Consolidating Honey

Having had a dry Spring and a wet Summer honey harvests across the UK are down by a huge percentage, the figure I've seen bandied about is 60%, and quite a few people in the forums are reporting no harvest at all. The season should be pretty much over by now except for any migratory beekeepers moving their bees to the moors for heather honey. However the temperature has been about 23 degrees celcius in Hull and the bees have been flying so what's actually going on is anybody's guess. There is a temptation to leave the supers (the parts of hives honey to be harvested is stored in) on the hives to let the bees carry on adding to them whilst the weather lasts but there's two reasons not to. One is after removing the honey crop the bees need time to stock up their own stores for the winter, be it from nectar or syrup they'll still need time to dehydrate it. The other reason is that ivy flowers late and we really don't want ivy honey, it crystalises in the honeycomb making it hard to remove and it smells pretty bad too.

Nine frames in a shallow Super, July 2012

In the brood box where the queen lives and lays her eggs beekeepers want as many cells as possible so the more eggs can be laid and more bees reared. In a Commercial like mine there are 11 frames giving 22 surfaces (one each side y'see) of cells to lay in. In a super we want more honey and less wax. Whilst a National Super can hold 11 frames it's more normal to use 10, 9 or even 8 frames instead. The bees then draw out the cell walls making them deeper so they store more honey in them with less space given over to vertical bee space, foundation and cappings. Unless you have frames already drawn out to the desired width it's normal to start with 11 frames per super and then remove excess frames as the middle ones get drawn out to fill the space in the box, otherwise there's too much dead air in there which the bees need to keep warm.The bees generaly draw out the frames in the middle first as the bees cluster in the centre of the brood box below and the warm air rising makes wax easier to work.

Almost fully capped frame of honey

A lot of people out there seem to think bee hives are always full of nice ready to eat honey, however that's not the case the only place I know of with ripe ready to eat honey all year round is a supermarket and if you buy the cheap stuff it's probably cut with syrup anyway but I digress... The honey needs to be ripened by the bees reducing it's water content over time, if it's not ripe then once you've extracted it the water content will be too high and it'll ferment. It's easy to tell when honey is ripe as the bees will seal the cells of ripe honey with wax. The capping over honey is white and smooth, unlike the thin brown cappings over deveoloping bees. Once a frame has 75% of it's cells capped the honey in it can be harvested. You can remove individual frames if you like but it's easier to just wait till the whole super is 75% or more capped and then remove the whole lot.

I had actually been expecting a huge honey crop this year as the mild winter meant more bees survived the winter than expected so the colonies were more populous in Spring than usual. More workforce equals more work right? Unfortunately after a winter that was a blessing the Spring and Summer were a mixed up meteorological mess and plants weren't flowering at the expected times and weren't producing enough nectar to suport our huge spring colonies, then the Summer rain meant bees couldn't go out foraging anyway. After starting the season smiling beekeepers were suddenly having to emergency feed their colonies to stop them starving ..and I gather quite a few did starve, it was a significant enough problem to prompt  reporting in the mainstream media as well as prompting DEFRA to issue starvation warnings. I also managed to lose a prime swarm from Hive2 which was unfortunate and temporarily reduced their workforce. Going by what I'm seeing reported in other parts of the country Hull seems to have done better over the summer weatherwise than other parts of the UK and I was able to to put two supers on both hives. There were a couple of false starts when I had to remove the supers and feed the bees again but eventually the season started moving forwards.

Hive1 has been happily filling up 2 supers both of which I'm planning to remove very soon, probably this weekend. Hive2 however managed to nearly fill one super but the other is only about 20% full and I really don't see the bees being able to comlete it in time for harvesting before winter preparations or the arrival of ivy nectar. So I hatched a simple plan to consolidate the honey from the nearly empty super with that of the almost full one -or into the brood box if the other super gets fully capped. At the top of the hive under the roof is another lid, the crownboard. The crownboard has a few holes in it for feeding and a few other things. When not being fed it's common to close the holes up, to the bees if you leave the feeding holes open just enough for them to get through they will consider anything above the crownboard to be outside the hive, and any honey outside the hive is fair game as far as they're conerned. So I moved the nearly empty super above the crownboard and hopefully as I'm typing this the bees of Hive2 are busily robbing the honey it contained and storing it in the Super I'll be harvesting, failing that they should be storing it in the brood box for themselves to use over Winter.

Hive2 with a crownboard between the two supers

The bees propensity (good word that, think I'll try to use it more) for stealing honey from anything above the crownboard is actually quite useful for beekeepers. After extracting honey with a spinner the beekeeper is left with frames of honey comb which have honey residue still stuck to the wax, these can be stored 'wet' but there's always the change the honey will attract pests so many prefer to store them 'dry' with this removed. The simplest way to dry your wet frames is to pop them back into your hives above the crownboard and let the bees removed every last drop for you.

Pearson Park Wildlife Garden

I've mentioned the Pearson Park Wildlife Garden previously in this blog. It continues to be a work in progress and still has very little by way of web presence -very little by way of any publicity at all really I suspect if I didn't pass the entrance on an occassional run I wouldn't've noticed it existed myself.

Welcome to the Just Outside the South Corner of Pearson Park, Wildlife Garden

The Yorkshire Wildlife Trust actually has two web pages for it here and here neither of which really inspire a visit unfortunately. There's also a Facebook Page which has various green links pictures and requests for volunteers, created in September 2011 it has 136 likes at the time of writing so evidently it's not really being pushed at the moment. Oh there's also some pretty good pictures of the denizens of the garden (and the park) on the Wild at Hull blog.

Free herbs for all!

One reason to visit the garden is to pick up some free herbs. They have an impressive herb garden you can pop to and snip a little of whatever you need from. I didn't see much by way of signage though so you'll have to be able to recognise what you want.

There's things wriggling in that water

The project also has a pond which is quite large, albeit very shallow. I'm not entirely sure what uses the pond but I think I've seen dragonflies in the area and there's definitely damselflies. I'd assume there's a frog population too and I've been told there's newts in the main pond in the park so I'd expect there to be a few in here too.

A pile of wood. Things sleep in it. Not just rats. Hopefully.

There's various piles of stuff for wildlife to sleep/nest or hibernate in ranging from woodpiles to pallets of various bits of stuff like twigs, bamboo canes, paper, sand and other stuff which whilst about as pleasing to the eye as a quick poke with a pencil should be useful for the wildlife. There's also some bundles of tied twigs and sticks which probably have some practical purpose other than giving the place a slightly sinister Blair Witch feel. There's also seating areas, bird baths, bird tables, bird boxes, bat boxes and a vegetable plot tucked out of the way. A little fenced off area with a tended lawn houses a rain guage and a Stevenson Screen which I would assume houses some temperature and humidity measuring kit. I think the place would be better off losing that really and having a bit more nature space but it's probably got some educational purpose or something.

By now you're probably thinking "This is another WTF about the bees posts.." well I was getting to that. Slowly. I've previously mentioned that the wildlife garden acquired a colony of Carniolans in a WBC hive in 2010. Whilst these originally slavik bees are particularly good at overwintering they perished in the freakishly long and snowy 2010/2011 winter. As a breed they actually have quite a reputation for swarming so they're possibly not the best choice for a city apiary. However they soon got some more bees, I don't know what type but when I encoutered a girl there emptying dead bees from the WBC she'd said they were hoping to catch a local swarm so probably buckfasts or some mongrel derivative. This year they've made it through very easy winter and also rather difficult sprin.

WBC, National and Topbar Hives

For reasons unknown to me they seem keen to mix it up a little in their apiary.  After getting some more bees into their WBC hive (the one on the left with the slanty sides and sloping roof) they added a kenyan top bar hive (the dark brown tabley looking one on the right) and this year's new addition is a National Hive (middle one like a tin topped tea chest). The National is meant to be something of a standard hive in England at present. It uses frames interchangeable with the WBC and I'd guess it was added to house an artificial swarm from the WBC, although I could be wrong -haven't actually asked anyone afterall. The kenyan top bar hive (actuall invented in the UK and not Kenya, but popular there) seems to have been turned and the entrance moved. When I looked at it in the winter it had the entrance at one end facing forwards like the WBC but now the entrance is in the middle of the side.

Drone Fly, declined to look at the camera.

Ther herb garden seemed popular with various polinators such as the drone fly above, a range of bumble bees, the park's resident honey bees, hover flies and just to add a little confusion for any budding entymologists and photographers hoverflies pretending to be bees. Given the distance I've no doubt my own bees forage here too and there's a pretty good chance my Queens have mated with drones from these hives.

Some kind of Bumble Bee, bumbling. As they do.

Honey Bee, working hard in the herb garden.

A bee happily working a red flower, except she thinks it's black
because bees can't see red. So there.

Sacbrood

When inspecting the hives the week before last I found some unusual looking larvae which I eventually identified as having a viral infection called Sacbrood. It's called that because basically it turns the larvae (or brood) into sacs of fluid

Healthy larva look like fat little white "c" shapes stuck to the vertical back wall of their cells. The most obvious sign larvae aren't healthy during a cursory inspection is that they're no longer stuck to the cell back wall but have fallen to the cell floor. You see this with Chalkbrood, European Foulbrood and no doubt a few other brood virii too.

The segmentation of their bodies should clearly visible in a way best described as looking like the Michelin man -in fact taking that a little further if you think of a healthy larvae as looking like the Michelin Man then think of the unhealthy larvae as looking like Ghostbuster's Mr Stay Puft.

Healthy Larvae

As well as losing definition larvae with sacbrood change shape with the head section staying small and raising up slightly, then with time the dead larvae darkens. In the UK these infected larvae are usually  described as being "Chinese slipper shaped" although to be fair I've not seen any Chinese slippers or shoes looking like diseased dead insect larvae and I very much doubt chinese beekeepers ever describe the condition as "my slipper shaped". I think the infected larvae look more like little crossiants really.

Larvae with Sacbrood

There is no cure for Sacbrood, but it's currently not thought to be a particularly major virus. Whilst it kills a few brood the general consensus is that a healthy colony should be able to weather it and it often disappears in spring anyway. The virus is actually carried by nurse bees who then transmit it to the larvae they're feeding. If it does become widespread enough to be a threat to the colony the only 'treament' advised is requeening the colony with a couple of weeks between removing the old Queen and adding the new one. There doesn't seem to be much real information available on why this works but it may be that in the time between losing the old queen and the new Queen starting to lay the virus is unable to infect new larvae and may die out.

As bees age their duties actually change and my theory is that in the interim between the old and new Queens the infected nurse bees are unable to pass the virus to new larvae and graduate to become forager bees by the time the new Queen's eggs are hatching. As they're then not feeding brood any more if they do still carry the virus they don't get to transmit it to larvae anymore. It's possibly a little simplistic but seems to fit with the requeening idea.

A couple more larvae with Sacbrood

As you can see from the images it's only affecting a small number of larvae at present, these are located in two small patches on frames 7 and 9 of Hive2. When I checked the hive again a week later I could see there was still some larvae with sacbrood present but they were still in the same patches of the same frames. This leads me to wonder if nurse bees work a specific area of brood rather than wandering all over the hive feeding all brood they encounter. If they do work in some sort of brownian motion which is pretty much what I thought they did then I'd expect to see the infected larvae spread evenly through the hive rather than concentrated in two specific patches.

The worker bees are supposed to remove and dispose of the infected brood -by dispose I mean they drag the ill larvae from their cells and throw them out. I may give them a little help with some tweezers next inspection and pull a few out myself. It's thought that Sacbrood is normally present in colonies but in levels so low it's often not noticed. Reasons it can increase are if the balance of the hive shifts for example if the bees are spread too thin withing the hive and I suspect that may indeed be the case in Hive2. They're working on 2 supers at present which does mean less bees available to work in the brood box, however the Queen is still laying like crazy so bee numbers are still increasing. I'm currently assuming as numbers increase the bees will be better able to manage the sacbrood and when I remove the supers the population in the brood box will increase substantially anyway.

Time will tell, and if need be I do have a spare Queen living in the nucleus.

BBKA Basic Assessment

Barring the odd martial arts contest over the past few years my Sunday mornings have been spent sleeping in after making the most of a Saturday night. This Sunday after an evening of pubbing, clubbing and a night of not really enough sleep I awoke to the noise of my phone bleeping an alarm which was swiftly followed by my cat jumping on the bed to investigate this rare Sunday morning occurance. Pretty as she is she's a bit prone to mood swings which regularly result in someone bleeding (me, guests, vets, passers by, housemates, basically anyone she can reach..) so her arrival was an extra incentive to get up despite my banging head and a hankering for sleep.

Shortly afterwards with a hangover and a Ramones CD for company I set off for a village out near Doncaster where I was going to take the BBKA Basic Assessment. It's basically a practical and oral examination of beekeeping skills and knowledge. The syllabus for the assessment is pretty huge but it's all stuff anyone who's successfully kept bees for a year should know really. It covers everything from hive hardware, bee life cycle, behaviour and diseases to honey extraction and labelling. You can take the assessment after you've kept bees for at least 12 months. You can keep bees all your life and never actually take it but it does give you a little credibility as a beekeeper and is often a condition to be met if you ever want to keep bees on an allotment (assuming you're lucky enough to have an allotment association who will actually let you). I chose to do it after an email from the Beverley Beekeepers Association mentioned that time was running out for people wanting to take it. After a phone call, a few emails and a cheque for fifteen quid -yep an actual cheque, an olde worlde money transfer! I was down to go meet an assessor at 11am on the Sunday. Two other people would be doing the assessment at the same time. After a brief email conversation with the assessor he kindly lent me a bee suit to use for the occasion. I don't use one at home opting for either a cheap thin smock from fleabay or a hood and veil over a fleece and some old jeans. There are pros and cons to using a bee suit, a major pro is there's less chance of bees getting into it or stinging you through it as it goes over your clothing, a major con is they cost about £170 and if you go for a white one you look like your playing astronauts in your back garden. Despite having discovered fairly early on that bees are able to sting through denim and that skinny jeans means there's enough of a gap for a bee to drop into your welly I've held off buying one so far.

Guided by voices, well the voice of my satnav, I reached the village. Having found the street I had a little trouble finding the house till I spotted the Honey For Sale sign and an old WBC hive in the garden. Once the other two candidates arrived, one from Bradford and one from somewhere in the countryside we got back into our vehicles and followed the assessor to his apiary. He had 14 hives tucked away in a very hidden location invisible from the road -it's a good idea to have your apiary hidden these days because there are people out there who'll happily steal your bees, equipment and honey. The assessor had 8 different assessments and we picked them at random without knowing what was on each.

We did the assessment one at a time so I waited in the car till it was my turn. Whilst Joey Ramone sang Bonzo Goes to Bitburg I was gemming up on the life cycles of the three bee castes. At one point I looked out of the window and saw the biggest dragonfly I've ever seen. According to a few online resources the biggest dragonflies we have are 80mm long but I'm sure this thing's long green body exceeded that -perhaps it was particularly large owing to a diet of my assessor's honeybees.

When it was my turn to do the practical portion I put my phone onto silent and turned off vibrate -an urgent buzzing sensation from your pocket isn't really what you need when you have an open hive in front of you, I popped on the borrowed suit, my wellies and some latex gloves then had to light my smoker. The assessor gave me some hessian for this, I've never used that before but after a false start it lit and smoked as expected. We had a short walk from our vehicles to the bees and when we got there I was surprised to find the whole place carpeted. OK it was a slightly muddy collection of carpet pieces but it was an effective weed barrier which I'm guessing was probably it's purpose.

Having lit my smoker the next part of the assessment was to identify the hive parts. Starting from the ground up I pointed out the stand, hive floor with small landing board, reduced entrance, brood box, queen excluder, super, roof and added that there was probably a crown board under the roof. The next thing to do was open the hive and see what was in the brood box -spoiler alert: it was bees. After a little smoke near the entrance and the roof I removed the roof and laid it on the floor. Sure enough there was a crown board on the super. We weren't going into the super tho so I removed that and put it on the inverted roof. This was a National hive which has a brood box internally smaller than my own Commercial which meant the frames were smaller and lighter than I'm used to working with. The normal way to examine a frame of bees is to lift it by the lugs at either end and manipulate it by these, however a commercial has very short lugs making this a bit impractical so I tend to use a tool called a frame grip to manipulate them. This was actually the first time I did a manipulation without the grip since attending the course in 2010.

I went to remove the first frame opting, as I always do, for the one furthest from me which as I was standing at the back of the hive was the one nearest the entrance. However the assessor stopped me and said that whilst there was nothing wrong with doing that it was actually easier to start from the back of the hive as the older flying bees returning to the hive would initially go onto those first few frames and if they weren't there would be more likely to start buzzing about and it was the older bees who'd be more aggressive. So I started at the back of the hive instead. The first thing I noticed was these bees were far better behaved than mine. The assessor bred his own queens and seems to have done a pretty good job of getting very placid bees.

Working through the hive whilst answering questions I pointed out workers, capped brood, uncapped brood, pollen, uncapped honey, capped honey and something looking a little like a grain of cat litter. This was actually chalk brood, a virus that affects uncapped brood effectively mummifying them. I didn't see the queen but that wasn't a surprise, I also had trouble finding any eggs, think I managed to see two in the whole hive. The assessor said he reckoned the queen would be slowing down laying towards the end of the season -although having just checked my colonies all three still have plenty of new eggs, perhaps it's down to environmental differences after all mine are fairly protected from wind and in a city which will be slightly warmer than the out apiary in the countryside.

After closing up the hive we drove back to the assessors house for the next two parts of the assessment, assembling a frame and the question and answer session. A couple of weeks ago I'd emptied my burnt out smoker fuel into a bucket to discover five minutes later it'd re ignited and melted my bucket (note to self: buy a metal bucket) so when we got to his house I decided not to leave the smoker in the car as I had visions of it relighting and returning to find my vehicle a charred molten mess. I pulled the smoker out and left it out of sight on the tarmac of the road where it couldn't do too much damage.

I was first to assemble a frame, basically knocking five bits of wood, a sheet of wax and 11 gimp pins together. Being a hot day the foundation was quite soft which didn't really help but I managed to put a serviceable frame together. The last questions were mainly about diseases, viruses and other pests particularly American Foulbrood and European Foulbrood both of which if found a beekeeper is required by law to notify the local bee inspector about. If your hive is found to have AFB the bees and boxes need destroying by fire to stop it affecting other colonies, if your hive has EFB it may be treatable in the early stages - any beekeepers in a local association will have insurance against this. Other things we legally have to contact the local Bee Inspector about are the discovery Small Hive Beetle and Tropilaelaps mites -at present it's believed neither are in the UK but they'll arrive at some point.

I won't get the assessment result for about 6 weeks so don't really know if I've passed or not yet but the assessor said he didn't see that any of us had had any problems with it so fingers crossed. I then drove the fifty odd miles back home with my car windows open because the smell of a recently used smoker isn't something you want to be sharing a car with, especially if you're feelig a little fragile from a heavy night out.

It was actually a fairly useful experience in that as well as being tested we got to discuss things which meant a learning opportunity. The assessor said he didn't usually use smoke on his bees but kept it handy in case it was needed. When I did my hive inspections today I used very smoke at all and began my inspection from the back and found all three colonies far easier to work with than they usually were so it was worth doing just for that really :)

4/8/2012 Edit: I passed. Found out a lot earlier than expected. Haven't told the bees yet but they should be relieved to hear I apparently know what I'm doing.

Encouraging Solitary Bees

This weekend there was a food festival in Hull. I eat food, so does prettymuch everyone I know, so I went along with a couple of friends for a rather fine burger, a pint of Blonde and a little Pimms complete with cucumber. Popping into Wilkinson's on the way home I spotted some insect boxes. They're actually extremely easy things to make yourself and I have a couple kicking about somewhere in the garden. These were fairly aesthetically pleasing tho so I threw caution to the wind, dashed the expense and purchased a Bee & Ladybird Box. Basically it's a few short hollow bamboo canes and a block of wood with smalled holes drilled in it. The hollow canes are for various solitary bees to nest in, and the holes are for ladybirds. Ladybirds are carnivorous so they should be good for the garden -barring a little home made pepper spray if the aphids are getting out of hand I generally let nature to control the pests for me rather than throwing chemicals all over my garden.

Hostel for solitary bees and ladybirds

It's made from some kind of softwood so I decided to waterproof the roof and back of the box with a little bitumen paint. Then as per the brief instructions found a location for it on a south facing wall. It's actually quite near the hives. I was a little apprehensive abut using a hammer drill so close to the bees but it turned out they weren't bothered by it -although they later took exception to the new lawn mower I've recently acquired and planted a sting in the sleeve of my Zombie Ghost Train tshirt. Grr.. Anyway will it be used or won't it? Time will tell.

Queens and Queen Cups

Well the weather is being a little wierd at present, cold and rainy one day then hot and sunny the next. I'm not too keen on the rainy days but the frogs seem to be enjoying them. On the hot days the bees can be seen sallying forth from the hives as they make the most of the weather and the frogs are cool off in the pond under waterlilly leaves.

I recently lost a swarm from Hive2 which was a bit of a blow and after a few weeks with no new eggs being laid I found egg laying had been resumed which told me there was a successfully mated Queen living in there. Last week I was lucky enough to spot her royal madge ambling along on the honey comb. She wasn't too shy so I took a couple of cameraphone shots. She still doesn't look that different to the other tens of thousands of bees which is why beekeepers often put a splot of paint on her back to make her easier to spot.

Spot the Queen.

She's easier to see in this one.

Something beekeepers check for during inspections are whether or not the bees are making new queens. If the bees make a new queen they may swarm and we don't want that to happen for two main reasons: it can scare the crap out of people living nearby and it costs a sizeable chunk of the workforce. n the otherhand if you have an apiary somewhere away from people and a few bait hives dotted about at a decent height you could use swarming as a way to increase your bee stocks. In the city it's definitely something to be avoided.. so there's a few things to look out for during inspections that tell us when the hive is getting swarmy..

During the course of their normal activity the bees build what is called a Queen Cup or Play Cup. This is a round structure protruding from the honeycomb looking a lot like the cup of an acorn -or cupule for any arborists reading this. During the inspections if I see these I have a look inside to make sure they're empty and then break them with a poke from the hive tool, once broken the bees will sort out the comb and hopefully return it to normal.

Queen Cups

As the Queen wanders about laying eggs she'll occassionally reaches a queen cup and lay an egg in it. If the bees aren't wanting to make a new Queen at that point they'll just pull the egg out, however if they do want a Queen they'll start flooding the cup with Royal Jelly.

Royal Jelly is a substance secreted from glands on the honey bee's hypopharynx. I have no idea how royal jelly is farmed but I'm told it's used in pricey skin care products based on the theory that it prevents ageing -of course it's never actually been proven to do that but some people will believe pretty much anything -are you gullible? Send me £10 and find out! I suspect if people knew it was actually gunk secreted from an insect's head they might be less willing to rub it into their skin. I also think anyone with half a brain would be a little skeptical about the anti ageing properties of a substance made by creatures that only lives about 6 weeks. If you do want to stop your skin from aging my suggestion would be to stop slathering insect baby food on your face and drink some water instead. Ground breaking eh?

When the bees have decided to raise a Queen and added Royal Jelly the larvae hatches and has a bit of a feast ahead of it whilst the workers add wax to the cup turning it into a full sized Queen Cell. There's two kinds of Queen Cell, Supercedure Queen Cells and Swarm Queen Cells. A Supercedure cell is created about half way up the honeycomb and the bees make these when they decide to replace the existing queen. She might be getting a little old, not laying enough eggs, not producing enough Queen Substance or perhaps she's eightysix years old and people are starting to wonder if she's ever going to let someone else have a go.  The workers make a few Supercedure Cells and the strongest Queen should hatch first slaughtering the others before they've seen light of day. For that purpose the queen bee has a sting which can be used repeatedly unlike the workers. She'll them head up the colony, sometimes alongside the existing Queen.

Sometimes the bees will decide the Queen about to hatch first isn't the one they want and will reseal the end of the cell as she's trying to cut her way out so a preferred Queen can hatch out and take over. Swarm Queen Cells are generally made at the bottom of the comb and when your bees are making these it means they're preparing to swarm. They'll cut the existing Queen's food intake so she loses weight so she can fly again and at some point possibly before the replacement has hatched she'll fly away with a large contingent of  bees leaving the depleted hive queenless till a swarm Queen hatches and gets mated to replace her.

There's actually a third kind of Queen Cell, but we don't like to see those very often as it generally means someone (as in the beekeeper) has messed up (as in killed the queen). The bees make Emergency Queens when they need a new Queen in a hurry. When making supercedure and swarm queens the bees can take a while to evaluate and choose the best eggs for the job, when it comes to emergency cells they don't have the luxury of time and choose the eggs less carefully sometimes even selecting a young grub to turn into a Queen. It's generally held that a Queen from an emergency cell probably won't be of the same quality as a more conventionally selected queen.

As an addendum the the previous post about visitors to the hive here's another visitor I found a few weeks ago. I'm not sure if it'd been in the hive or not but when I noticed it it was sat on a piece of brace comb I'd removed and was very reluctant to vacate it. I believe it's an adult Birch Shieldbug (Elasmostethus Interstinctus).

Birch Shieldbug sitting on bracecomb.

More Visitors to the Hive

Recently I've been seeing a few more creatures around the hive. Honey Bees being a part of our ecology naturally interact with other flora an fauna. Whilst they get pollen and nectar from various plants they also tend to get eaten by a lot of things and drop various edible bits along the way.

Common Carder Bee

Previously I found some Common Carder Bees had set up colonies in the ground below the nuc. Unfortunately not long after posting about them and how I was hoping to watch them over the summer it rained and they seem to have died off :(

This evening I found this large black bumble bee investigating the ground below the hives. Annoyingly it refused to keep still to oblige me with a photograph so 3 seconds of video will have to suffice. There's quite a few species of bumble bee and I've no idea which this one was. It seemed to be examining the ground below the hives and had a bit of a buzz against the mesh floors but didn't enter the hives -I doubt the guards would have let it in if it'd tried anyway. I suspect the Common Carders and this Bumble Bee were attracted by the scent of the hive with it's wax comb, developing brood and the queen's pheromones wafting about.

"I wasn't eating your bees, honest guv."

A few years ago I made a pond and once it was stable I introduced some Common Frog tadpoles with a view to them controlling slugs which were over running the garden. It seems to have worked and having added a second pond and more spawn and tadpoles from other sources to deepen the gene pool the frogs are still here 6 years later.

On his(?) way to chomp on some eusocial insects.

Recently I noticed a couple of them sitting about below the nucleus, I haven't seen one catching bees yet but they certainly do eat them. It's be quite handy if they ate the dead bees below the hives but unfortunately they only eat moving things, offer them as many dead bees as you like and they'll sit waitng for a live one to fly over. I gather toads will eat dead bees from the ground though so perhaps I should look into acquiring some of those. Note: Anyone wanting to do something similar should bear in mind that in the UK it's actually illegal to remove frogspawn (and no doubt toad eggs) from natural habititats so if you want to introduce some to your own pond and there's no chance of them getting there naturally you need to find an obliging pond owner who'll help you out.

Red Eyed Damsel Fly on a Water Soldier,
also a discarded nymph skin to the right.

Other pond life that eats bees are the Damsel Flies. Here's a photo of a recently emerged one I took last summer. I'm fairly certain this one's a male Red Eyed Damsel Fly, mainly on the strength of it's size although the red eyes are a bit of a giveaway too. I've not seen any dragon flies round my own ponds but if there are any they'll be happy to nosh on a honey bee too.

It's not just the ponds that provide plenty of predators for my poor bees. I've mentioned in a previous post that I'm sure it's not just a coincidence that the birdbox which remained empty for years became occupied by Blue Tits in my second season of beekeeping.

I've recently been finding spider threads near the hives where an industrious spider with an eye for opportunity must've thought it was going to hit paydirt. Well it might've if I didn't keep brushing them away. On  my last inspection I found a spider in the roof.

"Thought I'd have a bee for tea."

No idea what kind of spider it is, but it's legspan was about 2 inches and it lacks the white cross shape on it's back that would identify it as a Garden Spider.

This little guy was about 4mm big.

Recently I found a couple of small insects with long antenna wandering about on the bottom board. There's plenty to eat on there such as dropped nectar, pollen, sugar sypup, wax, bits of bees, dropped varroa and general detritus. I also sometimes see some really small pinkish spider mites running about on the board. In nature bee colonies are meant to live in cavities in trees and no doubt they'ed share their home with other things like woodlice too.

There's also of course the varroa who attach themselves to bees and suck out haemolymph, as well as these there's a few other mite types that live on or in the bees too, a common one being Tropilaelaps although I've not yet noticed any myself.. I'm currently treating the nucleus for Varroa using Apilife Var -a natural product that kills varroa, dissolves plastic and gets bees pretty angry, so it's not unusual for me to find dead varroa under there at the moment. It's recently been discovered -or more likely rediscovered  or remembered that pseudoscorpions predate the varroa mite and there are currently studies going on into whether or not they can be used as a biological control within hives.

Other creatures that interact with honey bees but so far haven't been a problem for me include mice (hence the need for winter mouseguards), badgers, woodpeckers, slugs and wax moth.

In the UK our bears were long ago hunted to extinction along with boars and wolves -I can't help wondering what the third world makes of that when we're lecturing to them about their elephants and rhinos... So whilst bears would rob hives, it's very unlikely your bees will ever even see one unless your apiary is next to a zoo. There is a popular belief that bees have an inherent dislike of bear shaped things which some argue effect the choice of colour a beekeeper ought to wear whilst working their hives. For example it's often suggested that dark or black clothing and in particular gloves may trigger an angry response from a colony mistaking  the dark beekeeper for bear, albeit a very skinny (hungry?) one. For that reason a lot of beekeepers wear lighter coloured or white protective kit. Any goths out there attracted to the idea of a hobby that involves being surrounded by smoke might want to bear that in mind, although I suspect the sunlight and heavy lifting may put them off anyway. Of course some people think that's nonsense and choose their wardrobe with impunity. I tend to wear black jeans and a green smock when working my hives. Having used both black and yellow rubber gloves and had bees sting through both my own theory is that bees simply don't like people riffling through their hives and don't really care what colour you're wearing for the occassion.