June Challenges

Introduction

June certainly does challenge beekeepers here in Nairnshire, and probably many other places too. The good weather ended as abruptly as the nearby field of flowering OSR that turned green overnight did. Beekeepers preparing to take bees to the heather in August might be in luck though— plenty of rain in June to ‘wet its feet’ usually means a good show of flowers and a bumper crop of honey. I harvested 100 lbs of spring honey from four productive colonies the day before the OSR faded. This replaces the last bucket of stored honey which went into my ‘creaming’ machine to make it soft-set nicely without the white frosting on the sides of the jar that often happens with that product. Sales at the gate have increased since I started using the wee cabinet that my neighbour Roger made out of scrap wood donated by another neighbour.

Extractions

Not a lot of time sitting with my feet up reading this week either what with childcare and extracting all that honey in my old three-framed tangential extractor. I’ve got arm muscles like Popeye. I’ve never bought a larger extractor because I have nowhere to store it. The bee shed is full and our house is bursting at the seams with beekeeping equipment. I tried to tidy the spare room in preparation for a visit from my Australian relatives this summer and ended up taking a lot of things to Moray Waste Busters this week,  https://moraywastebusters.org/ . It is a recycling depot with a treasure trove of a shop and I have to be careful to leave more donations than I end up buying. I’ve sold/given away a lot of surplus beekeeping equipment too and it feels good to have a big clear out. I steam cleaned lots of frames I’ve been storing for years in sealed containers, and ended up selling several hundred pounds worth of rendered wax to a local company that makes massage creams. I discovered a disconcerting fact about wax foundation. Not all foundation advertised as beeswax is actually 100 % that. My friend told me that she bought bulk wax from a local beekeeper but couldn’t use it in her products because it had been adulterated (presumably by the manufacturers and not the beekeeper) to make the foundation. Some of the wax formed a jelly when it melted indicating a petroleum product had been added to make the beeswax go further.  I’m glad that I decided a couple of years ago to make my own foundation and I’ve saved some wax for my next batch. BTW, wax sells at £15/kg here at the moment. The main reason I stopped buying foundation was because of pesticides lingering in the wax but I wouldn’t want petroleum products anywhere near food either. It’s a warning for us beekeepers to question the sources of products we buy.

Winter Losses

I did enjoy one good read this week though, and it made me focus on winter losses and learning from them. Paul Honnigman, author of https://www.northernbeebooks.co.uk/products/the-observant-beekeeper-honigmann , also writes for the Oxford Natural Beekeepers’ website blog page, https://oxnatbees.wordpress.com/ . This week he discusses winter losses and how heavy they were across the UK for reasons attributed to climate change and weather. He explains clearly and logically the reasons why losses in treatment-free beekeeping may be higher than managed colony losses and it isn’t because of varroa.

It is interesting to read Paul’s observation that the British Beekeepers’ Association has a charter that includes supporting beekeepers to make an income from honey bees. Historically, in the UK, farm labourers and workers in the country earned low wages and many of them kept bees to supplement their income. Conventional beekeeping education here continues to teach practical methods of manipulating honey bee colonies to produce maximum honey yields.
I’m enjoying a less hands–on approach as I work towards treatment-free beekeeping and tuning in more closely to what the bees would do without my interventions. I count fallen varroa mites every day and monitor for viruses. If I see more than a few crawling bees with deformed wing virus I will treat the colony. I do make money from my bees, but not much from five colonies. Just enough to pay for the equipment and running costs with a bit over. I will probably sell honey from my gate only this year as I have a feeling that the overall honey yield will not be as high for me as it was last season.

Reducing the Risk?

Have you lost a colony, or more this winter? If so, do you know why? Can you do anything to reduce the risk of the same thing happening again? I lost one colony out of five this winter.

It’s only my second winter colony loss since I started in 2004, but this year I have lost 20% of my apiary which sounds high. I replaced the dead colony with a swarm from my best colony that keeps varroa levels in check, chews pupae, and throws out lots of immature mites. But why did I lose a colony this winter? I am pretty certain that I contributed to the colony demise by omission. But was that a bad thing? In the wild this colony would have perished. With hindsight, I could have requeened the colony when their first attempt in June failed. Instead, I gave them a frame of eggs. When the queen they produced failed to get mated, I gave them another frame of eggs. Eventually they were queenright at the end of August and had built up to be what I thought was strong enough in mid-September to get through winter. I was mistaken it turns out, and probably they didn’t have enough winter bees to see them through. They limped through till March but were queenless by then with a handful of bees and no sign of the queen, brood or eggs.

Waiting

I’m waiting for the queens in three colonies to start laying. It is hard to be patient and just sit it out till I see the brood nest temperatures rise and stabilise. I was hoping that they would mate during the hot sunny weather and now we have rain showers most days. The chart above shows the temperature spike on 17^th May when a secondary swarm with a virgin queen came out and landed on the osmanthus bush. You can see how the temperature has fallen off and the parent colony stopped thermoregulating. I’ve calculated that she should lay around 7^th June but I will check the hive next week if the nest temperature fails to rise. This is the ‘free-living’ colony, removed from a church roof last year, so I will hang onto its swarmed daughter queen till I know that all is well. If not, I shall unite the swarm back to parent colony. The swarm weighed about 2kg and the subsequent weight loss was due to my harvesting honey.

One mistake that I keep repeating is giving away surplus bees and queens after swarm season before I am sure all my own colonies are queenright. I do this to avoid having an overcrowded apiary for too long, but I will be patient this year and wait. The main lessons I’ve learned from my colony loss are to make sure that a colony has a successful new queen by mid-July, and keep nucleus colonies going for longer in the season before giving queens away.