One year on

As of today I've kept bees for one year. It's been an interesting year, for me anyway -regular readers may disagree. It was a year ago yesterday that I drove home from Woodmansey Town Hall with about 15,000 stinging insects in a wooden box in the car boot, the lid secured with a poundshop ratchet strap and a bit of kitchen sponge keeping the entrance closed. Shortly after this I made my first faux pas by culling some queen cells to avoid them swarming, unfortunately it turned out the queen had already left and one of those two developing queens could've been her replacement. In the end I wound up getting a replacement queen from an online supplier, I'm not entirely sure of her lineage or country of origin but the colony survived. The second colony came a month later from a breeder in the York area after a short bidding war at an auction in a tractor museum

Since then I've bought a lot of sugar, made a lot of syrup, experienced a few stings and killed my food mixer making winter bee food. After a little time with Google and Youtube I also managed to make my own brood boxes, a couple clearer boards and most recently a nucleus hive.

Compact Des Res ideal for a young Queen just starting to build a family

Since acquiring the colonies I started regularly checking the weather in my urban neck of the woods having up till then been relatively happy to let it remain one of life's many surprises. In readiness for the honey harvest I got into the habit of saving jars, this lead to a formidable stockpile of things which I realised I'd probably never use and subsequently repurposed. As a result I now have jars of nails and screws in the shed, jars of apple and cranberry sauce in the fridge as well as feta infusing with chilli and basil, eggs pickling and three kinds of kimchi slowly fermenting. Speaking of consumables I've made some forays into the world of brewing with two batches of mead, a melomel and a cyser the latter two of which are still slowly clearing. I've filtered wax, made furniture polish, eaten undeveloped drones, been to no less than three auctions, posted countless picture of my kitchen, and my cooker, inside and out -something I'd never imagined I'd be doing. And of course harvested some honey.

Now the winter is over and the colonies both still alive my plan is to increase from two colonies to three, well two and a half really as I hope to populate my nucleus hive to hold a spare queen in reserve. Can't say if it'll work out for sure, but I'm fairly optimistic. I'm also hoping for a larger honey harvest this year too. That said I'll be fairly happy if I get through this year without losing a swarm or accidentally killing a queen. Fingers crossed.

 Another year of bees in the garden

Beekeeper Eats Own Bees. Queen Is Not Amused.

Last weekend it was warm enough to properly inspect the hives. Turned out Hive2 had almost entirely filled their sacrificial drone comb and sealed almost all the cells so I was able to remove it and pop it in the freezer. This is done because varroa mites prefer to lay their eggs with the larger drone lavae than with workers, by sacrificing these developing drones beekeepers can physically remove large numbers of varroa from the colony and stop new mites hatching -if left unchecked the mites would weaken the colony to the point of collapse. Unlike ourselves bees are cold blooded and prettymuch grind to a halt as they cool down, on colder evenings you can sometimes see a bee or two stranded outside the hive coming to a stop till they warm up again next day -assuming nothing eats them in the night anyway, so freezing them is actually far more humane than it sounds.

Drone comb. After a week in the freezer.

It only needs 24 hours in the freezer to kill the occupants but I gave it week. The little white bits in the picture are uncapped cells containing drone larvae. Once frozen honeycomb becomes very brittle so I was able to break it up to remove the pupae and larvae.

Drone Larvae

The larvae look a lot like maggots. All they do is eat. They're normally very soft and delicate but frozen solid I was able to remove them whilst breaking up the comb. The trick was to work very fast and keep work on the comb a section at a time whilst I put the rest back into the freezer. If they defrosted and it'd been like trying to pick up vanilla ice cream with your fingertips.

Drone Pupae

Like a travelling salesman in a Kafka novella, which I haven't really read, the larvae undergo a metamorphosis. But unlike Gregor they become pupae before insects. With their white bodies and pink eyes they look like some kind of wierd honey bee vampire things. Aside from the protrusion of the cell caps from the comb the huge eyes are the giveaway that these are definitey drones and not workers.

I had a plan to count the varroa mites and drones in the comb to give me an idea how the colony was faring but having removed all the pupae and larvae I didn't actually spot a single mite. However just like faries, gods and Russel's Teapot just because you can't see something it doesn't mean it's not there, although I suspect in some of those cases it may not be. I think they may well have been frozen to the wax I was removing and the young mites may have been too small to spot or not even hatched from their eggs. Not a problem, they're out of the hive anyway. Now what to do with the dead larve and pupae? Well as the article title hints, with all the subtlety of a neon sign, I ate them.

242g of Drone Larvae, Pupae and a little wax

In the western world we don't eat insects. Well that's not really true. It's more accurate to say in the western world we like to think we don't eat insects, but we do. Remember that head cauliflower you bought last week from a large supermarket? Chances are it had a few dead passengers tucked away in it which you unknowingly enjoyed with your cauliflower cheese. Broccoli? Excellent source of vitamin C, iron and aphids. And it's not just the good stuff that includes a few things not on the ingredient list. Fancy a bar of chocolate? Well that'll probably contain some ground up bug life evenly distrubuted through out the whole bar. And have you actually looked at the bugs they have in cocoa growing countries? Moreish? They're proper chitin clad horror stories. Enjoy your Dairy Milk now. 8-D

Other cultures consider insects just another edible item on the great buffet table of life. They're low in fat, high in protein and far more environmentally friendly to farm than for example the pigs and cows which we're more used to seeing pieces of on our plates. Bee brood is about 80% protein whereas beef gets to about 60% -the bee brood is also far lower in fat too and has less ecological impact than the cow. Beef farming is a worryingly inefficient use of arable land. Bees on the other hand don't need any arable land at all. So, gross as the idea may be to our cultural sensibilities they're actually better for us and this great spinning rock we live on than our preferred protein sources. Entomophagy isn't entirely new to me, having previously cooked locusts and meal worms and bought cooked ants and the like from specialist suppliers. I've always thought it odd that whilst we'll decline a cricket that only eats living plants we'll happily pay through the nose for that carrion eating cockroach of the seabed, the lobster. It's all about the image and presentation I guess.

Right let's get off that soap box and back to the kitchen. Time to see what I can do with these dead baby boys :p I pulled out a couple of cookery books, in this case The Eat-A-Bug Cookbook and Creepy Crawly Cusine: The Gourmet Guide to Edible Insects. Three bee larvae recipes in one and one in the other. I opted for the simplest of the lot which is basically fry them in butter with a little salt and pepper for three minutes. Cooking doesn't really get much easier than that. Being drones I don't have to worry about stings or venom, they just don't have them.

Dub dub be dub dub dub
Golden brown texture like sun..

I decided to blanche them first by boiling them for a couple of minutes to remove any wax still adhering to them and as an extra step against bacteria -well we are talking about a pile of dead insects afterall. Then they were drained and fried in three batches with a drop of olive oil, a little Flora Light and a pinch of low sodium salt.

Well the proof is in the tasting so how where they? My housemate and I sampled them and TBH we were quite impressed. There was a nutty taste which reminded me of roasted giant ants -another eusocial insect and relative of the honey bee. Tasted slightly popcorny -possibly due to the flora? A little crunchy on the outside and softer on the inside. I served them up accompanied with boiled potatoes stir fried with chopped spring onion, tomato and black pepper, some baby spinach leaves and a dry beer to wash it down with.

Grub's up.

Feeding Time

Had a look in the hives at last. Still a degree or so on the cool side to be pulling out frames but I've lifted the crownboards to see what's happening. As soon as I removed the roofs I could see both hives had finished their boxes of fondant and Hive2 had actually started building comb in theirs and there was bee larvae visible in it -shame I had to remove this really. I think that was a pretty clear sign that this one very strong colony. It also tells me they may be a bit crowded and may even be getting a little swarmy so I need to think about expansion.

Comb in the empty fondant box

Looking between the frames of Hive1 there were bees in about half the frames. So still some room in there for them to build up numbers and I don't think any particular danger of them swarming at the moment. Having had such a half arsed winter I think far more bees survived than would be expected normally.

This year I hope to expand to three colonies (two hives and a nucleus) so I'm going to need some drawn deep comb for this so I've added a second brood box to Hive2 -one of the ones I'd made last summer. The bees in Hive2 should now start drawing out the foundation in there. At the moment I've got a queen excluder in place as I'm not yet certain which queen I want to breed from. Last week my neighbours told me they saw a swarm in June or July which I think must've come from Hive2 so it may be that the queen of Hive1 will be a better option to raise a small colony in nucleus hive. For now that seccond deep box on Hive2 is effectively a super although I later plan to swap drawn comb from this box with comb containing brood and eggs from the box below so the queen has more cells to lay in and let the colony increase numbers but under my control. Because the bees are going to be drawing a lot of foundation they're going to need feeding.

Whilst no beekeepers ever actually agree, on anything, at all, ever, quite a few people feed their bees in spring to build up their colonies faster than would probably happen if left to nature. I gave both hives contact feeders full of thin syrup , 1ml water to 1g sugar, with some  Vitafeed Gold, a supplement which is suposed to encourage expansion of a colony, prevent nosema and cure dysentery -yep bees can get dysentery and we don't want that.. I've also removed the mouseguards at last.

One with two deep, both with feeders

Why My Hives Look Like an Oil Tank

Another post about hive insulation? 'fraid so.

Having already added a layer of space board insulation beow the hive roof in December I turned my attention to the sides of the hives. My hives are single walled as are most of the hives in the UK, single walled means there's one wall between the inside of the hive and the outside world.  The now less common but more aesthetically pleasing William Broughton Carr (WBC) hives have an extra walls around the boxes the bees live in. There's a couple of reasons why he designed his hives this way but having a stack of boxes within another stack of boxes looks like quite a faff to me. However modern houses in the UK have cavity walls for extra insulation so I decided to imitate that for my bees to give them a little extra insulation especially in the light of the previous winter's months of ice and snow.

The placement of the hives means that their front wall wich faces a wall and a corner is probably quite sheltered from winds but the back of the hive and the sides get the full effect. To reduce the effect of this I built a box to go around 3 sides of the hives and boxed up the gap between the hives at the front and on top. The edges where it meets the hives have draft excluder brushes on them to reduce the escape of warm air whilst the bottom is open and it goes down a little below the hive floor. My thinking is that it should provide some insulation from the elements on the more exposed sides of the hive whilst still letting the wooden hives breathe. I'm sure it doesn't make a massive difference but I'm expecting every little helps.The edges of the outer layer reaching below the hive floors should provide some protection for the open mesh floors from the winds too.

 

You too could have hives that look like an oil tank.

I painted the outside black to help it absorb heat -although it does look pretty ugly, and the inside a gloss white to (hopefully) stop it taking any heat from the hives. There is a downside to this as the extra layer of wood also slows the warming effect of the sun on the hives so on warmer days the bees will become active a little later, this is something known to happen with WBC hives, but my hope is that this will be outweighed by the benefit of less heat being lost when it's colder.

I left the green roofs in place but to be effective insulators there needs to be air in the gaps between the particles of the substrate (soil or perlite or whatever). In the summer that's not a problem and the sections insulate the roof against the sun but in the winter when they get waterlogged they stop insulating, not a problem with the spaceboard underneath already but next year I'll have to give some thought to drainage -which will be better for the plants too.

In February I popped down to the Pearson Park Wildlife Garden to see how their bees were doing and noticed they've used straw for upper insulation on their WBC hive. Those bees should be toasty warm because as mentoned above  as the WBC hive has double walls so there's an air gap between outer walls you can see in the and the walls around the bee cluster.

WBC Hive with straw insulation

The previous winter was a particularly long one and the wildlife garden actually lost their bees so I'd expect them not to be taking any chances this year. Although it looks like there's no extra insulation on their top bar hive at all.

Top Bar Hive in the snow

I'll be interested to see how these bees have coped, although having been a mild and short winter I'd expect them to be okay. General consensus is that as long as bees are dry enough and have enough food they should be able to cope with the cold. In case anyone's wondering that rock sitting on top of the hive roof is there to stop the flat roof being lifted by the wind, it's common practice with flat roofed hives.

The Scout, the Forager and the 3H Pencil

Whilst we're having some nice warm days night time temperatures are still dropping to as low as 3 or 4 degrees Celcius so it's still too cold to be opening the hives up. I took the opportunity to take a couple of pictures as over the winter there hasn't been a huge amount to photograph what with the bees all being tucked away in the dark.

Scout Bee investigating the patio

First up was a scout bee investigating the patio. There wasn't much on it to interest her except possibly me doing a spot of carpentry. I suspect she went back to the hive to report that I need to get the power washer out. I quite liked the picture so I whipped out my sketch pad and trusty 3H automatic pencil to draw it. Why do I use a 3H? Because they don't break easy and I probably got it to mark wood rather than paper, it definitely doesn't make shading easy -it's a bit like trying to draw with a nail TBH. Anyway I was quite pleased with my scribble so I decided to scan it and replace the bee in the blog title with it.

It was meant to be a cat.

The other is a forager with full pollen baskets. The pollen is the orangey yellow stuff on her back legs.The 'baskets' are actually a collection of hairs on the hind legs that the bee uses to carry pollen. The bee packs the pollen onto them then carries it back to the hive for storage.

Got protein.

In other news I've put new foundation onto shallow frames for this years honey crop, having crushed up last years comb to get the honey out. Did that after sundown because the smell of foundation tends to draw bees to investigate and when you're holding tiny nails to hit with a hammer you don't really want a bee in your lughole.

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.

Winter Padding

We've had proper snow over here. After false start in early December, Winter proper has arrived -although I have a sneaky suspicion it's going to be pretty short lived. There's snow on the garden, snow on the car, ice on the bloody windscreen and snow on the beehives.

I've been out in the cold to check on the bees. Using a stethoscope I got to hear what I'm fairly certain was a healthy hum in both hives. Most of the bees still living in the hive will have probably been born in late autumn at the earliest and many won't know much more than the darkess of the winter huddle. Any still surviving older ones probably regale them with stories of back in the day when you could go to magical place called Outsidethehive and meet flowers. As the younger bees roll their faceted eyes and mime tiny yawns at each other the old timers probably waffle on about all the work they did gathering nectar and turning it into honey and tales of the pollen and water they gathered for the colony. The young bees will probably think the old bees are a bit daft the in head as the only life they know is all about eating honey in a big winter hug and taking turns to move to the outside of the hug and shiver before going back into the warmth of the colony cluster.