Hive Entrance Video

This image is best accompanied by Wagner's Flight of the Valkyries

I've recently discovered my phone can record video in slow motion, so one sunny day with not a ot to do in the apiary I decided to film bees coming and going from the hive entrance. It's quite and eye opener, mainly because they don't seem to be particularly good at flying.

Watching the video I was surprised how many returning bees bumped into the Brood Box as they missed the hive entrance. One bee crashes into it four time before finding her way in. There's ample room for them to land on the landing board and walk in but despite the risk of concussion most seem to prefer to fly straight in rather than land and walk.

At the hive entrance, slow motion

September insect activity

By now most beekeepers will probably have removed their Supers and be dusting off the honey extractors for this years crop by now but the weather seems to move a little slower over here in Hull. At present the hives are ..well.. hives of activity. One lunchtime last week filmed a few minutes of the activity  outside the hives, holding my phone near the entrance of Hive3

Activity at the Hive entrance on 5th September 2014

Looking back at my records I can see I took in the 2011 crop on 1st September and the the 2012 crop in late September. This year I'll be removing the Supers in late September again. It's not a particularly good crop to be honest. Hive3 with the two united swarms gathered plenty of honey in their brood box but refused to put any of it up into the super. I tried bruising the cappings of the ripe honey to encourage them and they did move the stuff but instead of moving it upwards they moved it sideways so it's actually still in the brood box. Contrary creatures. Hive1 and Hive2 have been using the supers but neither are looking particularly full either and I don't think that's likely to change before I remove them. I've really only left the super on Hive2 as it's housing so many workers at the moment.

I took my phone down to Pearson Park and the Wildlife Garden on Monday , the bees there were still busy too and like mine still have a super on their hive. As I had my phone in my pocket I took a few photos of pollinating insects at work in the park.

Honeybee on a yellow rose

Drone Fly (Eristalis tenax)

Honey Bee working flowers on a tall marginal plant

Bumble Bee in a flower

Different Dronefly (Eristalis sp.) on a Coreposis gigantea

In my garden I spotted a couple of Harlequin Ladybird Larvae, these things look like monsters from a bad sci-fi film. But what's unusual is according the UK Ladybird Survey they should've been at this stage in July and developed into Pupae in early August and into adult Ladybirds  by now.

Harlequin Ladybird Larvae.

Still on the predator front I noticed a lot of spiders on my plants at the moment too. One keeps making a web by the hives and catches the odd bee. I tend to brush that aside on a daily basis. I think they're mainly European Garden Spiders.

European Garden Spider

Actually a couple of weeks ago when Hive3 was being particularly boisterous, I'd walked to the other end of the garden and was brushing off angry bees off me I saw a spider looking like a disgusting dark grey gobstopper attached to my arm. Regular readers may have picked up that I'm not massively keep on the eight legged garden dwellers. I may have shouted a rather short word the neighbours probably didn't want their kids hearing as I batted it off. I suspect that it's round shape meant it was carrying eggs.

I also saw the very first wasp of the season buzzing round the hives. It didn't stay still long enough for a photograph though. I'll be expecting a few more to be appearing soon.

Last week on Newland Avenue I also spotted some sort of large wood boring wasp. It was over an inch long and looks pretty horrific -looked worse in flight- but that long pointy bit at the back looking a little like a needle is actually for making holes in wood where she'll lay her eggs and these things don't actually have a sting at all.

Wood Boring Wasp of some kind

Guards! Guards!

My garden is probably a fairly mouse friendly place (except for the cat) as I have two rather modest woodpiles in the rear corners which I added to give my frog populations somewhere to sleep and encourage other urban wildlife. The only thing that'd make my garden more friendly (except for removing the cat) would be to add a warm box of food for them to spend the winter in ..which is exactly what a beehive is. The well fed and slightly insulated hive has warmth and plenty food in the form of honey, bees and possibly wax, it's also fairly safe from predators (like the cat), and people are fairly unlikely to disturb the hive till Spring leaving the mouse to spend a happy winter on a high sugar diet.

How do mice get in? They just walk. If it's a cold night and the bees are all huddled up for warmth a mouse can just wander in unchallenged. You would expect a mouse in a hive to meet a fairly unpleasant death by multiple bee stings once the bees become a bit more active and start wondering who invited the furry thing that keeps peeing in the corner into their home, however, whilst I've never actually strapped a video camera to a mouse and encouraged it to enter a hive so I can see what happens, I'm told that once the mouse is in the hive the bees will ignore it completely.

So we want to keep the mice out of the hive. How do we do that? We add a metal mouseguard. A determined mouse can gnaw through a wooden entrance reducer so for this job we need something metal. As with everything else in beekeeping there's umpteen different kinds of mouseguards. What they have in common is that they should provide a metal barrier that the mice can't chew through and present some kind of access that allows the bees to go in and out but not the mice. Mice can squeeze though some fairly tight spaces dictated only by the size of their skulls. I decided to make my own mouseguards from wood and aluminium, they double as entrance reducers too so I put them in place when the wasps numbers rose in the hope that they'll make the hive entrances easier for the bees to defend.

Mouse Guards

The guards are just a wooden batton the size of the hive entrance with a piece cut out to allow bees to enter and exit. Over that I've put a piece of aluminium in which I've drilled holes through, I think I used an 8mm drill bit, should be enough to let even the drones leave the hive whilst not letting the mice in.

Bees using the MouseGuard

As you can see the bees are getting through the guards ok, there was a little confusion as they got used to the idea and it does slow them down a bit on a busy day -and given the bizzare bursts of warm weather we've been getting there have been some pretty busy days of late.

Just visible in the above image is the edge of the mesh that makes up the hive floor. Whilst it sounds a bit nuts to have an open mesh floor at the bottom of a hive over winter common consensus seems to be that the extra ventilation this provides is more useful than the extra insulation afforded by a solid wooden floor. Apparently what kills bees in the winter isn't cold but dampness and starvation. Whilst we feed them against starvation the ventilation of the open mesh floor should hopefully stave of the threat of damp.