May Update

Bees doing well ['ish]

As at long last we have had some reasonable weather, the girls are making the most of it and at Ravensden they are gorging themselves on the Oil Seed Rape in the field next to the apiary.

It seems I lost three colonies over the winter. Not fantastic but not too bad. On a county level the picture is much worse and several people has lost all their bees.
From the initial information collected from members it seems, perhaps not surprisingly, that the greatest losses have been suffered by new bee keepers.
To the Association's credit it is trying to organise something whereby bee keepers who have had the worst losses have small colonies, called nucs, or mated queens made available to them.

A consequence of the heavy losses/bad weather is that honey production has been set back.
I have only a few jars and have only done 2 markets this year. I have cancelled the Beds Young Farmer's Rally and it might be I don't do another market until July.
A week ago I was contacted by someone who wanted 10 jars of honey. We didn't have this and suggested he went to a local farm shop that I knew normally had lots in stock. Sue was there a few days ago and there was nothing apart from a sign saying they hoped to have some honey in June.

The strongest of my colonies have had a second brood box added, doubling the space the queen can lay in. This should produce a bigger, stronger colony.

A by product of this is that it should reduce the tendency of the colony to swarm. One of the main triggers for swarming is a lack of space and the idea of trying to prevent swarming this way is called Preemptive Swarm Control, or as I put it, getting your retaliation in first.
The bees have a fair amount of work in the second box to do in drawing out the frames where they convert a flat sheet of wax into a 3D series of cells. However several of the 'double brood' colonies have nearly finished this so I am adding smaller boxes called supers. This produce the retail honey I sell.
There are numerous methods of trying to prevent swarms once the process has started, most of which are baffling but I might do a blog about it.

Wasps in residence

I store my supers in stacks that are ratcheted together and have a roof on top to try and prevent things taking up residence.
Its difficult to keep ants out and when I was sorting out a couple to put on the hives, I found this.

A tiny wasp nest. When I turned it over I could see the larvae about to hatch.

The traps are set

Swarm trap

This is the swarming season and bee keepers become obsessed with it and spend huge amounts of time trying to prevent it  using a variety of different methods.
I have a slightly heretical view that I got from a another bee keeper who lives locally and is far more experienced than I, who said he didn't really understand all the fuss about swarms, after all the bee keeper got a new young queen to replace the old queen.
Bee keepers far more interested in honey production than I, would say swarming can set back the retail honey yield. Something that doesn't bother me unduly.

An off shoot of swarming is that bee keepers can catch a swarm.
There has been lots of research into what sort of new home bees are looking for when they swarm. They have preferences as to volume, entrance size, absence of damp and draughts and the direction they face, all of which are fairly easy to recreate. They are primarily simple boxes and I make mine out of pallet wood.
When the bees have found a new home, bees at the entrance produce something called the Nasonov pheromone which they spread by fanning their wings and it acts as a signal to the other bees telling them where the new home is. This can be synthesised.
So I put a swarm trap at either end of both apiaries with a couple of old smelly frames in and a sachet of the synthesised pheromone in the entrance to attract swarms. For one of the traps at Scald End I left the pheromone at home and left the trap on the ground near the tree it was going. When I returned there were a few scout bees investigating the inside.

The traps can catch either random passing swarms or swarms from your own colonies.
Over the years I've got a few but it is really just a punt to nothing for some 'free bees'.