Apiary Round-Up for January.

24/01/20, Mahonia or Oregon grape, Mahonia spp., is popular this month.

Phoney Spring Likely to End.

Here in Nairnshire, January has mostly been mild with temperatures regularly around 11 degrees Celsius. It has been very wet and windy, but on sunny days it’s glorious. Snowdrops and aconites are appearing already. All three colonies are flying on good days, and some bees are venturing along the road to forage on viburnum in neighbouring gardens.

Birds Tuning Up.

Even at 7am when not yet light, I hear garden birds singing. Robins are prolific. The greater spotted woodpeckers in the nearby woods started their territorial drumming on January 23rd, and blue tits are investigating nesting boxes. A great tit was trying hard to enlarge the entrance of one the other day and his ferocious tapping attracted my attention.

As I start this blog at the end of the day on Friday 24th, it’s noticably cooler and the weather forecast predicts a rough weekend. Earlier it was sunny and warm and the flowering shrubs were busy with bees so I’ve checked on food stores by hefting the hives. I put my hand under the hive stands on the back and sides and lift the hives just slightly off the ground to feel how heavy they are from each of the postitions. It is just a rough estimate but I like to do it. One hive felt like it was nailed to the ground and I couldn’t raise it, but I knew that this one was well provisioned before summer ended. The brood box was full of stores as I’d I left a full super on top. This colony was united with another at the last minute because I’d found their queen dead on the landing board on 4/9/19. I’d checked them in August and planned to leave alone till spring. However, I didn’t want to risk leaving them to raise an emergency queen so late in the season. They were very strong going into winter so I didn’t feed sugar syrup because they had lots of honey stored. They haven’t needed any fondant yet either.

Butterbur is pushing up in the apiary, 24/01/20.

I lit the smoker and put on my bee suit to check how much was left of a bag of fondant in hive 2. It felt great to sniff the air thick with burning dried lavendar stems. The second colony was also strong before winter but had only been moved from a nucleus box to a standard brood box at the end of summer, and had no super full of stores to fall back on. Sure enough, the bag was nearly empty so I placed on a new one in case the weather is cold again for a while.

Sweet box by the front door on 24/01/20 was visited frequently by pollen collectors.

The third colony was active, but the hive not as heavy as I’d expected. A very quick look in the super reassured me that they still have stores. I didn’t remove frames. The small tub of fondant had hardly been touched. This colony suffered from chronic bee paralysis virus last year (reported and photographed in a previous blog) and for a while there was a steady daily number of dead bees out front on the concrete slab till the end of summer. So, I wait with bated breath to see how they fare this year. February and March will be a time of possible stress for the colonies if the weather prevents them getting out and about on cleansing flights so, I will be keeping a close eye on stores. Even if the weather is warm in February, I shall not be opening up the hives to inspect the frames. If I did and found that they were queenless there is nothing I could do about that till the drones appear. Also, if I stressed the bees by an early hive inspection they might ball and kill a perfectly good queen. So, late March if the weather is consistenly glorious, but most likely my first inspections will take place in April. I’ll check to see if our bee barometer, the flowering currant, is blooming. When it flowers it is usually warm enough for colony inspections. Around 14 degrees celsius is a fine temperature to inspect a colony on a still day. I forgot to mention this important shrub in the gardening blog. Ribes sanguineum, from the glossulariaceae or gooseberry family, yields nectar and pollen early in the season.

Varroa.

Treatment in December using oxalic acid sublimation was followed up by counting the dead mites on the trays. I was pleased to count only a few from each colony so perhaps the end of summer treatments had worked well. Oxalic acid works best in a broodless colony so I always get my treatments done before January. You might be suprised to know, that this January anyway, colonies may have as many as 3 frames of brood (hand-sized amounts on each side of the frame). I’ve just received information from a friend of mine 16 miles away who has been carrying out a bit of research. She was surprised to find as much brood in the colony she examined. It tells me what I already suspected, January is too late for a single oxalic acid sublimation.

Lesser Wax Moth.

I’ve never had touble before with either of the wax moths though I’d seen the odd larva (caterpillar) on the floors previously. This year I am paying more attention to them because I want to study their life cycle.

3 Lesser wax moth larvae, Achroia grisella, from the floor of hive 3 on 24/01/20.

You can clearly see two larvae and the one in the middle left of the frame has a gut full of wax, pollen and debris (brown area). The one in the top middle is fairly translucent. What they do after hatching from an egg is find a good clump of debris, often on the hive floor, and tunnel into it to feed before pupating. You can see the tunnels quite clearly here.

Captive Caterpillars.

On 05/12/19 I found 2 larvae in floor debris. One was about 4mm in length but it is quite difficult to measure one on the move. They tunneled into debris and then stayed put on the bottom of my collecting jar fitted with magnifying lid. On 16/01/20, 42 days later, I noticed that the tunnels were moving up the side of the jar and were wriggling like mad. Next day, all was still and the tunnels had divided up and formed 2 pellet-like chrysalises. They look a bit like rat droppings. They are in fact covered in their own faeces and look like the’ve been rolled in tiny chocolate sprinkles you see outside truffles. You can see 2 small faeces below the pupa on the right.

The Last Day Of January 2020.

After a week of heavy frosts, snow flurries, rain, wind the temperature is rising again and expected to reach the dizzy heights of 10 degrees Celsius today. I checked on the wild bee colony a week ago and they are flying on good days. In a future blog, I’ll explain in more detail about my monitoring plan for wild bees. I inspect them 3 times a year for recording purposes, though of course I visit this tree much more often than that. The key thing to establishing that a wild colony is in residence is to see pollen going in for that means they have brood to feed. One can be mislead by bees entering a wild nest because they might just have gone in to rob out any honey stores.

8 thoughts on “Apiary Round-Up for January.”

  1. Thanks Ann. You’re always so interesting to read but this one is particularly useful from a practical point of view.

  2. I think it’s amazing what you write about Ann it’s not just the bees , you delight the reader with what is happening in Nature with the birds the plants and the weather. It encourages me to look more at what is happening around me in Nature. Thank you

    1. Thank you, Susan, for your positive comments. As a non-beekeeper, it’s great that my blog provides an interest for you. I spend a lot of time walking in all seasons which increases my chances of seeing interesting wildlife and observing seasonal changes.

  3. Thank you, Ann, for this end of January report. I esp. appreciate the final section on the wild colony of honey bees near your home that you found some time ago. Fingers crossed that you will spot bees flying into its home carrying loads of pollen.

    1. I’m glad that you liked the January blog. Yes, fingers crossed about the wild colony surviving. Thanks to you, I will remember to check for pollen going in. When you see bees in the wild, or coming into a bait hive, it is easy to get carried away and assume that the bees are resident rather than robbers.

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