Hello Everyone,
Well well well, what fun I’ve been up to since the last post. Not going to lie, getting married has been one of the most stressful things I’ve ever done in my life; with the ceilidh band trying to cancel last minute, people letting us know they couldn’t attend only days before the big event and several friends finding out that they have COVID the night before thanks to our mandatory lateral flow testing, BUT I ended up married to this catch:
So, it was totally worth it! She scrubs up well when not stuffed into a bee suit doesn’t she?
As a wedding present, my work bought me two special queen bees… well... they gave me money and I spent it on bees before Kat could spend it on useless things… like a bathtub…
The queens I bought were a Buckfast (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckfast_bee) and a Carniolan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carniolan_honey_bee). These two breeds of honeybee tend to produce larger amounts of the honey than the native black bee with most commercial bee farmers using only Buckfast bees in their hives. Buckfast bees were specifically bred by a monk (called Brother Adam) nearly a hundred years ago by creating hybrids from almost every type of bee breed in the world. It tends to have all of the good characteristics and very few of the bad from each species making it the “Perfect Bee”.
“So, Greg” (I hear you ask quietly in your brain) “if pro bee farmers only focus on Buckfast bees as they are perfect, why are you getting another type too?”
The answer is that I’m a scientist at heart and love to experiment and test theories. Buckfast are great for the summer flow building up throughout spring to be absolutely massive ready for the June/July nectar flow. Unfortunately, they also require a lot of food to overwinter and can sometimes starve very easily in mild winters, like we get in the UK. Carniolan Bees, on the other hand, are renowned for their ability to overwinter and build up in late winter/early spring ready for a spring crop of honey. The majority of my hives are headed with queens from (my star) Queen Laura which is a Native European Black Bee (Apis mellifera mellifera) and evolved in northern Europe technically making it the most suited for our climate and forage.
My experiment is this, I want to test the ability of all three types of bee throughout the next season to see if their reputations are well founded and to see which is best for the climate/forage near me. I will be judging them on the following: Amount of winter food needed, Spring brood build up, Forage ability, Temperament and finally their ability to be split to make new queens.
The first step was to get some Queenless Nucs ready to accept these queens, that should be arriving any day now. I made up the two Nucs last Wednesday (30/6/21) by taking two frames of brood and bees from Laura and then a frame of food from Steph per Nuc box. I then took them from Apiary 1 to Apiary 2 so it’s far enough away that all of the older bees don’t just fly back to Laura. On Monday (5/7/21) I popped down to remove any queen cells that had been made. This is important as the new queens won’t be accepted by the bees if there are any virgins or queen cells anywhere in the Nucs. I’ll repeat this process when the new queens arrive, in a few days, to ensure that no more queen cells can be made, meaning that the new queen is the colony’s only hope to survive. I will be using a Nuc the same size with one of Laura’s prodigy from this year to compare them against, so it’s fair.
Once all queens have been accepted, the Nucs will all be fed well with syrup and pollen sub to promote egg laying so they can all build up to a full-sized hive ready for winter. This will be an interesting first step to see who can get to that colony size first. I’ll keep you all informed on how the investigation is going each week.
After prepping these Nucs for the new queens I’ve created a little game for you below called “find the queen cell”. Bees are experts at hiding them and the only true way of finding them all is to shake all the bees off each frame and looking very closely.
Try to spot any queen cells you can on each frame, and I’ll put the answers at the end of this post.
Something else I did on Monday was called “Sacrificial Brood Removal” on hive SWOM as I noticed a few bees with deformed wings. (Don’t worry, I didn’t trace any pentagrams on the apiary floor, light candles and pray to a pagan deity.)
Deformed wings are caused by varroa mites eating bee larvae whilst they metamorphosise into an adult, generally if you see them then it points to a large infestation. To reduce mite numbers without using chemicals, which is very important when honey supers are on, you can sacrifice capped brood by cutting it out of the frames.
The best type of brood to remove is drone brood as the mites prefer to munch on drone larvae to worker larvae, so its removal is extra effective, and drones don’t really do a right lot around the hive other than eat food and fly off to get lucky.
It feels bad knowing that you are sending a few hundred bees to their death but it’s aiding the hive as a whole and it also provides food for your local birds, so you don’t have to feel too bad. I’ve started making foundationless frames to save myself a bit of money (each frame costs 90p on its own and £1.50 with wax foundation and when you have 800 frames it makes a big cost difference) and strangely it actually makes brood removal extremely easy as the bamboo skewers provide a strong guide for me to slide the hive tool up against. I’ll still be using some foundation frames, as without bees tend to produce a lot of drone comb, but adding a few of these per hive should cut my costs down a fair amount.
Something else I noticed on Monday’s inspection was that every colony (barring the newly made Nucs mentioned above) now has a queen! Meaning I have nine queen right colonies from the original two I started with in January. Not bad if I do say so myself.
To be honest, I was getting a bit worried for hive Kate, as there hadn’t been a laying queen in it for the best part of a month and a half. Usually this can result in laying workers which can just ruin a colony and results in you needing to either shake them out or combine with a stronger hive. She has been getting really aggressive of late too which is usually a sign that the workforce is mostly older bees on their way out, as they are really grouchy. After receiving six stings on my wrists and arms from lifting out the first frame (and only swearing a little) I said “sod this” and just pulled up the middle frame as brood rearing usually starts here and works its way to the edges. Fortunately, I saw some gorgeous pearly white worker larvae filling the whole comb (good laying pattern). I put it back and checked the frame next to it and discovered it was full of eggs. After seeing this I got stung on the elbow so thought I’d better close her up quick.
It sucks that I didn’t see the new queen but having her in there has given me a sigh of relief. Hopefully the aggressiveness with fade as some new brood hatches out. I’m going to give the hive a month to itself now, only checking the supers every so often, as there is a bunch of space in the brood box for the queen to lay and hopefully all of the angry forager bees will have died of old age by then… my poor arms…
We do have two queens which are unnamed, I'd normally put a picture up of them but they have clearly been born with the power of invisibility... I’m going to have a month-long competition for you all to enter your suggestions and I’ll reveal who wins on my social media accounts. You can have as many suggestions as you want but don’t just spam the same name as that’s cheating.
Right that’s pretty much everything that’s happened on Monday and I’ve just received an email telling me the new queens are on their way, hooray! I’ll leave you with the answers to the little game I made before.
Hope you’re all safe and well,
Greg
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