Autumn Varroa Treatment

Following on from the previous blog, as the 'retail' honey has been extracted, I can now do the Autumn varroa treatment.
The chemical in the treatment taints the honey and makes it smell a bit, not that the bees care.
I used two different treatments, Apiguard for the Ravensden bees and Apistan for the Scald End bees.

The Apiguard should be applied when the weather is warm and two doses are given a fortnight apart.
Apistan should be taken off by 6 weeks or 8 weeks at the latest.

As I mentioned in the previous blog, its not uncommon for the treatments not to be applied correctly.
The Apiguard needs to be put on when the weather is warm and taken off after two weeks or else the bees can become resistant to a weak level of the treatment.

As honey bees are classified as food producing animals bee keepers are required to keep a Veterinary Medicines Report. Both Apiguard and Apistan have batch numbers and I keep a record of these should the Inspector from the National Bee Unit needs to see it.


Next year I might switch them around or try something different. Its thought best practice to change the treatments to prevent the bees building up a resistance to a particular treatment.

Autumn bee keeping

Its rather depressing to think that the season is beginning to wind down.
To use a footballing cliche the season is a game of two halves. The first half is where the focus is on colony development and production of honey. I call this 'retail' honey as its the stuff I sell at markets and is the honey I'm not that interested in.
Honey extraction normally is done twice a year and once the second extraction has been done the second half of the season begins and is about concentrating on preparing the bees for the winter and helping them build up 'bee' honey to get them through the winter.

To flog the footballing cliche again, the first half of the season had two halves. Firstly it was very dry which prevented plants from developing nectar and it got to the stage where the county bee keeper association warned its members about possible starvation. [of the bees that is, not the members].
Then it tipped down preventing the bees from getting out of the hives and meant they consumed honey rather than built it up.
When I finally got round to doing the second extraction I started at Scald End. In both apiaries there were colonies who had a second super and I was confident they would be filled.
However,  I was disappointed. Twice.
Firstly a lot of the supers weren't full and for those with second supers most of them were virtually untouched.
Secondly, the honey that was there had crystallised in the frames.
I wasn't too bothered about the lack of 'retail' honey but the thought of dealing with the crystallised honey wasn't a good one.
Extracting crystallised honey is a huge PITA and you have to cut the comb out of the frames, warm it until it melts, wait for it to cool, and then take the solid wax off to get to the honey which will probably need filtering again.
Some of the supers weren't worth bothering with so I let the bees keep the honey they made by putting them above the crown board as I showed in the clearing the frames blog.

I knew there was potentially a lot more at Ravensden and I dreaded finding it too had crystallised.
Fortunately it was runny although there was not as much as I expected, Saying that The Beast did it again, producing two supers stuffed with honey.

Since the first extraction, I played around with some brackets to attach the extractor to the leg weights more securely and these worked well and I could leave it to happily whirr away and not worry about coming back and finding it half way down the garden.

Both readers of this blog will know of my waning interest in markets and that I now only do one regular monthly market [Bromham Mill], one quarterly market [Potton] and a few one offs.
After I ran out of honey last year I thought I ought to see how much honey needed to be produced to support these markets and if necessary cut back some more.
In the past I never bothered weighing the honey I extracted [most of it was given away] but this year I did and the second extraction alone produced enough honey to last a full year.
Does this mean I will do more markets?
No.

The second half of the season is about treatment and readying the bees for the winter.
The next job I will start next week is the autumn treatment for varroa. There is something on the web site about varroa here
Varroa can only be managed but not eradicated and bee keepers are encouraged to adopt an 'Integrated Pest Management' system. This basically means don't rely on one thing all the time, mix it up.
Although treatments for varroa can be made at any time if necessary, normally there is an autumn treatment backed by by something in winter.
What I will do this year is treat the bees in each apiary with different medication and then swap it around next year.
Later in the year around Christmas time I will do an oxalic acid treatment.

Beeks, usually new ones, are often criticised for adding to the problems bees face by not applying treatments properly. A standard treatment called Apiguard has to be applied when the weather is quite warm so it evaporates properly and carried around the hive. If its added when its cool its effectiveness and therefore the varroa mites exposure to the treatment is reduced and helps them build up a resistance to the Apiguard. Other treatments can also be left on too long so the mites acclimatise to a weaker dosage.

Also, I now will be monitoring the food stores in the hive and if necessary help them build up 'bee' honey.
Its normal for the bees to have an Autumn feed backed by by a Winter feed if necessary. The Autumn feed is a liquid feed of syrup. You can buy whats called Ambrosia which is an inverted sugar mix and closer to what the bees need. The Association sells this more cheaply than can be bought on the internet and I'm waiting to see what it costs.
Its recommended you should monitor the weight of a hive to see to what extent its building up its stores, Last year I bought an electronic weighing device [yes. its a BoyToy!] that makes it easy.
A video about it is here.

Both jobs are equally important. If the varroa treatments are effective the bees are healthy and better able to survive the winter but could starve if their food runs out. Equally plenty of food stores might not be much use to an unhealthy and weak colony.

Cleaning the frames

Once the honey has been extracted, there is the question of what to do with the supers and the empty frames.
How ever much the frames are spun, there will be be some amount of honey left in them and they are called 'wet' frames.
There are various things you can do with them and I tend to just stack them at the end of the garden and ratchet strap them together to keep the mice and creepy crawlies out. When they are needed next year, if there is some crystallised honey in them, you just spray them with water and put them back on the hive and let the bees sort things out.

Another thing you can do is put them back on the hive for the bees to clean them out and make them 'dry'.

Normally supers are put above the queen excluder and below the crown board.
If you put them back above the brood box this way, they may start putting honey in them again and you don't want them to do this as during winter they huddle up in the brood box and might not find the honey in the super.
So the super is put above the crown board and below the roof and the bees now see the super as being something completely external to the hive and take the honey and put it in the brood box frames.
Once the super is 'dry' its taken off and stored.

I am getting ready to do the second, and last, extraction of the year and was sorting out the stored supers to make room for the ones coming off the hives. Two had a bit of honey in them and being lazy I decided to leave them at the end of the garden to let the bees clean them.
As expected the power of The Waggle Dance [I will do a blog about this] kicked in. Quite quickly a few bees showed some interest and as news spread around the hives, the frames became covered in bees taking the honey.

It can look a bit intimidating and they are quite noisy. However despite what the Daily Mail might think, as they don't have a hive to defend they are quite calm, and I did the video without any bee keeping kit on. I wasn't stung but a bee did fly into my ear. It didn't sting me.

The video is here

Whats inside a hive

At some point I'm going to do a blog on what happens when I inspect a hive.
Before that I thought I would do something about hives so you can see how they operate without having bees everywhere.

Honey bees have no consideration for us whatsoever.
Left to their own devices they will selfishly set up their colony to suit themselves and have no regards for our perfectly reasonable need to easily get the honey to put on our porridge in the mornings.
In the wild the bees will create parallel sheets of wax comb and as the queen can freely roam between these sheets it means they are a mess of eggs, larvae, pupae, pollen and honey all mixed up together.

This means getting just the honey out is a difficult process and amazingly the bees just don't care. Therefore it is entirely reasonable for us where an animal won't do what we want it to do, to make it do what we want it to do.

Honey bees have been around for about 35 million years but their problems started when we turned up and decided we liked honey.
The process of domesticating bees then started.

It is estimated that humans have kept bees for about 9000 years but we finally sorted them out in the 1850's when an American cleric Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth combined some discoveries about bee behaviour with a hive containing movable frames to produce what is considered the basis of the modern bee hive.

A number of variations on Langstroth's hive were developed and today there are a bewildering array of different types of hive,all designed to make our life easier even if it makes the bees life a bit harder.

It might be tempting to think of honey bees buzzing around our gardens as wild animals and free spirits to do what they choose but the reality is that honey bees are as managed as cows, pigs and chickens.

In the UK there is virtually nothing that could be consider a 'wild bee'
I read somewhere feral colonies will die out in 2/3 years, mostly due to disease or starvation.

At the time of his invention Langstroth said

The Creator intended the bee for the comfort of man, as truly as he did the horse or the cow.
In the early ages of the world, indeed until very recently, honey was almost the only natural sweet; and the promise of "a land flowing with milk and honey," had then a significance, the full force of which it is difficult for us to realize.
The honey bee was, therefore, created not merely with the ability to store up its delicious nectar for its own use, but with certain properties which fitted it to be domesticated, and to labour for man, and without which, he would no more have been able to subject it to his control, than to make a useful beast of burden of a lion or a tiger’

Although said over 150 years ago ,the principle behind the first line of the quote that everything is here for our benefit, still applies.

In the UK probably the most common bee hive is the National bee hive, a rather un-prepossessing collection of boxes stacked on top of each other,
Here's a video on how they work.