Introduction.
The weather warmed up during the last week of April with temperatures soaring to 16 and 18°C. The bees were foraging like there was no tomorrow and my strongest colony (Hive One) put on 7kg over a few days. OSR was in full bloom along the road and the apiary odours were redolent of cabbages. Things changed rapidly early May with cold days and nights, and temperatures down in single figures a lot of the time. The colonies stopped gaining weight and went off to OSR fields only for the few hours that it was warm enough on some days. Here we are nearly in the middle of May and it’s still too cold for inspections without compromising my colonies. Thank goodness for BroodMinder sensors which tell me what the colony weights and brood nest temperatures are.
Monitoring Varroa
This week I want to share the results of daily varroa monitoring and how I used my records to manage the apiary this month. I look carefully in the debris for immature female and male varroa mites and count them separately. They are light brown or white. I look for cappings and chewed up pupae which also usually indicate hygienic behaviour. I also look for chalkbrood and anything else of interest.
Varroa levels have been higher in Hive One than in the other three colonies. Because this colony was bursting at the seams and had wall-to-wall brood on ten frames, I calculated the number of live varroa according to the treatment levels advised for the month of May (mite drop for May is multiplied by 30 rather than 100. The figures you see for Hive One in April have been multiplied by 100 because I could not change the Excel set-up). But the point is they were lower than for the advised treatment levels and were not showing signs of deformed wing virus. You can read the criteria and advice that I followed here: https://www.varrvoaresistant.uk/mite-calculator/ )
I wanted this colony to have an early and natural brood break so I pushed them to swarm by confining them to a single brood box with ten National frames which they filled with brood. They took the hint and swarmed at 4pm on Thursday 30th April. That was good, except they ignored my lovely bivouac lures and made straight for the back hedge where you have to navigate a barbed wire fence to access swarms. Fortunately, Linton was home on a brief tea break and reluctantly agreed to get them for me. He backed his pickup up against the fence and got onto the back and deftly got the swarm into my bucket. It was a medium sized swarm. Interestingly the weight loss was only 2kg and a friend calculated that only about 700g honey was removed with the bees. Even more interesting and satisfying is that daily varroa levels in the parent colony dropped noticeably. Daily varroa levels in all the other colonies have been less than 10 mites daily as you can see from the graphs.
Free-Living Roof Colony
Hive One has never been treated for varroa and has been in my care for over a year. Its parent colony was removed from a church roof where honey bees have lived continuously for over 40 years. This colony was 96% Amm with the original queen in residence. Hive One queen is the daughter of this original Amm queen who now lives near Aberdeen, but she headed up the colony in Hive Three till May 1st when the colony became queenless to make their own new queen. I removed the queen and gave her to a friend who rears native bees and will keep her in semi-retirement in a nucleus box with a small colony. I have no idea how old she is but the chances are she might not make another winter here, and Stiliyan will make better use of her than I will over this season because he will graft larvae and produce more queens from her. My beekeeping needs to be really simple this season because of other commitments.
Nucleus
Hive Five is currently a small nucleus with a queen cell and frames of sealed brood (probably mostly all emerged now) from Hive One. The nucleus bees are bringing in lots of heavy pollen loads though the new queen will not be laying for another week, or two (if all goes well).
Your’e probably wondering what the happy families cards doing at the hive entrance and if I’ve completely lost it! I’m trying out a tip from an article in the ABJ by Tina Sebestyen who recommends placing playing cards at the entrance to give the bees something to slow them down when leaving the hive after you make up a nucleus to stay in the same apiary as the parent colony. In this case, I faced the wee hive in the opposite direction to the parent colony and stuffed the entrance with green sappy grass to keep the bees indoors till it withered. I raised the cards higher than they are in the picture and the bees also could use them as both a barrier and a guide for orientation to help them return to this hive. I think that it has worked because there are a steady stream of foragers out when the weather is warm enough which means that a lot of the bees stayed here rather than returning to the parent colony as they so often do.
I had been planning to monitor the swarm’s varroa levels very closely, so it was a big disappointment that it took off for its own chosen home a few hours after I hived it. However, one of my aims has been achieved and varroa levels are definitely lower in the parent colony where the levels of immature mites have also been very high. I should explain that this colony has been healthy and remains so, showing no signs of parasitic mite syndrome. It does have more chalkbrood than I normally see in my apiary. There was no chalkbrood at all last year in the apiary but it has been a very unusual season so far with prolonged cold weather.
My swarm management plans for the other colonies is the same as usual which is to use the nucleus method of swarm control when they make queen cells for swarm preparation. I will remove the old queens with some frames of brood and stores and let the parent colonies requeen themselves from the swarm cells. In my experience this method has not created ‘swarmy’ colonies that will swarm more than once a season. I know that eggs laid in swarm cells are larger than others so I am happy with my way of doing things. It is, of course, not the only way to manage swarming and will differ from many other beekeeper’s strategies.
Free-Living Colony
By the way, the free-living colony in the woods up the road died over winter. I had been monitoring this same colony since I discovered it in a larch tree in 2019. I hear that managed colony losses are fairly high locally this year and Louise has a theory that there will probably be more vacant nests in the wild too, so maybe our swarms will not be so keen to stay where we house them because they find the ideal home in the woods. Louise had a similar experience to mine with her first swarm disappearing off very quickly and stopping only to bivouac briefly. I wonder if she has something there?
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I believe Louise is on to something. My data shows the FLC’s here surviving at about 8% less than the managed population. The habitat hives having no intervention, high insulation and greater volume than a natural nest have the highest survival rate.
The free living population is a representation of the managed population. Looking at mine and other populations, if you’ve well adapted local bees of native approximation with VR, they’ll survive at a slightly lower rate than your managed colonies. If there’s a high level of continually replaced commercial type bees in the local population the Free Living survival will be a lot lower, down to that of a varroa naïve population.
FLC’s can be an excellent gauge on the fitness of your local population and if there’s prime bee real estate available they’ll pick that to occupy very quickly and some times preferably to a hive. Once the ‘in demand’ sites are occupied they may hang around longer searching and more likely emit into the wider environment for beekeepers to collect. Let’s just hope when you catch them, they’ve not already spotted somewhere better…….although the conservationist in me says “Free the Bees!” 😉🐝
Hello, Joe. Thank you for your comments and for sharing your expertise and knowledge on FLC’s with us. Best wishes, Ann.
I love the playing card trick and will definitely give this a try – I usually stand a branch in front of the entrance in this situation with mixed success so it will be an interesting comparison to observe.
Hello, Sue. I’m glad you feel inspired to try this card trick. I feel confident that more bees stayed in the nuc because of this strategy. It is now really busy and I actually saw the virgin queen going off on a mating flight the other day. They brought in loads of pollen from the start. I wish you great success with yours and hope you might share a photo? Best wishes, Ann.