Spring Broke

Well on paper we're into Spring but nobody's told the weather so it's still freezing cold and looks set to stay that way for a while longer yet. After giving both hives a block of fondant each on Monday and finding the Nucleus colony dead I thought I'd take advantage of the warm weather (6 degrees C) to have a very quick look to see if they were actually eating the stuff. It turned out neither was.

Starting with Hive1, when I removed the untouched fondant I couldn't see any bees below it at all. So I cracked the seal and lifted the crownboard to see what was ging on in there. It was rather disappointing. I could see bees in four seams (the vertical gaps between the frames) but not a large number. I reckon there was probably enough bees to have filled 1 1/2 seams.

Small cluster in Hive1

I suspect this colony might not make it to summer. Looking between the seams I could see large numbers of dead bees on the hive floor. Removing them would mean a lot of disruption for this colony so what I've done is ordered a new floor from Fragile Planet. Once I've got it assembled I'll be whipping out the old one and popping the new one in place. Removing all the dead bees in one fell swoop with minimum disruption to what's left of the colony. Meanwhile to try and improve chances for the living bees I sliced up the fondant and put the thin slices directly on top of the frames -when it's cold they really won't go far to find food hence the nucleus colony having starved about an inch from food. I also pulled out the second to last frame which was empty and replaced it with one that had a little honey on it left over from when I'd been building up Hive2 numbers to make up the nucleus colony in summer.

Replacing the crownboard I blocked the central feeding hole, replaced the insulation and roof. Now the fondant is directly above the bees -where they're standing in the photo I'm sure they'll start feeding. The question is of course is too little too late? I won't know for a few weeks yet. Being a smaller colony the food will go further but if the colony gets too small they won't be able to maintain hive temperature and humidity which might lead to their demise. The obvious thought is to add a heatsource, however that would make the bees more active, so they'ed blaze through their food, noticing the increase in temperature they'ed start flying out to forage and die out in the cold dwindling the population even faster than before.

Hive2 hadn't touched their block of fondant either, but when I looked into the feedhole below the block I could see loads of bees and some flew out to greet me -or perhaps they flew out to tell me to put the damn lid back on, it's cold out. I removed the crownboard as before and was able to see it was quite a different story to Hive1. There was about 6 full seams worth of bees in there, active and moving about.

About half a colony in Hive2

As with Hive1 I sliced up the fondant and put it on the tops of the frames then replaced the crownboard. This colony is far stronger than the other but the larger numbers also means more chance of starving as there's a few thousand more tiny mouths to feed.

Looking at the strengths of the colonies during the September inspection I can see that Hive1 actually looked the stronger colony, it had more bees and it had more brood. In the lead up to winter both hives were treated in the same way and fed the same amount of food so I think it reasonable to have expected Hive1 to be the stronger coming out of winter. The change in strength may be down to genetics with Hive1 having been requeened with royalty from unknown and probably foreign parts although I'm pretty sure she's been superseded and her successor(s?) will have mated with local bees. I did notice the different placements of the clusters. Hive1 were positioned slightly to the right and towards the back of the colony. This is away from the hive entrance and both feed holes in the crownboard whereas the bees in Hive2 had positioned themselves between the entrance and the feed holes which I would assume is a draftier place to be.

After five years or so of winter losses dropping it appears, from the beekeeping forums, that there are heavy losses this year with some people having lost large numbers of colonies so far -think I saw one person had lost eleven. The previous winter (2011/2012) was very easy on the bees with larger numbers surviving for spring, unfortunately the rest of the year was poor so many bees starved later in the year. This year the winter weather seems to be lasting into what's meant to be spring so whilst the bees have used up their winter stores they can't forage yet. I'm hoping both hives will pull through but the way it's looking I may well find myself bidding on new bees this year.

The Queen is Dead

This morning I got another email from the National Bee Unit about a starvation risk to bees and advising people to give their colonies a quick inspection to check food stores despite the cold. It's late March now, about time the bees start foraging and their keepers start feeding colonies with sugar syrup to build up numbers after the winter die back. Unfortunately the weather's being a bit random and instead of warmer days we've had snow and ice so the bees can't forage and it's too cold for syrup. I gave all three colonies a block of fondant as winter food back in November. The fondant was still there in January suggesting they were still okay for stored food at the time.

Lifting the lid from the nucleus and removing the polystyrene insulation I could see the upside down plastic food box with fondant in it above the feed hole. I initially thought was probably a good sign, after all if the bees aren't eating the fondant they're probably still eating stored honey. I removed the fondant, had a look in the feed hole but couldn't see any movement, if someone opens a hole in your roof when it's 2 degrees outside chances are you're going to be investigating pretty sharpish so the fact they didn't didn't bode too well. I removed the crownboard completely, I could see bees but they weren't moving.

Dead bees

Looking in the photo you can see all the cells have been opened and are empty, this suggests starvation to me. There is some visible mould but I believe that will have grown after the bees had already died -or at least had died back to too few to control moisture level within the hive.

It's quite a dramatic change from when I opened the hive in January and it was stuffed with live bees and stores. It didn't take long to piece together what had happened. Back in January I'd noticed the cluster was towards the left of the hive. As winter wears on the bees die back the cluster shrinks. As the colony had shrunk they'ed wound up clustering in the seam between the two left most frames. The feed hole is above the seams either side of the central frame. When the bees are clustered they won't break the cluster to look for food so they'ed remained in their cluster and starved to death even though there was a block of fondant big enough to sustain them for weeks about an inch away. There was even some capped honey on the outer face of the leftmost frame which they hadn't opened either.

I gave a handful of dead bees to the chickens, I may give them more another day. As I'm certain the bees died from starvation not disease the comb can be cleaned up by the other hives later and reused when I start up a new colony in the summer. As my colonies are part of the EU Pilot Surveillance Programme I shall have to email the Regional Bee Inspector and let him know the colony died. I removed the insulation, and the sliding bottom board to better ventilate the hive dead hive. I also stuffed up the entrance to keep out wax moth, mice and anything else that might want to set up home in the nucleus, and moved onto Hive1.

Once again I could see the block of fondant sitting in it's transparent box above the crownboard. I removed this and three workers quickly came to see what was happening. This could mean there were only three bees left alive in the whole brood box or it could mean the colony is happily clustered and eating stores. It also meant the bees are able to reach the fondant. When bees are cold they move slowly, you can actually watch stray bees outside the hive grind to a halt as evening falls and temperature drops. The three I saw seemed to be moving about as normal though which suggested to me the colony are okay and still able to maintain heat in the hive. The fondant had only been nibbled a little but I decided to swap it for a fresh block anyway just in case it'd dried out or anything. Instead of removing it from it's foil packaging completely I left it on and cut out a rectangle to expose the icing. Hopefully that'll stop the stuff drying out too quickly. I popped the hive back together and moved onto Hive 2.

That was a different story again. The bees had taken about half a cm of fondant directly above the feed hole and when I removed the block to look below it I could see a large number of bees milling about. This suggests suggests two things: one there's a lot of living bees in there, and two they're low stores hence their actively taking the fondant.

Live bees, Hive2

As with Hive1 I swapped the fondant for a fresh block and closed up the hive. I then got my stethoscope out and had a listen to compare the two hives, they sounded pretty much the same to me so obviously Hive1 does have more considerably more than three bees in it.

Over the past few years winter losses have actually been dropping, although there was an increase in the long wet 2011/2012 winter. Here's the figures from the previous 5 winters, taken from the BBKA's winter loss figures published after the October 2011/March 2012 survey.

Percentage loss of total number of colonies in England overall and North East England

Winter

2007/2008

2008/2009

2009/2010

2010/2011

2011/2012

England

30.5%

18.7%

17.7%

13.6%

16.2

North East

43.0%

8.9%

16.9%

17.1%

15.9

Hopefully I'll have no further winter losses.

The Moon On A Stick

One seriously cold evening back in January I popped down to Newland Avenue for the opening of Luna. A pop up gallery upstairs at The Moon on a Stick. I'd not been there before but it's one of those shops with a number of independent traders operating within it and sells a huge variety of crafty things -if you want an embroidered plushy owl, essential oils, olde worlde sweets, Rob Ryan ceramics, driftwood framed mirrors or a guinea pig clock that's the place to go, or you could pop upstairs to Fairymoo's Doodling World for cards, jewelery and craft supplies or into Luna to buy a picture by my housemate. They also do workshops on all kinds or craft and holistic health subjects.

At this point you're probably wondering what any of this has to do with beekeeping. I'm getting there. As well as selling their own lines they hire out shelves on a weekly basis for other people to sell from. I figured that my honey and polish would fit quite well with the Moon on a Stick's current lines. So I've hired one and put my remaining honey and polish on it.

The heart isn't mine..

Along with a couple of cards showing prices, a quick explanation how to use polish and a picture of a bee I added a couple of extracted shallow combs too. When you go to a supermarket to buy honey it's all too easy to forget where it comes from. I'd already sold quite a lot of the honey and after retaining one for myself and one to granulate for set honey next year there was only 18 jars left. I did have a vague plan to relabel the polish tins as my original bee picture does look a little waspy but as I'm still out of colour ink I decided to run with the labels already on the tins.

Edit 16/4/2014 The Moon On A Stick was a pop up shop and has since popped to a new location across the road. Having sucessfully sold the honey crop I don't have any other of my hive products in there at the moment.