oxacilic acid before but you administer it by dribbling it from a syringe. It just so happens I'm no stranger to drawing up and administering solutions in syringes, and it's easier without a needle involved.

My table needs a clean

Today the temperature below the hives was 8 1/2 degrees Celcius, the warmest it's been for a few weeks so I decided to apply the acid -it was also due to expire next month too. After lighting the smoker and popping on my smock and veil I decided to treat the bees in the nuc first. As I said above it's hard to know how the bees are doing over winter despite best efforts in the lead up to winter so it was something of a relief when I removed the nuc's crownboard to see bees in there under the fondant and more coming up from the seams to see why some fool was opening their hive in late Janury.

They're alive!

There looked to be four seams full of bees. In the photo you can see three of them, the edge seam on the left was also full of bees but they'ed propolised the top edge so you can't see them so well in the image. The two seams on the right were more or less empty of bees. Interestingly (slightly) the left side of the hive is more exposed with the right side facing Hive1 so I'm assuming they found it easier to keep warm on the left of the hive than the right. I drizzled 5ml of oxalic and syrup solution into each of the four occupied seams making 2 passes for each (2 1/2 ml per pass) rather than drowning them by trying to apply it too quickly. I had some spare brood frames with honey on that I'd stored in the summer in case it was needed in the winter. Rather than disturb the frames the bees were on I prised out the rightmost frame to assess their stores but found it still had capped honey in it, so I guess they're not short of food and that probably explains why they've shown little interest in the fondant so far. Closing up the nuc I cracked open Hive1 where I was greeted by a few bees and saw them crowded into the seams again. I drizzled 5ml of solution into each seam before moving on to Hive2.

"It's January, put the lid back on you muppet!"

In Hive2 I could still see some grey bits of Api-Life Var on the outer corners of the frame tops. This is a crumbly material holding thymol (thyme essential oil) which as it evaporates kills varroa but not bees -although it does annoy them. Normally the bees would have broken it up and thrown it out of the hive by now but with the cold weather I'd guess it's not been evaporating so I pulled them out. There were a few bees on top of the frames and investigating the fondant. Not too many though. If there'd been a lot of them then it would be an indicator that they were starving -I suspect they'ed've eaten the fondant before that was a problem though. Once again I trickled the solution over the bees and closed up. You can see in the above photo the bees are towards the far side of the hive rather than in the middle.That side of the hive whilst nearer the entrance is more sheltered from the elements as it face a garden wall whereas the other side faces the garden. Evidently they've chosen the warmer side of the hive to cluster in. Hive1 had done the same.

Oxalic acid applied and all the hives closed up again I popped to Pearson Park for a quick run. Apart from an occasional check on how much fondant they have left I'll be leaving the bees alone from now till spring.

Wireless Weather Station

A useful thing for beekeepers to know is the weather -specifically the weather near the bee hives. You can generally tell a lot about the weather by looking out of the window -or in the case of snow looking at your Facebook news feed and seeing umpteen people have posted "It's snowing" "Yay snow!" "Gonna write my name in yellow!" and so on. However the actual air temperature and humidity level you probably can't tell from looking. Given that everyone and his dog seems to have a smartphone these days a lot of people have access to a current weather report at their finger tips, however unless the service you're using has weather monitoring station located slap bang in the middle of your apiary there's a good chance the conditions reported won't be quite the same as conditions where your bees are. For example in Hull some bright spark thought it would be a great idea to place a weather station on the dock, it's more exposed than most of the city and it's near a large body of  water so tends to give temperature readings a little lower than the rest of the city.

My bees are located in my garden and as I don't have a vast sprawling estate (yet) I can use an off the shelf Wireless Weather Station. Basically a remote temperature and humidity sensor which transmits on a radio frequency to a base station located in your home. They generally have ranges of a few tens of metres so should be just right for the garden. There's a lot of different models to choose from and if anyone wants to do their research I'm sure there's reports and reviews of most of them n the web. I didn't tho. Today whilst in Tesco I noticed they had on reduced from £20 to £15 and on an impulse decided to get one. The one their selling 'Exclusively from Tesco' is the Technika WS 2121P Inverness Weatherstation. Who are Technika? Seems to be a subsidiary of Tesco. I own a Technika digital camera actually, it's pretty crap to be honest and I gave up on it after a couple of days. Anyway on a whim I picked up one of their Weather Stations.

Technika Weather Station -complete with fake security tag

Notice the box has a big sticker on it saying Security Protected? Well it isn't really. I paid for mine at the self service bit and wandered out without getting any security tag deactivated. Examining the box I found there's no device in the box or behind the sticker to activate a sensor. Maybe someone's realised that a sticker saying "Security Protected" is cheaper than an actual acoustomagnetic strip or RF tag and about as effective. I don't imagine many shoplifters go back to return their loot when those door sensors start beeping as they exit.

Anyway back to the Weather Station. It's made in China. I think it's a little disingenuous having Inverness printed on all six sides of the packaging and China on one, perhaps calling the device Zhenjiang or Nantong would been more appropriate.

I popped in some batteries -not included, but also sold in Tesco, I didn't buy mine there tho. Two AA size in the base station and two AAA in the remote. I noted the base station was showing a remote temperature and humidity reading and so set the time and date. Great. My plan was to pop the remote under one of the hives so I could see the air temperature the bees are dealing with at any given time. However I noticed that the temperature on the remote wasn't the same as that being displayed for it on the on the base station, they were both indoors but the reading I was seeing was obviously from outside. I figured Tesco are probably selling a lot of these units, they have a range of 30m so there's a good chance it's picking up someone else's remote. That was exactly what was happening. It didn't occur to me till later that my own should've been a stronger signal as it was nearest the base station anyhow. To avoid reading the wrong remote the devices support three frequencies so it's not a huge problem. I switched to the second frequency but got nothing, I tried the third frequency, still got nothing. Either my remote wasn't transmitting or my base unit wasn't receiving. I suspect the problem may have been the remote given that I was able to read somebody else's on the base unit using channel 1.

There's two things wrong with this picture.

As you can see from the picture above despite being right next to the remote the base station isn't getting a reading from it -if it was it'd be in the bottom left of the display. Having spent many years working in Information Technology I'm actually aware of a procedure that can be applied to computers and a vast array of electronic devices to remedy a range of problems. In I.T. we call it 'power cycling.' However it doesn't involve actual bikes or much by way of effort. Power Cycling a device just means turning it off and on again. And more often than not it works. If you've ever watched The IT Crowd Chris O'Dowd's character Roy answers the phone with "Hello, I.T. Have you tried turning it off and on again." If you haven't watched The IT Crowd then I suggest you do. Anyway pulling the batteries out of the base unit and remote sensor and reinstalling them worked for me :). Yay for turning stuff off and on again.

The more eagle eyed readers out there might have spotted that in the picture above the remote thinks it's 19.3 degrees C whilst the base station thinks it's 20.2 degrees. That's a discrepancy of almost a whole degree. Guess Technika aren't going to much trouble to calibrate their devices before shipping. Not a huge surprise really as it's a cheap unit at fifteen beer tokens, there's other units with similar functionality out there going for just shy of four hundred quid.

When two parties can't reach an agreement the obvious thing to do is get a third party's input. So I did. I dug out another digital thermometer I had knocking about and put it with the base station and the remote. I figured it would probably agree with whichever was correct.

There's no agreement here.

It was a good idea but a flawed one. I have no real idea how accurate my digital thermometer is, chances are it's about as roughly calibrated as both the remote and the base station, could even have come from the same factory for all I know. The thermometer read 18.5, the remote 18.8 and the base station 19.1. So I decided to average the readings to hopefully get something more accurate.

(18.5 +18.8+19.1)/3=18.8

Turns out the average of the three readings was actually the same as the reading from the remote, Good enough for me! I don't really need to know  the exact air temperature in my house. After all if it's warm I''m warm, if it's cold I'm not, don't need a digital display to tell me. The remote has to be kept out of drafts, rain and water so I've sat it on a brick under Hive1.

Under Hive1. Needs a sweep actually.

So now thanks to the wonders of wireless technology I can tell if it's cold or not outside without having to venture out into the snow myself.

Bees At The Bottom Of The Garden

It's snowing. The bees are staying in their hives leaving me with very little to blog about so it's time for a little winter filler in the form of another little book review.

My introduction to beekeeping was a 2 day course run by Beverley Beekeepers Association in 2010, they recommended we read Bees At the Bottom Of The Garden by Alan Campion. I'd already started reading Get Starting In Beekeeping though so decided to finish that first. Bees At The Bottom Of The Garden (which I'm now going to call BATBOTG because in these RSI concious times I'm not going to type that lot anymore than I need to) seems to be pitched at a slightly simpler level than Get Started In Beekeeping (GSIB!) and so may be an easier read or it may be that it was less new to me having read the other book first.

The start of many a journey

BATBOTG certainly has more images than GSIB with a large number of illustrations and black and white photographs for those who like to look at pictures, although not all of them do say a thousand words and many are there for aesthetic rather than instructional reasons. The book starts with a little information on bee biology then goes onto explaining the components of a hive, then it takes you through the beekeeping year including extracting the honey, before going into a bit more detail about oil seed rape, managing swarming and bee diseases. It probably does tell you enough to keep your own bees but a bit more reading and internet research would be an idea -that said I don't imagine anyone's likely to read a single book then run out to buy some bees.

Originally published in  1984 and reissued in 1990 the copy I got hold of was revised in 2000, published in 2001 and seems to be the latest version. Just like other books I've read it has a year planner for beekeepers telling you more or less what you should be doing in any given month -which in January is not a lot. Worth a read, definitely a good starting point for anyone wanting bees in their garden and if you want to learn more afterwards you can go to something more in depth like Ted Hooper's Guide to Bees & Honey which seems to be something of a beekeeper's bible at the moment.