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.

A lecture and some paperwork

This month I went to a Beverley Beekeeper's Association meeting. Local association meetings are actually useful resources for new beekeepers wanting to improve their knowledgebase, there's free lectures on bee related topics and a library of books and DVDs for members to borrow. You can also meet other beekeepers, if you like, and even ask them stuff if you want to.

I was a little late tho. The meetings used to be at Woodmansey Village Hall but now they're at Molescroft Pavillion. Lacking in signage and set at 90 degrees from the road and with the car park entrance apparently lost in a confusing little estate of cul-de-sacs it's not an easy place to find. For anyone trying to find the place Woodhall Way, Beverley, is an "L" shaped street with the Pavillion is just inside the right angle next to a kids play area. Actually I've just noticed the Beverley Beekeepers website is back online and has a map showing you exactly where the place is with a big orange dot, so no excuses of not being able to find the place again.

I wandered in about a half hour after the allotted start time catching the end of a raffle. Lucky for me the chap doing the lecture, a Regional Bee Inspector from the York area, had initially gone to the Association's old site delaying him long enough for me to find the place. The audience were generally older than myself. To be honest the stereotype of beekeeper's being older people does have some truth to it which is quite strange when you consider that it's a pursuit that involves working outside, lots of heavy lifting, keen visual observation and a lot of online resources. I guess today's kids are all too busy sitting about indoors courting obesity. Actually now I think about it I went running with my lightly built nineteen year old housemate and was surprised to find she couldn't keep up with me. I'm not even that good a runner. 8-/ Ah well a health timebomb waiting to happen for the nation there then.

Anyway back to the meeting. The lecture was called "Making A Good Start" and was all about treating bee pests such as the ubiquitous varroa mite, still the biggest threat to honeybees, a number of diseases and virii, and woodpeckers.

Regarding varroa thymol based treatments, such as Api Life Var which I use, can be 90-99% effective, I hadn't realised it was actually that good. Organic acids like Oxalyic Acid I applied last month are a good option too but only when the hive has no brood. Normally about 85% of the varroa mites in a hive will be tucked up safe and sound with the bee larvae they're feeding on so treatments like organic acids and dusting with icing sugar only affect the mites left they come into contact with which if there's brood is about 15%. Dusting with icing sugar only affects about 10% of the mites it comes into contact with so if there's a normal level of brood it only affects about 1.5% of the mites in the colony -unless of course there's no brood such as with a recently collected swarm, and it can be repeated a nuber of times

There's other biotechnical measure too such as  trapping mites but to me that looks a little labour intensive and means losing three weeks worth of eggs laid. There's a method I currently use which is sacrificial drone brood. Basically you encourage the bees to make drone comb, the queen then lays eggs in it. Drone cells and larvae being bigger the mites find them 10 to 12 times more attractive than worker cells and go into them. Once sealed the beekeeper comes along and cuts away the drone brood removing all the varroa mites in it. The weakness to that is there will be drone brood elsewhere in the hive containing some varroa and it leaves the 15% still on the bees -hence the need to use a number of techniques rather than just the one. Of course if you forget to cut out the drone comb you'll be boosting the number of mites in your colony significantly. Another method covered is the 'shook swarm' in which you shake your whole colony into another brood both with new frames and destroy the old comb and brood complete with mites -this should remove that 85% of mites sealed in the brood. However it does mean a high turnover of foundation and once again losing a lot of brood. For now I'll stick with the thymol, acid and open mesh floor and sacrificial drones.

There was some talk about diseases, complete with photos of infected brood and healthy brood too. The chap also briefly discussed woodpeckers. Not a problem for me at present but in a rural area they can devastate hives. To deter them beekeepers apply chicken wire to the outside of the hives. I'd always thought  this would mean making a sort of jacket around the hive stopping the bird being physically able to reach the wood but apparently if it's flush to the wood it still works as the woodpeckers don't like to land on it.

After the lecture there was an explanation of DEFRA's current open consultation Improving honey bee heath. Anyone involved or interested in bees, bee products, pollination or whatever can respond to the consultation. To read it just follow the link, if you want to respond the closing date is 9th March 2013.

Whilst discussing the consultation someone asked about bumble bees and solitary bees. I had no idea that green house fruit and veg growers regularly import foreign bumblebees to pollinate their crops. Apparently there's very little control over this but they are mean to destroy the imported bumble bee nests at the end of each season as a measure to stop them escaping into the wild and displacing our existing bumble bees and releasing exotic pests into the wild. The inspector said that one step often taken by foreign bumble bee exporters is to remove the queen and sell bumble bee colonies queenless to ensure they can't establish themselves over here. At present bumble and solitary bees which are also managed for use as pollinators don't fall within the remit of the same body as honeybees.

At the end of the meeting I was given my certificate for the BBKA Basic Assessment which I'd taken in the Summer. It's a rather attractive green print on white paper affair with an embossed gold bit in the bottom right. There's a lot going on in the green print with images of bees, olde worlde beehives, plants -probably plants we use and  bees pollinate, in the top there's the date the association was instiuted, 1874, and in the lower middle a union jack with an ancient looking beehive in the middle. To be honest it puts my various academic certificates to shame.

Examining Boards could learn from this.

Displayed on it is the name of the person who passed and two signatures from the BBKA as well as the beekeeper's town and date passed. I don't think I'd like some numpty to stick a scan of my signature on the internet so using the miracle of computing technology and software that was groundbreaking way back in the mid nineties, I've obscured the names and signatures but they're there on the original, honest. There was also a BBKA patch to go onto my beesuit. I probably shan't be using that because my sewing skills are a little rudimentary to put it mildly, that and I don't have a bee suit yet.

Retains it's colour in washes of 60 degrees Celcius!

Something I was also surprised to learn was that only about 50% of beekeepers in the country are actually in the BBKA. That's a little worrying given that one role of the associations is to promote standards in beekeeping. Whilst I don't currently make the most of the association's resources, lectures, library and whatnot I still feel it's worth being in the loop with the associations emails and the BBKA newsletter and I'd suggest it to anyone else too.

Schrodinger's Bees

Winter is a period when beekeepers don't do a huge amount of hands on beekeeping. It's a good time to clean up kit, drink some mead, pad out your blog with book reviews and so on but as far as contact with the bees go there's not a lot. Whilst beekeepers do their best to ensure their colonies will survive the winter we do seem to end up a with a Schrodinger's Cat sort of situation. Are the bees in the boxes alive or not? There's a lot that can happen to them over the winter. They could starve if they didn't have enough food stored or warm snaps made them use up what they had too quickly, they might get damp and die, varroa load may be too high or some other pest or illness may have wiped them out.

Anyone alive in there? Knock once for yes, twice for no.

I occasionally pull out a stethoscope and have a listen to my colonies just to be sure they're still alive in there. Hopefully the bees have been living on the honey stored in the comb of the brood box, but that may be running low by now so many beekeepers will feed their colonies a nice lump of fondant icing after xmas. Actually I got an email from Fragile Planet last week advising customers to feed their bees this winter. However I'd given mine some fondant back in November just in case it was needed and as I checked recently I was able to see most of it still there, it may be a little dry but condensation inside the hive should provide water to allow the bees to use it.

Lotta sugar and 3 bees. The brown stuff is a supplement.

Another thing beekeepers do when it's cold is pour acid on their insects. Sounds a bit strange, I know, but it's for the benefit of the colony. It's intended to kill the varroa mites. Normally most of the mites will be safely tucked away in the capped brood along with the bee larvae they're feeding on, however when it's too cold to raise larvae the queen stops laying eggs so the mites hang about on the adult bees instead at which point they're more vulnerable to varroacides, specificall organic acids applied to the bees directly. The January edition of the BBKA News advised waiting for a period of cold weather with an average of 5 degrees Celsius, lasting three weeks so any capped brood will have emerged. Then as the cold snap comes to an end you trickle a 3.2% oxalic acid solution and 1:1 syrup onto the bees between the combs. The bees between the combs are called a seam, and the figure people go by is 5ml of solution per comb. I suspect that's actually based upon the population of standard National hive brood box really and it may be that in a Commercial like mine you should use a little more but I decided to go with 5ml per seam for now. I think I read somewhere that the acid damages the mouthparts of the varroa leading to their demise, many believe it also does some harm to the bees but less than the varroa would do and given the short lifespan of individual bees shouldn't be a significant problem for the colony as a whole. The figure bandied about for efficacy of dribbling oxalic acid onto the bees seems to bea reduction of about 90% in the colony's varroa population.

Do not drink me.

A very weak solution of Oxalic Acid is used for this, other organic acids can be used such as Formic or Lactic Acid, but Oxalic is currently in vogue. It's legal status seems a little confusing to me, the choice of these organic acids as varroacides seems to be based upon them not having a defined Maximum Residue Limit like regular pesticides. I gather these organic acids occur naturally to some degree within bee colonies anyway and unlike other varroacides don't leave a residue affecting the hive products. It's not difficult to make up your own solution, but if you get it a bit wrong it could be a disaster for your bees either by not killing enough mites or by damaging the bees themselves -and do you really know how accurate your kitchen scales are? I doubt it.

If you really want to know more about varroa control DEFRA have a 44 page document available called Managing Varroa that you can download and includes Oxalic Acid treatments. There's other ways to administer organic acids such as spraying or vapourising the stuff. Vapourising seems wonderfully dangerous giving beekeepers the chance to find out first hand how much damage of a lungful of vapourised acid can do to a person, whilst simultaneously being less effective on the varroa. The advantage of vapourising it is it's faster to do than dribbling, although that doesn't take into account time spent waiting for an ambulance and further time spent recuperating after burning your lungs out.

Back to my bees. I've never used oxacilic acid before but you administer it by dribbling it from a syringe. It just so happens I'm no stranger to drawing up and administering solutions in syringes, and it's easier without a needle involved.

My table needs a clean

Today the temperature below the hives was 8 1/2 degrees Celcius, the warmest it's been for a few weeks so I decided to apply the acid -it was also due to expire next month too. After lighting the smoker and popping on my smock and veil I decided to treat the bees in the nuc first. As I said above it's hard to know how the bees are doing over winter despite best efforts in the lead up to winter so it was something of a relief when I removed the nuc's crownboard to see bees in there under the fondant and more coming up from the seams to see why some fool was opening their hive in late Janury.

They're alive!

There looked to be four seams full of bees. In the photo you can see three of them, the edge seam on the left was also full of bees but they'ed propolised the top edge so you can't see them so well in the image. The two seams on the right were more or less empty of bees. Interestingly (slightly) the left side of the hive is more exposed with the right side facing Hive1 so I'm assuming they found it easier to keep warm on the left of the hive than the right. I drizzled 5ml of oxalic and syrup solution into each of the four occupied seams making 2 passes for each (2 1/2 ml per pass) rather than drowning them by trying to apply it too quickly. I had some spare brood frames with honey on that I'd stored in the summer in case it was needed in the winter. Rather than disturb the frames the bees were on I prised out the rightmost frame to assess their stores but found it still had capped honey in it, so I guess they're not short of food and that probably explains why they've shown little interest in the fondant so far. Closing up the nuc I cracked open Hive1 where I was greeted by a few bees and saw them crowded into the seams again. I drizzled 5ml of solution into each seam before moving on to Hive2.

"It's January, put the lid back on you muppet!"

In Hive2 I could still see some grey bits of Api-Life Var on the outer corners of the frame tops. This is a crumbly material holding thymol (thyme essential oil) which as it evaporates kills varroa but not bees -although it does annoy them. Normally the bees would have broken it up and thrown it out of the hive by now but with the cold weather I'd guess it's not been evaporating so I pulled them out. There were a few bees on top of the frames and investigating the fondant. Not too many though. If there'd been a lot of them then it would be an indicator that they were starving -I suspect they'ed've eaten the fondant before that was a problem though. Once again I trickled the solution over the bees and closed up. You can see in the above photo the bees are towards the far side of the hive rather than in the middle.That side of the hive whilst nearer the entrance is more sheltered from the elements as it face a garden wall whereas the other side faces the garden. Evidently they've chosen the warmer side of the hive to cluster in. Hive1 had done the same.

Oxalic acid applied and all the hives closed up again I popped to Pearson Park for a quick run. Apart from an occasional check on how much fondant they have left I'll be leaving the bees alone from now till spring.