Bee keepers beware

[AJB Temple]

For any beekeepers among us, swarming season has well and truly arrived VERY early down south. We only started checking our hives properly a couple of weeks ago and a few local beekeepers are now wishing they had too: my bee mentor has had three call outs to swarms just today, and she had whooping cough last week and lost her strongest hive to a swarm whilst she was ill. One of my hives is completely combing out and filling a fresh super in two weeks at the moment as we have an absolute abundance of blossom and a lot of rape, plus about a quarter of an acre of nettles in flower just in the orchard (kept for wildlife). Not keen on rape honey as it is hard to harvest, but you can't choose.

Just been through our few hives this afternoon and checked. Need to crack on and get some more frames made next week.

 

[Cabinetman]

A mysterious art needing a lot of experience and age old wisdom I suspect.

 

[akirk]

I know very little about bee keeping (but love honey!) Is the issue that they are effectively filling the hive very quickly and swarm because they run out of space in the hive?

 

[Phil]

We are entering the rest season.
Still lots of autumn flowers around and all the aloes have started flowering.
My bee friend will also start feeding sugar water.
(I have more hive stuff to finish off for him)

 

[AJB Temple]

Not really Alasdair. Bee keepers keep adding supers (honey boxes) and maybe even an additional brood box (where the queen lays tens of thousands of eggs) to create space, but they are pre-disposed to swarm anyway, so you have to check the brood box every six days and make sure that the workers have not started producing queen cells in readiness for a swarm.

We started this bee malarky about 5 or 6 years ago by attending an evening course once a week and attending practical sessions at our local apiary. However, as a novice you have no real idea of what is involved, the incredible amount of (not cheap) gear you need and the work involved. For this reason more than half of people who start give up after the first year, and the rest of us end up with multiple hives, in order to deal with swarming and to have insurance for losing colonies over wintering. Then there is the winter feeding and pest control....

If we had known how involved it is when we started, we would probably not have done it. We also switched over from smaller national hives to the more commercial langstroth. When you get it right though, the bees are super impressive. In our best hive there are probably 70-80,000 bees right now. Not at all aggressive. But it took us amateurs three hours to go through the hives yesterday afternoon, track down the queens, mark one, fail to find one, set up a new hive ready for swarming risk and another new hive to take one of the swarms my bee mentor captured the day before, and then clean up (honey and propolis and bee wax sticks to everything better than titebond !

 

[AJB Temple]

Phil in the UK the norm is to winter feed sugar syrup and then fondant. We don't do that much at home as we prefer to leave a super or more full of honey on the hive since we are not commercial (ie we do not sell honey) and prefer to let our bees keep the winter stores they have made (we also remove the queen excluder). We would however typically add home made fondant in a weak hive or one collected as a late swarm.

 

[akirk]

Thank you, a fascinating insight… how do you recognise Queen cells, just a visual difference?

 

[AJB Temple]

Queen cells are long and look like a peanut husk. The bees are smart and often hide them right at the bottom of a brood frame, so it is frequently necessary to shake the bees off the frame to spot the queen cells. I suspect I will be dealing with this within 2 weeks. Will shift my strong queen and some brood and young bees to a fresh hive if I spot queen cells. I will pick what looks like the best and squish the rest. (don't want a queen bee face off in the hive!). The new queen will have to fly off and get mated by the male drones. Then she will come back and become an egg laying machine.

I've been doing this for a few years and only just starting to get the hang of it. Made lots of mistakes. Everyone does and bees are fickle. Wild creatures after all.

 

[MJ80]

We have got ride of our bees.
Are you running a single or double brood box. I went over to a single brood chamber system and it really helped with controlling swarming. I think it's called nadier. Even so sometimes there is nothing you can do, last year was ridiculous. The worst was when we got a real cold snap just into the start of spring so the hives got overloaded with the initial worker bees (we don't get much action here at less than around 10 degrees), that was absolute chaos!

 

[AJB Temple]

Single brood box in Langstroth 10 frame. We're in mid Kent so the temperatures are typically OK. There has been a lot of rain and especially wind this year, which must make life difficult for the flying bees at times. But it's quite warm and so everything has been growing like it's the tropics and the bees have a LOT of food. The concern is if we get a long drop in the flow later in the year. However, we won't take off supers unless the hives get too tall to manage.

The main reason we did the bee thing was that we wanted to support pollinators - honey is not our primary motivation, which is why I am happy to leave a super full of honey on over winter. We are the only ones in our bee club (Laddingford) that do this I believe. But as we have a massive surplus of honey it doesn't make sense for me to buy commercial fondant at great expense, when it is a poor substitute for stored honey.

 

[MJ80]

I was a reluctant bee keeper, my wife got a hive from school, which then became my job when she realised it's hot and heavy awful work. As you know managing one is hard, two is easier and six even easier. I don't eat honey and and allergic to the stings. Interesting definitely, but when I was away last year it was too much for her to cope with so they got rehomed. Did make some excellent sloe gin with the wild forage honey the other year.
I think we must have a couple of hundred jars in the cellar. I'm not going to miss sweating myself to death this year though.

 

[AJB Temple]

I don't regard it as awful work, but it is a lot more involved than most people think. I agree that a full super, especially at the top of a stack, is pretty heavy when full of honey. The real problem for me is the constant need for new gear - supers and waxed frames, plus new hives for swarm control. Our bees are very calm and it is rare for me to get a sting,. but as I'm asthmatic and have allergies I do carry an epipen in case of an unexpected reaction.

 

[Phil Pascoe]

In the late '80s I got a third prize at Royal Cornwall Show (fifth largest honey show in the Country, apparently) for comb honey, at my first attempt. I beat a judge who'd been showing for fifty years in to fourth place, and the steward said had I cut the comb to fit the box I'd have got second - I pointed out that it would have beeen very well over weight, but said that judge wouldn't have marked it down for that. Of course, R.C.S. isw early in June so you have to remember to put comb away from the year before. I was in the process of requeening with N.Z. queens (Buckfasts were not available) when one of a particularly colony stung me and nearly killed me. End of beekeeping, I still have an epipen.