Blog Posts

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Honey for sale

Phew…

I have a load of rape seed (canola) honey, some lovely wildflower honey, some honey from beans and now some honey from borage (starflower) too.

I’m selling in in 1lb jars for £4.50, 12oz for £3.50 and 1oz sample pots for 40p (was going to be 25p but it worked out cheaper that way than to buy 1lb at a time).

I can do collection from Harlow or White City , West London; or maybe delivery subject to volume/distance. I looked at postage, but the suitable packaging for glass jars costs a fortune, as well as cost for the weight of postage.

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Framing and making an escape…

As I said previously, I was at Thorne’s centenary day, and bought some good bargains. One of those bargains was plastic excluders. Now, I have bottom bee space and so unframed excluders can be a pain; not easy to put on (‘move I said bees…!’) or take off (damn sticky propolis glue), not to mention that I think its harder for them to get through without a bee space. Last year I got some nice frames wire excluders, but now the cheapest I can find is £15 each and that is before shipping. These were £1 each, and I do like doing the woodwork bit and the gadgets I have to buy to get them done. This one would ‘require’ a new purchase, an electric nail gun / staple gun. Now quite excellently the nails (brads) this takes are just right to use instead of gimp pins for making frames with… Hooray !

This job also utilised my fondness for hoarding bits of wood, nice big bits of plywood, and a love of power tools, in this case my table saw. I started by cutting narrow lengths of 6mm ply, and laying them out like so:

 

…and then stapling it together, and to the excluder. Then turning over and repeating.

Now those of you paying attention will note that I have now put a ‘bee space’ on each side of the excluder, which is naughty, because the bees will now have more than a bee space between the excluder and the underside of the frames of the super. Tough ! I’ve tried doing framing on one side only, it doesn’t work well. I have some 3mm ply that I could have used to mitigate the issue; but at least this way its now reversible. I will see how it goes; can’t be as bad as when I did it one sided. I put to of them on hives already as I write this, and it seems to be acceptable access for the bees to go through nicely.

Tips and tricks – a couple of notes:

I offset the corners on one side with the other for strength
I used four staples on each edge, don’t want it to come apart when stuck down with propolis
I used longer staples on the other side, to go right through the ply, excluder and into the other ply, hoping for a more durable join.
Once I had finished I went around with a belt sander (cool toy !), sanding down the edges to allow easier access with a hive tool, so as to avoid accidental splitting.
So once I had done that there was no stopping me, I made up all 5; then I made a bee escape / clearing board , the type where they can see from below but they need to go round the long way. I may have overdone the depth of it there, using 3 layers of ply for the edges. I had planned fewer, but I needed the height to allow for the escape construction.

Framed excluders and a clearing board

So now I have replaced a few other excluders, I can put frames on those too (one wire, one zinc, two plastic). I quite fancy trying a Vortex bee escape, I should find my round escapes, or I may chose to be ‘creative’. Another bargain from Thorne was a whole load of varroa mesh, which will prove to be I’m sure invaluable.

 

 

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Get her Girls

I was inspecting my bees on Thursday evening and removed the supers to see this sight.

Bees attacking wasp

Obviously, this unwelcome visitor had got as far as the queen excluder before being spotted, which is a bit worrying she’d made it so deep inside the hive. My girls were not about to let her go once they found her though, tumbling over and over, biting and I am guessing trying to ball her to overheat and kill her. I guess failing that they could have gone for the kamikaze route and stung her in the musketeer fashion.

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Find the queen

So today I needed to requeen a hive. I had put a test frame in on last Saturday and it now had what looked like sealed emergency queen cells… shrug, after 6 days?
Anyway, I decided to look in on my lovely new queen in my nuc that we introduced as a queen cell at Stock on the last day of my queen rearing course 8 days ago
So, I found eggs, but could I find the queen… I looked high and low, one side and the other, back and forth. You would not think it was only on 3 frames!!
I looked, and I looked, expecting to see a yellow queen with a black tail, or at least one that was a bit different to the other bees, longer. Nope, lots of the bees were long compared to others.
So I started to think what else can I look for. Height… she would be taller than the rest, well with uneven comb and bees climbing over each other, that quickly failed.
Leg colour, I had previously noted queens with orangey legs compared to the black legs of workers. I came up trumps! The queen at last! Stripped like the rest, very slightly longer than many of the others, moving quickly through and ignoring the others. Clearly orange slightly more substantial looking legs, especially the hind ones. A quick comparison to the others said that she was alone in these features.

I got hold of her marked her red, clipped one wing (after a lot of running around, I am not good at handling I am afraid) and put her in a cage blanked with a bit of fondant with a tiny hole in. I popped her in her new home and let them get on with it.

Lessons –
– she’s not always going to look that different
– don’t give up
– use other characteristics to look for her than shape / colour
– after keeping a nuc open for a while they will start to forget about the smoking your gave them, and a top up doesn’t always work.

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Update for July

Well, once again its been too long without an update so here goes;

Finished the queen rearing course mentioned in the last update – having learnt various facets of queen rearing and general beekeeping
I’ve finally taken a serious amount of honey – approx 300lbs so far with more to come. Saying that I found today that from 2 x 30lb buckets I got 81 1lb jars, so it might be conservative. Hooray !
I have bought some labels for honey jars, finally, I just chose a temporary one for now. Then found some online software for creating labels myself at home, as our club secretary does. I made this

First Label

I went to the Thorne’s centenary in wragby, lincolnshire. It was very interesting, I got some good deals and learnt a neat idea from artisan honey, put honey cappings in a hive top feeder and give the bees full access and they will clear the cappings of honey, so effortless separation and the honey goes in the super again.

I also got a number of bits and bobs to make things out of which with a bit of luck will feature here. I have some plastic excluders that I am going to make a wooden run for so they have bee space (I am bottom bee space) and extra stiffness. I also got an electric nail / staple gun, so I should make quick work of that. I got some varroa mesh, from which I plan to make queen cages, mesh floors, clearer boards and other contraptions.

I worked the apiary on the borage, including one hive that went a bit mean. I found the queen and was on the verge of ‘dealing with her’, I chickened out and had a word with her, because she’d been good up til then. It seems to be getting better now, stopped pinging off the veil. She was also saved by having produced the most honey this year of any of the hives, with 5 supers taken already and 4 still on but not quite filled.

I acquired some decent strain queens in nucs and mini nucs. Two from Clive de Bruyn, some from Terry Thrussell (although I dont think any of them made it:- ( ) and some from other sources (I should keep better records)

I need to get on an put some pollen cages on hives so I can collect pollen before its too late, to make pollen patties over winter.
I have a lovely queen that I want to try breeding from, she hasn’t swarmed, she is very calm natured and produced a fair load of honey (by comparison). I am not sure if I have missed the opportunity though in terms of the right time of year.

I think that is all for now. I will have to get back to writing better posts with more pictures, I have lots of pictures, so I’ll just have a few historical posts when I get round to it.

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Busy, busy. Queens, Swarms, new apiary

Couple of weeks since the last update and I have been very bee busy.

Lets see, not in order:

– Started on a queen rearing course – homework was making queen cups, that was fun.
– Killed a queen, not all my fault, she was squashed in a plunger during a mêlée as her hive attacked me.
– Requeened, maybe not successfully, can’t find the queen but saw about 5 eggs after 3 days
– Melted a mating nuc plastic parts while steam cleaning it. Apidea hive parts curl up as they cool, be warned.
– Got a new apiary on fields of borage; with a chap from our group we were hacking down brambles the other night.
– comb changed another hive, same issue of the bees ignoring her in the empty box like last time.
– set up a double mating nuc with bees and queen cells, although they may be a swarmy strain I don’t have much choice.
– picked up a swarm, hived it, and here is the video after I put her in the hive

– seen so many queen cells its unreal. I thought it was enough when I had 15 in a hive. Last night I found 10 on the bottom edge of one frame! Then about 7 on each side of a frame in the same hive.

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She’s Doing it

Quick note – Good news from the hive. That hive where I was doing a frame change, and she wasn’t laying. Well after I changed the order so the new box was on top, they started building comb for her and she started laying when I checked last saturday.

Phew. Well now I can get on with doing it to two other hives.

In other news,

that queen seems to have lost a middle leg…
the WBC in matching green had more queen cells, and I plan to bailey comb change to artificial swarm this weekend.
I finally got some more frames so I can start patching the gaps I had, and swapping out broken / hole-y comb
the two other hives at matching are still not building up. I am thinking of using the below recipe to see if that improves matters.
1 x Tsp Tea tree oil
1 x Tsp Wintergreen oil
1 x Tsp of Spearmint Oil
10 drops lemongrass

Put a cup of water in a blender and then the oils. Blend to emulsify the oils
make up to 1.8ltr with water.
Pour 40 ml of this into 1.5 ltrs of 1:1 syrup shake up well.
I’ll see if that improves anything

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Watch out ! They’re ready to swarm

I checked my 14×12 WBC the other day, and its packed to the rafters with brood. They were so packed in that they were making comb on the bottom bars and the queen was putting eggs in. They also had 5 queen cells on them. I didn’t see the queen, but I saw loads of fresh eggs (standing on end in the cells), so I was fairly sure she was present before knocking down all the queen cells. They had a super on but had just not touched it at all, so I took off the excluder to see if that would encourage them up there.

It does pose a quandary though, unless you have two WBC hives, how do you do an artificial swarm?

Well I’m going to try a bailey comb change / demaree swarm control. Basically putting the current colony above a box of new frames, with the queen in the lower box separated by a queen excluder, then once she start laying swapping the ‘clean’ box to the top. This will supposedly reduce the swarming intent and also reduce the varroa count significantly as the old lower box is left.

On the down side it will require a good number of lifts, so its lucky I have a couple of spare ones, not entirely sure they will fit, but we shall see.

In other news, I have 1 national that I just made brood and a half, another that I tried to comb change onto commercial frames where the queen is refusing to lay in the new area. I have two hives where things are just not building up quickly, and two that are running low on space that I just put supers on. So in short, nothing that is going really well while not causing issues.

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Bee rescue

So last week (Thursday 9th) moved to rescue my Buckfast queen “Danish Lady”. The colony was just not building up right in the previous inspections; in the last I could see no sealed brood, few bees and no sign of her. I thought the treatment with varroa guard had done for her.

So, I planned to have a shook swarm into a nuc. I prepared ahead of time, nuc, sheet, frozen comb, some stores and foundation. I put a super on the floor, put a mesh floor slide board up to it to make a ramp. Putting a sheet over both, I put the nuc on top, took the lid off to allow insertion of the queen to the hive; so her scent would draw the others in.

I went to the troubled hive and started taking frames out, starting with ones with no bees. Where I found bees I shook them onto the sheet in front of the hive after looking for the marked queen, all going to plan.

Then I found a patch of sealed brood. Ahh, the queen was doing slightly better than last week and is still here somewhere. So, plan B, not all new frames, I wasn’t going to throw this lot away. So I continued to shake off bees and pulling out frames; no more brood, just the one precious patch.

I checked the bees on the sheet and there she was, with a bright green mark; don’t know how I ever miss her, but there you go. I picked her up on the edge of a hive tool and popped hee in the top of the box along with her brood. Great! Brood in, queen in; the bees should smell them and follow along now… well come on then, in you go, I don’t have all day.

Oh, did I forget to mention it was windy; windy enough to probably blow away any attractive scent … oops.

Well, time to get the bees moving in, maybe if they see their sisters going in they will get the idea. Smoke them up into the nuc, shake the sheet towards the nuc, shout “come on, she’s in there!”; all tried with small levels of success. Then the smoker ran out of fuel. After a top up of slightly damp grass I got some nice yellowish smoke; oh yeah raining a bit too, not ideal conditions.

Anyway cutting a long story short, I got most in and the others can take their chances with one of the other hives there. I took the nuc away and drove home slowly due to forgotten hive straps.

The bees seem to be getting along ok in my garden for now, so I will cross fingers for a good build up.

Lessons to learn

  • Hive straps
  • Have multiple plans
  • Weather is a pain
  • Pheromone smell travel best without wind
  • Steeper angle on a ramp will allow you to smoke bees ‘up’. Smoking sideways tends to scatter them.
  • If you are in a rush, the bees won’t be.
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Yalding Bee Fayre

http://beefayre.yaldingbeekeepers.co.uk/

I am going to this next weekend (May 11th 2013), taking one of my little boys to enjoy the attractions and then seeing what I can get at the auction.

It was good just as an auction when I went a couple of years ago, now its bigger and seems to be attracting a lot more attention.

Its not far on the other side of the Dartford crossing if I recall correctly.