Expansion

I had a plan to add a third colony this year. To that end I'd made a nucleus hive to house it in, moved aside some greenery and plonked down one and a half paving slabs and couple of breeze blocks to sit it on. All I needed then was a load of bees to inhabit it. However I wasn't going to be buying more bees.

When people think of what a bee colony makes they generally think of honey and wax, someteimes they'll also think of propolis and royal jelly too but there's something else they make which whilst a little obvious people often overlook. It's bees d'oh! Queen bees take a little bit of planning, work, resources and luck but all being well over the summer a colony should be churning out between 1000-2000 new workers per day. So I figured I'd just make up a third colony from those I had.

There's a few ways to do this. Whilst it's actually pretty simple to move some bees, brood and eggs into another box that will give you a colony with no queen. A queenless colony will die out as existing bees age and die without being replaced by new ones. In fairness the bees will probably knock up an emergency queen from existing eggs in that case but she may not be as good quality a monarch as one selected normally.

My initial idea was to follow a fairly simple plan. Basically add a second brood box to my strongest hive with new frames of foundation for the bees to draw out and the queen to lay more eggs in. At some point I would then place two drawn supers and two queen excluders between the two brood boxes. The bees in the brood box without a queen seperated from the pheromones of the existing queen should then, in theory, make a new queen form one of the many eggs they have to choose from.

I selected Hive2 for this and added one of the brood boxes I'd made last year. I fed them up with syrup as they would need a lot of energy do draw all that comb and eventually gave the queen full run of both broods so she could lay more eggs and raise me more bees to populate the nuc. She certainly managed to make the that. I acquired two queen excluders from an auction, all was going to plan except one thing. The weather was being really unhelpful. We had acold wet Spring so there was no forage for the bees. With no forage the bees weren't going to be drawing supers anytime soon.

Luckily at the last auction I went to I'd picked up a set of 10 cell punches with which I was able to devise a plan B. :)

Cell Punches

A cell punch is a short metal tube about an inch long and sharpened at one end and with a plastic collar at the other. The other part of the punch is a wooden plug. Removing the wooden plug you use the sharp end of the cyclinder to cut out a complete cell with an egg in it from the comb.

Cutting out an egg

You then put the wooden plug bit back in the cylinder in the sharp end to push the cell to the plastic collar. Having done that you then secure the punch complete with wooden plug, cell and egg vertically with the cell opening downwards. The whole assembly then goes into a queenless hive. The idea is that the bees find this vertically oriented call, somehow overlook that it's made of brass and plastic rather than wax and start stocking it with royal jelly and do the necessary wax work themselves. This method is called cell punching. an is meant to be one of the simpler ways to raise queens.

I knocked up a frame for the cell punches using some bits of frame, a wooden lath and some of those nails that have a plastic bit to hold cables.

Frame adapted to hold cell punches

Well that was the plan anyway. I knew the plan. You now know the plan. Perhaps I should've told the bees the plan.

I populated the nuc with 4 frames of brood and food from Hive2. I used seven of the punches to cut seven cells containing eggs from another frame which I returned to Hive2. Why seven? I'd never done this before and didn't want to take too long between removing the eggs and placing them in the nuc. I then put the frame of now populated punches in the centre of the nuc. After this I shook out the bees from two more frames from Hive2 into the nucleus and smoked these down into the nuc brood box before adding a crownboard, feeder and replacing the roof. The reason I added extra bees was because whilst there were bees on the frames I'd just added any flying bees that left the nuc to forage would return to Hive2 -yes bees remember where they live.

I later checked the cell punches expecting to see some nice big queen cells but it was a non starter, the bees hadn't been keen so they'ed pulled out the eggs. I repeated the process and next time found the bees had decided to make one of them into a queen.

One new Queen Cell

I decided to place that queen in Hive1 in the hope that she would displace the existing queen. I put some tin foil round her for protection -otherwise the bees would sense the developing alien queen and kill her themselves. This still didn't work though. When I later checked to see if she'd hatched I found the workers had managed reach the side of the cell and kill the developing queen. So my first foray into queen rearing by cell punching was something of a failure. I later realised if I'd just left the new queen cell in the nucleus she'd've hatched in there and I could've later replaced the queen of Hive1 with her. I'm pretty sure I've learnt a little there and have no doubt I'll trying again at another point

Whilst contemplating a third attempt at cell punching I found the now somewhat crowded Hive2 had started making queen cells. I selected a frame with 2 supercedure queens cells on it and popped that into the nucleus instead of the cell punch frame. It also had some brood and eggs on to boost the numbers in the nuc which willl have been dwindling  whilst they failed to gain a queen. For good measure I also gave them another frame of capped brood. When I next inspected the hive I found an empty queen cell

Recently vacated queen cell

You can see the flap at the bottom where the queen made her exit. The other queen cell was on the other sde of the frame but I couldn't see any sign of it so I assume the new queen hatched then killed her opponent by stinging her in the cell and the workers tore down the cell. Just had to wait and see if she managed to mate next. Two weeks later I still haven't seen the queen but that's ok as there are single eggs are beng laid in the empty cells and I can see uncapped brood developing so I know there's now a mated queen in there even if I've not seen the little lady. Success. I now have a third colony complete with queen.

Later in the year I'll need to decide whether I want to use her to replace the queen of Hive1 or see if the whole colony can survive the winter in the nuc, or I may just unite this colony with whichever is weakest going into winter. Whether or not I replace the queen of Hive1 is largely going to depend upon whether or not I ever see the elusive little madam. I'd like to replace her because the bees of Hive2 are calmer than hers and also I've recently noticed Hive2 is filling the super faster than Hive1. When you replace a queen what as the existing bees age and die off naturally the new queen's offspriing are hatching and maturing to replace them. Given life expectancy of a summer worker bee it takes about 6 weeks to replace the whole colony. By changing the queen you can replace aggressive bees with more placid ones of the same breed or if you really want to you can completely change the race of your colony.

Enemy under the Microscope

I've previously posted about Varroa Destructor, the asian mite that poses a huge threat to european honeybees, this week I spotted a dead one on the plastic board that goes beneath the nucleus hive. At about 2mm across and flat like a little discus they take some searching to spot but every bee keeper needs to look out for these critters.

Tiny 2mm corpse

One aspect of beekeeping I've not really spent any time on yet is microscopy. There's various things one can do with a microscope such as identifying bee diseases and pollen grains, learning a bit about bee anatomy and artificial insemination of queens if you ever feel the inclination. I haven't got round to examining the stomach contents of squashed bees for bacteria or searching for tracheal mites but I may give it a whirl on a rainy day.

Anyway a couple of years ago and purely for aesthetic reasons I acquired an antique microscope and have never really felt the need to upgrade to one of those new fangled models made in the past hundred years or so. Actually it's probaby a replica really as those old microscopes didn't have the best quality glass lenses and this one seems pretty sharp when it's focused. Also if it'd been made back in the days of yore I suspect it would have a manufacturers name on it somewhere, optics manufacturers were keen on that sort of thing -afterall it pays to advertise. The only downside to this very easy to use antique/possibly mock antique gadget is that like pretty much everything else made before 1996 it lacks a USB port, does look pretty tho.

The cutting edge of microscopy,
circa 1870.

I popped the dead mite on a slide, flipped it onto it's back and stuck it under the microscope. To get a photo with it I held my cameraphone (which now an HTC Desire S if you were wondering) above the microscope and manouvered it till I could see into it on the phone screen.Sounds easy enough ..but it wasn't. The slightest movement or angle change on the phone meant losing the image entirely and letting the phone rest on the viewfinder meant pushing the viewfinder down and losing focus.

For your delectation here's what I saw..

Varroa Destructor under the lens

Not the prettiest thing you could find at the bottom of the garden.Well actually I've not seen what you keep in your garden but it's certainly not the prettiest thing in mine. The structures you can see are it's eight legs and I think the thing sticking up in the middle is actually it's mouthparts, they punch a hole in the bee and suck out the hemolymph. Since it's discovery in the Soviet Union and Japan in the sixties (thanks Wikipedia!) these critters have travelled all over the world affecting honeybee stocks everywhere warm enough to support them with the exceptions of Autralia who's bio screening measures seems to be working, part of Libya and the Pitcairn Islands -probably on account of there's nothing of any actual interest to anyone on them. You may be thinking hang on it's a tiny creature with little midget legs how far can they actually travel? Well they can go up to about 3 1/2 miles riding a bee but they've also managed to travel huge distances thanks to people. Yeah people moved them all around the world by shipping bees all over the place so basically it's a man made problem. Face palms all round! Weather permitting I'll be treating the nucleus for varroa this weekend.

The Swarm

The other Tuesday I was at work when I got a text from my housemate telling me the bees were swarming. I hadn't expected that but should've known that if they were going to do it it would be on a working day. Hive2 had been very populous so I guessed they were probably the culprits. To be fair they had been making swarm queen cells so they had warned me, however instead of doing an artificial swarm I'd hoped they'ed be happy with a couple of supers adding to give them more space and the swarm cells being squished but that wasn't the case. Next year I'll do an artificial swarm instead and hopefully avoid it.

A real actual photo taken in my back garden.
I'm one of the guys on the left with a flamethrower.

When people think of swarms they probably think of the 1978 killer bee film "The Swarm." The film was a disaster in every sense, a box office flop and an embarrassment to Michael Caine who said it was the worst film he's ever been in. It's basically about a humongous swarm of scary killer bees in america that kill loads of people. Inspired by the africanized honey bee which to be fair is an aggressive little hybrid bugger. The africanized bee was actually developed by a chap wanting to make a bee better suited to tropical conditions. He certainly managed to do what he wanted and they're great as far as honey yield goes, unfortunately they'll also happily chase people up to a mile before stinging them to death. :-s It's actually pretty rare for them to kill people really but the media had a field day with it. Fact is they're used by beekeepers all over the world these days having mixed with bee stocks everywhere warm enough to support them. Fortunately for us in the UK our climate is too cold for them to survive here so unless global warming changes that we don't need to lose sleep over them. So remember folks, no africanized honey bees in the UK and as disaster movies go avoid The Swarm.

People have asked me why bees swarm and in short the answer is to reproduce. Within the colony there's a queen laying eggs so technically the bees are reproducing but that maintains the colonies population, if you think of the colony as a one super organism then to reproduce it needs to make up a whole new colony and that's what the swarm is. They swarm leaves the parent colony find a new home and becomes another independent colony. When a colony throws out a prime swarm what happens is a large proportion of the workforce leave to start a new colony taking the old queen with them whilst the rest stay in the hive where hopefully a new queen they've made will then take over and head up the colony. They also throw out smaller secondary swarms or 'cast swarms' with new queens but typically these are pretty small and can be as little as a half pint of bees.

Back to the bees in my garden then.. right where was I? Well as I said I was at work luckily I was able to take an hour's annual leave and pop home. When I got there my housemate was watching them from an upstairs window and I have to say it was really impressive. Above my garden thousands of bees were milling about darkening the sky in a huge three dimensional cloud. They seemed to have a few false starts tho as they kept going back into the hive then pouring out again -was hard to believe they could actually all fit back into the hive. The sound was also something else. We all know the sound a bee makes but throw up about 20,000 including a contingent of drones and you've got quite a formidable noise.

Unfortunately the individual bees being small I couldn't get a decent photograph of them in flight but here's an image my housemate took from the bathroom window.

There's a buzz in the air

Doesn't really get across quite how impressive it was but you can see a few black dots.. Whilst bees are swarming they can look pretty intimidating but contrary to popular belief they're not really aggressive. Whilst I wouldn't suggest you run into the middle and start shouting and waving your arms about they're actually preoccupied with finding a new home to live in and not attacking people. After all the swarm has no actual home to defend, they're gorged on honey and it's not like they eat people anyway is it?

I quickly hatched a clever plan to catch the bees and put out three boxes with used honeycomb and food stores and a drop of lemongrass essential oil (it attracts bees dontchaknow) in them so that when they did settle and choose a place to live they'ed choose one of those boxes and I'd still have my bees :) I then went back to work and when I got home in the evening I could see bees coming and going from the box entrances. Having outwitted a creature with a brain the size of a sesame seed I felt rather smug.

Unfortunately I was completely wrong and when I checked the next  day I found that the bees in my baited boxes were just robbing them for their colonies back in the hives, the swarm itself has vanished. Going by the capacity of the Hive2 and how full it was before and after the swarm I reckon it was about 20,000 bees that went along with the old queen. Hopefully when they settled someplace some other beekeeper got a call and now has my bees in a new hive making lots of honey. All isn't lost for me tho, I still have bees in my hives just one of the colonies is slightly smaller now.

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.

2012 Beverley Beekeepers' Auction

Yesterday was the annual Beverley Beekeepers auction, in Woodmansey Village Hall. At last year's I got my first colony of bees. Beekeepers really like their auctions. and having never been to one prior to taking an interest in the honey bee this was my fourth. I didn't need anymore bees but I did need another queen excluder pretty soon for my attempts to raise another queen, I'd also seen there was going to be a mead filter up for grabs and I could really use one of those.

Auction Stuff!

The auction started at 12 o'clock with time for viewing for a couple of hours before that. It's a good idea to go along and see what's there and decide what you want to bid on before the auctions starts. But I didn't do that. I'd been out clubbing the night before, was out till late, up till stupidly late and didn't wake up till nearly 12. Oops. Skipping breakfast, elevensies and lunch I charged out into the pouring rain briefly pausing only to pick up some money from an ATM and then hightailed it to Woodmansey. Did I mention the pouring rain BTW? When I say rain we're talking rain of Genesis proportions, I mean chapter six not Phil Collins and Mr Gabriel. If Noah was around he'd've been rushing to load up that Ark with not enough of every animal to leave a viable gene pool. And a pool is prettymuch what the village hall car park was.

The auction had started by the time I got there but it looks like all I'd missed out on bidding on was a shedload of honey jars. There was a bigger turnout than last year's, strange given that last year was a nice warm day and yesterday was cold and wet. I bid on a bag of 67 plastic metal ends. 67 is a nice round number, although you're probably thinking "WTF is a plastic metal end!?" Well a metal end is a metal spacer you attach to the ends of frames in a hive to space them out. Nowadays they're made of plastic but the name has stuck. After that I bought a cup of tea as a late liquid brunch and took a couple of pictures of general auction stuff as this blog has been a little text heavy of late. Looking at the various items I noticed there was a heather honey press standing there. There's been a heather press at every beekeeping auction I've been to. I'm starting to think it's always the same one. It always sells too.

Heather Honey Press, appearing at every auction.

I bid on a box of shallow Manley frame parts and for my fiver came away with 30 top bars, 153 shallow frame sides, 20 national deep sides and 60 bottom bars -not bad for the price of 5 new top bars. Doubt I'll need them all but at just under 2p per item they're there if I ever do. Manley frames aren't self spacing so they're a little out of favour at the moment -of course if by chance you've just bought 67 plastic metal ends that's not going to be a major problem.

£102 worth of new frame parts for a fiver? Don't mind if I do.

The next thing I bid on was a batch of rather aged solid hive floors. I don't plan to use them for my hives but as they were at 4 for £4 I figured they'ed be handy to put things on.Two were made from what looks like floorboard and the other two from plywood. When I scorched them later at home they had a tarry kind of smell so they'ed evidently been treated with some kind of preservative so I suspect they'll be good for a few years. Pretty good deal for a pound a piece even if one had a few woodworm holes in it. Eventually we got to two framed wire Queen Excluders, they were the whole point of my being there so I started bidding. Turned out there were two of us interersted in these and I stopped bidding when they got to about half the price of new ones. Luckily it turned out there were two pairs so I got the second pair. If I'd turned up earlier and had a look at what was available and known there was a second pair I may have bidded differently, well proper prior planning and the other 4 P's spring to mind there.Still I'd got what I needed and rather cheaply too.

Get your loverly solid hive floors pound a piece! Queen Excluders two for nineteen!

After that I finished my cuppa, loaded Facebook on my phone and let the world know I was "Hanging with the cool kids - at Woodmansey Village Hall." They auctioned the live bees in the middle of the day this time but didn't go out into the rain to do it. One advantage of the rain was that anyone buying bees on the day didn't have to wait hours for foraging bees to return to their hives and nucs like we'd had to last year, with the inclement weather none of the bees would be flying. I think they all sold but I was a bit distracted trying to draw a representation of a nun on my phone in a game of Draw Something. When my attention returned to proceedings the next item up was a Baby Burco Boiler. Apparently the auctioneer used to ferment mead in one of these. They're fairly useful things, builders use them to supply gallons of hot water for their constant tea breaks and beekeepers use them to clean frames and stuff. I decided to throw a few bids in as I was never keen on boiling frames in a huge sauce pan of caustic soda perched on my gas cooker. I won the item for £11 which I was fairly pleased with.

Baby Burco

There were a few other bargains, someone got a commercial brood box for the princely sum of £2.50 -better made than the pair I made last summer I might add. Eventually we got to the two mead related items in the auction. The first was an automatic bottle filler. A strange looking thing that was greeting by mumblings of "What's that?" "What is it?" "What's it for?" I didn't really know what it was initially either but the seller had rather wisely printed and laminated a sign saying "Bottle your mead" from which I was able to figure out what it did, didn't really take a Baker Street based Consulting Detective to figure that one out.. Nobody else wanted it so I offered a pound and won. It's not exactly an essential item but for a solitary golden nugget I'll give it a try. After that was the wine filter, helpfully signed "Filter your mead." This was actually a Harris Quickfine kit consisting of two wine filters and two buckets one of which has a hole in the bottom the filter goes in and 6 containers of chemicals which had 'expired' back in 2005 -but lets be honest a tub of perlite is still a tub of perlite even if it's spent 7 years sat in someone's garage, these aren't exactly the most volatile substances known to man after all, half of them were unopened. I paid a fiver for the filter and chemicals. Being almost at the end of the auction I decided to hang about to the finish and got 10 new Jenter punches for my trouble -you use these to make Queen cells so I'm thinking they'll come in handy for my nuc project, made a frame for them today and I'll post about them at a later date. I also picked up a manipulation cloth for another pound. A manipulation cloth is a weighted cloth you put over an open bee hive with a slit in the middle for you to work on one frame at a time, you can acheive the same effect with two tea towels if you like. I'm thinking it'll be useful with Hive1 what with them being a little flighty at the moment.

When I got home I found the Burco Boiler was actually dead as a doornail. Well that's the chance you take with an auction, everything is sold as seen. It'd been PAT tested and evidently wasn't about to electrocute me, although it wasn't about to do anything anything else either. I checked the fuse, that was fine. After a little thought I whipped out my multimeter and a screwdriver took the bottom cover off it and started poking away. There isn't much to these boilers, it's basically a five gallon drum, a switch and a heating element.

Troubleshooting

The multimemeter showed me electricity was reaching the switch but not leaving it. Grabbing some pliers I disconnected the switch and attached the power straight to the heating element, that worked fine. I then removed the switch and noticed the casing was partially open on it. Prizing it all the way open everything looked fine to my electrically uneducated eye. A little more investigation into how it worked and I realised the misaligned casing was stopping two contacts meeting. Popped it back together, turned it on and watched it boil up some water. Nice. It's seen a lot of use and has quite a bit of scale in it so for the time being I'm leaving it tucked out of the way with a 16 litres of supermarket cola in it. I'm thinking the phosphoric acid should eventually dissolve the scale. Interestingly or possibly rather worryingly when I heated up the Cola it smelt exactly like the bathroom surface cleaner I use on the cat's tray. :-s

All in all quite a successful day.

Edit (17/6/2012) the calcification was too much for the cola to deal with so I resorted to some washing machine descaler tablets, five at a time. It's now gleaming inside.

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..

Bees on the box

Been watching some honey bee related programs.

Recently the BBC Two's Natural World series showed an episode called Queen of the Savannah which followed the fortunes of a colony of African honey bees and a herd of elephants. Not having a TV I watched it on the internet, by the time of writing it's probably no longer on BBC iPlayer unfortunately but it's probably still up on youtube -or for those naughty people who aren't adverse to a illegally downloading copyrighted material it can be donwloaded as a torrent from Pirate Bay or for the more careful pirates who use newsgroups instead there's an NZB file for it -not that I'm advocating, endorsing or reccomending illegally downloading copyrighted content of course. Afterall according to the entertainment industry illegal downloading is killing the entertainment industry, some may say it's the mediocre dross being pumped out by the  industry that's doing the real damage ..but that's a whole nother arguement waaaaay outside the scope of this blog.

So back to the Queen of the Savannah. Unlike our bee colonies which will set up a colony at a site and remain there as long as the site remains african honey bees are migratory (which I didn't know) and move to keep up with changes in forage availability. It starts with a queenless colony living in an acacia tree and follows the bees raising a new queen, being harvested by a local honey hunter, swarming, a stint doing elephant guard duty in a bee fence, and eventually migrating to a forest area. It contains some amazing footage of inside the colony filming what goes on on the comb itself, a Queen hatching, the waggle dance (of course), the short battle between two queens and lots of bees going about their housekeeping. What is a little misleading is that the program omits to mention that all that activity takes place in near darkness and the bright light it's filmed in was added for the benefit of the camera. The programme then goes on to the situation of honey bees in Britain and their urban resurgence.

The BBC made another decent documentary about bees back in 2009 called Who Killed The Honey Bee? about the dissapearance of the bees. It follows some of americas large scale beekeepers trying to understand Colony Collapse Disorder and the mysterious dissappearances of millions of bees. It was repeated last year and you can probably find a torrent to download the program with or find it on YouTube. The programme is actually renarrated and re-edited footage from the full length american documentary film Vanishing of the Bees. An interesting film for anyone interested in bees but probably overly long for anyone who isn't, and the narrator sounds like some kind of wierd female robot which grates after about half a minute. Apart form a few beekeeping players and pundits edited out of the BBC documentary this film also mentions the import of cheap dodgy honey blended with various syrups exported from China and marketed as honey in the western world.

*Spoiler alert* in case you were wondering the biggest suspects for Colony Collapse Disorder seem to be pesticides and monoculture.