Hello Everyone,
It’s me (Greg) back again and I think I will be the main writer for a while as Kat is quite busy currently, and probably will be for the next few weeks until half term (teacher troubles). I’ll try to keep this one short but will probably fail…
Tuesday (18/5/21)
The sun seems to be trying to wrestle its way free from the clouds today. The average temperature is about 15°C - perfect fidgeting weather. I booked half a day holiday from my main job to put ReFeeBee through a shaker box to find the queen and cut down her 14 x 12 frames to finally get her solely into one of our hives. I won’t go into much detail as I’ve already described the process in last post.
I gave the shaker box a go as I transferred the frames from Nuc to hive. The bees absolutely hated it and I got stung on both wrists almost simultaneously… which hurt… a lot… But the shaker box worked a treat because I finally found the queen! She was absolutely tiny, barely bigger than a worker bee and when I got her into the queen cage it was obvious that something was wrong with her. Unlike the other queens who walk about with purpose and balance she was really wobbly on her feet and quite twitchy for some reason, curling up, shuddering as if in pain and then uncurling to try walking again. It’s no wonder that she wasn’t laying very well if she was like this, poor girl. I put her out of her misery in the most humane way I could when I got her home later on … hope she’s not suffering any more.
I put a frame of eggs from Steph into the hive and made a mark on it so I know to only keep the queen cells produced on this frame. I’ll check back in a week to see how many sealed cells there are. If there’s none then there may be another queen in there somewhere which means I’ll have to get the shaker box out again… I’ll wear thicker gloves this time though…
We also released the bees from the Chinese Mating Nucs mentioned in the last post. They’ve been cooped up for two days so were very happy with their new freedom. I’m hoping the queens will emerge this week and that the weather behaves long enough for them to get well mated. I’m using this as a bit of an experiment as two queens will be emerging and flying off to be mated at both apiary 1 and in my back garden behind the green house where it’s quite sheltered and warm. I’ll judge how successful each site is and use the better one in future queen rearing. I’ll be doing another split on Laura soon I think so I’ll be able to test apiary 2 for its queen rearing ability. Anyway, wish them all luck everyone.
Wednesday
The weather forecast has given us an extremely wet week ahead (surprise, surprise) so I decided to do a quick inspection of Laura and Kate while I could. Both are fine as they have lots of brood with no swarm cells. The bees seem to be filling up the boxes okay. Laura has a bit of an issue in that the 2 frames in the bottom box that were FULL of honey are half empty now.
Forage must be getting hard for them, especially in this wet weather. I’ve decided to feed her but I’m unsure how as she has honey supers on and the last thing you want to do is contaminate your honey with sugar syrup. I’m debating removing the supers and putting yet another brood box on top and then feeding her or just leaving her on two brood boxes then giving her food. The prior will provide her room as well as give the bees something to do (draw out foundation) so they don’t get restless and start making swarm cells. The problem with this is that half the food I give them will go into drawing frames out. The latter will provide her lots of food and will be cheaper for me but it will reduce the space they have and could possibly lead to swarming…
I have until Saturday to make a decision because of the aforementioned rain keeping the bees locked indoors. In other news, the queen cells should nearly be hatched so I hope they get a good few day of no rain soon. It’ll be a nightmare if 4 out of 4 queens don’t return or don’t get mated properly.
Saturday
Well the weather people were lying, there was definitely rain on Saturday… I waited for a dry spell and pootled out leaving Kat working hard in her study (teachers really get too much work). I came to the conclusion that instead of syrup, I would instead feed Laura and Steph fondant. Bees usually take syrup from the feeder and store it in the honeycomb, this is because they can take it down faster than they consume it meaning there is usually an excess. Doing this can clog up the brood comb meaning the queen can’t lay, inducing swarm triggers. The syrup (if not completely consumed) can be moved up into supers at a later date contaminating any honey the bees collect. Fondant on the other hand takes a bit of work for the bees to collect, meaning they mostly take it at the same rate they eat it so no excess for storage.
I started at Apiary 2 so I could check on ReFeeBee and its fresh queen cells… there were none again… I closed them up while I pondered what to do. I used this pondering time to have a look at Steph as I’ve been taking frames of eggs from her to support ReFeeBee and it’s getting to the stage that I’m probably causing issues for her.
I’ve decided to do a different method of making inspection notes. I’ve found a method online that involves different coloured thumbtacks to denote what is in each frame and then taking a picture on my phone at the end. Steph will be my Guinea pig for this as I don’t know how much I like the idea of carrying around pots of different coloured pins, nor how fiddly it will be pulling out pins and putting new ones in on a regular basis. I started basic this time with the following:
Blue thumbtack meaning brood,
White thumbtack meaning stores,
Red thumbtack meaning empty comb or foundation frame.
I plan to use more pins in the future so different combinations mean different things such as “green and blue” thumbtacks means capped worker cells and “blue and yellow” means larvae, but for now I just stuck to the one pin per frame. I’m also hoping that it will give me a visual insight into how the brood box layout is managed on a week to week basis. Might be able to do a slide show at the end of the year which could be fun. The biggest issue with this notation method that I can think of is my terrible memory and ability to guff up the simplest tasks, I’ll have to keep a legend of some sort to remind myself what the different pins mean.
Steph had six frames of brood which is more than half in the box and given that the weather sucks these next few weeks, I decided that she could lose one more to ReFeeBee. I swapped it out with the frame I put in last time and closed both hives up. Before I left the apiary I had a quiet word with the problem child “ReFeeBee, this is your last chance… if you don’t make queen cells I’m going to shaker box you again and if I don’t find another queen I’m going to have to shake you out completely or combine you with Steph as there’s clearly something wrong with you… Plus the head gardener Ian got stung three times during this inspection so I’m not liking your aggression either… you’ve been warned missy”.
I went to Apiary 1 feeling a bit deflated and was perked up by watching Laura. Talking to a lot of beekeepers, every single one has their favourite hive. The one that is an absolute joy to have and reaffirms your love for the hobby and mine is Laura. It had started raining and the bees were still flying in and out, hard as nails, calling every other insect sheltering a wimp as they do their jobs without a worry in the world. I popped her open to put the fondant on and even in the rain the bees weren’t bothered by me pretty much taking the roof off their house and noseying at them. I decided to leave them be after plopping the food on as the rain picked up a bit more and although they were fine with it, I didn’t want my golden girls working harder than needed. I checked on Kate’s feeder and noticed no syrup had been taken, strangely, I might not have dribbled it down the feed hole when I first put it on to alert the bees to its presence. I rectified this and closed her up quickly.
Last of all was the Queen Mating Nuc. There were bees flying out of the left side but none
coming out of the right on first glance meaning that the number of bees might not be evenly distributed. I lifted the lid and had a look down the feeder windows. The left side certainly had more bees milling around up there and when I topped up the feeder it took seconds for the left side to walk en-masse and start taking it down. The right side had maybe 10-20 bees milling about and they didn’t show much interest in the food. I’ve only got one more week before I can look inside the Nuc. I’m guessing the left side’s queen has emerged and is laying from the bee numbers. Not so sure about the right-hand side though, will just have to see.
As I finish writing this post it has started raining heavily again… here’s hoping for a better summer.
Thanks for reading and hope you’re all safe,
Greg
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Tuesday (25/5/21)
So, this post is going to be a 2 weeker after all as I forgot to upload it on the Sunday (oops, sorry!)
Today is overcast with showers and the temperature reached around 15°C at 3pm. I decided to watch the Tiny Queen Rearing Nucs in the back garden to see if there were bees coming in and out or if they had died of cold or starvation. There weren’t a lot of bees coming out but that’s hardly surprising given that there was only a handful of them to start with. Good news is that there are a few bees coming back with pollen for both nucs so that IS promising (they tend to only do this when there are larvae that need feeding).
As it had been well over a week since we let them out and the weather has been a bit of a wash out, I decided to give them some syrup. This was hard to do because if you open them up too early before the queen (if alive and laying) has established herself and a brood nest the bees can “ball” around her and kill her accidentally.
Balling is when the bees in a panic will surround the queen en-masse, creating a golf ball sized huddle. They do this to protect her from any beastie trying to eat her (think secret service agents jumping in the way of bullets) but most of the time it overheats and cooks her alive. Bees aren’t the smartest sometimes…
To avoid this cooking of the new queen I placed some small Tupperware dishes full of sugar syrup outside the nuc entrances. To stop them drowning I cut some of that “non-slip” foam stuff and placed it on top of the liquid. I read somewhere that it was good as a float so bees can walk on it and drink the syrup from the holes. It worked like a charm although the girls still preferred to stand on the sides of the dish. It took a few minutes for one bee to notice the food and to get more bees to come out. I left them to it after a while as Kat had got back home from work and needed me to help her with some “Greg-Jobs” (aka stapling workbooks for her students).
After about a day both feeders were empty, industrious little blighters.
Thursday
Today is glorious! So much so that I’ve completely forgotten how crap the weather has been… well… I’m trying to repress it in a very unhealthy manner at least!
I’d taken the day off from my actual job to get my car fixed (alarm trouble… it’ was a whole annoying thing) and after wasting half of it waiting for the mechanics to rebuild my car again I had the afternoon to check on the girls. As in properly check for once! So here we go: (bet you’ve missed this!)
ReFeeBee
Medium strength
(Understandably) Annoyed temperament
1 National brood box
8 Seams of bees
8 Frames of stores
2 Frames of partial brood (just larvae and capped)
“Cut out” frames are all secured and elastic bands chewed away
No signs of queen cells after another week!
I’ve given up hope on ReFeeBee and I think I’ll be retiring the name of “Fee” too as it seems to be a bad omen for our nucs; Sorry to Kat’s mum… Fiona can and will still be used for a future colony though. As stated above, there were no queen cells throughout the hive, let alone on the frame of eggs I put in from Steph. I did as I had been threatening and put all of the bee through the shaker box to find out if there were any more queens. I couldn’t find any others (and received three stings, including to the back of the head) but when looking through the frames I found some eggs around the edge of the cells which generally points to “Laying Workers” and could be the reason for our troubles.
Laying Workers occur when there isn’t a queen or fresh larvae in the hive for several weeks. Every worker bee is female and has the ability to lay eggs but the queen and larvae pheromone usually suppress the worker’s ability to lay eggs. When HRH isn’t about for a while the workers decide that they are the new queen. Unfortunately, Workers cannot mate with drones meaning none of the eggs can be fertilised and so the colony is doomed.
Cleverer people than I think that this is the last chance of a hive to send out its genes, as the unfertilised eggs will turn into drones who can mate with virgin queens. The tell-tale signs for laying workers are:
lots of eggs around the edge of cells, worker abdomens are not long enough to reach the bottom of the cell like a queen and they don’t really have the control to only release one egg,
Only drones are being produced, due to lack of fertilised eggs
Unwillingness to produce queen cells or accept new queens, the bees think they have a queen because all the laying workers start giving off queen pheromone.
Unfortunately, there are limited things you can do with laying workers. Most bee farmers do something called “Shaking out” where you walk a fair distance away (>100m) and shake all of the bees onto the ground. The older forager/flying bees will fly back to the hive position as they have had chance to orientate, the younger bees (which tend to be the laying workers) can’t find their way home and perish away from the hive… this is pretty heartless let alone drastic and I really couldn’t sleep killing all those bees willingly.
The best method (in my opinion) is to combine it with a strong hive e.g. Steph. I’ll hopefully be doing it this weekend if Kat can tear herself away from work. The pheromones from the strong hive will overwhelm the ones from the laying workers suppressing their ability to lay. The benefit of this method is that no bees are lost in a field somewhere and the strong colony becomes even stronger by doubling its forager force. Researchers have found out that one colony with the same number of bees as two colonies will outperform both combined. This is because the jobs around the hive are taken up with a single hive’s worth of bees leaving the other hive worth of bees the freedom to go forage. It’s quite smart really thinking about it…
Right, Back to it!
Steph,
Strong strength
Perturbed temperament
1 National brood box and 1 National Super box
11 seams of bees in the brood box
2 frames of stores
8 frames of brood in all stages although more eggs than capped brood
1 Frame of foundation being drawn out
“Cut out” frames are all secured and elastic bands mostly chewed away
Steph’s bees are a bit tetchy when I’m fiddling with them, bouncing off my veil and hopping onto my hands when I reach for the frame lugs but they are yet to sting me so I just smoke them a bit and say “knock it off” a fair whack. I’m waiting for them to move up into the super and have removed the queen excluder to encourage them up but still had no luck. Hoping that when I combine her with ReFeeBee the extra bees will help in this respect.
Laura
Strong strength
Super chill and very busy temperament
2 National brood boxes and one National super box
Both brood boxes are full and the super has 3 seams of bees
10 frames of stores
10 frames of brood in all stages
Laura is a beast of a workhorse; she’s moved up to the super and started drawing out the foundation frames as well as filling the centre drawn out frames. I’ve taken the fondant off because, even if there is another long spate of crap weather, they have enough food now and I don’t want any of that bee food going into the honey. I’m going to make up some nucs out of her this weekend as each one of those frames of brood will produce 3 seams of bees and I don’t want her getting too massive.
Kate
Strong strength
Busy temperament
2 National brood boxes
6 seams of bees in the top box and 8 in the bottom
5 frames of stores
8 frames of brood
Kate has moved up into the top brood box but the bees don’t really need the space as she isn’t filling either box up. The only difference between her and Steph currently is the extra frames of food Kate has. I think I’m going to knock her down to a single brood box and use the excess frames of food or drawn comb in the nucs I make from Laura.
Saturday
Last day of this post because it’s getting far too big after ironically stating that I was "going to keep it short".
Today I had decided to combine ReFeeBee and Steph as well as make a couple of nucs from Laura. I also had a happy helper in the form of Gabriella, a good friend of the family.
Gabriella absolutely loves bees but has a terrible fear of them buzzing near her head and possibly getting stung. I asked if she wanted to join me as she could come face to face with her fear in a completely safe environment to which she agreed because she is hard as nails and wants to conquer her fear. I made sure she was well wrapped, so no bees could sting her and led her into Apiary 1 where Laura and Kate (the golden girls) are situated.
We started on Kate, knocking her down to a single brood box. I showed Gabriella the difference between worker bees and drones, she saw the different stages of larvae and even came close up and smoked the bees down for me while I had my hands full. I managed to get a few photos for her mum because its not every day that someone literally holds their crippling fear in their hands with a smile on their face. I also managed to show her what to do if you do get stung as one of Kates bees decided to get the tip of my thumb… helpfully…
The way we knocked Kate down was to remove all of the frames out of the two brood boxes that weren’t being used by the bees. We then moved any stores that were being left to the outside of the bottom brood box and filled the rest of the gaps with any brood frames. It is a simple procedure and it concentrates the brood box meaning less bees are needed to keep it warm and feed the babies. We put a queen excluder on the box and then placed a few supers on top of that too as the bees will need some space when the foragers return at night and it will encourage them to start making honey (I hope). We left her with two frames of food and put the rest in a couple of empty nucs.
Next, we moved to Laura where we took two frames of pollen from the top box and four frames of brood (including bees walking on the frames) and evenly distributed them among the nucs. We refilled the now half empty brood box of Laura’s with frames of foundation and then closed her up. Now we were left with two nucs, each containing :
2x frames of food (nectar/honey)
2x frames of brood in all stages (young larvae and eggs needed for them to rear queens)
1x frame of pollen (food needed to rear strong queens)
1x frame of foundation (to keep the bees from getting bored)
We taped them up and safely secured them in the car before driving to apiary 2.
Combining ReFeeBee and Steph was surprisingly easy and took literally minutes, less time if I didn’t take photos. We took the roof and crown board off Steph, placed a queen excluder on top and then some news paper on top of that. We then sprayed the paper with 1:1 sugar syrup and poked little holes into it with the hive tool. Finally, we lifted ReFeeBee up, minus it’s floor, and placed it directly on top of the newspaper… that was it… no mess, no fuss. It should take a couple of days for the bees from both colonies to chew their way through the paper and in doing so their smells should merge and Steph’s queen pheromone should move around ReFeeBee suppressing any laying workers. I’ll check that everything is okay on Tuesday or Wednesday.
Combining colonies should only really happen at night when all bees are in the hive and there are no foragers out and about. Unfortunately, this is not an option with apiary 2 as it gets locked up at 5pm. When combining the hives there were a lot of lost looking foragers buzzing about so we placed one of the fresh nucs in the place of ReFeeBee and they all started going in. This is ace as they will reinforce the nuc’s strength making sure the brood and nurse bees are kept warm, well fed and protected from intruders. This colony shall now be known as Fiona.
As for the other nuc, I let Gabriella choose a stand to place it on and let her do the honours of opening it up. This one is another special nuc that you can place a divider in and turn it from a 6 frame nuc into two 3 frame nucs (like the queen rearing nuc at apiary 1). I'll check both nucs for queen cells in the next few days.
So, there you are, a massive two weeklong post about rain, shaker boxes, ill queens, stings a plenty, a FULL inspection (finally) and a bunch of other fun things. My plans now are just to do inspections of hives and pop supers on top of the hives when needed. Next week I get to check on the queens in the tiny nucs in my garden and in the Queen rearing nuc at apiary 1 so that should be exciting, just hope they are all laying well. We’ll have to see what happens and I’ll try to not forget to post next time.
Hope you’re all safe and well,
Greg
P.S. How are you enjoying this blow for blow style of posting? I seem to be using it like a diary, hence the waffling so I’m finding it more useful for keeping track of everything but I’m not sure if it’s easier to read. Please leave a comment or send me a message with any feedback =)
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