Catch One, Prevent Thousands

Even though it may seem early to be thinking about protecting our bees against Asian Hornets, we’ve

learned over the years that being prepared is (almost) everything. As the daylight hours lengthen and the temperatures hopefully rise, we’ll be on the lookout for emerging Asian hornet queens. 

Calm down, calm down! Or, please don’t be stroppy with me…

At last the warmer weather is with us, plants and flowers are flourishing, and the beekeeping season has well and truly started. All of our bee colonies came through the Spring successfully and have grown exponentially in the past few weeks due to the abundance of forage, higher temperatures and relative lack of predators compared to previous years. (To be honest, the Asian hornets don’t usually become a problem until later in the summer but for now we are enjoying their absence around our hives). There are more insects appearing in our gardens, which we see as a positive, but we are often told by people that they don’t like bees as they are frightened of being stung.

Don't Panic!

 ‘Melissaphobia’ is an intense fear of bees, which can be overwhelming and cause great anxiety. One
way to combat this panic is to learn more about these insects and hopefully come to manage feelings of stress when encountering them. We often meet people who have attended our afternoon taster sessions because they’re not sure how they will react when surrounded by thousands of bees. Maybe they have always liked the idea of keeping bees but before they commit to the expense of buying the equipment and taking on the care of living creatures, they want to experience being near a hive. In turn, we don’t want our bees to be disturbed by scared students, so we take good care to explain what is going to take place and what to expect. The students get a similar briefing…! It’s much easier to be brave when wearing protective clothing and often people will say “Oh, it wasn’t as bad as I thought, it was so fascinating I forgot to be scared”, a win-win by our reckoning.

Ready for some R&R?

As the beekeeping season draws to a close you’d like to think that those people ‘of beekeeping age’ (according to The Guardian*, they are “ripped, rugged, with a confident bearing, and have a certain ease in their skin”), could finally think about putting up their feet for a few weeks. Far from it! It’s true that the work involved in keeping bees is less intensive over the winter months, but it is still important. Bees are living creatures, not toys to be packed away until next year, so they need to be looked after even if you don’t actually see them very often.

After the honey harvest, typically for us in September, we treat our colonies for varroa mites, and carry out our final disease inspections to ensure that our bees are as healthy as possible going into the winter. We assess their food stores, and if we feel they are a little low (happily very rarely), we’ll feed them sugar syrup that they can store. In a typical French hive, a viable colony requires around 18-20kg of food to see it through until the Spring when the foragers can start again to gather nectar and pollen in earnest. So, by checking the frames for capped honey and nectar, and by hefting the hives to feel their weight over the following weeks, we can ascertain whether or not they have enough to live on.

Pests and Posies

 

2020 continues to be a challenging year for everyone, but back in the spring we tried to mitigate things a little for our bees. We decided to turn over a section of our land to provide forage for pollinating insects; we're very lucky here to have the space to do that! In April the field was ploughed and we spent a few back-breaking days clearing it of roots and stones, then after the earth was tilled, we had fun sowing around 5kg of mixed wildflower seed. Stunning purple phacelia was the first to appear at the end of May, then over the next few months cornflowers, calendula, cosmos, zinnia, crimson clover, poppies and anemones showed up in force. Our delight was shared with that of bumble bees, honey bees, butterflies and many more, and we are overjoyed to see that the flowers are still blooming even in mid November. Even better, new young phacelia plants are growing again, so hopefully we'll have some early flowers next year too. With everything else going on in the world, the spirits are certainly lifted when a cloud of purple and pink blossoms greet you on a gloomy day.

 

Unfortunately the Asian hornets are also thriving this year, and our bees have been under sustained attack for a couple of months now. We have done our best to protect them by fitting muzzles on the hives and restricting the entrances so that the hornets can't get in. We've also put out several traps which are specifically designed to trap Asian hornets, minimising the amount of other insects that are caught. As yet we haven't been able to find the nest which is a real shame, but we're hoping that the coming winter will mean the workers will die off and we'll have trapped young queens before they go into hibernation. We'll be ready for them when they emerge in a couple of months, and will do our utmost to trap them before they start making new nests.

Here's to better days...

Cheeky Blighters!

Last week we moved a couple of hives to a new location elsewhere in our meadow. The colonies in these hives have grown quickly this Spring and all of a sudden there were far too many bees flying close to the house for my comfort.

How was it for you?

Ok, so it's not quite year-end, but it's the middle of November and cold enough and wet enough to look back on 2019 and weigh up the year as a whole. Even though it happens every year, I am still taken aback in the autumn to realise that only a few weeks ago I was sweltering in my bee suit as I placed parasols over the hives to provide them with some shade from the relentless sunshine. How things change - it's 4c outside now, but two months ago we were harvesting honey in 32c!

The warm wet Spring meant that there was an abundance of forage (in this area, at least) for our bees. Our meadow was chock-full of the usual borage,

Asiatic Hornets - to Trap or not to Trap?

According to the information available on Asiatic Hornet life-cycles - plus a large dose of observation over the past several years - over-wintered AH queens have been out on the wing looking for carbohydrate-heavy forage since the end of February.

Now this knowledge gives us a tough choice...

We try not to kill any creatures and to let nature sort out the balance between the various species who share our home with us.  But... we know that each queen can go on to build nests that will house thousands of adult hornets, each capable of eating up to 50 honeybees per day during the summer.  So any queens we can stop during the Spring could mean saving entire colonies later in the year.

Trapped Asiatic Hornet queens from the garden

Whilst our choice won't be for everyone, we have decided to trap queens now and have weighed this up as the lesser of several evils (certainly not a choice we wanted to make).  Consequently, we have been experimenting with various types of traps and, more importantly it would seem, the lures/bait to go inside them.  There are many, many types of trap available and a quick Google search will reveal lots of interesting and entrepreneurial ideas from beekeeping suppliers and beekeepers alike from all over Europe.

Some are very simple - make a trap out of a fizzy drink bottle, for example.  And some are ingenious but in our view, to be truly successful at protecting honeybees,