Bottom-up Beekeeping: Guest Blog

Introduction

Here we are almost at the end of May and no rain yet in Nairnshire. I was astounded to see open bramble (blackberry) flowers at the roadside on a recent walk. This is very early. I will be sharing how to make a bivouac lure soon (following reader requests) but this week I have a real treat for you.

I’m very excited to introduce my friend Ray Baxter to you and his unique project collecting hive floor debris and learning from it. Ray is a retired biology teacher and one of the main movers and shakers in getting beekeeping into Scottish schools and onto the official curriculum. I’ve been an admirer and follower of Ray’s work for a good few years now and he has inspired me to do an official proofreading course, and to study hive floor debris and varroa counting in a disciplined manner.

I am also excited to have played a role in the development of Ray’s soon-to-be-published book —BOTTOM-UP BEEKEEPING – The fascinating story of how bee debris can be a beekeeper’s best friend. It’s going to be published by Northern Bee Books, July 2025. Make sure you order a copy folks. I’m pretty certain that you can contact Northern Bee Books and pre-order.

Thank you for contributing your work to the blog, Ray. Your photographs are amazing too. I particularly like the one of the honey bee egg. By the way, all these superb pictures are the copyright of Ray Baxter. I hope you get a wee holiday soon after swarm season is past, Ray. It’s over to you now.

Hello everyone, my name is Ray, beekeeper and amateur scientist living halfway up a very windy hillside in the Scottish Borders. I’m honoured to have been asked to write this piece about my experience of writing a book about bee debris. For almost two years I have been researching the debris produced by honey bees, and exploring how this information can improve my beekeeping practice.  

I didn’t start beekeeping for honey or money. My passion for beekeeping started fifteen years ago when I was working as a teacher. My initial plan was to learn more about honey bees and share this experience with students in the biology classroom. This quickly developed from being an occasional lesson into an extra curricula bee club, to putting beekeeping on the school timetable as a Scottish National Progression Award (GCSE level) and supporting other schools with the development of their own beekeeping qualifications. It’s been a journey that has been inspired by the enthusiasm of young people and the questions that they ask. In fact, the idea for this book came from a discussion with youngsters who were counting mites on the inspection board, and who became side tracked by other finds in the debris.

Each year we collected debris from the inspection screen to count varroa mites and agree management methods. One year, we decided to get the microscopes out and have a closer look. We were all enthralled by what we could see in the debris. The students would ask “what’s this? why has this happened? I wonder…? I soon realised that I was out of my depth, and the study of bee debris was put on the list of things to study after retiring.

Soon after ‘retirement’ I set about carrying out my own research, by studying how its composition changed during a year.  I identified and measured everything I could find. I loved the research process and used each find for a deep-dive into the scientific literature to explain the debris and relate this to beekeeping practice.

My book describes this journey of discovery and contains more than two hundred high quality images of bee debris that give a fascinating insight into life of a honey bee colony.   Each month I would start by photographing and weighing the debris deposited in quadrats drawn on the inspection board.

This weight data was used to produce heat maps, showing the distribution of debris on the inspection board. The darker the red the more debris in that quadrat. A heat map helped to visualise the size, growth and movement of the colony over a year, but didn’t really show a huge amount more than a simple photograph of the inspection board, so today I rely on taking photographs of the debris as a key part of my beekeeping records, to keep track of changes over time.

Along the way I discovered and learned so much about bee debris, how it can be a proxy indicator of colony activity and provide a way to understand what’s happening inside and outside of the colony.  The process continues to transform my beekeeping practice, so much so that before opening a hive, the first thing I now do is examine the debris. It gives me a way to understand more and inspect less. Clues in the debris help to make judgments about the location of the colony, its size, the shape of the cluster, the lifecycle stage, the history of the colony, colony activity, pests and parasites, and helps me to make more informed hive interventions. I now have a much deeper and broader understanding of my colonies than before. I hope to convince everyone who reads this book that each fragment of bee debris can tell a story and that learning to read the debris is an important skill for beekeepers.  Also, that recording how bee debris changes over time may be very important work in monitoring the status of bee health and the wider environment. 

This colony produced 224 grams of debris over the whole year and yielded 37.8 Kg of honey. It was satisfying to know a colony producing that amount of debris can lead to a specific amount of honey and to have some baseline data for when I look at the debris in the future. Extracting the honey with an old two frame spinner gave plenty time to ponder possible relationships between the debris trail and the honey yield. I was surprised that the act of honey production and storage seemed to produce relatively little debris as compared with nest construction, maintenance and brood activity

After weighing the debris, I used a microscope to take a much closer look at the debris. It felt like real detective work. I started to share pictures and findings with other interested beekeepers. The following pictures are just a few of my favourites.

Everyone was so helpful with trying to identify and better understand many of these finds. One of these people was Ann Chilcott without whom this book would not have been written. Ann encouraged me to contact Northern Bee Books. She said ‘You should write a book about bee debris, and they should publish it’ Well I did and here it is. Writing a book was out of my comfort zone and not on the ‘to do’ list. Ann gave the confidence to start and the greatest gifts that a new author can receive: an honest and comprehensive critique of work, while also supporting me to find my own voice in the process of putting pen to paper.

Under a microscope, a brood cap looks more like a double layered textile. The study of nibbled cap edges is useful to learn about the structure and imagine bees emerging from the safety of their cocoons.  The outer layer of each cap is a thin layer of processed wax mixed with propolis. 

The inner layer consists of thin silk fibres which is laid down from beneath. Brood caps differ from honey caps in ways that relate to their function. A honey cap is built almost entirely from wax. Its construction prevents the reabsorption of water that would spoil food stores by fermentation. A brood cap has a very different function, with a structure to match. A highly permeable capping allows the diffusion of gases for respiration. The brood cap also provides a cue for the larvae to spin a silk cocoon for the metamorphosis of a larva into a pupa. Covering the glossy silk cocoon with a wax capping is known to be beneficial for optimal brood development by buffering the humidity and temperature conditions. A total lack of brood caps in the third week of July shows that there was no longer a laying queen. My best guess was that the poor spell of weather as reported in June led to a pause in the queens laying schedule.

Mites – friend and foe

At different times in the year, I found different types and numbers of mites. These along with other finds showed a remarkable ability of the colony biome to reuse, recycle and dispose of debris in different ways. These mites seemed very good at making a living among the discarded brood caps and other debris found on the inspection board. I had hours of fun watching them eat, move and reproduce within the debris.

On the darker side of the mite world is the more well known varroa destructor. Each month I would count whole ones found on the inspection board and calculate a daily drop rate. Microscopy showed a graveyard of varroa parts. Encapsulated in the debris I started finding missing legs, feet and obvious bite marks on mites. Varroa could easily be found that had had their legs nibbled and outer shells broken. These finds along with adult bee exoskeleton parts and pupal cuticle fragments prompted questions and discussion about hygienic behaviour and cannibalism in honey bee colonies.

Honey bees as samplers of the environment

Foraging bees not only excel at collecting pollen but inadvertently are very effective at collecting other fine particles and that can be found in the debris. The design of a bee really means they can’t help it. Thousands of small fibres, some of which were believed to be microplastics were found each month. We can only speculate what the burden of these fibres is for honey bee colonies. Certainly, it is a topic that we need to understand more.

Finding eggs in the debris created lots of excitement. Initially I thought these must have accidently ‘dropped’ by the queen. In one week, I kept on finding them in pairs. The clues started to suggest that alongside a healthy laying queen, the colony also had a few laying workers, and it seemed that the eggs were being discarded by workers who were policing brood cells.

Looking for balanced nutrition

Each month, the pollen species amongst the debris helped to better understanding the diet of these bees. Six different flower species were found in the January debris. With limited forage availability in January and it being too cold for flights, evidence from last year’s pollen stores, was a useful reminder of the importance of a balanced diet for bee health.

I realise in this article I have already exceeded the allocated word count. Yet, there so much more to say. I have just loved the experience of pulling it all together. It feels wrong not to have even mentioned bee exoskeleton parts, bee hairs, cuticle fragments, propolis, chalkbrood, stellate trichomes, fungal structures and more. Hopefully the book will inspire you to look closer at the debris produced by honey bees – that would be wonderful. There is so much more to learn about how colony debris can help beekeepers.