More Manuka Madness

I've been sorting out things I take to the talks I give and for display at the Farmer's markets and came across the stuff I have on Manuka honey. Apart from it's alleged magical powers I did a couple of blogs about the ridiculous prices being charged for it here and here.

The most expensive Manuka I found was on the Bodykind web site and out of curiosity I re-visited the site to find the price of the honey had gone down to under £80 a jar.

Old price

New price

I noticed a couple of things.
Firstly the current ad has a blurb that wasn't in the original ad about

Manuka Health MGO 550+ is 100% pure Manuka Honey straight from the breath taking landscapes of New Zealand.....................................

Exactly the same wording as in their email to me when I asked them why it was so expensive.

Also, although the price has gone down a bit, the new add says

'reduced from £99.99 - saving you 20%'.

So the price was £83 that went up to £100 and down to £80

Bodykind also stock another brand of Manuka

£113 for a jar of honey. Wow, but at least its less than the £162 it used to be.

The ad talks about being

 'tested for its Methylglyoxal [MGO] by a certified laboratory...................'.

As far as I knew there was no agreed test for Manuka honey which lead to a series of meaningless acronyms [UMF,NPA, MGO] used to rate the honey's 'goodness', so I did some Googling to find that by coincidence on the 12th December the New Zealand Ministry of Primary Industries announced a test for Manuka honey to take effect from the 5th February that was to apply to exported honey.
Only honey that meets the requirements can be called Manuka honey

Reading about the new requirements they seem to open a whole new overpriced can of over hyped. worms.
More of which later

What is 'Local Honey'?

Something I am asked all the time is 'Is this local honey?' which is often followed up by 'Local honey is supposed to be good for you'.
Unfortunately I have no idea what 'local' means so I don't attempt to answer this and just tell them where my bees are and let them decide. I try not to comment on the 'good for you'bit.

I don't know of any accepted definition of 'local' but some Farmer's Markets require produce to be made within a certain distance of the market, usually about 30 miles, but this has nothing to do with 'being good for you' but more an 'air miles' thing
I used to do a market at Stony Stratford [about 25 miles away] and once someone said he wouldn't buy the honey as it wasn't 'local'. I never had anybody else at the market who had a problem.
My regular markets are at Bromham [6 miles away] and Potton [15 miles] and nobody has ever had a issue with where my honey comes from.
So is the boundary of 'local' less than 25 miles? Bees normally travel a maximum of 5 miles to forage so is my honey 'local' to Bromham or Potton?
If it is, then why is the apparently magical Manuka honey so 'good for you' when it comes from 6000 miles away?

All honey is 'good for you' in the sense it has potential medicinal properties. ALL honey.
As everyone knows, bees make honey from the nectar of plants. Different plants produce different types of honey in terms of its colours and taste but bees do the same thing with all types of flowers. Nectar is watery and contains sucrose and the bees have a lot of work to do converting the nectar into honey by substantially reducing the water content and also breaking down the sugars in the nectar to sugars more easily digestible.
In winter the bees don't hibernate and want to expend as little energy as possible so its beneficial to feed on more easily digestible sugars So they add enzymes to the nectar to break down sucrose [a disaccharide] into glucose and fructose - monosaccharides.
As part of this process some of the sucrose is converted into gluconic acid which in turn produces hydrogen peroxide. This makes the honey acidic and is partly responsible for its medicinal properties.
Different plants produce different proportions of the sugars which will be reflected in the amounts in the honey but I have never seen anything that measures this. In any event bees make honey from any type of flower they can find. Although I could examine the pollen to find out what plants they are foraging on, I have no real idea of what they are foraging on

Its quite possible for a bee keeper to produce honey that is 'local' to somebody but it has been heated, micro filtered and blended reducing if not removing any medicinal properties.
For this reason I prefer to call my honey 'unprocessed'

Also I have no idea of what 'good for you' means. Is non local honey bad for you? How do you measure 'good' - with a Goodometer?

I expect the whole 'good for you' thing is tied up with the myth of honey being good for hay fever.
This is based on honey containing pollen from 'local' flowers. I did a blog about this and there doesn't seem to be any basis for this. Its possible for someone to live 'locally' yet the flowers in their area are completely different to the flowers in my bees area.
Is there any difference between say Oil Seed Rape flowers that are 'local'and OSR flowers from 50 miles away. Is the pollen different?

When I started doing markets my display sign for the honey referred to 'Local Honey'. It now says just 'Honey'

January Update

The shortest day has passed, a New Year starts and gradually we edge towards the start of the bee keeping season.
I've been away for a couple of weeks but before we left I checked the fondant stocks on the hives.
In Ravensden 3 colonies out of 10 needed new blocks and in Scald End all needed some more.
Like people, different bee colonies have different characteristics. Some calm, some not so. Despite being a 'non interventionist' job and the temperature  being a few degrees above freezing, the Headbanger Bees, Ravensden 3 and Scald End 4 just had to come out to say hello.

The main winter job is treating the bees for the varroa mite with oxalic acid. Not a particularly fun job  but it hopefully reduces the amount of varroa on the bees and gets them ready for the spring.
Its done during the winter as the oxalic acid would kill any bee larvae but this is minimal as the queen would have already stopped laying eggs.
I'll be doing this in the next week or so.

Bees on the internet  

Honey bees do not hibernate. The Queen stops egg laying, the drones are dead and the colony reduces to about half of what it was in summer. To preserve their food stores they 'ball up' in the center of the hive and try to move as little as possible and preserve heat.
The queen is in the center of the bees and they keep themselves warm by slight fluttering of their wing muscles. Like penguins they take it in turn to be on the cold outside of the ball.
Below is an extract from a YouTube video about bees in winter.

Yet more bees.

Every year Sue asks me if I will be getting any more bees. The problem with this is that its actually quite difficult to control. I'm with Homer Simpson when he says 'if somethings hard to do then don't do it'. So I don't.
Come June time when swarming starts its difficult not to get more colonies. Although I don't broadcast the fact that I could collect swarms for people, some will inevitably turn up and what am I supposed to do with them?
Also for the bees I have now, if I managed to split them during the swarming season I could have up to another 18 potential colonies. It is suggested that after a colony has been split and the swarming instinct goes away, you re-unite the two colonies again and 'let them fight it out' to keep control over the number of colonies you have.
For some reason this doesn't appeal to me but saying that the amount of time and money spent on the bees obviously increases with the number of colonies you have so I will be careful. Maybe.

However I am very keen to populate my beloved Top bar Hive.

So using some of the vast cash reserves  built up by North Bedfordshire Holdings in a private offshore hedge fund account from the sales of honey at farmer's markets , I have bought a colony specifically for the TBH.
It is called a package rather than a colony or nuc as it is just a box of bees with a queen in a special compartment and will probably look like this.

The reason I am getting a package is a normal colony comes with the bees on frames that can just be dropped into a normal hive but don't fit a TBH.
I've paid a deposit but it won't be ready for collection until May, perhaps June.
New colonies rarely produce any 'retail' honey in their first year but I'm not bothered as I have no intention of extracting any honey from the TBH anyway.

Markets aren't all bad

Although there is much to dislike about markets - days of preparation, setting up, selling stuff, clearing up, putting stuff away, there are bits that are good fun.
When I started doing markets I would say 'yes' to anybody that asked me to come to an event and I found myself doing an event, perhaps two, most weekends and the thrill rapidly wore off but the emotional scars of the horrors of Sandy Market still remain.
I decided I would only do the markets I like doing although it meant I stopped doing a Market at St Neots where I took the most I have ever taken at a regular market.
So now I only do the quarterly market at Potton and the monthly market at Bromham Mill.
Potton is more urban and Bromham Mill is a lovely environment and they both have a nice atmosphere and there was Carol singing at both markets in December [busy girl, Carol] and there are often musicians playing at Potton.
Having done the markets for a couple of years I now have a number of regular customers who I have got to know and we have a chat about stuff and perhaps they buy some honey.
At Potton I got my first ever Christmas Card from a customer, Matt and Stacey who earlier in the year had a trip out to see the bees and despite me breaking Matt's glasses and him being stung in the forehead within a couple of minutes of arriving, want to have another session this Summer.
At Potton I've also got to know a family that have twin girls and apparently they like coming to the markets and wear the bee badges I gave them.
At the September market their Mum said they had made some pictures for me.

Add caption

The orange on the middle bee is a crown as she is the Queen bee

The black on the bees are their stingers.

At the December market their Mum said they had seen something they wanted to give me for Christmas.

A glass bee. How nice is that?

Making stuff with bees wax

bee producing wax

To one degree or another bee keepers will find themselves building up amounts of bees wax.

The wax in the frames needs to be replaced from time to time, particularly the brood frames that can get quite black. This is a build of general muck and particularly brood poo.
Its recommended you change  third of the frames each year. Its important as the queen won't lay eggs in dirty comb.

Also the wax in frames can be damaged and need to be replaced.
I have done blogs on collecting wax from extraction and also the use of a steam extractor..

The wax I get from the steam extractor mostly comes from old brood frames and isn't as clean as the cappings wax which is usually bright yellow.

So what to do with it?

I use some of the 'brood' wax for general repairs to frames and to stick things together.

Once the wax has been cleaned it can be traded in against the cost of new sheets of wax and the Bedfordshire Bee Keepers Association run this sort of scheme. The cost of sheets of foundation to members of the Association is about half the normal retail price.

However for most beeks, particularly if they do markets, the wax is used to make candles and furniture polish.

Making polish is easy, if a little pointless as few people have wooden furniture.
Its just a mixture of bees wax, I use the brood wax as its colour isn't important, turpentine. and carnauba wax.
Its important to use pure turpentine not turpentine substitute.
You can buy artists  turpentine by Winsor and Newton for £5.25 75ml but I get it from eBay for £8.50 500 ml
Carnauba wax comes from the leaves of a palm tree only found in North Eastern Brazil.
INTERESTING FACT - Keith of The Little Smokehouse tells me its used to make the shiny shells of Smarties.

There are a variety of different ways of making candles but I don't have the patience for most of them.
I have tried to make moulds by covering a suitable figure/toy with layers of latex but it was a pain and didn't come out well.
Dipping candles also takes too long so I just use silicone candle moulds.
I use the cappings wax as the candles are quite yellow and nicer to look at. Most of the candles are sold to kids and I don't think any of the candles are actually lit.

Here are videos of how I make the polish and candles.

December Bee News

The Bees

As the weather gets colder, the activity gets less but I still get the occasional nutter who makes it across the field to The Shed.

I still have a look every day at the Ravensden bees as I take The Boys for a walk and clear any corpses from the landing boards. During the Summer the corpses are left on the landing boards to dry out and get lighter making it easier for the worker bees to get rid of them. In Winter when they can't fly they just drag them out of the hive on to the landing board

A bit of a disaster happened today [22/11].
The bees in Ravensden are in a copse across a field about 150 yards from the back gate of my garden and I can normally get to the bees by walking around the field. The field is usually seeded but there's a headland around the field.
Today its been ploughed right up to the perimeter hedgerows meaning it's very difficult to walk around the outside of the field to get to the bees and impossible to get any equipment like supers to or from the bees.

A full super can weigh 30lbs and its no fun trying to wheelbarrow up to a dozen of them across a field.
It looks like I'm going to have to move the bees, possibly to Scald End. A job so mind boggling awful it makes me feel dizzy.
Its not ideal as with the number of bees I now have, there are benefits in having two apiaries at least three miles apart so I might have to find a friendly local farmer.
We are away for Christmas and the New Year so I will have to forget this until we're back.

Whats that bee?

I have often mentioned the confusion there is about bees and that people often cannot tell one type from another.
On a blog I follow the writer said there are two pubs near him in Newcastle called the Bee Hive.
This is the sign outside one.

He didn't have the nerve to go inside and point out the sign has Bumblebees on it and they don't live in bee hives.

The other one does have a bee hive [a skep] on it but again the sign has bumblebees.

I did a quick image search on Google for Bee Hive pub signs and these aren't the only ones that are wrong.

Solitary Bee Houses

I have finished the [slightly] newer version of the solitary bee house.
It has a release box underneath which hopefully might mean the emerging female bees will use the channels again.

I've mucked around with the nesting channels. Initially they were wide enough for mason bees, the most likely bee to nest. Leafcutter bees make a smaller channel in the wild so I have put some smaller channels on the outside of the blocks and drilled some holes in the middle of the blocks to have removable straws that are big enough for the mason bees,

I think I will sell them at markets next year and include a copy of the Little Book of Solitary Bees, a booklet about siting the house and how to deal with the cocoons and also a couple of tubs to store the cocoons in. Probably ~£18.

Obviously the Solitary Bee market is booming as in direct competition to my bee house the Flow Hive people, producers of the bee hive that's a solution to a problem that doesn't exist, have produced their own Flow Bee House.

It doesn't seem to be on sale outside Australia and they are charging about £50. Its a limited edition and made from off cuts from the Flow Hive. All profits go to charity.
Its a lovely looking thing  and will look great sited next to people's Flow Hives, but is essentially a lot of bamboo canes in a box. It suffers from the usual problem with these sorts of things in that the tubes can't be cleaned so parasites and disease will build up.
As usual they produce a lovely video about the hive that makes you feel all warm inside and has lots of bees and smiling children in it [The children are in the video not the hive, that would be silly].

Making feeders

Not only is Winter time for dull routine chores, it's also time to try and set up a few new things for the coming season
After the autumn feeding I brought back the feeders to be cleaned and stored for use in the Spring.
When we first started bee keeping we bought whats called a Miller feeder. Its a tray that sits on top of the frames and has a slot the bees can climb up and syrup is stored in a reservoir. The wall to the reservoir has slots so the syrup can be accessed by the bees without them drowning
They're nice things and can hold a lot of syrup so I thought I might buy some more. That is until I found out they cost £50 each.
So I made one and it cost about £10.

Bees making Comb

In the wild bees make lovely sheets of wax comb.

Although fine for them, its very inconvenient for us as its a difficult and messy process to get the honey for our porridge. So we make them make their comb in neat wooden frames in a bee hive

This is a time lapse video of  bees making comb naturally albeit it in a glass observation hive.

November Bee Update

It's now winter, at least as far as the bees are concerned.
They are still getting out and about but things are slowing down and my focus is getting them thorough the winter.
I have put their winter wraps on
These are plastic sheets that are wrapped around the hives for insulation. I have to cut them back slightly to fit and to have a gap where the hive entrance is.

I also took the opportunity to add fondant blocks for their winter supplement.

The next thing to do will be to give them their winter varroa treatment but this won't be until after Christmas.

Although the bees will be tucked up until next march there's things to do for next season.

Drinkers

Like all animals bees need water to drink and they also spit water into the hive and fan it with their wings to keep the hive temperature constant.
Scald End bees have a stream running behind the hives  but there's no standing water that's close to the Ravensden hives.
In the past I have used these things which are largely useless so I've decided to do something about it. ready for next season.

This came about from watching another video by the man who did the swarm video I posted recently. The video is here and you might want to watch to see his obvious pleasure at being with his bees and also to enjoy his wonderfully soothing voice, nearly as good as the great Oliver Postgate
I have a couple of old chicken drinkers and will probably set up the same thing as used by Arven.

Supers

These are the boxes that during the Summer have the 'retail' honey i.e the honey that is extracted for sale.
It appears I now have 32 of them that need to be checked. A standard winter job is for the frames to be checked for repairs/replacement and with an average of 10 frames a super it can take some time.
Is it a fun job I look forward to? No.

As a start I have put together frames to produce cut comb. Its not complicated you just use foundation than is thinner than usual and doesn't have the wire that conventional foundation has.
Its never going to be a best seller and is a bit 'generational' but I did a few frames last year and got more interest than I expected so I will set up a complete super which should give me about 40 blocks.

The frames that have damaged foundation will have the old foundation removed, a mucky job.
I clean the frames in a weak bleach solution, using a Burco, and then replace the foundation.
The frames that have foundation that can be used again are sprayed with something called Certan .

Wax moth can set up home in the cells of drawn out foundation and the spray should take care of them.

Solitary Bees

I've extracted the cocoons from the straws, and will clean them and store in my fridge for next Spring.

I've made a slighter bigger bee house with an integral cocoon release box and they have a removable cassette so you can view the bee's progress.
I'm thinking of making a few of them and selling them at markets with some bits and pieces to do with the cocoons as well as a booklet on solitary bees and how to look after the cocoons.
Keep an eye out in the Solitary Bee aisle in yoir local North Bedfordshire Honey Mega Store.

Ban on neonicitinoids?

As well as being an utter arse,Michael Gove is Environment Secretary and today has said in an article in the Grauniad about neonicitinoids that

While there is still uncertainty in the science, it is increasingly pointing in one direction. Not to act would be to risk continuing down a course which could have extensive and permanent effects on bee populations. That is not a risk I am prepared to take, so the UK will be supporting further restrictions on neonicotinoids. Unless the evidence base changes again, the government will keep these restrictions in place after we have left the EU.

Being the duplicitous shit he is,and aware that the NFU will be lighting torches and sharpening their pitchforks, he goes on to say

The current process of emergency authorisations – used not just in the UK but across the EU – will remain in place, allowing the short-term, limited and controlled use of neonicotinoids in exceptional situations to control a threat that cannot be contained by any other reasonable means. Farmers will be able to apply to Defra who will take advice from the advisory body on pesticides and Defra’s chief scientist, with authorisations granted where the evidence is clear that neonicotinoid use is essential.

The have already been invoked in the UK and last year three areas were allowed to use neonics.

37.6% of statistics are rubbish

The National Honey Week.
I didn't know this was on until Sue showed me an advert in the Grauniad with an unfunny and stupid cartoon.
Its sponsored by the British Beekeepers Association and I went to their site to see what sort of things were going on during the week.
Very little it would seem other than the National Honey Show at Sandown racecourse on the 26th-28th where the many varieties of honey and honey products are judged.
I suppose any pursuit will have advocates with a competitive edge but I'm afraid I don't really understand this. I know someone who used to be on the circuit and told me about the weird things people do to show their honey like having special spoons to remove air bubbles from the corners of jars, otherwise the honey doesn't stand a chance.

The other thing that happens is the BBKA announce figures for their members' honey production and they came out today and HONEY PRODUCTION IS DOWN!!!!! AGAIN!!!!!
Not only this but much is made in the media of the fact that 62%  of bee keepers 'are worried about 'the use of pesticides including neonicotinoids'
This gave the press the chance to dust of their stock of standard headlines and the Grauniad presented us with this

The 'decline' is  from 12.8kg per hive to ........11.80 kg. 1kg less.
Is this significant? Honey production is obviously variable and the Secretary of the county association said his honey production had been affected by hot dry weather early in the season reducing nectar production and then rain later in the season reducing the bees ability to forage.
Is this reduction indicative of the continued decline in bees and can it be linked to neonicintinoids?
Lets not forget this is a survey of what I would call 'retail' honey i.e the honey extracted for sale and ignores the honey the bees make for themselves. We're obviously not too bothered about this type of honey rather than the possibility of having to endure the nightmare of eating waffles without honey on them.
It's quite reasonable to have a situation where the bees have produced plenty of 'bee' honey that will get them through the winter but not produce a big excess for us to pour over our porridge. Year before last was a 'poor' year for my 'retail' honey yet all the colonies survived.
I had some hives that I deliberately didn't take any honey from and was happy for them to build up their stores and next year I will have at least one hive where I have no intention of taking honey from.
At this point I will again refer to the legendary and still incomplete blog I intent to do titled 'Bee keeping without honey'.

Also I'm not sure this is a representative survey of honey production anyway. The BBKA is essentially an organisation representing amateur bee keepers of which there are a lot in the UK. However the real volume honey is produced by professional beekeepers who belong to the Bee Farmer's Association. You have to have at least 40 colonies to belong to the BFA who as far as I know do not publish annual statistics.

The 62% of beekeepers who are worried about neonicintinoids in itself produces another statistic that 62% of bee keepers are probably stupid as neonicintinoids have been banned in the UK for nearly three years.This doesn't stop Grauniad readers from getting their lattes in a froth as they rage about pesticides and we are treated to the old favourite 'if the bees die, we die'.

'How was my honey production?' I hear you ask. I'm not too sure but OK I think
I don't keep records of what the bees produce although this year I had decided to do as few markets as possible and not get in the position of doing markets but running out of honey.
So I roughly worked out how much I might need for a year and it looks like I got enough to do them.
I did weigh the buckets but unfortunately lost the bit of paper the numbers were written on.
If I have more than enough to get me to the first extraction of next season in May then the surplus will sit in the garage.
If I run out, no big deal.