Shock Manuka News

As any fule no, Manuka honey is a gift from the Gods and there is seemingly no end to the magical powers of this amazing food. The Kim Kardashian Institute for Advanced Entomological Studies has produced a stream of detailed scientific studies that proves this conclusively and are above reproach as they all have  FACT! at the end of the report.
As they are produced by scientists, and therefore experts, mere mortals like us are obviously in no position to doubt their pearls of wisdom.

Again as any fule no the Heavenly Sweetness comes from New Zealand where the Nice Australians, as New Zealanders are known, live and also where the award winning documentaries on orcs, hobbits, trolls and other New Zealand wildlife were filmed.
However in news that is likely to cause X5, Audi TT and Evoque drivers to park even more erratically in Waitrose car parks and outside schools, there are claims that honey from Australia has the same properties as the One True Honey.

It includes the words 'a study has found....' and  'research' which means it must have been done by scientists and therefore must be true.
However the Kute Kiwis were quick to respond to this outrage and New Zealand's UMF Honey Association says the Australian researchers are "hitching a ride" on the global reputation of our honey by branding their 'jelly tree' as mānuka.
"It's like me taking a vine from France and calling it champagne," says association spokesman John Rawcliffe.
He thinks it's ludicrous Australian producers could stake a claim on New Zealand's local industry.
"The consumer has always seen the words 'mānuka honey' being a badge of honour saying it comes from New Zealand."
'And any way...', he continued, 'our scientists are better than your scientists. So ya boo to you!'

The UMF Honey Association is funded by Comvita, the main honey exporter of New Zealand and the company that funded the initial research into the Liquid Loveliness although obviously this has no relevance to their statement nor does the fact that the Tea Tree or manuka bush [or jelly tree] originated in Australia and grows widely throughout Eastern Australia.
Also although John says 'mānuka honey' being a badge of honour', he seems to forget the fact that official figures from New Zealand show there has been 5 times as much manuka produced as consumed leading to widespread claims of fraud.

Depressingly some dark hearted soul has pointed out that the research about the Australian honey came from.....an Australian university. Shockingly this deviant seems to imply there could be some sort of self interest. This would imply that scientists aren't the infallible beings we know them to be and, like Caesar's wife, they must be above suspicion. Say it aint so.
He also made some reference to Kashing Inn which I assume is some sort of hotel.

More Manuka muddle comes from two other reports suggesting Welsh and Scottish honey has the same properties as the Golden Goo.

 These are both scientific reports carried out by scientists so are obviously true. One of them was carried out by Glasgow University and the other by Cardiff University although I not sure which University produced which report. Or am I?
The deviant has said something about another two rooms being taken at the Kashing Inn apparently.

All this has led to a hastily arranged press conference at the palatial Press Office on the 89th floor of Honeycomb Towers.

Honeycomb Towers

'Ladies and gentlemen' announced Connor Mugg, the Scientific Director of North Bedfordshire Holdings, to an audience made up solely of a rather smelly dishevelled man with two large supermarket bags full of clothes who occasionally shouted at the pigeons passing the window..
'The finest scientific  brains at North Bedfordshire Holdings have been taken out of the buckets of cold water we keep them in and come up with some amazing findings which are:-
'Manuka is apparently honey and so is our honey.
'Our honey and manuka honey looks the same.
'Our honey and Manuka tastes the same.
'Our honey and Manuka both fit in glass jars'.
'Our honey and Manuka honey is made by bees.
Therefore the only conclusion its possible to make is that our honey and Manuka are the same thing and therefore our honey must have the largely unproven benefits of Manuka.'
Connor paused to beam at the man in the back row who had fallen asleep and was gently snoring.
'We have noticed the disparity in prices between manuka honey and ours and as now we can prove the honeys are the same, we will be making a tiny change to the price of our honey.
The very small change is to move the decimal point to the right so it will now cost £45.00'
At which point the strange man woke up, shouted 'The bloody pigeons are after me'' and left.

Not just honey bees

As far as my bee keeping goes, the last couple of years have been a bit strange.
It seems only yesterday I had a few hives, gave my honey away and that was about it.
Then a series of chance, unplanned events ended with me agreeing to take over the Farmer's Markets that someone used to do.
After a fairly steep learning curve I found that I wasn't too interested in selling honey but quite enjoyed meeting people and talking about the bees. Gradually I took more and more bee paraphernalia to markets and to the amusement of the other stall holders I spent more time talking about bees than selling honey.

I was then persuaded that I ought to give talks about honey bees and I find myself joining the WI Speakers List and also giving talks to schools, guide/brownie groups and other groups.

Although no expert on bees generally myself, I found from talking/meeting people they often had no idea what a 'bee' actually was and often didn't know what a honey bee looked like.
I came to the conclusion that if you asked someone to name a bee they would say a honey bee even though  in a recent poll two-thirds of people could not identify one.
Also if you asked someone to draw a bee it would probably be a bumblebee. And probably yellow and black.

So at the beginning of my talks I did a quick bit about identification and briefly mentioned solitary.
bees. People often didn't know they existed, were surprised about how many types there were and how different they were to honey bees or bumblebees.
I started to get more interested in solitary bees and finally bought a solitary bee house and set it up at the end of the garden.

At the end of the year it wasn't packed but there was enough to get me interested in the next stage - what to do with the cocoons.
Also, I thought that I could make something similar to the house I had bought and also found there were other designs that looked reasonably easy to make. Apparently the types often sold in garden centres were more pieces of furniture rather than anything practical and were in the words of the man who sold me my SB house, 'death traps'.
These other designs had the advantages of increasing the survival rates of the cocoons and also being able to observe the bees at work without disturbing them.

As I now have the Strategic Hub for Experimentation and Design or Shed as its known, I  have started to make the houses myself. There will be four different types and I have started to clear an area in my garden to put them. I'm making one for a friend and might take them to markets to sell.
My first attempt

Not as elegant as the garden centre ones but it works.

So, the blog will now also be about solitary bees and bumblebees as well as honey bees and I'll do something on the main varieties and differences between solitary and social bees.

The Honey Bees

First blog of the New Year and its about the honey bees.
I'm not sure how I've managed it but I am now up to 16 colonies, 9 at Ravensden and 7 at Scald End. Some of the new ones I bought, two were given to me and another three were swarms.

For me the most interesting one is the British queen I bought.
British black bee colonies are now virtually non existent  having been nearly wiped out by disease in the last century and bee keepers replaced them with European bees. [No Beexit jokes please].
Having evolved over centuries in our climate the British Black bee was much better suited for our environment although apparently they could be a little 'spikey'.

It is still possible to buy BBB queens which I did and managed to successfully introduce her [I call her Victoria] to a queen less colony. The colony was quite small so they were put in a polystyrene nuc box [a small bee hive] and left there for the winter.

Long term keeping BBB's is a bit pointless but more about this when I move her into a full sized hive in the Spring.

The bees had their autumn feed of syrup and this year I have tried different winter insulation wraps for the hives They are made from a plastic material and as well as insulation they are supposed to protect the hives from wood peckers.

For their winter feed of fondant I have again used something slightly different. Its still fondant but it comes in plastic trays that you put on top of the crown board and the bees come up to get it. Its a bit less messy that just putting blocks on fondant on top of the frames and the bees have taken it up well.

I've just done their winter oxalic treatment and I'll do a blog on this later.

Last year I lost two colonies to wasps and to try and prevent this happening again I bought a couple of wasp traps.

It did catch a few but there were very few around this year. Also saw very few wood peckers.

The honey situation this year has been a bit weird.
As some of you might know I have very little interest in honey as regards selling it at markets and haven't eaten any for years. To me the importance of honey production is more to do with the ability of the bees to survive the winter yet people often ask me if its been a good year for the bees when they really mean how much honey have my bees produced. My standard unhelpful response is 'I don't know yet'.
For me the judgement as to whether it has been a good year or not is how many colonies get through the winter. Although bees face all sorts of problems, honey bees are not at risk, but saying that an  large number of colonies don't make it through the winter.
On average in this country about 20% of the colonies don't make it, so I could expect to lose 3. Despite the largely uninformed hysteria in the press about bee deaths, there has been a gradual improvement in honey bee winter mortality in the UK.
In America however its much worse with an average of a third of colonies lost, and last year it was 41%.
The main factors that affect their ability to survive the winter are keeping them healthy and having enough honey to survive until the Spring.
The health issue really relates to the varroa mite, hence the winter treatment. Varroa cannot be entirely removed but the oxalic acid reduces the mite numbers.
Obviously the more honey they have going into winter improves their chances of survival.
2016 honey 'production' in the UK was an improvement over the previous year with an average of  26lb honey per hive being produced; a 5lb increase over the previous year.
Yet we could have a very long cold wet winter as in 2011 [when all my colonies died] and the bees just haven't produced enough food to survive leading to a high winter death rate.
I think the figure can be misleading as its the honey we take and ignores the honey in the brood box. It seems quite possible for a colony not to produce any surplus we take yet have enough in the brood box and have adequate feeds to get it through the winter.
To make it more complicated, a warm winter can be as bad as a bad winter. Its been quite warm over Christmas and when I was last at Scald End there were lots of bees from all seven hives flying.
Although bees don't hibernate they go into a torpid state to conserve food. If its warm enough for them to fly they consume more food, reducing their chances of surviving winter.
The National Bee Unit have just issued an email saying:-

In some regions of the UK beekeepers have reported excessive use of food stores due to the un-seasonally warm weather. It would be advisable that you check your colonies have adequate stores and add supplements if required. With the weather being quite variable, fondant is the best option not liquid feed.

So its possible to have a high winter mortality rate ['bad year'] yet high honey production ['good year']
My honey year as regards production has been awful. I'm not the only one as nearly everyone I have spoken to locally have had the same problem,  even the large scale honey producers.

For the coming year will I get more colonies? I think you know the answer to that.

I am probably going to get involved in something that will need two new colonies on a new site. They may be needed quite early in the season so I can't rely on getting some swarms or splits from my existing colonies so I may have to buy a couple of colonies. I could move a couple of my existing colonies but I'll see how things go.

Earlier in the year I was talking to a local bee keeper about swarms. He is far more experienced than I am and he said he thought we should just leave the bees alone in swarming season and let them get on with it. After all  the bee keeper gets a new young queen in the existing colony and if he also catches the swarm then the colony count goes up by one.
One thing that was obvious was that  he is far more in top of his colonies than I am during swarming season  [which explains why I lose so many swarms] and as soon as there are queen cells and other signs of swarming he splits the hive so the existing queen is still in the apiary and he gets a new queen in a new colony.To do this you need a lot of nuc boxes to put the new colonies in and I think they are expensive.
Fortunately Noah Deer, the Director of Strategic Development at North Bedfordshire Holdings, recently authorised a substantial investment in a state of the art research and development facility.
To prevent industrial espionage, it is cunningly camouflaged as a garden shed and has been built in a top secret location at the end of my garden.

Because of its confidential nature it is kept under constant satellite surveillance, surrounded by anti personnel mines and guarded by laser guided weapons.
I also have two attack trained cocker spaniels who look cute but would rip your throat out if you so much as look at them funny.

If all that fails there's a Keep Out sign on the door.

I have now have much more space to try and make things and I have also bought some nice new wood working toys to play with.
I have made a couple of nuc boxes and they came out OK. I have made varroa floors for them and ekes so I can put a feeder on top of the nuc box.

These can cost about £40 without a floor or eke but they cost me about half that to make. They might not be so posh as the commercial ones but I don't expect the bees will be too bothered. If they are they can bring it up at our monthly Liaison meetings.
I'm also going to try to make a Top Bar Hive to replace mine that was wrecked by wood peckers.

This is what its supposed to look like

The next blog will probably be about the winter varroa treatment.

The Blog is back

Yes, I'm back. Why? you might reasonably ask and to be honest I'm not too sure.
In the few month or so things as regards bees and markets have changed a bit and I have also got involved in a few new things, one of which lends itself to doing a blog.So, here it is.
Firstly a quick 'where are we now' blog.

Honey Bees
They have had their autumn feed and have been settled down for the winter. I have tried a new type of winter insulation.
They have also had their winter varroa treatment.

Markets
I had decided to cut back the markets I do to just one monthly market [The Forest Centre at Marston Moretaine] and the quarterly market at Potton.
The Forest Centre market has now closed permanently and in anticipation of this I had started going to St Neots instead.
However for reasons that I expect most people would find utterly laughable, I won't be going back.
Instead I will be going back to the Bromham Mill market. This is a very nice friendly market and its changed from being a food only market to food and crafts. Keith and Lynn Merediths Little Smokehouse, The Indian Orchard, Rudi's Dog Treats, the Little Treat Shop from the Forest Centre all attend.
Its the first Saturday of the month and there is a nice walk along the river, a good cafe and lots more stalls than when I was last there.
The next market will be on the 4th March and more details are here
Apart from these two, we will be doing the usual 'events' like Bromham, Kempston, Sharnbrook, Open Farm Day at Scald End, RSPB Summer Fair and the Bedford Young Farmers Rally.

Propolis
As some of you know I sell [or attempt to] propolis tincture and cream at the markets I do.
I have met two people recently who also have an interest in using propolis and I am going to help them.

Wildflower meadows
One of the people I have met has a farm in Sharnbrook and is thinking of setting up a wildflower meadow on his farm as part of a project to run weekends for people to come and work on the farm and I will be helping to set this up in the New Year.
He has asked me if I would give a talk on bees and give some practical bee keeping experience to the people who come to the farm and also run some bee hives on the farm in the visitor area he also wants to set up.
Wildfower meadows led onto Solitary bees
Which led onto Solitary bee nests
Which led onto Bug Houses.

Solitary Bees
This has become a real interest. When I give talks about honey bees I mention solitary bees and have put up a solitary bee nest in my garden.
Expect to read a lot about them.

See you after Christmas.