Rain, rain, go away…

…Come again another day – maybe overnight during the inevitable heatwave in July, please?! We’ve had quite enough of this wet and cold start to the year, thank you. During the winter months our primary concern is how we can best protect our bees, with insulation and ventilation being of supreme importance. Damp is actually a worse problem to have than cold, as mould and bacteria can thrive and lead to colony health issues. Hives can become damp when condensation forms due to the humidity caused by the bees’ breath meeting cold surfaces (e.g. the underside of the crown-board). It’s astonishing to learn that a colony of bees can produce up to 26 litres of water over the course of the winter months! Even though bees are experts at controlling the temperature of the colony, beekeepers might need to take measures to help provide a healthy environment.

New Bees and Newbies

It’s summer already, although I don’t know why this surprises me as every year I exclaim at how quickly time passes. The winter months seem interminable but as soon as spring is here it’s practically summer! I recently read a piece about how, in countries in south and south-east Asia, the New Year is celebrated in mid-April instead of January. This makes sense to me as January is a difficult month with limited hours of daylight and miserable weather; far better to celebrate new beginnings when everything is springing to life, the sun is shining and we can hope that things will turn out well.

Changing Seasons

We are all aware that our climate is changing, and you only have to think about weather patterns over

the past few years to understand the uncertainty this causes. Whatever you do, whether it’s working with crops or livestock, renovating a house, or planting your garden/veggie patch, you need to know what to expect from the weather. Current scientific thinking states that more ‘extreme weather events’ are likely to occur in the near future, along with dramatic rises in air and sea temperatures. All of this will have, and is already having, an effect on life on earth, and as everything is interconnected, the challenges are complex.

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.

This Season’s Fashions

 

Anyone who keeps bees knows that at some point, hopefully ‘later’ rather than ‘sooner’, (but almost never ‘never’!) they will be stung. Honey bees are not usually aggressive, but they are sensitive to being disturbed, and can quickly feel threatened by the presence of anything that distracts them from their work. Their reaction is to defend the colony and this often includes deploying their stings. It’s not true that all bees die when they sting – if they can retract the barb, the mechanism by which the venom is delivered, they’ll live, but often the barb is fatally ripped out of their bodies. Being stung therefore isn’t great for the bee or the person being stung and so it makes sense to disturb them as little as possible and for us to wear adequate protective clothing when we do want to be working with our bees.

Keeping Busy

“It must be a doddle being a beekeeper in winter, there’s nothing to do!” such is the kind of remark we often hear, but, au contraire, the winter months give us a chance to catch up on lots of jobs. We also still have to care for our bees to ensure that they survive the ‘downtime’ and emerge in the spring as healthily as possible. Just because we don’t see them as often as we do between March and October, that doesn’t mean we can forget about them.

It’s important to ensure that our hives are sound, secure and waterproof, and we have to check for dampness under roofs and on crownboards after any prolonged period of bad weather. If there are any stretches of particularly windy weather then we often place bricks or large stones on the hive roofs to weigh them down, and we know of beekeepers who have hives in exposed positions where strapping them to the stands is a common requirement.

Problem: Too Much Honey!

We hope all our readers have been enjoying a relaxing summer without too much to think about, where all the decisions have been easy ones to make. It goes without saying that we have been as busy as our bees, checking that our colonies are healthy.  Even the very hands-off approach of just observing their comings and goings can tell us that they are doing what they are supposed to do: making more bees and making honey! We are pleased to report that our colonies are thriving and have been foraging on the abundance of nectar-rich plants in the area. For the first time since we have been beekeeping in France, we moved one of our colonies to another location to help some farmer friends with pollination. The fact that they have hundreds of hectares of sunflowers was also a deciding factor in our participation in ‘transhumence’. It’s an activity carried out by many commercial beekeepers, where hives are moved to different areas so that pollination is improved and different types of honey can be produced. Our colonies usually provide us with ‘miel de fleurs’, mixed flower honey, as we grow lots of different plants, but the colony that we have moved will be making sunflower honey, a first for us.

Bees and Brambell's

We’ve recently been in conversation with a UK-based beekeeper who is studying for exams in Bee Health, studies that appear to involve for the most part killing bees so they can be dissected and examined. Not very healthy for the poor bees involved, but you can’t make an omelette without breaking  a few eggs, as they say…

Of course, we want the best for our bees and it has been interesting to hear about the new research centred on pest control, and the recent ideas around how to identify and treat for certain diseases. As in France, the same in England, with last year seeing an increase in the number of outbreaks of European Foul Brood, a disease that can lead to colony loss. The effect of varroa mite infestation also appears to be more insidious than first thought, with the mites being vectors for several different diseases that can deplete a colony of bees over time.

Dear Diary

“Keeping a diary” seems to be something that most people have done, in one way or another, at some point in their lives. It’s usually as angst-ridden teenagers that we scribbled down incredible insights (hands up those who admit to identifying ever-so-slightly with Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole, aged 13 and three quarters).  Those diaries were always supposed to be secret, but as we got older we didn’t have the time or inclination to retain the habit. Perhaps social media, with its instant access and global reach, has replaced the traditional form of diary-keeping, but there is definitely still a place for old-fashioned observation in the world of beekeeping. Fictional diaries such as ‘The Diary of a Provincial Lady’ (E M Delafield) and ‘Diary of a Nobody’ (G&W Grossmith) are amusing and tell a good story, dealing as they do with the comings and goings of ‘ordinary people’, whereas Samuel Pepys’s Diary and Daniel Defoe’s ‘A Journal of the Plague Year’ are informative and useful in helping us understand life in a definite place and time. The ‘diaries’ or records kept by scientists are even more so, and this is where the link with beekeeping comes in.

When you start your beekeeping life, you may only have one or two colonies and so it will be fairly
easy to remember what’s going on, when and where. Having said that, we have been known to mis-remember things e.g. which queen bee is in which hive, even when there are only two of them! As time goes on, and as the number of colonies rises, remembering becomes more difficult, and so we urge people to get into the habit of record-keeping right from the start. Records are not just for checking what you did last time you did a hive inspection, but they are essential when you want to look at performance – colony build-up, productivity (bees and honey), resistance to disease etc.