Mead

Having harvested a modest 11kilo of honey this year I needed something to do with it. I don't eat that much of the stuff really, sometimes drop a spoonfull in a jasmine tea, use a little in cooking and have the occassional honey sandwich but I'm not really going to use 11 kilos of the stuff in a year. I had planned to flog some of it but instead I've given away about half of it and figure I'll leave that venture till next year. This year I decided to make mead.

Mead is basically a fermented drink made from honey. People seem to think of it as a honey wine and I'm happy to go along with that. If I'm in York I occassionally buy a bottle from the Jorvik Centre. Apparently mead was a popular drink amongst vikings as any viking metal fan will attest -just go to a rock night and look for someone hairy drinking lager from a plastic cows horn, he'll tell you. A quick look on Wikipedia tells me that mead production seems to go way back to 7000 BC China. I gather it was a popular drink in Olde Englande and if I was going to make up a plausible sounding theory as to why from the top of my head, based on no research at all, I'd assume that the climate here is better suited to farming honey more than vinyards.

I did a little research on the net (where else?) and looked at a few mead recipes. From this I cobbled together my own recipe based more or less on what was to hand. Here's my mead recipe for your delectation:

Mead Recipe
Ingredients:
Roughly 1360g of honey
4 pints of water (and then more later)
1/2 teaspoon of allspice
1 cup of strong black tea
One peeled and mashed up orange
Yeast

Method:
Boil up the 4 pints of water with the honey, throw in the allspice and mashed up orange. Make you cup of black tea -I used 3 bags in a coffee cup for this, no messing about there, pour it into the mix, boil it for ages -well one hour at  least. Pour it into a sterilised Demijon. Realised there's loads of space in the demijon so boil up some more water to top it up. Let it cool. Throw in the yeast. Pop on the airlock and sit back. When the bubble slow to one per second or less filter it into bottles, slap a cork in and leave it a few months before drinking.

Why tea? The tea is added as a source of tannins. Apparently the tannins are important for flavour, given that tea didn't reach England till around the 1650's I'd assume something else was used for that -or maybe olde meade in the UK never had tannins at all.

Equipment you'll need are a Demijohn, an airlock, wine bottle, corks, something to sterilise the demijohn and bottles, funnel, something to filter the mead, you'll also need yeast. I got all the wine making stuff from Wilkinsons in town. The airlock sounds a little scientific but it's just a plastic tube with a u-bend in it that you add some water to, this lets ait out as the yeast releases CO2 but doesn't let it back in. It's simple but works.

So with my recently sterilised glass and plastic ware I boiled up the ingredients and popped it into the demijohn. It took a very long time to cool and eventually I resorted to running cold water over the sides of the demijohn to take the heat away. This seemed to do the trick and I added the yeast. About ten minutes later I touched the demijohn and found it still seriously hot though so I figured my using water to draw heat off had only affected the outer mead and the glass rather than cooling the whole lot. I suspect the heat will have kiled most of the yeast so after letting it cool I added some more. At this point it was too late to pop out for brewing yeast but a biology teaching mate who used to make wine and mead herself told me yeast is all prettymuch the same so some baking yeast I'd had in a cupboard for years got dropped into the mix, actually the proper name for the mix seems to be 'must' -now you can impress friends, family and colleagues with your knowledge of mead making jargon..

The 'must' promptly turned bright orange and started to bubble. I was quite surprised by the intense orange colour, it looked very chemically -like some kind of industrial waste or a kids drink from the 80's.

Fermenting Mead. It went the colour of Kia Ora.

I set it to ferment next to a windows where it would be warmed by the sun. After a week or so the colour calmed down. Whilst the mead was fermenting you could seeand hear bubbles passing through the water in the airlock. When the bubbles slowed to one buble per second or so it was time to remove it. There's different ways to do this, some people filter it into another demijohn to sit some people put it straight into bottles. I opted to bottle it. By the time fermentation had slowed there was a layer of dead yeast at the bottom of the container and I think it's this that you want to get the mead away from.

There's all kinds of clever filtery type stuff you can use and ideally the mead shouldn't be areated so the normal method seems to be to siphon it from the demijohn into the next stage. I decided to use coffee filters for this. I sterilised a plastic bottle to filter the mead into so I could then decant it into wine bottles later. Initially I used Melitta 1x2 micropore coffee filters simply because that was what I had to hand. However it took hours to filter thorough. I decided to get a second funnel and some Melitta Original 1x4 filters so I could have two loads of mead filtering at a time. The mead shot straight through these filters and came through all cloudy. So I used two of these filters at a time which worked rather well -albeit rather slowly. The process was so slow that I wound up filling the filters then putting clingfilm over the tops and around the bottle necks and leving them over night. It took literally days to filter my demijohn. I then decanted the now surprisingly clear mead into wine bottles and corked them. Obviously this way isn't ideal as the mead gets exposed to air which I gather isn't a good thing but it's new to me and seemed to work. Oh and apparently it's not called 'bottling' it's called 'racking' -I think people just make up terminology for the sake of it.

Hivemind and Me Mead

Looks pretty good doesn't it? For the first batch I used the very pale honey and for the second batch I used the darker stuff. In the second batch I also added Rooibos teabag to the tea just for variety -well it's good tea so maybe it'll be good mead. I sampled the meads whilst bottling -I mean racking- them and found the mead made from darker honey was very dry whereas the pale stuff was really sweeet. For the first batch I'd used plastic corks but my pal with the mead making knowledge advised me they're not always as good for keeping air out as a cork cork so for the second batch I acquired a corking tool (Wilkinsons again) and some corks made from trees. The real corks also look more aesthetically pleasing.

Mead

After racking the bottled mead is then place in a wine rack or someplace else out of the way for a few months to improve. I'm not entirely sure of the chemistry or biology involved in this ageing process but I gather that there may still  be some fermentation going on in the bottles if  any live yeast made it through the filtering but eventually the alcohol level will kill anything living in there, hopefully anyway. the bottles are meant to be stored on their sides to keep the corks damp -the wet cork expands, doesn't really matter with the plastic corks, and any sediment in the bottle will sink and adhere the the side of the bottle. I've noticed that more sediment seems to have made it into my first batch, I'm also not entirely convinced of the airtight seal of the plastic corks. In a couple of months time I'll give it a try and see how it's worked out.

Worker Bees

Green Hive Roof mk.II

When I first set up my hives I had the intention of giving them green roofs. I posted a blog about the green roof on Hive1 back in June 2011. It looked good, I'm pretty sure it insulated the hive below nicely, was aesthetically pleasing, helped my hive look a little less obvious to bee paranoid neighbours and even gave the hive proper a little more shelter from the rain. However it was heavy, especially after a rainfall. My solution was to replace the large box with two smaller ones. I was initially considering using aluminium as it's light weight and fairly strong. The two problemns there were I havn't got a clue who could make the items from aluminium and as someone pointed out on a BBKA forum plants don't fare too well in aluminium containers -possibly to do with heat and cold I guess.

Stage one. Not quite done yet.

I opted for a material I've used a little bit before and know where to source. Wood. Specifically gravel board, a treated peice of wood meant to go at the bottom of a wooden fence to protect the fence from the damp ground. I still don't have a decent work surface so once again I got out the mini vices and used a double hive stand weighted down with breezeblocks and a cat.

Stabilise wobbly worksurfaces with breezeblocks and cats as required.

With my still worryingly unstable worksurface I cut the boards to size. My plan was to have three sides of the box hanging over the edge of the metal roof skin and somehow magically join them together once the boxes were in place then unconnect them when I needed to remove them so I could lift of half a green roof at a time.

Testing the fit.

As you can see I used mortise and tenon joins on the corners and a handfull of nails to hold them together. What you can't see is I also used some wood glue on the joints and to hold the pieces together as they dried I used a few staples too. With my prototype green roof it had orignially had a solid marine ply floor but I quickly discovered it was too heavy and cut out most of the floor to leave a frame around the edge to support a two layer lightweight plastic floor. I decided to do the same thing with these to help keep the weight down. I figured I could just use one layer of correx on these as they're so much smaller too. Satisfied with the fit on the hives on the roofs I added a shelf along the long side of each box held in place with yet more glue and nails. Next step was painting the boxes to match the hives. I decided to cut a corner at this point and poured a few litres of shed and fence paint into a bucket then dipped the submerged box ends in using a brush to work the paint across the long sides that hadn't been submerged. It worked okay giving me a pretty good coat of paint. It was also incredibly messy and took days to dry. As the wood was already treated the paint was just an aesthetic touch really.

Green Roof boxes. They're now green.

On the shelves I put a single layer of correx board with the internal walls running the short distance across the gap for support. Correx is the type of plastic FOR SALE and SOLD signs are made of. You can buy the stuff, but if you're lucky you can sometimes find it in the street or in a skip. The black plastic liner was just an offcut of pond liner. I folded the liner into place and used brass drawing pins to secure it. Once they're filled with the growing medium and the plants the contents will hold the liner in place so I'm not too concerned about the pins falling out later in their lives.

I then had to give a little thought to how I was going to joing the boxes to keet them in place. In the end I got some hasps from B&Q, they were the priciest part of the project and I needed one per box. I glued them into place then used the supplied screws to secure them properly. There was nothing to secure the hasps so I just drop a nail into each which seems to work adequately.

Green Hive Roofs Mk.II

The last stage was to add the growing medium and some plants. Once again I opted for mostly perlite as it's lighter than soil, and planted a mixture of sedums, some rockery plants and a few other things I felt might survive in the green roof boxes -over the course of a year they'll probably experience flood and drought conditions. I also transplanted all the plants from the original roof garden into these. It's not really the best time of year for plants to be getting used to a new container but I figure nature will take care of it and whilst some of the plants will quite probably die back others should survive and grow to fill the gaps left. They look nice enough, as the perlite settled I added some vermiculite to the top. Regarding further development I may at some point think about adding a mechanism to allow running off excess rain water, but for now I shall wait and see how they fare.

Space board

In the last really exciting installment of The Hivemind and Me I wrote a bit about follower boards which provide a litttle insulation to help the bees make the most of their space in the brood box. As it gets colder the bees are going to need a little more insulation than that. Hot air rises so I think a little insulation on the top is called for. There's various options to choose from all with different rationales. For example the Warre Hive uses a cloth placed on top of the fames with a 'quilt' of wood shavings on top, whilst other people like to wrap up their hives in black insulation giving them a Pulp Fiction Gimplike look. Obviously what you opt to do depends by and large on where you are, for example a bee keeper in Kenya probably doesn't loose much sleep over winter snows, high winds and sudden drops in temperature whereas in Siberia it's possibly a little more relevant.

However I'm in neither Kenya nor Siberia but the North East of England, I can't ignore insulation but at the same time don't need to go overboard. What we normally use in our homes is a thick layer of fibreglass wool, more recently there's been various kinds of fibreglass and polystyrene insulation boards coming out too. It's a good idea to avoid added a surface which water can condense on when you're insulating a hive. I opted to use Knauf Space Board Loft Board Insulation which is a 52.5mm thick extruded polysyrene board giving insualtion equivalent to a 27cm thickness of glass wool. Part of my reason for using this is that it's good insulation but also with it being so robust I can just stick a square of the stuff on a crownboard and drop the roof back on top of it.

Knauf  Space Board.
Traditionally used by beekeepers since the dark ages.

Honest. Really.

I popped to B&Q and bought one board which was large enough to cover both hives with insulation to spare. I just cut out two squares using a long craft knife and a crownboard as size guide then cut out a rectangle in the middle the size of a chinese takeaway box. I then pulled out this smaller rectangle and cut in two pieces across the thickness so I have a removeable portion to allow winter feeding with sugar fondant which I can then place some insulation back on top of..

The problem with this stuff is when you cut it little crumbs rub off. I don't really fancy a garden covered in bits of orangey pink extruded polystyrene and don't think the bees particularly want a hive full of the stuff either. So out came the blow torch and with the lightest brushing of a flame all those little bits of polystyrene shrunk back into the main body.

I'm contemplating putting a thin polystyrene tile over the rectangular cut outs as some heat may escape from the cuts, there will be a ventilated 20mm gap between the top of the space board and the underside of the roof. In the case of these two hives I'll also be putting green roof boxes above the metal skins which will mean a little more insulation above the roof.

Follower Boards

Through the year I provide a little insulation to the bees in the form of follower boards at the front and the back of the hive. Their job is to provide a bit of insulation for the outer face of the frames facing them. Without them in place when you push the frames together in the middle of the hive you'd also have a large gap at either end and the queen might decide those areas are a little chilly for her royal sensibilities and decide not to lay eggs on the outer two faces of the brood frames.

Follower Board in Brood Box

These are just thin pieces of plywood cut to more or less the shape of a brood frame and dropped one at either end of the rows of frames.

Follower Board. You could train a monkey to make these.

The board reduces what would be a large gap at either end of the frames to a bee space on the side of the frames, and creates a seperate air gap between the board and the hive wall. Without the boards in place the bees produce burr comb in the gaps at either end of the frames but with them in place whilst they still have access to the gap behind the boards they seem to consider it to be outside of the hive proper and don't make any comb -just like the space above a crownboard.

Follower Boards in use

I suppose they're a little like secondary double glazing, except you can't see through them, they're in a beehive and nobody knocks on your door trying to sell you them.

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.

As winter draws closer..

Been a while since my last entry. Fact is as the temperature drops and winter approaches there's less  for the beekeeper to do. The bees give up the urge to swarm, in theory anyway, and things start to calm down for the winter, so now there's no more need to open up the hive and check every frame for a few months. Ideally having made a shedload of honey the bees should be all set for a winter of happpily eating honey and staying warm. However what happens to honeybees in hives is some bloke comes along and steals most f the honey they've made. Oh dear. Hard life for a honeybee.

Luckily beekeepers are bright enough to know to feed the bees up for winter. What we feed them is syrup. The syrup is made from ordinary granulated sugar the sort you'd buy from Tesco for the coffee club at work -or if you're a bit thrifty from Wilkinsons who sell the same stuff for a little less.

The syrup for winter is thicker than the syrup given in the spring and the recipe varies depending who you ask. some will tell you it's 2KG of sugear to 1 litre of water, others will say it's 2 lb of sugar to 1 pint of water, and about umpteen other slight variations on a more or less 2:1 theme. To make it you just get a humongous pan, measure out the sugar and water then heat it up till it's melted then wait around whilst it cools.

One pan of winter syrup.
(Possibly not the most exciting picture ever placed on the internet.)

The syrup then goes into a feeder of some description. There's a lot of different feeder types. Ask a handfull of beekeepers about the merits and shortcomings of the different types and they'll all quite happily give you conflicting information all the while insisting they're right and nobody else knows what they're talking about. Beekeepers are like that.

Aaaaaaaanyway the feeders I've opted to use are called Brother Adam Feeders. You're probably thinking "Who the hell is Brother Adam?" He was a benedictine  monk born in Germany in 1898, at the age of 11 he went to live at Buckfast Abbey. In 1916 whilst mankind was busy trying to wipe itself out with World War I the humble Honeybee was being wiped out across the UK by a tracheal mite called acarapis woodi. It was probably a pretty crap time to be a honeybee. Brother Adam started a breeding program to develop a bee that was resistant to the mite as well as relatively easy to handle and with a good honey yield. His end product was the Buckfast bee which we're still using nowadays. They contain DNA from Italian, English, French, Turkish, Greek and African honeybees.

Brother Adam  is attributed with inventing a kind of feeder. some people swear blind that he didn't and it's just named after him. Although it strikes me that a guy who spent 77 years in beekeeping and was bright enough to develop a strain of bees to suit our climate and survive a devastating disease which wiped out most of the nations original honeybees was quite probably bright enough to make a wooden box and drill a hole in it. The Adam's Feeder is essentially just that. A box with a hole in the middle. There's a little island bit in the middle that the bees can climb out of from underneath to get to the syrup and a small bowl over this to limit the bees access to the reserviour.

Adam's Feeder

You need to limit bee acess to the reserviour otherwise they'ed drown in the syrup. As you can see from my picture a bee managed to get into the syrup before I had chance to pop a cover onto it. Don't worry tho, I rescued her. The reserviour is waterproofed by being treated with varnish, although some people prefer paint, and other's molten wax -whatever rocks your boat, and the whole thing sits on top of the hive. The bees climb up into the island in the bowl get some syrup and take it back down into the hive to store, no doubt grumbling all the that some idiot stole all their honey and now they're having to faff about with sugar syrup. Waterproofing these two took a while as there was a few knots in the wood which no matter how many coats I tried kept leaking when I tested it with water before putting them on the hives. I the end I turned them on their sides and poured varnish into the knots then left them to dry. Seems to have done the trick.

Bees using Adams Feeder

When the feeder is almost empty you remove the plastic bowl and let the bees have full rein of the reserviour. In theory they then pick it completely clean, what I've found is that the sugar crystalises a bit a the bottom and the bees have trouble removing it but the wet stuff they manage with just fine. When you take the bowl off the bees come boiling up out of the island it's like a little bee volcano. With this feeder you can add more syrup to top it up without having to remove it from the hive making it prety handy for bulk feeding..

The Destructors

Bees have problems. Probably the biggest one in the UK at present is the Varroa Destructor, an asian mite that lived amongst asian bees who were able to control the mite within their colonies. Mankind in his wisdom or lack thereof  has managed to transport the mites over much of the world to places where the honeybees have no defence against them. Our bees tend to ignore these rather large mites that cut whacking great big holes in their chitin and dine on their body fluids. Well actually they don't completely ignore them, they chew their own wings off if they get too bothered by them. Either way it's not good.

I wasn't able to get a picture of one using my camera phone and microscope so here's a link to a google image search for Varroa Destructor. As you can see they're rather large as mites go in comparison to their hosts, and look a little like crabs. For a comparison it's a bit like if you were being parasitised by medium sized cats.

There's a few ways to treat a honeybee colony for varroa and most people use a mix of measures. The most ubiquitous one is replacing bee hive floors with a wire mesh so any falling mites leave the hive. You can brush icing sugar into the hive which is supposed to loosen the mites' grip on the bees causing them to drop off. You  then put a monitoring tray below the hive and count the number of mites that fall. I tried this and saw exactly no mites at all. Either it didn't work or ants, wasps or whatever gobbled up the mites before I saw them. It did make the bees look amusing as they  buzzed round the garden covered in icing sugar like little angry ghosts. another way to check a colony for mites is to use a capping fork to pull out a load of drone larvae, the mites prefer the drone larvae, then you can count the mites on the larvae. I did this too and saw no mites either.

After the open mesh floor the next step is some kind of chemically type thing to kill the mites and not the bees. In different countries there's different substances you're legally allowed to use. I opt to use something called Apilife Var -it's a mix of thymol, Eucalyptus Oil, Menthol and Camphor. It certainly smells strongly and probably clears a blocked nose faster than Vicks. The theory is is suffocates the mites but doesn't harm the bees.

Apilife Var

It comes as two black biscuit type things in a yellow foil. You break the biscuits into 4 pieces and put them in the corners of the hive brood box. Whilst they're made from natural products the wrapper does say to avoid letting it make contact with human skin. Bees are actually livestock so whenever treated with a medicine such as Apilife Var the beekeeper has a legal obligation to keep a record of the batch number of the product.

Apilife Var in brood box

It seems to work rather well and I was soon seeing dead mites dropping onto the monitoring board beneath my strongly medicinal smelling hives. Whilst it may not harm the bees it seriously annoys them. To get the above picture of the broken biscuit in the hive corners I had to smoke the bees and photograph it quickly because it doesn't take long before the bees start attacking the stuff. They shred it and throw it out. Because of this you have to repeat it four times  on a weekly basis.

You can't get rid of the varroa from a colony completely so what beekeepers try to do is keep the varroa population at a level that doesn't impact the bees too heavily. There was an article on a BBC program this year about a chap who seems to be making headway in developing bees that will groom each other and pull off the mites -as the asian bees do, but it's probably going to be a long time before we have self grooming bees.