General Bee Stuff

The Bees
At the risk of this statement coming back to bite me in the bum, they seem to be doing OK.
The autumn varroa treatments have been completed and they are in the middle of their autumn feed of syrup.
Its seems a little odd that some of the colonies quickly slurped up the 2/3 pints of syrup I have given them each yet a few others haven't touched it.
This will go on for a few weeks yet and then I will switch to the fondant that I ordered.

The bees at Ravensden are on the route I take The Boys for their walks so twice a day I just have a quick look in to the copse to see what they are up to.
I do enjoy the regular inspections and its a shame this now won't start again until March/April next year unless something dramatic happens. I won't disturb them just because I fancy a look/see so I will have to content myself with visual checks and its encouraging to see them very busy.
I have no idea where they are getting it from but they are still bringing in yellow pollen so the Queens are still laying.
A little while ago I combined two hives as one of them was struggling and wouldn't have made it through the winter and I pleased to see  a large amount of activity in the combined colony. The down side is that this colony now has two brood boxes [like The Beast] which are a pain to check.
Here's a short video about some of the colonies.

All the supers have been bought back and stacked up and this will be one of the winter jobs to replace/repair broken frames and get foundation put in ready for next year. They also need to be sprayed to prevent parasites setting up shop in the frames.

From time to time I am asked about what I call cut comb but is also called honeycomb or comb honey. Its basically a rectangle of wax cut from the frame with the honey still in it.

Inexplicably a lot of bee keepers consider it a 'premium product'. I consider it 'revolting'.
The frames have to be specially set up to produce it and I did  few and rather to my surprise its proved quite popular so something for next year is to set up more frames.

My main objective for next year is to populate my Top Bar Hive.

I had hoped to get a swarm to put in it but surprisingly it never happened.
I could wait for a swarm next season but rather than muck around I intend buying what is called a package. This is a box of 'loose' bees, usually about 3lb, with a queen in a queen cage. You normally use a package as normal frames don't fit in a TBH.

I don't know anybody locally who sells packages so I might have to get it from a company I know in Sussex. Unfortunately it means I have to drive there to pick it up.

Asian Hornet
Bees can be forgiven for thinking that life, like history, is just one bloody thing after another.
Climate, insecticides, varroa and habitat loss and now Asian Hornets can be added to the list of things they have to put up with.

Widespread in France a single hornet was found in Somerset last year and three days ago a confirmed sighting was made at Woolacomb, North Devon.
Reassuring noises are being made by the authorities but it all sounds a bit Canute like. They spread very quickly in France and will no doubt do so here and bee keepers will have to start thinking about what they can do.
Asian Hornets are nasty things and their favourite snack is a honey bee.

Still out of adversity comes opportunity.
Shortly after the announcement was made one of the more 'stack 'em high, flog 'em cheap' bee keeping supply firms sent out something to all their email subscribers attempting to flog their Hornet trap.
The email had the heading
Asian Hornets sighted in the UK!
They rapidly issued another email to their 'esteemed customers' saying some browsers translated the emoji wrongly and it should have been a grim face emoji not a smiling one which might suggest they were happy with the sales opportunity.
I use Chrome and I checked the email in Explorer and it had the smiling face as well. Perhaps users of more popular browsers didn't have the problem.

It also gave the Independent to go all Daily Mail'ish and run the headline

Originally the Independent showed a picture of the wrong type of wasp

The Express followed with

This despite the National Bee Unit saying

The Asian hornet is smaller than our native hornet and poses no greater risk to human health than a bee.


I understand tomorrows Daily Mirror headline will be:-

Introducing a new Queen

I often start a blog, possibly finish it but then forget about it.

This is one of those blogs,

Although our Queen seems to live for ever, honey bee queen have a shortish life.
She can live between 3 and 5 years although once she reaches 3 she starts to be lose it a bit and she starts laying just male drone eggs rather than a mixture of drones and workers, which is not a good idea ,so she has to be replaced.
Also she can just die or perhaps a queen doesn't return during the swarming season.

It is possible just to let the bees develop a new queen on their own but I decided to use some of the vast cash reserves North Bedfordshire Honey has accumulated in its secret offshore tax haven to buy two new ones.

Click here to see the video.

Autumn Feeding

Now the 'retail' honey thing is out of the way, its now time to concentrate on 'bee' honey.
A healthy hive can produce three times the amount of honey it needs but poor weather, bad winters and disease can mean the bees may need some help to get through the winter.

The varroa treatment has started and I need to think about what feeding may be necessary.
Autumn feeding is usually some form of syrup. Although its just sugar and water you wouldn't believe the debates on the forums about what mixes to use.
As far as I am concerned you use 1 lbs sugar to 1 pint of water in early Spring and 2:1 later. In winter I switch to fondant blocks.

There are a bewildering array of different feeders you can use.
At the top end of the market there are Ashforth feeders which holds two gallons.

These are put on top of the brood box and the bees come up through a slot to feed. I have two of them, one that only fits the WBC hive and the other will be put on The Beast.
Very nice but they are £50 each. I have eighteen hives so not having £800 handy, I use plastic contact feeders.
The ones I use are called rapid feeders and hold four pints, so obviously need filling up more regularly, but they only cost £3.50.

In each apiary I will have a 25ltr container of syrup to keep the feeders topped up so I buy a few 25kg sacks of sugar from Bookers.

How much to feed them?

As in all things opinions vary. I know two very experienced bee keepers who belong to the Association, one gives a gallon per hive and that's it, the other feeds as they need it. I'm of the latter school of thinking.

Steam Wax melter

Throughout the season you build up a pile of normally skanky wax comb from damaged frames or from extracting the honey

The local beekeeping association has a scheme where you can trade in your unused wax and they in turn sell it on to an organisation that then gives it a discount on the wax foundation sheets we buy from them.
However before we pass the wax onto them it has to be cleaned. There are many methods of doing this and normally you melt the wax with some sort of bain marie and then strain it through a pair of tights, first making sure no one is wearing them, into a plastic container.

If you can afford it you can buy steam wax melters which do what the name implies

The association recently bought one for use by any of its members and I wondered about making one and in the words of that irritating arse Jeremy Clarkson, thought 'How hard can it be?
I wandered through YouTube and a lot of home made ones used the steamers you use to get wallpaper off. I had one of these so I thought I would give it a go.

Apart from trading it in I use the wax to make candles and furniture polish and add it to propolis to make a cream. More of which in a future blog

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