New for Old

Spring is a time of rebirth, renewal, and regrowth in Nature, and this of course includes the honeybee.
Having survived the winter, bee colonies are now increasing in size, with queens typically ramping-up their laying rate to 1500-2000 eggs a day. At this time of year, some of these will be drones, the males produced to mate with virgin queens from other colonies. It’s also the beginning of the swarm season, when colonies make the decision to split with up to 40% of the bees plus the queen flying out to a new home.

April was an extremely busy month; the weather was perfect, and forage for pollinating insects was plentiful, so we received several calls to collect swarms.

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.

All We Can Do

Here we are, then; the clocks have gone forward and I am reminded of an old rhyme from my school days: “Spring is sprung, the grass is riz, I wonder where the lawnmower iz?!” However, this month, as beekeepers, we have more important things to do than cut the grass. Hopefully the temperatures are now consistently high enough for us to open the hives and carry out the first inspections of the year. We did everything we could do to help prepare our colonies for the winter, and so now we are looking forward to finding that it was all worth the effort and our bees are fighting fit, ready to face the challenges ahead.

Off We Go Again!

Winter is almost behind us, the Spring equinox approaches, and the extra hours of daylight quicken our pulses as we look forward to warmer days. March is a nervous month for beekeepers as we are close to being able to carry out gentle hive inspections and discovering quite how our bees have fared since we last saw them in autumn. If we are lucky we’ll have some balmy weather with ambient temperatures in the early teens, just enough to allow the bees to take cleansing flights and begin foraging for early pollen and nectar.

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.

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.

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.

A Surprise Visitor!

At this time of year we are usually very busy running our beekeeping taster sessions and other courses but, due to the current lock-down situation, we have had to postpone those. Our work as beekeepers doesn’t stop though, and we still have the challenges of ‘swarm season’ to face, as well as ensuring our colonies are healthy. We also keep an eye out for predators and pests, and have the perennial debate over the issue of whether or not to put out hornet traps. 

While Asian hornets are an acknowledged threat to honeybees, and in our experience a very real problem, we also are keen to avoid killing any ‘innocent bystanders’

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,

Make Mine a Pint!

 As we approach the Spring Equinox (and with it, a 'Worm Moon' apparently!) the longer days mean that we are seeing more and more of our bees as they venture out to inspect the lay of the land. Obviously locating forage as soon as possible is important as the queens will be laying and brood (baby bees) need to be fed. Finding water is every bit as key to the colony's survival as sources of pollen, so we always advise that you put out some water for your bees. This needs to be in a shallow container, ideally with various items such as leaves or pieces of wood for the bees to stand on to ensure that they don't drown while drinking. We diligently do this in our apiaries, along with placing pots of damp soil near the hives (the bees can suck the moisture from the earth).

However, you know the saying "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink"? The same is true of bees; I have never actually seen any bees drinking the water that I carefully put out for them. The ingrates. Instead I find them around my watering can and the chickens' saucers. Their favourite drinking den, though, is the poor tortoise's water bowl.....who knows what it is but they love it! The important thing is that, like all living creatures, they need water to survive and so if you keep bees, please ensure they have access to a safe supply. If you don't keep bees, you can still do your bit to help them (and keep them from clustering around your swimming pool!) by putting out a pot of damp earth or a shallow saucer of water with a pebble or leaf in it. Cheers!