Apiary News for May

This must be one of the driest May’s on record and the farmers are crying out for rain. Louise’s BroodMinder sensor is telling her that nectar production in her area is low https://eu.broodminder.com/collections/all . This confirms my own suspicions that the field of OSR up the road is not yielding well. My biggest strongest colony suddenly became unpleasantly defensive (I hope this is temporary because it is coping best with keeping varroa numbers low) and I notice that there is not as much OSR honey in the supers as I had expected. I think some of it is dandelion as the wax is very dark yellow. I got my first harvest from four productive colonies so it was a busy week. There is only about another week or so to go before the field greens as the blooms fade. I notice the observation hive bees are dancing for this field and storing the OSR nectar in newly constructed comb. When I watched them yesterday at 8 am they were getting ready for another busy day. I clearly saw the shaking signal as one forager grasped a sleepy bee and shook her into action.

Play Cups

I didn’t realise till now how much work a bee does on what we call ‘play cups’. These are acorn- sized cells that might house an egg and become a developing queen cell. For the last 18 days there have been bees working constantly on this cell. I cannot see inside, even with my dental mirror, because there is always a bee poking its head inside and obscuring my view. There is only one cell at the top of the frame in supersedure position so we watch with interest. So far, nine visitors have come through the bee shed to watch the observation hive goings on and it is great to be able to let new beekeepers familiarise themselves with brood and bees without having hives open for so long. Sadly, there is so much reflection on the glass walls that my photos of the observation hive are not clear.

Solar Wax Extractor

The sun was hot enough to melt old brood frames and I’ve cleared out all old stored wax and the solar wax extractor is stored away for the season.

Teaching

We have new beekeepers in our local association, but no training apiary, so a couple of us open our apiaries for teaching. I really enjoy this part of beekeeping and we had quite a party yesterday with Louise, Eithne and Sharon coming to my apiary first then down to the distillery to help Cynthia. After that we went into Nairn to Cynthia’s home apiary. Her bees are really mellow and we had afternoon tea a few feet away from her pretty WBC hive (a double-walled hive named after William Broughton Carr). Tea was served from a posh silver teapot with matching milk jug, and pretty flowery mugs that matched too.

When we were at the distillery a tourist came past and wanted to photograph ‘the bee ladies’. I’m wearing a clean but tatty old bee suit that has been patched to prevent bees getting in through the holes that were burnt when my smoker went berserk and puffed out sparks one day. I’ve just treated myself to a new pink Oz Armour bee suit with three layers of mesh to keep me cool but keep out any stings should I be working with defensive colonies. The suit arrived within a few days of ordering and there were no import duties to pay: https://ozarmour.co/collections/beekeeping-suits/products/pink-oz-armour-3-layer-mesh-ventilated-beekeeping-suit-with-fencing-veil

Legs and Genes

The work in my apiary involved transferring the colony of free-living bees, cut out from a church roof, to a full-sized hive and collecting drone pupae legs for genetic testing as the bees look fairly dark and we are all curious to know if there is a high proportion of Apis mellifera mellifera in their genes. It was a little fiddly getting 15 drones at the purple-eyed stage and I had difficulty removing the legs with the plastic forceps. Fortunately, Louise is more nimble-fingered than I am now and she made a super job of collecting the legs and getting them into the tiny tube which was then stored in the fridge propped between two packs of organic butter. https://beebytes.org/

A Good Read

There wasn’t a lot of time for reading this week ( I also spent a day in charge of an energetic toddler) but in quiet moments I’ve been enjoying Andrew Durham’s new book on the yellow-legged hornet. I’m not officially reviewing it since I played a small part in its production by giving Andrew proofreading support, and now I am able to concentrate on the whole story rather than concentrating on each word and the sentence construction.

This book is different from the others on Asian hornet written by entomologists, and by beekeepers who have managed colonies in France. Andrew’s book is a mixture of investigative journalism and practical advice on equipment and management of apiaries under attack. I’m blown away by the amount of research that has gone into this book—over ten years of inquiry with visits to France and interviews with beekeepers and officials, for starters. Asian Hornet is dedicated to the French beekeepers and royalites will go to the French Beekeeping Association.

You will discover how politics, weather, climate, and region shaped what happened in France and how hard the beekeepers struggled to keep colonies alive. The key thing is we can learn from Andrew’s work here in the UK, and elsewhere, as the yellow-legged hornet is established and we have to face the reality of changing our own management strategies. Andrew homes in on exactly what we need to do here and how to do it. The equipment and the pros and cons are discussed in detail.

At £26, this is excellent value for a book with so much practical advice. The ISBN is 978-1-912271-97-9 and it is available from Northern Bee Books who published it very recently.

Bivouac Lure Works

At the end of the beekeeping day yesterday I was clearing up equipment and tidying before sitting down to my evening meal, and what should I find but a swarm on my bivouac lure. I realised that the nuc that the observation hive queen and two frames had come from had swarmed. I had left them to make and choose their own queen cell but they must have felt overcrowded and produced a few more queens. So, this was a primary swarm with a virgin queen. It was so easy just picking up the post and shaking the bees into a nuc box. The difficult part was holding the post and taking the photo for you.  I have all the nuc boxes ready with frames during swarm season. This whole business of hiving the swarm and checking parent colony nuc took under ten minutes. Phew! In the parent colony I heard queens piping so I released them all to fight it out as Ted Hooper advises in his excellent handbook. He reckons that the bees will not send out secondary cast swarms if all the virgins have emerged. You can find his book here; https://www.northernbeebooks.co.uk/

And that’s it for another week.