Feeding Bees and Social Media

The other day I spotted a Facebook post from someone recommending putting out sugar water to feed bees. I've seen a few of these posts and invariably the social media using public think it's great and a few thousand people endorse the post and a few thousand then repost it further spreading the message. Unfortunately what seems an obvious way to help can actually be damaging to bee populations. I was at work at the time but quickly threw together a quick post advising people that open feeding spreads bee diseases and advising against putting out sugar water for bees.

The post got a surprising response and a lot of questions, more than I have time to answer on Facebook, so in this post I'll endeavour to answer a few and provide pointers to peer reviewed information sources.

What's the problem!?
The problem similar to the well documented role bird feeders play in the spread of disease amongst wild birds, open feeding brings bees together to feed and pathogens can easily be spread between them. Whilst it's not unusual for a bumblebee or honey bee colony to have some base level of viral, disease, and parasitic load which they're able to cope with. However current agricultural practices disease levels are being increased through Bumblebees imported for pollination. It's also been documented that there's been a rise in hobbyist beekeepers who lack the skill or ability to manage colonies and their contribution to increased hive mortality. With increased risks from escaped imported bumblebees with high viral loads or Honey Bees from sick, weak or otherwise compromised colonies it's easy for an open feeder to quickly become a reservoir for pathogens which healthy bees can then pickup from either the feeder or other bees using it.

Different bee species have their own parasites and diseases. As well as the various parasites for example Honey Bees have the devastating Varroa Destructor Mite and Varrooa Jacobsoni Mite, Osmia have pollen mites, Bumblebees have a huge range of mites and internal parasites they also have their own diseases. A few years ago it's was discovered that Honey Bee diseases have actually spread to Bumblebees.Many of these diseases can't be treated, some are so dangerous that to control their spread whole Honey Bee hives need to be killed and burned - although Honey Bees have the help of someone hopefully monitoring their health, nobody reading this is monitoring disease load in wild Bumblebees or Solitary Bees.

Bumblebee being busy

Doesn't the same thing happen with flowers?
A single flowerhead produces a miniscule amount of nectar hence bees having to visit so many of them. Compared to a flower a single feeder with a small amount of sugar water in it receives a massive amount of pollinator traffic. To give you some idea here's the figures:
A Canadian study identified that a Dandelion flower holds 7·4 µl (microlitres) of nectar.
A study in the Journal of Apicultural Science found Royal Crown Lavender (Lavendula Dentata) flowers hold an average of 0.68 µL of nectar.
A Sainsbury's plastic milk bottle top hold 11ml of fluid that's 11,000µL.

One milk bottle top, equivalent to 1486 Dandelion or over 16,000 Lavender flowers

So one milk bottle top feeder holds the equivalent of just over 1486 Dandelion flowers or over a staggering 16,000 Royal Crown Lavender flowers. All that in just a small area a few cm across. You probably don't have a degree in Botany but you can probably visualise roughly how big an area would be required to hold that many Dandelion or Lavender flowers. Bees foraging in such an area will make occasional contact with each other and may even pass on a pathogen or two, however if you then focus all those bees on a small area a few centimetres across the unnaturally high concentration of bees coming and going and making contact with each other and it's  inevitable that pathogens are going to be rapidly spread amongst them.

A good analogy for comparing a bee collecting nectar from a flower vs. syrup from a feeder would be to compare it to the difference between letting a friend try your drink on a night out versus you both gulping like crazy from a wheely bin full of something everyone else in the city has been putting their mouths to.

What about bees sharing a water source?
Honey bees gather water and providing a water source is an excellent way to help them. However Bees gather far less water than nectar so again a water source will also see far less traffic than a bee feeder with sugar water.. For example recently watching a pond next to a roughly 100,000 strong honey bee hive there there were only twenty bees actively gathering water. An open feeder with syrup in the same location would have drawn a few thousand bees from the same hive.

A Wildlife Pond located a few feet from a couple of busy hives

There's too much conflicting information!Yes there is.. There's a plethora of bad information about bees all over the Internet from the misinformed, mistaken and even inept, it doesn't only come from random Facebook posts either: the BBC has been known to put out some terrible advice about beekeeping. Regarding bee feeders some organisations that should know better (the RSPB for one) actually sell bee feeding stations, which gives the public a very misleading message. A good rule of thumb for anything posted on the Internet is to ignore it unless it can be proven to have come from a credible source, in the case of information about bees a competent beekeeper would be a credible source. Whilst other beekeepers have actually posted similar warnings and my post of the warning on Instagram was met with nods from beekeepers and insect breeders as far afield as Hawaii, Germany rather worryingly one beekeeper disagreed with the Facebook post giving her pal bad information which goes to show not every beekeeper is a good source of information.

It's only a little bit of syrup what harm can that do?
In case you skipped the boring numbers above one milk bottle lid is the equivalent of 1486 Dandelion or over 16,000 Lavender flowers. A milk bottle lid seems like nothing to us humans but to pollinators it's a huge food store.

But don't Beekeepers feed bees sugar water?
Yes indeed. However if used this is for a specific purpose and made in a specific concentration depending on the time of year and the weather. The purpose built feeder is placed inside the bee hive with an entrance accessible only to bees in that hive so bees from different colonies aren't feeding together. Weaker colonies will even have the hive entrances reduced in size to reduce the chance for other bees to rob them and make it easier for them to defend. Any information for Beekeepers about feeding bees be always includes an admonition against spilling syrup in the apiary.

Only the bees in the hive below this feeder can access the contents.
A Hive Roof will go above it too.

But I saw a video of a Beekeeper Open Feeding on YouTube
Open feeding seems pretty common in the USA, it's bad practice. Perhaps if they did less of it they wouldn't make so much prophylactic use of medications such a Terramycin which leaves England's Beekeepers scratching their heads. Here the Vetinary Medicines Directorate imposes four figure fines on anyone giving bees unlicensed unprescribed medicine.

What about reviving a tired bee with sugar water?
Giving a tired bee a little sugar water to revive it will is fine. If you're only feeding one bee she's not going to swapping pathogens with other bees. Just remember not to leave it out for other bees.

Inviting aggression
Another danger with open feeding Bees is your own safety. If Honey Bees encounter a readily available food source their behaviour changes and they go from foraging to robbing. After that first scout returns to the hive and tells her sisters about the free food robbing bees can arrive en masse and become aggressive and frantic as they try to take away as much food as they can before another colony does. Aside from fighting other bees there's also a pretty good chance you'll get stung if you're sat in your garden admiring the bee activity at your milk bottle top feeder.

Who forgot the flowers?
The other thing to remember is Bees are Pollinators. They pollinate plants whilst feeding. If instead of feeding from plants they're drinking sugar water from a plastic container that's a lot of plants not being pollinated and will led to a dearth of nectar the following year. Look again at the photo at the top of this page. There 5 milk bottle tops being used. With each holding 11ml of syrup each that's 55ml of syrup, the euivalent of almost 90,000 lavender flowers that aren't being pollinated by bees.

What about butterfly feeders?
In short: Dunno. Never used a Butterfly feeder, being a beekeeper and all. Presumably Butterflies face less imported exotic pathogens than bees as I doubt anyone's keen to import more caterpillars however I'd be concerned that a butterfly feeder baited with sugar water may be found by bees. Anyway if Butterflies are using a feeder they're not actually doing any pollinating.

So what can I do to help?
A lot of people genuinely want to help bees and there's a lot of ways to do this. The most obvious is to still to provide food, but not in the form of sugar water. Feed them the natural way, plant native flowering plants, and water them so they're able to provide nectar.

The natural way to feed Bees!

Housing is also useful. A bumblebee house can be very easily made from items probably already in the shed or garden. A solitary bee house takes up very little space and mounted high enough in full sun on a South facing wall can hold a few hundred Mason and Leafcutter Bee nests. You can even make your own with bamboo sticks or by drilling holes in wood A regular birdbox is perfect for Tree Bumblebees, just remember to position it so you're not bumping into the thing or walking through their flightpath.

A Mason Bee nest in the edge of a Honey Bee Hive.
The young Mason Bees will emerge from those cocoons next Spring.

Something particularly useful to Honey Bees is a Water Source. This can be as simple as a dustbin lid with water and some stones to land on. Birdbaths are also good for bees, typically having a wide edge to land on and whilst the water may look a little grotty after a couple of starlings have had a scrub the bees don't seem to mind. Near my hives I have wildlife ponds with plants and surfaces for bees to safely land on which is also great for biodiversity. One of the apiary ponds has newts and Damsel flies at the moment.

Honey Bee gathering water from a Wildlife Pond

This was just a quick whistle stop tour of some of the dangers of open feeding bees and things you can do instead. I've intentionally not gone into detail about bee diseases as there's a lot of information already out there and unless you're a beekeeper you're unlikely to deal with them and if you are you should already know. Hopefully it will spread a little awareness and the next time someone posts a photo of an open bee feeder people will ignore it rather than endorsing it and reposting it 30,000 times. The bees have enough problems at present so try not to add to them.

Short Lug Hive Tool

The beekeeper's Hive Tool has remained unchanged for about 100 years, might even be older. It looks very basic made from a flat piece of steel sharped at both ends with a 90 degree bend at one end and a small hole in it. Despite it's simple construction it's actually something of a Swiss army knife. The long flat part is used pry apart hive boxes the bees have propolised together, the angled part to pry frames apart, both ends have uses removing burr comb and propolis and the hole is for pulling out loose nails.

Hive Tool, it's seen a bit of use.

There's been a few innovations on the hive tool but the only enduring alternative seems be the J-Hook which is flat and has a J shaped arm used to lever frames upwards. Some beekeepers prefer one, some prefer the other. I occasionally use a J-Hook on some of my Nucs where there isn't much space to prise frames apart but other than that I use the regular hive tool. There's also hybrids which are standard hive tool with a J hook sticking out of one side.

J-Hook Hive Tool

To separate frames with a regular Hive Tool the flat right angled part is inserted between frame top bars and the tool twisted to push them apart breaking the propolis seal. It works well, the longer the tool the more leverage you have, if you use one in each hand you can work very quickly. However the tool works better for users of long lugged frames like the National as it can go between the lugs where there are no bees walking around. With short lugged frames like those in my Commercial brood boxes (or Langstroth, Dadant or Smith hives) the tool is inserted between the bars where the bees are. This means there's a risk of squashing a few bees. Whilst it's only a small risk chances are you're doing it on both sides of each frame that's 22 small risks per brood box. I take a little extra care to avoid squashing bees which slows down hive inspections a little, not a problem if you're dealing with one or two hives but ideally inspections should be fairly quick to reduce the impact of opening the hive and if there's a few to go through and the bees are bit edgy the time stacks up. Over the past few years I've given this a lot of thought whilst going through my brood boxes and I've finally got round to modifying a Hive Tool to better suit short lugged frames. I had a few different ideas including cutting out a part of the 90 degree blade or replacing that end entirely with two pieces of bent rebar but as I use that part of the tool a lot I soon ruled them out.

Modified Hive Tool for short lug frames

My modification is the simple addition of two round metal pegs on the back of the tool with rounded ends. I think it's fair to say when it comes to welding I'm a little bit rough. The sum of my welding knowledge comes when I went to pick up a SIP Weldmate 100 stick welder I bought on eBay from a chap in Skirlaugh and he gave me quick two minute tutorial to show me it was working.

Securing one peg with the grabby bit to weld on

I know welding clamps exist, but I don't have one so I used the grabby bit of the welder to hold the pegs in place as I worked. This went okay although one is noticeably a few degrees off of vertical but still works. I use a really cheap pair of welding goggles but had to change the lenses for darker ones as the arc was still too bright, unfortunately that meant until the arc was blazing away I couldn't actually see what I was doing so I reached a compromise using two different shade lenses, one for each eye and switch to the darker one once the arc is struck. It's not ideal and means I have no depth perception but I'm unlikely to do enough welding justify electric autodarkening goggles.

And the second peg

I just used General Purpose 3.2mm E6013 welding rods. Not sure what the voltage was set to but seems to have done the trick.

Two modified hive tools and my SIP Wedmate 100

It's not the most complicated modification. Basically I took a 5mm diameter metal rod, some sort of steel, cut off two 2.5cm pegs, welded them to the hive tool and used a Dremel to round off the cut end and tidy up the welding a little. I decided to go with 2.5cm pegs so that in use there's a space for bees between the flat of the tool and the frame top bars when it's being used.

Pair of modified tools, cleaned up a bit with a Dremel

I've been using these modified tools for a couple of months now and have been quite pleased with how well they work. My welds have held up so far too. The modification still leaves both blade parts of the tool intact which is fairly important as I use them regularly, but it does render the nail puller unusable. I'm not sure how useful the nail puller really is anyway as I've always preferred to use a claw hammer or purpose built nail puller with a claw anyway.

Here's the tool in action. I think it bothers less bees than pushing the regular tool edge between the bars and as the part making contact is rounded rather than a right angle edge it's probably a little easier on the woodwork.

The Short Lug Hive Tool in use.

It's a very easy modification for anyone with rudimentary welding ability and a very old stick welder but it'd be nice if someone starts selling hive tools like this. I think it probably has a potential market out there especially as a few outfits are currently pushing Langstroth hives in the UK. I wanted to call it the rather catchy Frame Seperator X2000 Mark 1 Two Peg Modified Super Lucky Hive Tool Deluxe but beekeeping tools tend to be named after what they do or who invented them so I'll go with the less imaginative but quicker to type the Short Lug Hive Tool which tells you what it is and what it's for.

Two Short Lug Hive Tools

Swarm Traps

After last Winter's surprisingly high losses my bee stocks are a bit low and demand seems to be pushing up the cost of new colonies. Normally I'd be looking at splitting existing colonies to make new ones but at present colonies aren't strong enough for that to be an option so I've decided to make some swarm traps to hopefully catch myself some passing swarms. Through a chance meeting I happen to know where there's  a chap who keeps bees and very unwisely does no swarm control at all so assuming he got some bees through the winter there's a likelihood of swarms from there at some point.

A swarm trap isn't really what it sounds like. It's not so much a trap as a rather nice house with the door left open. It's left out in the hope a passing swarm will spot it and move in. They can be as simple as a bucket or a cardboard container stuck up a tree, an unoccupied hive stuck on a shed roof, a purpose built wooden box and I've just seen a new one that looks like an empty kick bag too. I decided to build a couple of wooden boxes myself to place in trees.

I started roughing out some designs and measurements and designs. They're not the most complex things to build. You just need a box with a hole in it that you can open to remove the bees from. I decided to make mine to hold a few frames which should make bees easier to remove rather than having to deal with wild comb, it also means I can store frames in themm when they're not in use. Depending what you read bees will be seeking a 20-70 litre cavity. Some people use 5 frame National Nucs with success but that's probably on the small side. After some drawing and capacity calculations I decided to save a little time and money by making mine out of cut down brood boxes.

A couple of spare Brood Boxes about to be repurposed

First thing to do was use the trusty table saw to cut the boxes to size. To save time I used two of the existing corner joints already on each box. I cut two sides so that the finished boxes would be 30cm wide. Actually I cut one wrongly so had to do an extra cut and reattach a piece of wood to get one side the right length. Oops. The sides that would become the box fronts I removed some of the screws from the joints and cut them flush to the inside edge. The finger joints that got cut off I just glued them back in place. As swarm boxed they're not going to be weight bearing.

Precision wood butchery

I wanted to be able to put deep frames in and originally planned to use the existing rebate in the box sides to support them, however I decided the boxes would be stronger with an eke at the top to hold them together and increase the space inside for the bees.

Taking shape. The shape is an oblong.

A 1/2"  thick floor was screwed and glued underneath each cut down box and I made a little eke with rebates for the frames. The ekes were attached with nails in guide holes and more wood glue. They were then left for the glue to cure overnight.

Hook for hanging

The plan is to hang the traps from trees so borrowing an idea I saw on YouTube I added a vertical piece of wood with a large hole drilled near the top. My plan is to knock a big nail into a tree and use the hole in the plank as a hook. The vertical piece is going to be stuck between the box and a tree so I used tanalised wood to protect it from damp. It's on the outside of the box so the bees probably won't be making much contact with it. I gave the side that'll be against the box a coat of Shed & Fence paint before attaching it with more screws and glue - don't want the boxes dropping off afterall.

Usually bee hives are fee standing and the roof is able to sit on top, with sides reaching down around the box below, however as these are going to be hung in trees I couldn't do that. I opted to use a hinged roof attaching the hinge to the vertical support. The roof is just cut from some thick plywood.

Toby the Cat handling Quality Control
-yes, he's pretty clueless

I attached a batton to each of the short sides so I had some way to carry the boxes. I do the same thing with brood boxes. The whole lot got an uneven coat of  badly mixed bklack and brown Shed & Fence paint then I cut entrances with a wide drill bit. I actually drilled straight through a screw making one of the entrances which ended the working life of the drill bit which was a bit unfortunate but did give a natural non uniform looking hole.

One door opens..

Once occupied I'll need to move these boxes to get the bees into a hive so the entrances needed some sort of closing mechanism. I opted for a simple rotating door. As a hinge I took a regular wood screw and filed down part of the thread near the top. This went through a hole in the door with a washer between the rotating door and the screw top.

Entrance, Door and Doorstop.

I also added a door stop to reduce the chance of accidentally knocking the door open whilst moving the traps with bees in them. To keep the lids closed I attached a couple of brass plated hooks attached to screw eyes and drilled holes in the battens for the hooks to go into which will secure the roof closed.

Bitumen Paint and closures

I'd already given the roofs a lick of Shed & Fence paint where they don't make contact with the bees but decided to finish the roofs with some flash tape so I could form some sort of drip edge to guide rain away from the boxes. It's a lot more expensive than roof felt but easier to apply and more robust.The tape comes with some water based bitumen paint to prime the surface before applying the tape. I painted both roofs black and went inside to do something more interesting than watch paint dry. A few hours later I went outside and found it'd rained so reapplied the bitumen.

Pretty sure this will be the weakest point.

I think the hinge is the area most likely to suffer rain damage so I painted over the moving part and the side on the roof I also painted with bitumen then flash taped over. The vertical part is going into treated wood so should be okay but when I take them down at the end of the season I might give them a squirt of polyurethane varnish or something for extra protection. I applied the flash tape so it always overlapped and made drip edges by simply folding the tape back onto itself and then back to the underside of the roof. The roofs are larger than the boxes themselves with an obverhang on three sides.

Labelled so mice and birds don't mistake them for birdboxes

A few seconds scrawling on the front with a huge sharpie had the boxes labelled, just in case anyone gets curious and finds them occupied before I do. Each box holds 7 Deep Commercial Frames with a little more space at the bottom than a regular broodbox on a hive floor due to the eke on top. I think they've got a capacity of about 25 litres each. Believe it or not when looking for a new home scout bees measure the capacity of the cavities they find.

I loaded each box with a couple of old frames of dark comb, bees seem to like moldy old comb. Strange. I also gave each a couple of frames of undrawn fresh comb to give any swarms moving in something to do and filled the rest with empty frames. I also added some swarm bait and a little slumgum.

Big nail, that'll do it.

The swarm traps completed the next thing was to put them up trees. I found a couple trees in the area I was thinking of and put a nail in each high enough to keep the boxes just above head height. One tree I was able to climb a few feet, the other I just had to reach up and try not to hammer my thumb. As the holes in the traps wooden supports were fairly large it was easy enough to get them on the nails without being able to see what I was doing.

Once hanging from the nails the traps needed securing so they didn't rock or get blown off. One I stabilised by wrapping with a bungee chord, the other wasn't level so I wedged a piece of wood behind it and wrapped a ratchet strap around the whole thing to hold it still.

Half a brood box stuck up a tree.
Bees won't find that suspicious at all.

I've not tried this approach before and my placement of the traps is based more on them being out of the way of people and for myself to be able to remove them easily rather than the best position to attract bees but I'm going to see how it goes. I've also filled an empty hive with frames and a swarm lure at the apiary too so now I'll just cross my fingers and wait.

The second trap, also up a tree.

2018 Beverley Beekeepers Auction

Conflicting with Whitby Goth Weekend this year was Beverley Beekeepers' Annual Auction. No doubt this caused sleepless nights for many beekeepers in the East Riding as they deliberated whether to dust off the New Rocks and head for the coast or empty the back of the estate and head to Woodmansey in search of bees and woodware.

Jars, buckets, woodware, shiny things, fondant..

The Auction started at 11am on the Sunday morning, I rocked up at half past. The hall was noticeably fuller than previous years. As expected alongside the usual hives and Supers there was a huge range of equipment on offer, ranging from buckets of formic acid pads and sugar to microscopes and a cuddly toy.

Bucket of 10 Formic Acid Pads, went for a pound

Hard to imagine an apiary without one of these

Actually the bucket of Formic Acid went for £1, the cuddly Winnie the Pooh dressed as a bee and accompanied with a few large flowers went for £6. The acid is for treating Varroa, the Pooh bee and flowers are props for educating children about pollinators. I'm not sure what the Brunel SP20 Microscope went for but there was also a binocular microscope amongst the lots too.

Beekeeping isn't all banging nails and burning stuff

As usual there were a few shiny motorised extractors standing out against the boxes and wood. I bid on a couple of those but was unsuccessful so if I get a honey crop this year I'll be extracting with my trusty two frame manual extractor.

Motorised Extractor, it's gone to a new home.

One thing that caught my eye was the Honey Twin-Spin. A two frame electric extractor which appears to have been designed by some guy was hugely into fifties sci-fi and probably saw flying saucers in his sleep. It's a two frame radial extractor but unlike every other extractor I've ever seen holds the frames almost horizontal. It's made by Brinsea Products who are still around but nowadays focus on poultry rearing.A quick Google finds the extractor  mentioned in an old Kent Beekeepers Association Newsletter. The writer comments on how efficiently it extracted as well as being particularly easy to clean too. It didn't generate much interest and there was only myself and another chap bidding on it, he got it for £16. It's an odd looking and bulky thing but £16 for a motorised extractor is quite a steal.

Flash Gordon's Honey Extractor

In previous years there's usually been a lot of Nucs on sale, probably because most beekeepers get free ones with their first colonies and later it's probably one of the first things they build for themselves. I've made four myself, and still have a couple of others knocking about. This year the Nuc contingent was limited to a group of five brightly coloured wooden Nucs and a couple of Poly Nucs with built in feeders. Perhaps people are keeping their spare Nucs for making splits later in the year.

How come that bear is in so many photos? :-o

A couple of Poly Nucs

Of course the main draw was the bees. Winter losses over 2017/2018 have been seriously high across the UK, Europe, USA and Canada, figures I've heard bandied about have been up to 90% for some. This means there's going to be a lot of beekeepers looking to replace stocks and conversely far less bees available for sale.

Bees for sale

There were 12 colonies for sale this year. 8 of them were 5 frame Poly Nucs with July 2017 Queens ready to be hived.They went for £240-250 each. From the descriptions I think these nucs actually contained bigger colonies than my surviving hives at the moment. I've long since realised that trying to predict bidding is impossible so I wasn't hugely surprised when two full sized colonies in National Brood boxes complete with floor and roofs containing 6 and 7 frames of brood respectively went for £230 and £240 each. That's less than the smaller colonies in the Nucs and basically includes a usable hive. A Poly National hive with 6 frames of brood and four spare empty Supers also went for £240 and the last colony another Poly National but with a half filled Super and 3 spare empty Supers went for £250. The last colony I bought at a previous auction was £150 and one year in York I saw 2 Nucs going for £50 each, the prices this year probably reflected just how heavy the recent Winter losses have been.

These bees couldn't wait to get to work

It was really cold outside but a lot of people braved it for the bee sales. Before proceedings went back inside a gazebo and a 6x4' trailer also went under the hammer. Whilst probably not the first thing most people think of a Gazebo would've been really useful for me over Winter when I was working on hive floors in the snow. I've also had the weather change after painting hive parts and hd rain completely wash off the wet paint in the past.

The right place for a gazebo or trailer

Back in the warmth the hall was noticeably emptier. Probably as a lot of people had come specifically to buy bees -have I mentioned those Winter losses?.. I guess a few will also be going to the York Beekeepers' Association Auction on May 12th. After the bees have sold and the crowd has thinned a little is a good time for bagging a few bargains. A few people got honey buckets with lids at four for a pound, mesh floors went for a pound each too. I picked up a solid wooden floor for £7, that'll be going under a spare hive at the apiary in case a passing swarm feels like moving in. They're also handy to have around when you're moving full Supers and extracting.

Perfect for Asda

There's usually something unusual at these auctions and this time the oddest thing was probably a wooden box on wheels. Inside it on one side there were a couple of net curtain wires attached to the frame to hold things in place. The were also six swarm boxes on offer but they didn't meet their reserve.The swarm boxes are lightweight boxes the size of a 5 frame nuc with straps, a close fitting sliding lid and mesh areas for ventilation. When you're moving bees it's important to keep them cool. Being based in a city I've not had to travel far to collect a swarm yet so I just bring a Nuc when I go to collect them. If I was travelling further I'd probably think about one of these ventilated boxes.

Ratchet Straps, Uncapping Tray and Fondation

As the Auction progressed I picked up a box of beekeeping books and a medium size bee suit for a fiver, quite a few people are interested in seeing my bees so I got that for visitors. There was some steelware in the form of a couple of uncapping trays, that always gets interest. A large honey warming cabinet went for £30, useful things, this one looked like it could take a couple of buckets at a time. At the moment I have some jars of liquid honey that's granulated so they'll need a spell in my warming cabinet before they sell.

Honey Warming Cabinet

Something which didn't sell but would save someone a lot of labour was a motorised Honey Creamer. From the outside it looked a lot like an extractor but inside instead of a cage for frames there was a little propeller near the tank floor. You load it up with liquid honey, add some existing creamed honey from th previous year, turn it on then go do something else whilst it mixes. At the moment I use a strirring device that attaches to a drill and cream the honey in 9 litre buckets. It's still fairly hard work and takes a long time mix it consistently.

Honey Creamer

Stainless Steel Settling Tank with Filters

The second to last lot was a heavy little stack of glass rectangles. It turned out they were glass quits, basically a glass Crown Board. Each was in two halves and each half made from two panes of glass joined together. They allow a beekeeper to see where the bees are in the hive without fully opening the colony. I'm not sure why these are in halves but it might be to do with weight and strength, it'll also mean not having to open up the full hive at once which should reduce flying bees. Nobody was interested in them although polycarbonate quilts had had some interest earlier in the day, so I them up for £2, making them £1 each. I'll see how they are to use -if I like them I may be popping up the road to Jack's Glass for some more. The last item was a very tall stainless steel Settling Tank with built in filters. I was interested in that but so was everybody else so it was soon bid out of my intended budget.

Section Racks

Towards the end I managed to pick up a pair of Section Racks with metal spacers. There was the usual boxes of jars and foundation. I didn't need any foundation this year having traded in a load of wax for foundation last year. I did pick up 72 1/2lb jars with lids for £12 and 72 1lb jars with lids for 17. Not the most interesting purchases of the year but jars are quite an overhead for beekeepers so any chance to save on them is welcome.

Solid hive floor and a little reading material

 When I got home with my little haul the first thing to do was scorch everything - well okay not the books, that'd've gone pretty badly, but the floor, section racks, their metal spacers and even the smoker, whilst it doesn't come into contact with bees it comes into contact with gloves that probably have.

Snelgrove Board, front and back views

I had bid on a couple of Snellgrove Boards but didn't win, however the chap from Green Man Honey who had won them was kind enough to sell me one after the auction. They're made from two thicknesses of ply with cutaways at the exits on one side, an unusual way to do it but will certainly make for a strong board. When I scorched it the glue holding the mesh liquefied so I scraped it off, burnt it off the mesh then stapled the mesh back in place.

This Smoker reminds me of The Klangers.

It was a fairly busy day, with three different auctioneers taking the gavel. The impact of the Winter losses on attendance was pretty obvious. As usual the auction is a handy place for beginners to quickly and cheaply stock up on kit. As well as the sales mentioned above National Hives assembled and painted, complete with two supers were going for £40-£50 each.