This Season's Colour

I've mentioned previously that locating the single queen bee amongst a thousands of other bees is a tricky business. At some point some bright spark realised that what really helps is to put a splot of paint on her back and then just look for the dot. The dot of paint is also used to record what year the queen is from. To keep track of this there's a 5 colour cycle based on what number the year ends in.

Year ends in	Colour
1 or 6	White
2 or 7	Yellow
3 or 8	Red
4 or 9	Green
5 or 0	Blue

So as examples the queen of the colony I bought at auction in 2011 was marked blue showing she was from 2010, the one I had delivered for the apparently queenless first colony was marked with white showing she was from 2011. There's only five colours in the range because a queen bee isn't likely to live longer than that, assuming she's not been acidentally squashed by the beekeeper or lost in a swarm the bees will replace her when she starts to fail anyway.

A blue marked 2010 Queen

I hadn't really thought about marking my queens before but when I got my smoker, hive tool and a few other bits from an eBay seller back in 2011 the package included a Queen Clip and an odd looking thing called a Queen Marking Cage and Plunger which has spent the past 2 years languishing in a box in my shed. This year I decided to give it a whirl. At the start of the season the colonies are at their smallest as they've been dying off over winter and the new workers haven't emerged to replace them yet. It's a lot easier to find the queen when there's less bees to lose her in.

I can't be 100% certain that both my queens are from last year rather than the previous one so what colour I mark them isn't necessarily going to be correct. I decided to go with red rather than use yellow for last year. If they swarm and someone else catches them the red marking will be a little misleading but with only 2 colonies to think about at the moment it's not really a problem for me and my main concern is being able to locate them. As time goes on and they're replaced by supersedure or requeening I'll be able to mark their replacements correctly. In hindsight maybe I should've used a colour outside the range to reflect their unknown age.

Umm so today I'm a make up artist for royalty.. never saw than coming. :-/

There's specific insect paints around, believe it or not, but having done some reading people are using paints ranging from enamel to Tip Ex. I opted to use acrylic paint because it's water based, less toxic than a lot of other paints around, low on smell and most importantly I have a box full of the stuff. The paint goes on the large round chitin plate on the back of  the bee's thorax. The 2010 queen I got with a colony from York in 2011 was marked a little heavy handedly, if you look at the picture above you can see paint on her wings but she still managed to head up a colony so I guess she wasn't too concerned about that herself.

The first thing to do was locate their Majesties. Whilst they'ed not been particularly shy in the last two inspections today they proved very elusive. After inspecting every frame with brood on it I was unable to find either queen. Queens aren't keen on light and tend to hang about where there's brood, knowing that a beekeeper can reconfigure the frames narrowing down the places she's likely to be -particularly in a small colony. With a couple of empty frames removed I paired up the frames with brood separating each pair by an inch or so. After a few minutes I checked the inner faces of the paired brood frames and sure enough there she was.

Queen bee in a clip

The next job was to catch her I did this using the queen clip. After trapping the queen and a few attendant workers I then had to isolate her. A couple of workers crawled out through the slots in the clip making things a little easier for me, but it was basically a case of encouraging them out but not the queen being careful not to squish Queeny B with the springloaded clp..

Marked queen in marking cage

After this came the Marking Cage. Removing the plunger and holding the clip open above the open hive so I wouldn't lose her if I dropped her I gave the clip a couple of taps till she fell into the tube and replace the plunger so she couldn't escape. It now occurs to me that I could've probably made things easier if I'd just caught her in the tube in the first place. Ah well we live and learn. The marking cage is a transparent tube with a fabric net at one end, the plunger that goes into it has a soft sponge top. The idea is that you gently push the queen to the netting then dab the paint on her back whilst she held there.

Red paint. They'll all be wearing it this season.

After the paint was applied I pulled back the plunger giving her some room to walk about in the tube whilst the paint dried before popping her back into the hive. To reintroduce her I let her walk out onto the topbars and make her own way into the colony.

The Queen going home again..

Going through the hives it was evident Hive1 is building numbers faster than Hive2. The theory goes that you can stimulate the bees to build up more brood by feeding them thin syrup so this weekend I think I'll put the rapid feeders on and see if the queen of Hive2 steps it up a notch on the egg laying front. Hopefully the paint will stay on them and their colonies will accept them back. Later this season if I find queens in the hives without the red splot then I'll know they've been superseded.

Auction Season

Last weekend was the April 2013 Whitby Goth Weekend. But I had higher things on my mind as for bee keepers in this neck of the woods it's auction season, the time of year when beekeeper's swarm to various town and village halls, beer tokens at the ready to buy and sell a variety of beekeeping related gubbins ranging from the very useful such as actual live bees to the marginally less useful such as VHS video tapes (of bees) and pretty much everything in between. On Sunday the 28th it was the Beverley Beekeepers Association 2013 Auction. This year I took a friend along, she'd never been to an auction before and when you get right down to it what girl doesn't secretly want to be spirited off to a local beekeeping auction?

As with last year I rolled up a few minutes after the bidding had started and too late to get a seat. Maybe next year I'll get there in time for a viewing, but I'll not put money on it. The first thing I noticed looking at the array of woodware with the occasional plastic or shiny steel item was the heather press which seemed to be at all the previous auctions I've attended was absent. Maybe it's found a home at last.

Auction stuff, don't think the extractor sold.

This year I was after three things a strainer, a Snelgrove board and some food grade plastic buckets. There wasn't a strainer in the printed item list I'd brought with me but the auction seems to get a lot of submissions on the day so I figured one might appear. ..and not long after wandering in, a conical stainless steel tap strainer came up. Basically it's a device that hangs from the tap of your honey extractor or other container and honey coming out passes through leaving bits of wax and the odd bee leg or whatever behind. I picked it up for a fiver, they cost about £20 new so I was quite pleased with that. There's some glue from a paper label on it and a little what might be wax so I'll have to get some stainless steel cleaner or possibly a little caustic soda to it at some point. I can't just bung it in the dishwasher because it there's any wax on it will melt in the water and adhere to the machine.

Stainless Steel Conical Strainer, every home should have one.

Thanks to being late we were standing to the side of the stage but I spotted some spare seats in a hallway and brought a couple over seating ourselves with an excellent view of the proceeding albeit a little close to the Megamouth MP3 Pulse portable PA. Whilst the feedback wasn't quite at Jesus and Mary Chain levels it was enough to elicit the odd wince amongst the assembled. Moving the speaker a few feet to one side of the auctioneer fixed that.

My second purchase was two supers with castellated spacers. Purchased in the spirit of optimism. I'm hoping to need them for the huge honey harvest everyone is hoping for this year but nobody is really expecting. I'm not sure what they're made of but they're quite light, going by the weight and the colour I think they may be cedar.

Possibly Cedar supers, two for a dozen beer tokens.

When I last fed the bees I later noticed there'd been some syrup leaking from the contact feeders I was using. Not surprising given the temperature changes we've been having recently. I don't hugely want my queens to die under a cascade of sugar syrup so when some rapid feeders came up I bid on some picking up a lot of four for twelve quid. They're a simple idea. It's a donut shaped bowl you pour syrup into, bees climb up the inside of the hole and access the syrup. Their access to the reservoir is limited by a plastic cup over the central column to minimise drowning incidents.

Rapid Feeders

There was a break whilst the bees were auctioned outside, was a little windy out there so didn't stay out long to watch that myself, instead I took the opportunity to reconnoitre the items on the floor and note down what I was going to bid on. I pointed out  a few things to my friend explaining what they were and picked up a solid wood floor to that'd been creosoted or something leaving me with a black thumb. Well there's probably a lesson for me there. I spotted two lots of buckets to bid on but no Snelgrove boards at all. There was a few interesting bits and bobs like a hive trolley for lugging hives around without putting out your back, a box of some rather worrying rubber objects that later turned out to be candle moulds, a handful of honey extractors, a rather swish honey refractometer.

Bariatric Kick Scooter!

There was a lot of beehives in varying condition ranging from very used to brand new. I suspect a couple had probably been made locally for sale at the auction. Unfortunately I doubt my own woodworking skills would have impressed anyone.

Rather fetching green and black national hive on a stand

An old galvanised steel settling tank sat in one corner. You can't use these anymore as some bright spark realised that an acidic substance like say honey could leach zinc from the metal so now they have to be made from food grade plastic or stainless steel,  but it was still an interesting looking lump of beekeeping history nonetheless. This one had strainer in the top part and a layer of plastic had been placed below it presumably to protect it.

An interesting lump of beekeeping history, and some plastic.

There was an item looking a like a cross between a ski pole and a walking stick. It was a honey creamer used to make set honey -the opaque non runny type. I have a vague plan to try making some this year. I didn't bid on that though, figure I'd wait and see if I get enough honey to experiment with first.

Self righting walking stick

After the bees were auctioned and I had a mug of tea (white no sugar if you're wondering) the auction returned inside. I was outbid on both lots of buckets but after the auction the chap who'd won a batch of seven for the rather good price of £6 offered them to me for the same which I took him up on. Now I have my all important buckets just need the bees to do their bit so I can fill them now :) I haven't photographed the buckets as I'm fairly certain most readers have a rough idea what a bucket looks like. These ones are food grade white plastic, metal handles and white lids. I've mentioned food grade plastic a few times, the name suggests it's some sort of edible plastic but it isn't. Normal plastics can leach unpleasant things like phthalates into food they're in contact with or in other cases may break down easily releasing carcinogens and other nastiness into your food and drink. Food grade plastic is free of these things and of any surface contaminants too -which actually means food grade plastic coming into contact with something toxic is no longer food grade.

Back to the auction.. a stainless steel double strainer came up. This is two strainers with the coarser one fitting into and above the finer one. The whole thing goes into the top of a honey bucket supported by it's adjustable arms and honey poured in passes through first the 1.5mm mesh then the 0.5mm mesh. There was a new one going for twenty quid from the local supplier who was selling kit in an adjoining room so with that as a fallback and a guide price I stared bidding and got it for twelve of little gold coins, looks like it may be unused.

Take the strain

Something I'd noticed in the auction listing was a lot labelled propolis kit. I don't get much propolis from my bees, there's ways to harvest it but I don't do it, not at the moment anyway It's touted to have useful health properties which are currently being investigated and is used in tinctures, salves and so on, curiously it's also used to make polishes for violins. Even more curiously propolis tincture tastes suspiciously reminiscent of Jägermeister, the world's favourite Kräuterlikör. I spotted the lot near where I was seated. There was some containers of propolis, a bag of plastic tubs, some very old leaflets about the stuff, a litre of Propylene Glycol, some 30ml dropper bottles, an unused syringe and what appears to be a small wooden club. I think the little club might be for breaking up frozen propolis. Having read a little about propolis products I decided if there wasn't much interest I was going to bid on this curious lot. Turned out there was only myself and another person interested and I got it for under a tenner.

Propolis and chemical stuff.

I reckon there's about 1.25 Kilo's of propolis in the various containers. Most of the bottles had a small amount of thick black propolis tincture in them. I have no idea of the composition of the tincture but it's very thick and I'd guess quite old. Other things I picked up were thirty 1lb jars for three quid and a batch of plastic frame runners. There was a few DEFRA leaflets around so I picked up some bedtime reading on Tropilaelaps, Varroa, Foulbrood and the Asian Hornet. Afterwards we adjourned to Lempicka Cafe in Beverley for a very late lunch.

I didn't manage to get a Snelgrove board, but that's not a huge worry as I have one and can make a second myself if I really need to. It was quite a successful day. An email following up the event said about £4400 of business was done. The atmosphere at the auction was pleasant and the auctioneer kept things moving nicely -turns out he's the chap who keeps bees a few streets from me, small world.

An Inspector Calls Again

Warmer weather at last, bees are flying and in the pond frogs are doing unspeakable things to each other. Yesterday, marking what may at last be the start of the beekeeping season I gave both hives a contact feeder full of 1:1 syrup.

Dinner is served

I actually had 2 litres of 2:1 (2kg sugar:1 litre water) syrup that'd been left over from last year. Rather than binning it I'd put it in a bottle and left it in the freezer for a few months. After defrosting it in the fridge I added 1.5 litres of hot water , it won't be exactly 1:1 syrup but I think it will be pretty close. I stirred it a long time and then with a few ml of Vitafeed Gold poured it into the feeders and placed them over the feeding holes. I could see there was still some fondant on the top bars but I left it there for the time being, I didn't open the hives at the time as I wanted to minimise disruption to the bee plus I was planning to do that today because..

Today was my second of three visits from the Regional Bee Inspector as part of the European Union Pilot Surveillance Programme for honey bee health. The previous inspector had changed roles and I gather is still working with bees but in a microscopy type role now and his position hasn't been filled yet (job vacancy there for someone who knows their bees and bee diseases) so today's Inspector, a chap with 45 years beekeeping experience, had been drafted in from another region.

The visit started off with a discussion of changes in my apiary, colonies added, sold, lost, merged and split. The only change to mine was the loss of one colony in the nucleus. There was a few questions about what I've been doing with my bees since last inspection too such as any treatments, I'd given them one treatment with Oxalic Acid back in January which was duly noted. He mentioned about heavy bee losses all over the UK particularly Scotland this year and how the past few years weather has been very different from that of previous decades. This time last year my hives has been teeming and I was removing drone brood to control varroa. The strange weather this year has meant the colonies are about 5 weeks behind their normal spring buildup. Next we went outside to meet the bees.


During the previous visit in September samples were taken from all three hives, in this visit samples were only being taken from hives showing signs of disease. I felt Hive1 may be a little touch and go as numbers were far lower than Hive2 so the inspector suggest we start with Hive2 to avoid transferring across any disease that might've been present in Hive1. With the crownboard off the inspector quickly located the Queen and some existing capped honey remaining. I like tot think the presence of capped honey meant I got things right preparing the hives for winter, it also explains why they hadn't paid much attention to the fondant and told me that the fondant on top of the frames wasn't necessary. We scraped of the existing fondant, I noticed a few bees had actually been trapped in the fondant when I'd placed the crownboard over it so I'll have to take a little more care next time -maybe smoke the bees down into the box more than I did. There were some eggs visible so she'd only started laying within the past 3 days. One frame had a small number capped brood on it, they weren't particularly well grouped. So she'd started laying on a previous warm day but stopped again. He felt this might indicate she wasn't mated well and may need replacing. I'll have to watch how she does as laying progresses.

Hive1 was less populous than 2, as I'd expected. There were a few eggs but the pattern better than in 2, the Inspector felt that despite there being less bees in Hive1 she may actually turn out to be the better queen. In this hive he spotted a few larvae who weren't quite correctly adhering to the vertical cell wall and had slumped a little. Segmenting of the body was still visible but did look a little relaxed. Out came a matchstick. The test for Foul Brood is to dip a matchstick into the dead larvae and pull it out, if it has Foul Brood the contents will stick to the stick and the cell contents forming a rope of slime. That didn't happen with these so no foul brood. I wonder if perhaps they're in early stages of a little sac brood, going to be a case of watchful waiting there really. I removed the fondant from this hive too.

He'd also spotted pollen being brought into both hives and no obvious signs of bee diseases in either. Given the high mortality rate in Hive1 I'd saved a jar of the dead bees in the freezer which he took. Looking at the jar he said he could see a black, hairless, shiny bee in the jar -that'd point the finger at Chronic Bee Paralysis Virus (CBPV), although there'd been no visible signs of it amongst the living bees. CBPV affects honey bees all over the world and is endemic in the UK. Normally present to some degree in most colonies it only seems to become a significant problem when the bees are crowded and unable to forage such as has been the case with the long winter. There is no treatment for CBPV but as they're no longer crowded, now foraging and I've pulled out the dead perhaps the colony will work through it if it hasn't already.

He had a quick look a the dead nucleus, I'd already pulled out most of the dead though there were a couple with their heads still in the cells. He concurred with my thought that the white mould visible on the comb had grown after the bees died too. There was still capped honey on the frames which the bees hadn't eaten having refused to break their cluster to get it. Whilst it certainly looks like they'ed starved he took the sample of dead bees from here that I'd frozen for testing in case there was anything more sinister at work.

Frozen bees

I'll check BeeBase at a later date to see if examination of the dead bees yielded anything unusual, but so far it seems there's nothing too major to worry about. No obvious signs of diseases, eggs being laid in both hives, pollen being brought in and capped honey still present in both hives, no varroa mites spotted. He felt Hive1 would build up rather well assuming the weather doesn't do something unexpected. Just need to keep an eye on the brood pattern in Hive2 and consider replacing her if she doesn't get her act together.

Bring Out Your Dead!

As winter progresses the bee colonies die back. Those dead bodies can accumulate on the hive floor  reducing the ventilation element of the wire mesh floor and even blocking the exit so living bees can't get out. I don't imagine it's a whole lot of fun living in a house where the floor is covered with rotting corpses and doors jammed shut by more of the dead. Normally the colony will remove dead bees from the colony carrying the dead away and dropping them away from the hive, when it's too cold for flying they can't do that and the tiny corpses accumulate. Last winter seemed happy to hang about and lasted well into spring which caused a few problems for the bees including meaning they were cooped up in the hive longer than expected so there's more dead on the floor than you'd expect in a normal year.

There's probably a few ways you could remove the dead bees but possibly the easiest, quickest and least disruptive is to whip out the corpse covered floor and pop in a new one. I gather that the original National Hive floors had a slope so water could run out which also gave the floors half turn symmetry so you could just pull out the floor turn it over and put it back under the hive, that's no longer the case with open mesh floors, it's easier to make horizontal ones and it's not like water pooling is going to be a problem.

New hive floor, flat packed like Swedish furniture.

Having seen the floor of Hive1 was deep with dead bees last week I ordered a new floor from Fragile Planet. Couldn't find them cheaper anywhere else, and it included a correx board to check the mite drop. Before assembling it I treated the wooden parts to a coat of shed and fence paint. Normally I wouldn't put that stuff on surfaces the bees will come into contact with as it probably has a pesticidal component to stop bugs gnawing on your sheds and fences but I don't want the floor to rot out from under the hive.

Treated for the weather

After a look at the instructions and viewing of the online video I knocked the new floor together. The floor it was replacing has a landing board -a sloping piece of wood the bees can land on before entering the hive. I didn't really have to time to add on to this floor as I wanted to get it under the bees asap.

Hive floor ready to go in

Landing boards seem to be more for the beekeeper than the bees anyway. It gives us a chance to see what's entering and leaving the hive, and whilst the bees will use it it may be something of a liability for them often being wet, providing purchase for mice and providing a place for bees to loiter whilst wasps pick them off. On the other hand some people suggest they make the bees' return easier to the hive after foraging.

After a quick peek under the crownboard I could see the bees were taking the fondant I'd  given them the previous week. Good news. Prising them apart with a hivetool I broke the propolis seal the bees had glued the brood box to the floor with and removed the brood box with the crownboard in place.

Deep in dead bees

As you can see it was pretty deep in dead bees. So deep they were actually blocking the exit stopping the remaining bees being leaving the hive at all. To keep the exits clear over winter beekeepers usually poke a stick or a wire into the entrance and waggle it about to create a clear space but with so many dead it didn't make a difference for this hive. I moved the corpse carpeted floor onto the ground the putting the new floor on the two beams supported by breeze blocks which I call a stand I popped the brood box back on, then replaced the insulation and roof. This time last year the bees were already active and filling supers, hopefully I'll be removing the insulation next week and the bees will begin building numbers as the weather warms.

I took the floor away from the hive and gathered the dead bees into a large metal bowl. Gave the chickens some but they weren't too impressed. Then I gave the propolis a quick scrape before lighting a butane torch and scorching all the wood and the mesh of the floor. Doesn't look as pleasant as it did now but my scorching was thorough so there shouldn't be any unpleasant germs or virii in there to infect the next set of bees it comes into contact with.

A thinner layer of dead bees in Hive2

That done I repeated the procedure with Hive2. A quick look under the crownboard showed me they're working the fondant. It had an almost complete carpet of bees on the floor but it was only one bee deep and hadn't blocked the entrance this time. This colony is larger than Hive1 at the moment and the bees were more active than I'd expected so a few puffs of the smoker were called for.

Floor, landing board, reduced entrance, and dead bees.

I placed the recently scorched floor from Hive1 on the stand and put Hive2 onto that taking away it's original floor. After removing the bees I scraped and scorched the last floor before putting it away till next spring when I'll probably repeat the whole process. In case you hadn't noticed beekeepers spend a lot of time cleaning things. The dead bees I've put in a sealed bin liner for now. A mate said she could add them to her compost heap. They might attract a few wasps but it's far better than popping them in the wheely bin. If the weather continues to improve I'll be starting proper hive inspections soon.

Hope there's no queen in this lot..

Spring Broke

Well on paper we're into Spring but nobody's told the weather so it's still freezing cold and looks set to stay that way for a while longer yet. After giving both hives a block of fondant each on Monday and finding the Nucleus colony dead I thought I'd take advantage of the warm weather (6 degrees C) to have a very quick look to see if they were actually eating the stuff. It turned out neither was.

Starting with Hive1, when I removed the untouched fondant I couldn't see any bees below it at all. So I cracked the seal and lifted the crownboard to see what was ging on in there. It was rather disappointing. I could see bees in four seams (the vertical gaps between the frames) but not a large number. I reckon there was probably enough bees to have filled 1 1/2 seams.

Small cluster in Hive1

I suspect this colony might not make it to summer. Looking between the seams I could see large numbers of dead bees on the hive floor. Removing them would mean a lot of disruption for this colony so what I've done is ordered a new floor from Fragile Planet. Once I've got it assembled I'll be whipping out the old one and popping the new one in place. Removing all the dead bees in one fell swoop with minimum disruption to what's left of the colony. Meanwhile to try and improve chances for the living bees I sliced up the fondant and put the thin slices directly on top of the frames -when it's cold they really won't go far to find food hence the nucleus colony having starved about an inch from food. I also pulled out the second to last frame which was empty and replaced it with one that had a little honey on it left over from when I'd been building up Hive2 numbers to make up the nucleus colony in summer.

Replacing the crownboard I blocked the central feeding hole, replaced the insulation and roof. Now the fondant is directly above the bees -where they're standing in the photo I'm sure they'll start feeding. The question is of course is too little too late? I won't know for a few weeks yet. Being a smaller colony the food will go further but if the colony gets too small they won't be able to maintain hive temperature and humidity which might lead to their demise. The obvious thought is to add a heatsource, however that would make the bees more active, so they'ed blaze through their food, noticing the increase in temperature they'ed start flying out to forage and die out in the cold dwindling the population even faster than before.

Hive2 hadn't touched their block of fondant either, but when I looked into the feedhole below the block I could see loads of bees and some flew out to greet me -or perhaps they flew out to tell me to put the damn lid back on, it's cold out. I removed the crownboard as before and was able to see it was quite a different story to Hive1. There was about 6 full seams worth of bees in there, active and moving about.

About half a colony in Hive2

As with Hive1 I sliced up the fondant and put it on the tops of the frames then replaced the crownboard. This colony is far stronger than the other but the larger numbers also means more chance of starving as there's a few thousand more tiny mouths to feed.

Looking at the strengths of the colonies during the September inspection I can see that Hive1 actually looked the stronger colony, it had more bees and it had more brood. In the lead up to winter both hives were treated in the same way and fed the same amount of food so I think it reasonable to have expected Hive1 to be the stronger coming out of winter. The change in strength may be down to genetics with Hive1 having been requeened with royalty from unknown and probably foreign parts although I'm pretty sure she's been superseded and her successor(s?) will have mated with local bees. I did notice the different placements of the clusters. Hive1 were positioned slightly to the right and towards the back of the colony. This is away from the hive entrance and both feed holes in the crownboard whereas the bees in Hive2 had positioned themselves between the entrance and the feed holes which I would assume is a draftier place to be.

After five years or so of winter losses dropping it appears, from the beekeeping forums, that there are heavy losses this year with some people having lost large numbers of colonies so far -think I saw one person had lost eleven. The previous winter (2011/2012) was very easy on the bees with larger numbers surviving for spring, unfortunately the rest of the year was poor so many bees starved later in the year. This year the winter weather seems to be lasting into what's meant to be spring so whilst the bees have used up their winter stores they can't forage yet. I'm hoping both hives will pull through but the way it's looking I may well find myself bidding on new bees this year.

The Queen is Dead

This morning I got another email from the National Bee Unit about a starvation risk to bees and advising people to give their colonies a quick inspection to check food stores despite the cold. It's late March now, about time the bees start foraging and their keepers start feeding colonies with sugar syrup to build up numbers after the winter die back. Unfortunately the weather's being a bit random and instead of warmer days we've had snow and ice so the bees can't forage and it's too cold for syrup. I gave all three colonies a block of fondant as winter food back in November. The fondant was still there in January suggesting they were still okay for stored food at the time.

Lifting the lid from the nucleus and removing the polystyrene insulation I could see the upside down plastic food box with fondant in it above the feed hole. I initially thought was probably a good sign, after all if the bees aren't eating the fondant they're probably still eating stored honey. I removed the fondant, had a look in the feed hole but couldn't see any movement, if someone opens a hole in your roof when it's 2 degrees outside chances are you're going to be investigating pretty sharpish so the fact they didn't didn't bode too well. I removed the crownboard completely, I could see bees but they weren't moving.

Dead bees

Looking in the photo you can see all the cells have been opened and are empty, this suggests starvation to me. There is some visible mould but I believe that will have grown after the bees had already died -or at least had died back to too few to control moisture level within the hive.

It's quite a dramatic change from when I opened the hive in January and it was stuffed with live bees and stores. It didn't take long to piece together what had happened. Back in January I'd noticed the cluster was towards the left of the hive. As winter wears on the bees die back the cluster shrinks. As the colony had shrunk they'ed wound up clustering in the seam between the two left most frames. The feed hole is above the seams either side of the central frame. When the bees are clustered they won't break the cluster to look for food so they'ed remained in their cluster and starved to death even though there was a block of fondant big enough to sustain them for weeks about an inch away. There was even some capped honey on the outer face of the leftmost frame which they hadn't opened either.

I gave a handful of dead bees to the chickens, I may give them more another day. As I'm certain the bees died from starvation not disease the comb can be cleaned up by the other hives later and reused when I start up a new colony in the summer. As my colonies are part of the EU Pilot Surveillance Programme I shall have to email the Regional Bee Inspector and let him know the colony died. I removed the insulation, and the sliding bottom board to better ventilate the hive dead hive. I also stuffed up the entrance to keep out wax moth, mice and anything else that might want to set up home in the nucleus, and moved onto Hive1.

Once again I could see the block of fondant sitting in it's transparent box above the crownboard. I removed this and three workers quickly came to see what was happening. This could mean there were only three bees left alive in the whole brood box or it could mean the colony is happily clustered and eating stores. It also meant the bees are able to reach the fondant. When bees are cold they move slowly, you can actually watch stray bees outside the hive grind to a halt as evening falls and temperature drops. The three I saw seemed to be moving about as normal though which suggested to me the colony are okay and still able to maintain heat in the hive. The fondant had only been nibbled a little but I decided to swap it for a fresh block anyway just in case it'd dried out or anything. Instead of removing it from it's foil packaging completely I left it on and cut out a rectangle to expose the icing. Hopefully that'll stop the stuff drying out too quickly. I popped the hive back together and moved onto Hive 2.

That was a different story again. The bees had taken about half a cm of fondant directly above the feed hole and when I removed the block to look below it I could see a large number of bees milling about. This suggests suggests two things: one there's a lot of living bees in there, and two they're low stores hence their actively taking the fondant.

Live bees, Hive2

As with Hive1 I swapped the fondant for a fresh block and closed up the hive. I then got my stethoscope out and had a listen to compare the two hives, they sounded pretty much the same to me so obviously Hive1 does have more considerably more than three bees in it.

Over the past few years winter losses have actually been dropping, although there was an increase in the long wet 2011/2012 winter. Here's the figures from the previous 5 winters, taken from the BBKA's winter loss figures published after the October 2011/March 2012 survey.

Percentage loss of total number of colonies in England overall and North East England

Winter

2007/2008

2008/2009

2009/2010

2010/2011

2011/2012

England

30.5%

18.7%

17.7%

13.6%

16.2

North East

43.0%

8.9%

16.9%

17.1%

15.9

Hopefully I'll have no further winter losses.

The Moon On A Stick

One seriously cold evening back in January I popped down to Newland Avenue for the opening of Luna. A pop up gallery upstairs at The Moon on a Stick. I'd not been there before but it's one of those shops with a number of independent traders operating within it and sells a huge variety of crafty things -if you want an embroidered plushy owl, essential oils, olde worlde sweets, Rob Ryan ceramics, driftwood framed mirrors or a guinea pig clock that's the place to go, or you could pop upstairs to Fairymoo's Doodling World for cards, jewelery and craft supplies or into Luna to buy a picture by my housemate. They also do workshops on all kinds or craft and holistic health subjects.

At this point you're probably wondering what any of this has to do with beekeeping. I'm getting there. As well as selling their own lines they hire out shelves on a weekly basis for other people to sell from. I figured that my honey and polish would fit quite well with the Moon on a Stick's current lines. So I've hired one and put my remaining honey and polish on it.

The heart isn't mine..

Along with a couple of cards showing prices, a quick explanation how to use polish and a picture of a bee I added a couple of extracted shallow combs too. When you go to a supermarket to buy honey it's all too easy to forget where it comes from. I'd already sold quite a lot of the honey and after retaining one for myself and one to granulate for set honey next year there was only 18 jars left. I did have a vague plan to relabel the polish tins as my original bee picture does look a little waspy but as I'm still out of colour ink I decided to run with the labels already on the tins.

Edit 16/4/2014 The Moon On A Stick was a pop up shop and has since popped to a new location across the road. Having sucessfully sold the honey crop I don't have any other of my hive products in there at the moment.