Wasps

Spotted some wasps flying near the hive today, and a dead one on the floor in front of  them. Wasps are happy to steal honey from a hive, being carnivorous they'll probably happily eat bees, steal eggs and larvae too. There's also some larger hornets will decimate a colony in next to no time but I don't think we have them in England yet thanks to our climate and the channel. Wasps are physically stronger than bees and in a one on one fight the smart money is on the wasp. However a healthy honey bee colony should be able to fight off a random wasp -albeit at the cost of a couple of bees, but enough wasps can overpower them and even kill off the whole colony. What beekeepers do to keep their bees safe from wasps is put out a wasp trap near the hive, although I've always wondered how many extra wasps are drawn toward the hive by the bait in the trap. There's other things you can do too like reduce the size of the hive entrance to make it easier for the bees to defend and not spill syrup and honey all over the place so the wasps aren't so attracted in the first place. I may put a small trap out there myself whilst hive2 is queenless but I'd rather not as wasps play their own part in our ecology. Whilst bees get their protein from pollen wasps get theirs from eating other insects and whatever bits of meat they can find. That makes them pretty useful around the garden as they eat the bugs that're dining on your plants, as well as pollinating them.

Vespula Vulgaris (I think)

Addendum (23/7/11) Turns out there's more wasps than usual this year to the point that the National Bee Unit (part of FERA) have published an advisory about wasps for beekeepers. coincidentally today after inspecting the hives I saw quite a few wasps and saw some attacking individual bees so I guess the common and german wasp does kill adult bees. I stood and watched for a while, killed six of them with a stick then made some small wasp traps.

The Bad Beekeeper's Club

For me mornings are that time of day when you either wake up late to a screaming alarm and have a mad rush to get to work more or less on time or, at the weekend, that time when you stumble home worse for wear after a heavy night out and crawl into bed. For other people the morning is, I'm told, time to watch some TV. Aside from not having time in the morning I don't own a TV anyway, it's the 21st Century, things have moved on since 1926 and I replaced it with an XBMC pc years ago. Anyway the upshot is that I don't watch breakfast television. If I did I might have had a clue who Bill Turnbull is. But I don't. So I didn't.

Turns out Bill Turnbull is or possibly was a breakfast television presenter. Yes, as if this blog wasn't already exciting enough I'm waffling on about a breakfast TV news reader. It turns out he's also a beekeeper. And it turns out he's written a book. About beekeeping. It's called "The Bad Beekeeper's Club" and it's rather good -except for the bit with Chris Tarrant in it, although as I recall from my television owning, TV License paying days bits of anything with Chris Tarrant in it tended to be a bit pap. Anyway the rest of the book is rather good. It's not another 'how to keep some bees' guide but an autobiographical piece about his beekeeping experiences. Basically it's exactly like this blog, only better written, more interesting and by a bloke who knows a lot more about bees than me.

A Right Riveting Read. Really.

Pleasure, pain, sweat, smoke, killlings, knife wielding bikers, dangerous dogs and amusing anecdotes it's all in there. Ok so it's no World War Z but it's still a good read, if you're interested in bees that is.

Waiting on a queen

Hive2 was queenless but had queen cells in it. On my next inspection I saw that two of these had hatched and the others looked like they had been torn down by the workers. I also think I saw a very small virgin queen on one frame so all looked to be going well on the road to a queenright hive.  However I still didn't see any eggs or uncapped brood. I checked the hive again a week later, still no eggs or brood. I did some searching online apparently it can take 30 days for the queen to get mated and start laying. I know there's drones about for her to mate with because I have the other hive with it's company drones and I happen to know there's someone else keeping bees a few streets away and two hives in a wildlife project on the edge of Pearson Park so I'm pretty sure she'll be able to mate if we get some good weather.

After 30 days there may be no young bees left in the hive to tend the brood -although to be fair that didn't seem to have been a problem when hive1 was queenless for so long before requeening. Anyway I decided to pull a frame with uncapped brood and eggs from hive1 and place it in hive2. I picked out a commercial frame covered in capped stores to give the bees in hive1 in exchange for their brood. Thinking about it later I realised this was a mistake. What I'd done was effectively increase the hive2 population whilst at the same time decreasing their food store. What I should've done was put a new commercial frame into hive1, remove one the emptier national frame from hive2 and put it in the national box currently supering hive1. I'll know for next time

Here's a picture of some bees by the way. They're on a piece of wood I used to cover the holes in the crownboard whilst not in use. I'm told that both my colonies are buckfast bees, however I've noticed some of them (one in top left and bottom middle) look a little dark to me so I may be wrong but I suspect their queen may have met a black bee drone or two on her mating flight.

Bees

Progress/Problem in Hive2

I was feeding both hives up untill I supered hive1 then I stopped feeding it a week later. I figured hive1 could use the feed to help them draw new comb on the frames I'd put in. However I continued feeding hive2 whilst they built up their numbers. And build up their numbers they did. One day whilst replacing the feeder (got stung in the face! Ouch! Mental note to self: wear veil when feeding bees.) I realised that there were rather a lot of bees in the roof space above the crownboard. They weren't doing much just hanging about. It wasn't a massive leap of logic to realise the Brood box was full to capacity so I figured I'd better super the hive asap.

Oh in hive2 the bees had drawn all their comb really fast and made drone comb under the shallow frame as I'd hoped -this was the first time I noticed how different the two colonies were as hive1 was really dragging it's heels on drawing comb.

Anyway I ordered a national shallow, with frames and foundation -yeah I decided to go with shallows for actual honey production. I'll swap out the national frames somehow at some point but I'll figure that out later. I waited. I waited. I waited some more. The super took over 2 whole weeks to arrive. When it did arrive I got home from work and knocked the box together in a hurry, in the pouring rain. Was in such a hurry I managed to get one of the side's outer pieces on upside down -D'oh! Hasn't affected it's functionality all tho really, it's still beetight and still holds the frames level with the right amount of room below. When the rain finally let up I started treating the wood with green shed and fence paint like the rest of the kit, I had to keep stopping as the rain kept restarting. Eventually I put some cardboard on the dining table and brought the thing inside to paint it there. I gave it one layer then gave it a few hours to dry. The rain had finally gave up as darkness fell so I brought the box out gave it a second coat and popped it in an outbuilding to dry overnight. Then with a chiminea to keep me warm I assembled the shallow frames and inserted foundation finishing at 11pm which meant I could super the hive in the morning. Great!

So that's what I did. Unfortunately when I opened the hive I was unable to spot the huge fat queen with her big blue splot at all, I was also unable to see any eggs or uncapped brood. What I did see were these:

Queen cells

Four queen cells. They were halfway up the frame. I also noticed that my brood box which had been overflowing into the roofspace was now looking a little more roomy. I could be wrong but I reckon the bees probably realised they were too crowded and booted out the queen along with a cast swarm. There was no uncapped brood or eggs but still lots of capped brood on the frames. If only that super had arrived a little quicker, but it can't be helped and the bees seem to be handling it anyway.

Water water everywhere

My garden contains two wildlife ponds. I made the first one to house frogs to control the slugs and snails and generally protect my plants. Why fight nature with pesticides when you can let nature do the job for you? I liked the first pond so much I made a second bigger one in the middle of the garden. They look nice and house a variety of plant and wildlife, this year I found young damsel flies drying their wings on the water soldier leaves.

Wildlife Pond2

There's also a small birdbath. It's about a foot across just over an inch deep and rather than the nice clean oxygenated water of the ponds tends to look a bit murky what with it being shallow, birds washing and crapping in it and the sun warming the water making it an excellent environment for all kinds of mould and grot, even the mosquito larvae in it look a little unhealthy as they fight to breathe through greasy matt meniscus. Anyway guess where the bees go to collect their water? The clear waters of the wildlife ponds or the murky shallows of the birdbath. Yep they choose the birdbath everytime.

Bee drinking the birds' bathwater

Progress in Hive1

Hive1 is now full of bees. I've still not seen that queen at all but eggs are being laid and new workers are hatching, I'm also not seeing any swarm cells or supercedure cells so I guess the bees must like her. Something I have noticed is that the bees in Hive1 are a bit slow to draw comb at the front of the hive, the shallow frame I put in nearest the entrance for sacrificial drone brood is untouched so far, although they have torn down a load of comb on one of the national frames and replaced that with drone comb. The bees are so populous in hive1 I decided to super it and take the chance of swapping out some of the original national framed and their adapters for commercial ones.

I ordered a National shallow to use as an eke for the feeder and built up some national deep frames to place in the national deep box along with the removed national deep frames. It all went fine, I pulled out two national frames removed the adapters and popped them in the middle of the deep box, put a queen excluder over the commercial brood box and the national deep over that. I figured the existing eggs and brood in the removed national frames would hatch and leave those frames whilst the bees below drew out the commercial frames below. It worked perfectly, not one swarm cell was made.

What I did find though was the plastic queen excluder was a total pain to use. The bees covered it in bright orange propolis, some bees got caught in the holes, others got caught in the propolis. Removing it took an age as I had to free it from the box and the frame tops it was also stuck to. I wound up ordering some framed wire excluders and shelving the plastic ones -maybe I'll lose them next auction I attend.

Some bees. Of course.

Green Hive Roof

A while ago I read something on the net about green roofs. I thought they were a pretty good idea, I'd also read that a beehive may need some insulation to keep the heat in over winter and in the summer the sun on the metal roof skin can make things pretty uncomfortable for the bees inside. So I figured why not put a green roof on the bee hive? It should provide insulation, it'll be more aestheticaly pleasing and it'll possibly reduce the amount of attention the hive draws from neighbours.

My first attempt at a green hive roof

Turns out nobody seems to sell them so I needed to do a little research then make one myself. I read all about the different layers used for drainage, growing medium and whatnot and thought it sounded a little complex. I figured with it being such a small area I could just ignore all that technical stuff anyway. So off I went and bought some exterior plywood for the bottom and some wood for the sides.Treated the sides to match the hive and made basically a box with the sides dropping an inch below the floor. This then sits on top of the hive's proper roof and won't slide off. Unfortunately it was too heavy so I cut out most of the floor leaving a frame in which I stuck two layers of correx.

I then lined it with pond liner underlay, pond liner and another layer of underlay and flilled it with mostly perlite, a little soil and some vermicompost. I'd read that sedums are the things for a low maintenance green roof so bought a few and some nice grassy looking stuff. Popped it all in the box and slapped it on the hive. It's all doing rather well. Mostly I let the rain water it but I've added a litre or two of tap water myself now and then to help it along. As you can see from the picture it's doing fine, and certainly looks nicer than the metal square with a brick on the top type roof common to many hives. When I want to work the hive I just lift it off and pop it on the floor then remove the regular roof which is still underneath, in the photo above you can see hive2 still has a bare metal skin.

It is a little on the heavy side in fact and I suspect the wooden sides won't last forever so my plan is eventually to make a new version using two halves, each being a watertight rectangluar box with a lip on three sides that completely cover the hive roof and clip together in the middle. I'm thinking of maybe using aluminium for this so it'll last longer and have thinner walls. That'll have to wait till I have some spare cash kicking around though.

I occassionally see bees investigating the sedum flowers on it, posibly even gathering pollen or nectar, and I think they may use it to identify their hive. At the moment the second hive has a large bonsai tree sitting on top of the roof, looks nice and holds the roof down but obviously doesn't insulate much.

Roof space