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

Unwelcome Visitors

Last week whilst inspecting Hive2 I got to the final frame and noticed some cobweb in one corner. I assumed this meant wax moth larvae. Not the best thing to find in a hive but it can happen from time to time.

It wasn't wax moth. Turning the frame round to examine the far side I loosed a loud expletive as I was unpleasantly surprised to find a huge spider a few inches from my hand. It wasn't one of those inoffensive raisins on skinny leg type spiders we see so much of, this was a fat legged, silvery grey refugee from Middlearth. Luckily she was busy with a worker bee. Her web making skills weren't up to much but there was another cocooned bee and an egg sac in there too. I'm certainly not arachnophobic but it's fair to say I'm not hugely keen on finding large unexpected spiders near to my fingers -the latex gloves I was wearing suddenly felt far too thin.

Initially I decided to try and take a photograph but quickly changed my mind. Like I said she was pretty big and I thought she might nick my camera. I also didn't want her to run onto me or to escape near the hives to spend the rest of the year chewing on my workers. Holding the frame at arms length I rushed over to the patio and with one welly booted foot kicked her off and stamped on her. To any onlookers I imagine it was just like that bit in The Lord of the Rings where Samwise Gamgee defeated Shelob.With a hivetool I removed the mess of webbing and as I didn't want a tribe of spiderlings feasting on my bees I lit the blowtorch and took take care of the egg sac.

After a lot of Googling I think what I'd found was a particularly large female Mouse Spider. They're called Mouse Spiders because their grey velvety fur looks a little like that of a mouse, well a little like a mouse if you overlook the fact it's got no tail, 8 legs, 8 eyes, fangs, mandibles and makes webs. They're one of the few venomous spiders in the UK that can bite humans and as English arachnids go I gather they're rather aggressive. Hope not to encounter any more of them this year.

With that unpleasant little experience in the past I found another visitor to the hives this week. Inspecting Hive1 I'd removed the Demaree and the Super and had just moved two frames onto a perch to give me room to work in the hive when a black hairy shape poked up between the dummy board and the hive wall. I stopped work to see what happened next and up popped a very large bumble bee being harried by a few workers. Going by the colouring and the size I'm pretty sure it was a Tree Bumble Bee (Bombus Hypnorum) Queen.

Whilst the Bumble Bee is far bigger than the Honey Bees it was hugely out numbered. She was actually far too big to fit in the bee space between the frames and at one point tried to go back into the larger gap between the dummy board and hive wall. The workers clung to her and I think were probably biting her, don't think any actually managed to sting her - perhaps she was too heavily armoured for them. In the end the she managed to fly away.

Tree Bumblebee Queen vs. Honeybee Workers

I'd expected the honey bees to be a bit more proactive on the home defence front with alarm pheromones triggering lots aggro and the mature bees going onto a war footing but that wasn't the case at all, they were no more feisty for the rest of the hive inspection than any other time.

Wasps At Last

It's been a difficult year for bees, as but they're not alone in that, it's also been a tricky one for wasps. The wet summer has made things difficult for Queen wasps to establish new nests, assuming they'ed survived hibernation and the aphid populations they prey on are down too. Up until today I'd only seen one wasp in my garden all year. Today marked their arrival at the hives. There was nothing like the numbers from last years population boom but there were a few buzzing around. After a little look at an online wasp identification guide I'm pretty sure they were Common Wasps or Vespula Vulgaris if you're feeling pedantic.

Common Wasp with a dead bee

I doubt numbers will be getting high enough for me to have to put traps out but we'll see how it goes. The ones I saw today were content to pick up dead bees from the ground. They have no use for some parts of the bee such as the head, legs and and wings. I filmed one butchering a dead bee.

Whilst my the camera phone work is a little shaky  you can see at the start it removes the bee's head, next it chews off a wing. After rolling over the bark chipping you can see it making short work of a couple of legs. After this it evidently decided it didn't like being watched and took the bee behind a blade of grass and a bark chipping to finish work in a little privacy before flying off taking the thorax and the abdomen.

I think it's fair to say as a society we're a little prone to over reaction when it comes to wasps. The usual reaction upon seeing a wasp is flap about or try to kill it, both of which bump up your chances of being stung. However as you can see I was holding a camera phone about 4 inches from this one whilst a couple more buzzed about out of shot and I didn't get stung, bitten, murdered or otherwise molested by any of them.

They aren't my bees mister.

Yesterday I mowed the lawn, it'd got pretty long partially because I'd not been able to cut it due to rain and partly because well I have more interesting things to do... Anyway as I pondered the wisdom of enjoying the sun with my top off whilst I pushed a loud whirring device around the lawn watching bees issuing from and returning to the hives in the corner I noticed some bees taking an interest in the ground. I looked a little closer wondering what they were doing and as I admired the bright orange fur covering their bodies it occured to me that my bees don't actually have bright orange fur. They weren't my bees. They weren't even honey bees.

Common Carder Bees, I think.

After a little Googling I identified them as Common Carder Bees, or Bombus Pascuorum if you're not much fun at parties. It's a type of Bumble Bee which can nest above or below ground. The patch of ground they've chosen is where I moved a shrub from a few weeks ago so it's probably fairly soft. They seem to have two entrances one of which goes underneath the paving slab my nucleus hive is standing on, so it could even be two seperate colonies I suppose. Apparently they're really common (hence the name d'oh!), although I've never noticed orange bees before. According to wikipedia their colonies can reach populations of up to 150 individual bees. They seem incredibly placid and didn't mind me crouching by their nest entrances holding a cameraphone a few cm from them.

Their nest entrace is less than a foot below the entrance to the nucleus hive, I have no idea if they'll interact with my honey bees but I haven't seen any fighting yet. Whilst in recent years the media has highlighted the decline in honey bee populations there's about 250 species of bee in the UK and they're all under pressure at the moment so I'm going to be carefull not to disturb them and will see how they fare. They seem very placid I very much doubt they'll be robbing my hives but even if they did at full strength the Carder's will by outnumbered about a thousand to one by the honey bees.

Weather and Warnings of Starvation

I got an email from the National Bee Unit at The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs today. They maintain a great big database of beekeepers and apiary locations so they can keep bee keepers updated with warnings and info as and when they need to. Last year they sent one advising wasps were having a population boom so predation on honey bees was a concern. Today they were advising that due to the recent poor weather there's a chance of bees starving so to check their food and  feed them up.

Rain and cold weather stops bees flying -no flying equals no foraging and no foraging, as any hunter gatherer will tell you, means no food on the mud hut table. There's were some days of glorious sunshine recently when the bees made the most of the time window they have to gather food, however with this fairly freaky random weather there hasn't been a huge amount of food for them to collect anyway. Something I've noticed with this rapidly changing weather is that bees can read the weather better than me.

The above footage was shot after work on 20th April, 2012, I'd got home, it was nice bright and sunny. You can hear how busy the bees are but you can't really make out how many of them there were in the air at the time -but believe me there was a lot! After briefly filming the bees going crazy I decided to take advantage of the good weather and knock up some dummy boards I needed -basically a false frame for the hive that fills up space instead of leaving a gap the bees will have to heat or might build brace comb in. I brought out the wood, a saw, right angle measuring thing whose name I still don't know -I should google it sometime really but I'm still thinking it's probably called a t-square, a pinpush, a few boxes of nails, a craft knife, two hammers and a tape measure. Whilst I was doing this the activity around the hive ground to a complete halt. I thought nothing of it selected Winter Hill by Miss Derringer on my phone and started work. Then it began to rain. It seems the bees had been able to tell it was going to start raining and got under cover about five minutes before it began.

So yes, unpredictable weather and a message from DeFRA warning of starving colonies because of it. When I last checked the hives I was able to see a lot of capped brood in both, this mean that new bees would be hatching out within 2 weeks at most. New bees means a bigger workforce but it also means more mouths to feed and it takes a while for the young bees to graduate to foraging so this meant a greater demand on whatever stores the colonies already had. Well I know Hive2 has loads of stores as I've been feeding them up to build numbers for the nuc but I haven't been feeding Hive1, in fact when the weather was looking particularly good I'd somewhat optimistically plopped a super on top of it. A quick look in the super this afternoon showed not much of the foundation in in it had been drawn out and there were no stores in it at all. There were also quite a few bees wandering about in the super which could well've been a sign that they were low on food. :( Luckily I had 2 litres of spare sugar syrup sat in the fridge, I just needed to remove the Super first.

I whipped out the Queen Excluder, dropped one of the rhombus escape clearer boards I'd made last year and waited an hour for most of the bees to scoot through it. When I went back the bees had gone through the clearer so I removed the super and the clearer, replaced the crownboard stuck a contact feeder full of syrup over the central hole and an empty super on top of that then added the roof and green roof boxes on top.

In other completely unrelated news I've just noticed Blogger has a built in spellchecker. Think I'll be making use of that..

Spring Forward

Spring is here! We've had a few days warm weather over here. The frogs have started hopping towards the ponds for their annual swinger pool party and the bees are flying again! This is quite a relief as it means my bees are still alive and, possibly more importantly, it gives me something to write about.

There's been a few dead bees appearing on the landing boards where the winter survivors have hauled out the dead and I've seen a few undertaker bees flying off carrying dead bees away for disposal away from the hive. They look quite dramatic flying towards you with a cargo the same size as themselves, you'll just have to trust me on that though because I couldn't photograph any with my phone's camera not being up to the job and the chance of one flying by as I'm waiting would be pretty slim too.

They're also going for cleansing flights. A 'cleansing flight' really means going for a fly and having a dump away from the hive. Bee crap is yellow and has, believe it or not, been mistaken for chemical and biological weapons and fallout from power stations. Haven't seen much of it myself tho so it's probably falling on the garden and winding up in the soil -that or it's falling on someone elses property. :-/ Apart from causing the odd political furore and leaving yellow dots on cars it's not a problem. If there's a lot of it on the hive landing boards it could be an indicator that the bees are ill but no suggestion of that at the moment.

As well as slinging the dead and crapping who knows where the bees have also started foraging. A while ago I planted a small prune tree in the garden, it's a strange little tree having shown no inclination to actually grow since it was planted but it does seem to be permanently flowering. It's just a few metres from the hives and I thought the bees would be hitting it's pink blossoms for nectar and pollen, but evidently I don't think like a bee because they're ignoring it completely and bringing back an orangey yellow pollen instead. I don't know wher they get it or what plant its from, maybe early daffodils -your guess is as good as mine, but the important thing is they are actually bringing in pollen which is their protein source. I assume they're bringing nectar back too but both hives also still have some fondant above the crownboards. There's stil some freezing nights at the moment so I'll leave it in place for now and remove it when those are behind us.

Here's a short phone video of the entrance to Hive2. It shows the bees coming and going through the holes in the mouse guard. Right at the beginning you can see a bee with full pollen baskets run straight into the hive.

Found the Queen of Hive2

Another week another hive inspection. All seems to be going well in both. Lots of eggs and brood and they're still bringing in nectar and pollen. In the shallow supers comb is being drawn but they've started to store in them already. The National Deep I added as a super whilst I phased out the National deep frames in Hive1 seems to be full now so it'll be time to extract soon -built myself a honey extractor, I'll say a bit more about that in a later post when it's time to use it. This week I spotted the queen in Hive2, she's a fat little thing and quite camera shy so it's a bit blurred.

Queen on frame of honey

I've finished sterilising the crownboards from the auction, also treated the outside edges with Shed & Fence paint. One of them needed escape holes cuting into it and another needed one adding and one widening so I got to have a play with the power saw. I've also sterilised the supers and begun painting them green too -taking a few coats to cover the brick red they're already painted and really it's just an aesthetic thing anyway. Two had plastic runners and one had metal ones, I've removed them and will be replacing them when I need to use them -although I plan to use two as ekes for feeders so shan't be needing to do that for a while.To sterilise the nails that I pulled out with the runners I dropped them on a piece of wood and got the blowtorch to them till they were red hot, I'm fairly confident that'll do the trick. Haven't made a start on the frames yet so got them tied up in bin bags at the moment. I'll probably deal with them in the winter when they're less likely to draw attention from the bees. The frame scraper and caping fork I acquired were treated to and hour of being boiled in a soda crystal solution whilst I watched an episode of Dexter and drank a Latte (hard work this bee keeping malarky) and came out gleaming -I'm going to varnish the scraper's wooden handle at some point to make it easier to keep clean. Meanwhile for your delectation here's 30 seconds of bees flying in and out of the hives:

Exciting isnt it? :p The nearest is Hive1 which has a huge population, Hive2 is less populous but the entrance looks almost as busy.  It was an overcast day of drizzle so there was less bee activity than I see on sunnier days.

I've spotted a few undertaker bees carrying dead bees for disposal away from the hives. Watched one on Saturday leave the hive I was inspecting and fly around the garden in clockwise circles which got wider and wider till it left the garden. No idea what that was about but I'd guess it was looking for a site to drop it's dead sister. Last week I watched another undertaker despoit a dead bee in one of the wildlife ponds. There's probably something in there that'll eat it.