Mason Bees & BroodMinder Tech.

This week, I’ve got an exciting update on the mason bee saga. If you remember, I found four eggs on lumps of pollen under a hive roof on World Bee Day (20^th May). So, I carefully removed them with my sharpest hive tool and relocated them to a safe place on my desk. I discovered quite a lot about their diet from looking at the pollen under my microscope and doing a bit of research. I watched as three eggs successfully hatched over the next few days, and one failed to survive after eclosing. Over the next week the larvae grew bigger and fatter though the third to successfully hatch was always the smallest one and it went black and shrivelled a month from the start of my observations.

Both large larvae were mobile and moved freely around the box sometimes ending up side-by-side, and other times alone in one of the honey comb box grooves. I could see their mouth parts moving as they ate pollen.

 On 25^th June, one larva was quite still but white and healthy- looking so I didn’t worry. I was expecting them to weave a silk cocoon around themselves and I did see a tangle of silky material on the box floor. At first, I suspected that it might be mould so I relocated the surviving larva to new containers. They had both stopped eating by then so there was no pollen to get damp and mouldy. On 29^th June, the second larva was still after two days of writhing on the spot, and on 30^th they were both still healthy looking and yellow/white but quite still.

Meanwhile my research continued and I discovered a thin little book on red mason bees, I’d forgotten about, tucked away in the bookshelf. I ordered up a classy mason bee house online which is now on the bee shed door under the eaves. I’ve seen leafcutter bees, from the same megachilidae family as mason bees, collecting pollen from perennial sweet peas near the bee shed so hopefully they will notice the luxury apartments for free rental.

I’ve been busy over the last week so haven’t paid as much attention to the quiescent larvae, but I was amazed and thrilled yesterday to see that one of them is pupating in the little jam jar from a hotel breakfast table. It is very clearly a little bee with head, thorax and abdomen and tiny stalks that look like sprouting wings.

The Journals

Sunday was a great day for reading the journals in the morning before preparing the family roast chicken for an early evening meal so Leo could get to bed on time. BeeCraft (https://www.bee-craft.com/) is particularly good this month with a fascinating article on oil seed rape (Brassica napus) production by Co-Editor Richard Rickitt following his interview with agronomist and beekeeper Tim Bullock. Did you know that the Romans probably introduced this crop to England (The Picts in Scotland were a bit too wild for them to subjugate and I don’t think that they did much farming up here!) and it was first recorded growing as a crop in the fourteenth century? In the era of steam, it was commonly used to lubricate engines in the nineteenth century. Now it is widely used in the home as a cooking oil having been modified by the Canadians so that it is low in erucic acid and the bitter ingredient glucosinolate which gives its unpalatable taste. Canola (Canada oil low acid) is the cooking oil many of us use on a daily basis though less is produced in this country since the ban on neonicotinoids. However, as one might imagine, the oil is still just imported from countries that do use this controversial chemical.

Beewild Report

I like the ‘Recent Research’ section with links to further investigation and got carried away for a good couple of hours reading the report, Bee:wild recently published by Reading University on the top 12 emerging threats that are speeding up pollinator losses. Depressing as the reading may be, the article offers hopeful solutions. You can access the full report here: https://www.tinyurl.com/BC2025-07-03 and find out more about Bee-wild here: https://www.beewild.org/

In a nutshell, the current threats are; wars, conflict, microplastics, light pollution (especially for nocturnal animals such as moths), planting trees without understanding the impact of poorly planned planting with inappropriate species, antibiotic pollution and more, giving us much to contemplate.

It is easy to knee-jerk and plant something because you want to help the environment, but if you haven’t researched the topic well enough, failure often follows. This happened to me about ten years ago when I planted a wildflower meadow in a pretty circle on the front lawn. It took ages to make but it disappeared leaving little trace the following year because I hadn’t taken the time to learn how to do it properly. I didn’t plant the best seeds for the area, or allow the seeds to form before cutting the patch.

Observation Hive

The weather has been cooler and wetter over the last week and the observation hive bees tore down all the queen cells. I noticed that the last one has been torn open this morning on the start of what is supposed to be hot weather bringing a nectar flow. Hopes of watching another swarm leave this season have faded. I’m feeding the little colony till they have built up more stores. They were pretty low after the swarm and then the weather turned bad for a while. They threw out some drone pupae and I saw chalkbrood, but now the floor is pretty clean.

Their new queen started laying yesterday on the 8^th. The bees changed their mind about swarming, probably because of bad weather. I saw an egg at the end of the new queen’s abdomen yesterday as she walked over the frame looking for a cell to lay in. This is good news.

BroodMinder

Who remembers Tupperware parties back in the day? Well, some friends and I had a BroodMinder party last week to jointly order our sensors, hubs and what-nots (https://eu.broodminder.com/collections/all . Cynthia hosted it with homemade cinnamon cake and tea from her silver pot. We were not sponsored by the company I hasten to add, but, having been inspired by reading Theresa Martin’s Dead Bees Don’t Make Honey (https://www.northernbeebooks.co.uk/products/dead-bees-dont-make-honey-martin?_pos=1&_sid=344364dec&_ss=r , six of us are now enthusiastic BroodMinder ‘novices’. New beekeeper Louise, who has been using the system for a few months now, paved the way for us and came along to share her experiences and advise on our purchases. I already have a temperature sensor that she gave me on my recent birthday and it is above the brood nest of the wild bee colony from the church roof that is 96% M lineage Amm.

Some might think that they can learn all they need to know by watching the bees and doing hive inspections, so why would you want sensors? Well, I want them because I want to disturb the bees much less often than I do already. The wild bees have been without their old queen for three weeks. She was removed as part of swarm control and I’ve estimated that the new queen will lay around 10^th July. Well, the weather is so fickle and might be poor when I want to look in to check. I want to check because the new queen might not have been mated properly, or even returned from a mating flight and who wants to have to deal with laying worker bees towards the end of the season?

So, how shall I know from looking at my BroodMinder App if she is laying or not? Well, a healthy colony maintains its broodnest at a fairly steady temperature of between 33-37°C but when there is no brood such as in winter, or during a brood break in the active season, the colony stops regulating the temperature which drops. I noticed the other day (around 5th) a temperature drop, which coincides with emergence of all the brood and no new eggs. When the queen starts laying, the temperature should rise and the colony will start thermo-regulating again. Here is the graph for this week.

I’ve just discussed this pattern with Theresa Martin on one of our regular information-sharing Zoom chats. You can see from the latest chart above that the temperature is all over the place. Theresa suggests that there is usually a smoother transition from when brood emerges to when the new queens starts egg laying, and there are not usually such large temperature swings. This is a good time to open up the hive and check the colony to see if I can find eggs. Given the bad weather a week or so ago, I will leave the bees alone over the next few days of hot weather undisturbed to collect nectar and I’ll check within the week. It might just be the position of the sensor between the double brood boxes in relation where the first eggs have been laid. Often it takes longer to get queens mated up here anyway so I am not too worried yet.
The observation hive queen started laying on the 8^th. I saw an egg at the end of the new queen’s abdomen yesterday as she walked over the frame looking for a cell to lay in. This is good news.

Queen Trapping

Hive 6 shows no sign of swarming and varroa levels are low making me think that the mites are there alright but in the brood cells. So, I have just given the colony a brood break by trapping the queen on a frame in a cage. I decided to follow Steve Riley and Westerham Beekeeper’s strategy of trapping the queen for four weeks to allow all the mites to emerge and become attracted to the second caged frame. I placed the queen on an empty but drawn comb where she will remain for two weeks before I remove and freeze the brood killing the varroa mites too. I will then place the queen on the second frame inside the trap for a further two weeks. When the time is up, I will release the queen and destroy the brood with varroa captured inside the cells and the levels of varroa inside the hive should fall considerably before it is time for winter bees to be produced.

Summer Heat

Meanwhile, we have another gloriously hot day here, though ‘hot’ depends upon where you live in the world. Theresa, from Kentucky USA, thinks it’s amusing that I describe 23° C as being hot. But it is and the grass is scorched dry. The local farmer got his hayfield cut and baled in just over a week and we picked masses of perfectly ripe wild cherries yesterday. We shared some with neighbours and family and I dehydrated the rest for winter treats.