Queen Clipping

In the last entry I wrote about using the Demaree method of swarm control, temporarily separating the Queen and mature bees from the housebees and brood to reduce the chances of swarming. There's a couple of other steps sometimes taken to reduce the chances of swarming based on basically stopping the Queen bee from being able to fly away. One method is to place a Queen Excluder below the brood box so the Queen can't physically escape -the Excluder is basically a set of slots that are too narrow to stop a queen passing through them but wide enough for a worker to get through. One disadvantage of that is that drones are also unable to exit the brood box too. It's probably worth doing if for example a beekeeper is going away for a short while. Another way to stop the Queen flying away is to clip her wings.

One marked Queen

As well as bees I also have chickens and I already clip their wings, after all I don't want to come home and find they've decided to hop over the wall and dug up next doors bedding plants. Whilst people talk about 'clipping wings' you actually only clip one wing so the bird (or bee) can't fly properly.With a bee you only need to cut off the tip of the wing.

I decided to try the Queen in Hive3 first, that's the weakest colony and the one I'd miss least if things went belly up. Opening the hive I quickly located her, partially because she doesn't seem very shy but also because there's less bees in there. Initially catching her in a Queen Clip I transferred her into my gloved left hand and held her gently whilst using a pair of nail scissors to cut the tip off her right wing. I didn't have any problems and was rather pleased with my first attempt.

Then I released her onto the top bars of the open hive and it went downhill as she dropped between the frames. Bees have really grippy feet and don't generally fall down so that didn't bode well. Pulling out a couple of frames and shining my phone's torch onto the floor of the hive I could see her lying there with a small group of workers around her. She was moving a little but not a lot. That didn't bode well.

I closed up the hive and checked hives 1 and 2 then opened 3 again to see if she'd moved. She hadn't. I figured I'd probably held her too tightly and damaged her. I'd probably committed regicide by accident. The colony would have to raise a new Queen, she'd have to mate then start laying eggs and they'ed have to hatch, that'd be about 2 months before the population increased. The colony could've dwindled and died out by then :-o

It was about a week before the York Beekeepers' Association Auction so I figured I'd buy a new nuc of bees there if she was dead. The Friday before the auction I opened Hive3, removed a couple of frames and had a look at the hive floor where I'd last seen her. She wasn't there.Well no surprises there really, bees usually take out the dead after all. I started checking the frames and found eggs in them. If the Queen was dead any eggs she'd laid would've been hatched by that point. Turning the frame over I was surprised to see the Queen, with her blob of red paint and clipped right wing, wandering along the comb as if nothing was wrong.

She'd survived having her wing clipped and returned to laying. Hopefully she'll soon catch up colonies 1 and 2. After that experience I decided to modify my technique by holding the queen by her other wing. A few days later I opened Hive1 and clipped the Queens' wing with no problems at all. I wasn't able to find Hive2's queen yet but I'll be sure to give her a snip when I do.

From what I've read clipping a wing doesn't actually stop the bees from swarming. But it does stop the Queen flying with the swarm which then returns to the hive once they've noticed her absence. Some literature suggests the clipped Queen is seen as damaged by the bees and so they replace her sooner, not a problem for me as my Queens are probably all 2 years old now and I'm wanting them superceding at the moment anyway.

Demaree Method of Swarm Control

After last years rather unsuccessful attempt at swarm control using the Snelgrove Method this year I decided to try the Demaree Method on Hive1 this year. It seems a fairly simple method of swarm control and lets all the bees in the hive continue to work on the same honey crop.

The basis of swarm control is to make the bees think they've already swarmed. A swarm that's left a colony to start anew consists of a Queen Bee and a cadre of mature forager bees, no young bees and no brood. So if we can remove the brood and young bees they might just fall for it. The Demaree Method was first published in an article by George Demaree in an 1884 edition of The American Bee Journal. Here's the method broken down as I understand it:

Equipment:
Existing bee hive with Queen Excluder, Super(s), lots of bees etc
Brood box with full compliment of frames and foundation.

Method
1. Remove existing hive from hive floor and place the new brood box in it's place.
2. Remove the middle frame from the new brood box.
3. Locate the Queen Bee in the old brood box, place that frame in the middle of the new brood box.
4. Put Queen excluder over new brood box, replace the supers.
5. Place old brood box on top of Super(s)
6. Push the frames in the old brood box together and pop the spare new frame in at one end.
7. Put the crownboard and roof back on.

What should happen is the young bees will continue to tend the brood in the old brood box but with the queen will be unable to get through the excluder to lay any more eggs in it after 21 days there should be no brood in it at all. Meanwhile foraging bees will climb down from the old brood box to go foraging and on their return to the new brood box where the queen is should remain there. As there's new foundation they should start drawing it out and making new comb similar to what they'ed do if they had just moved to a new cavity.

The young bees in the old box at the top of the hive may decide to make some new queens if they think they've lost the old one and some sort of division board can be used to turn them into a separate colony if required or you can just reunite them down later.

Locating the Queen in Hive1 took me absolutely ages. She kept hiding away. I separated the the combs into pairs to limit where she could be but in the end had to search through the frames about 3 times before I located her. I then transferred her frame into the centre of the new brood box and popped the empty new frame into the old box.

You may be able to work out which is the old frame in here.

I then plonked the Queen Excluder back on and the Super which the bees are working on in earnest.

Working in the Super.

I then put the old brood box on top of the super. I actually want to raise some new Queens from this hive so I decided to try a method of tricking the workers into creating queens. The technique is called 'notching' which is pretty much all the beekeeper needs to do. Using a hive tool the beekeeper presses in the bottom cell walls of some cells with very young brood or eggs -that's the 'notch'. The workers hopeful misinterpret these damaged cells as vertically oriented queen cells and start flooding them with royal jelly to make the new Queens. I've not tried it before but fingers crossed. The current Queens of Hive 1 and 2 are a couple of years old now so due to be replaced.

Hive after Demaree Method

Whilst in the Hive I also cut out the sacrificial drone brood to keep varroa levels down. The comb was only about a third covered with capped drone brood but it should still make a serious dent in varroa numbers.

Drone brood, sacrificed for the greater good.

Tree Bees

On Sunday afternoon my neighbour told me about somebody who had had a colony of honey bees arrive in their garden. They were in a bird box so I suspected it was probably some sort of bumble bee rather than honeybees but a gardener had been fairly sure they were honeybees, so I made a phone call loaded up the car with my empty nuc, a box of frames with foundation, smoker, tools, gloves, wellies, smock, aspivenin and some toothpaste in case of the sting and guided by satnav drove over to Anlaby to pick them up.

Bird Box of Bees

The bees were in a bird box which a quick glance told me was too small to house a colony of honey bees. They really want something about the size of an actual beehive and the bird box probably had a capacity of 2 or 3 litres. The bird box was located about head height on a wooden fence behind some tall plants and shaded below adult trees. We could see bees going in and out of the box and buzzing about near it. The small fluffy bees had an orange thorax and a black abdomen some of which had a white tip. Easily identifiable as Tree Bees (Bombus hypnorum), a type of bumble bee first spotted in the UK in 2001 and spreading ever since. The Bees, Wasps & Ants Recording Society maintains a map of Tree Bee sightings. Whilst this is a fairly recent arrival to our shores and they're spreading very quickly it's believed they don't pose any threat to indigenous wildlife. In fact whilst other pollinators are on the decline Tree Bees seem to be bucking the trend and doing rather well for themselves. As somoe as I posted abut it on facebook friend told me that his parents who live over near Driffield has had the same thing happen in one of their bird boxes too.

Heavily Propolised Entrance

They're actually very placid bees and I was able to stand directly in front of the bird box to take a picture holding my phone only a few inches from the entrance - although I don't suggest you try that at home kids.. You can see from the photograph they've reduced the entrance to the birdhouse so it's big enough to let one bee through at a time. Nobody does anything with Tree Bees as far as I know but looking at that reduced entrance I'm wondering if they'ed possibly be useful as a source of propolis or wax. It may be something worth looking into if I can get some hold of some used bird boxes. In nature they live in holes in trees but nowadays as well as bird boxes they've also been found in clothes drier hoses, chimneys and under eaves.

I explained to the home owner they were probably good for her garden and shouldn't really be a problem, the nest was tucked away and they'll die off by Winter anyway at which point the queen will go somewhere hibernate. I suggested that in Winter they get move the box though otherwise it'll probably get reused next year, she has a friend with some woods it will probably go to. Just after I'd explained they weren't really aggressive one decided to start buzzing my head persistently so I swatted it away a couple of times and beat a retreat. Whilst Tree Bees are normally rather placid if you interfere with their hive they can mobilise the colony to defend it, so if you find some your best bet is not to interfere with them. I also explained that the drones can be very noisy  when they start congregating around the colony entrance but they don't actually have stings. You can identify drone Tree Bees easily because they have the white tipped abdomens.

Bee Craft published some information on Tree Bees which is available online here.

Simple Swarm Advice

Over in the beekeeping forums it appears bee have been busy swarming with some bait hives being found full and beekeepers collecting so many swarms they're running out of spare kit to keep them in. Last week some friends over in Newbald got out their empty Warré hive just in case they were lucky enough to catch a swarm, to their surprise a swarm moved straight in, now they're building a second hive.

There's even been a couple of swarms reported in media. Over in Beverley a swarm stopped on an open window above the Market place which the Hull Daily Mail reported on. Bizarrely the reporter claims she was stung just below the eye, gotta wonder how that happened. The Metro reported a lady being 'attacked by' a swarm of 5000 bees outside TopShop although 'attacked by' may actually mean 'walked through', I suspect if 5000 adult bees ever do attack you you're going to hospital and the story doesn't actually mention anyone being stung -but hey if that sells a newspaper go ahead and print it...

It seems many bee colonies managed to continue rearing brood across the mild Winter, add this to the Spring build up and you've got some pretty full colonies out there, although 2 of my colonies seem to have missed that particular memo, as a result there's a lot of swarming going on out there. If you do encounter a swarm the most important thing to remember is, in the word's of that famous Hitchhiker's Guide: Don't panic.

Contrary to certain newspaper headlines swarming bees don't 'attack' people, after all they have no home or brood to defend, they're also probably carrying a lot of honey which many believe impairs their ability to sting. However if you start screaming, flapping and running around they're likely to make an exception for you. The best plan is to stay calm and walk away.

When bees gather on a tree branch or wall it's just a temporary stopping point for the swarm whilst scouts seek out a new home. When the scouts return the bees should decide where they're headed and fly away.

You can call your local Council to deal with a swarm of bees, they'll usually have connections to beekeepers who'll to come and collect them if they're accessible or you can even call a beekeeper or local association yourself and find someone willing to take away those bees for you -after all they're worth a bit of money.
Before calling a beekeeper to remove a swarm or colony of bees make sure they are actually honey bees first. We don't remove bumble bees, wasps, hornets, flies, ants or inlaws. 

Beverley Beekeepers' Association have a chart to help you figure out if the insects your looking at are actually honey bees or not. You can find that here.

Ender's Entomology Fail

I recently watched the Ender's Game, the Hollywood adaptation of the hugely acclaimed novel by Orson Scott Card. The movie, quite a departure from the book, reminded me of 80's anime series Gunbuster (released about 3 years after Card's novel) and the visuals made me think of Dead Space, whilst the aliens seem to have been borrowed from the Babylon 5. Why in a blog about beekeeping I'm talking about a sci-fi film. Well, [spoiler alert] central to the movie is that the aliens are very much like ants and so Earth's entire strategy is based upon the protagonists' understanding of ants.

Ants like bees are part of the order of Hymenoptera. Hymenoptera are basically four winged insects whose fore and aft wings are connected by hooks. The order includes a huge number of insects but ants, bees and wasps have their very own suborder called Apocrita, it has to do with their tiny waists. In common with a lot of bees, ants are social insects, they live in colonies, have queens, drones and sexually immature female workers.

In Card's novel he mentions the aliens have a similarity to bees and ants. In the movie the script writers felt a need to go beyond that and have the relationship between Queen ants and the rest of the colony explained clearly and slowly for the viewer. It's very important the viewer understands this because, as I mentioned, Earth bases it's whole survival strategy on it and for reasons I didn't quite follow they only had one shot at doing their thing. Unfortunately Hollywood then undermines the whole film by getting all it's ant facts completely wrong..

Dynamite fact checking Hollywood.

Mazer, the unconvincing Maori, has our protagonist Ender slowly explain, for the benefit of the audience, that the Queen ant "directs the worker ants." This isn't true. The Queen lays eggs and that's about all, the workers feed her and attend her needs but she doesn't actually direct them. In fact it's more likely to be the other way round. In honey bee colonies it's been observed that workers exert some level of control over the Queen by altering her food intake if they want to slim her down to swarm and dictating what kind of eggs she'll lay through cell construction.

Ender then goes on to tell us "What she thinks they do." No. Ants haven't somehow evolved telepathy, and as I've mentioned she doesn't control the colony anyway. Bearing in mind Queen ants have a very limited sphere of experience if the colony was dependent upon her directing it they would be unable to forage, defend the colony or do any of the other fairly surprising things ants get up to,

In case the viewer still hasn't grasped what some script writer too lazy to spend ten minutes with Wikipedia is trying to get across we then get told "Without her they can't think for themselves." Not true, foraging ants can travel a couple of hundred metres from their nest, encountering and responding to situations a Queen would have no experience of or ability to cope with..
 
And finally we're misinformed if she dies "they die." Wrong again Ender! What actually happens is, just like honey bees, if a Queen is lost the workers will select an egg or grub and raise a new Queen. If there's no viable eggs or grubs then some workers will sexually mature and start laying male eggs to continue the colony's genetic lineage. Oh and just to fully undermine the whole plan many ant colonies have multiple queens anyway which should render the whole exercise of killing the Queen pointless.

So there you have it, a $110,000,000 movie with it's plot resting on some incorrect information a few minutes with a book (or Google) could have cleared up. Despite being a box office failure it's actually a fairly entertaining flick, just better if you ignore the dialogue though.