In the Apiary in May. Nigel Salmon.

1 Regular check for queen cells/swarm control/clipped queens

2 Check for brood disease, esp. EFB

3 Add supers ahead of requirement

4 Clear/extract/replace supers after oilseed rape flow

5 Monitor varroa situation

We are having another wonderful spring again, and the bees are building up quickly, foraging on cherries, plum and increasingly oilseed rape. One of my 2 hives occupies a brood and 4 supers at present (first cross Buckfast) so they will need frequent checking for queen cells – the other hive is about where I would expect them to be for the time of year..

This month, you should be checking your hives at weekly (if you have an unclipped queen) or 10 day intervals (if she is clipped) to spot the first signs that the bees are preparing to swarm (bees will not normally swarm until they have drones on the wing, so you probably don’t need to check hives that haven’t produced any yet). Remember, it only takes 8 days from the queen laying in a queen-cell to the time it is sealed, and on that day, or the first fine sunny day thereafter if it happens to be dull and wet, the old queen will usually leave the hive with between a third and a half of the workers. They will cluster for a while (anything from a few hours to one or two days) quite close to the hive whilst scout bees search for a suitable new home, and if not captured by the beekeeper, will leave for an unknown destination. This is the scenario if the queen’s wings have not been clipped. If, however, the queen’s wings have been clipped, then when the swarm emerges, either the queen will drop onto the grass and be lost, in which case the swarm will return and await the first virgin to emerge before they can swarm, or the bees will find the queen and cluster around her very close to the hive. You can see by this that clipping a queen’s wings might buy you up to 5 or 6 extra days before the bees can swarm again, but you need to be vigilant. Also, do keep well ahead of the bees when supering so that you do not force them to swarm in the first place.

On finding occupied queen cells, you need to make an artificial swarm (see April’s notes) unless you can visit your apiary daily and so pick up any swarms that emerge. For ease of manipulation, allowing the bees to swarm, collecting them in a container and hiving them in the evening cannot be bettered, but it isn’t always possible or desirable if neighbours might get involved or the bees are in a distant, infrequently visited out-apiary.

If you have an aggressive hive that you dread inspecting, a simple method of re-queening it without finding the queen is to cut out a good queen cell from one of your more amenable hives that is preparing to swarm, place this carefully in a queen cell protector (available from the bee equipment manufacturers), then make an indentation in a brood frame in the aggressive hive and press the queen cell in its protector into the gap you created. You will need to have gone through this stock and removed any of its own queen cells first.  Close the hive and don’t go near the broodnest for a month, after which you can check and see if you have a new queen – in a surprising number of cases a virgin queen will emerge and kill your resident queen and after mating should settle down to lay, although nothing is 100% certain with bees. Moving the hive across the apiary so that it loses most of its flying bees will ensure it doesn’t swarm and I am sure other beekeepers can think of more variations on this theme.

Fields of oilseed rape will have been in flower for 3 weeks or more, and supers should have been added well in advance of them being needed. From the middle of this month, you will hopefully have full supers to extract – so long as the combs are at least 2/3 sealed, and no drops fly out if you gently shake the frame horizontally over the hive, then it should be ok to clear the bees and remove the super/s.  Clearing bees can be achieved using porter escapes or one of the more rapid methods based on the canadian clearer boards; I have had a lot of success using a Thorne’s fume board impregnated with ‘Bee Quick’, but it does need warm weather to be totally effective; if the sun isn’t shining then the board can be warmed using a blow torch. I have also read that you can impregnate a cloth with Bee Quick and put the cloth into a smoker (unlit of course) – by operating the bellows you will vapourise the solution and clear the bees from the super. Whichever method you use, you should aim to remove and extract the supers as quickly as possible if the bees have been foraging on oilseed rape– if the supers being cleared are left unoccupied for long, and especially if the nights are cold, then the honey can become very viscous and difficult to extract. After a week, you will probably find them well on the way to becoming totally granulated.

Whilst you are inspecting your hives, do carry out a disease check of the brood, especially looking at three or four frames containing larvae after shaking off most of the bees, to check for European foul brood, for at this time of the year it is much easier to spot.

Lastly, don’t forget to keep monitoring the varroa levels in your hives, and if the counts indicate that the mite population in your hives is reaching a critical level, then you need to do something to lower the population. Making a shook swarm in a fresh broodbox and then treating the displaced bees and brood in the original broodbox with Apiguard will control the mite population.  Using mesh floors on all your colonies may keep mite numbers at a reduced level, but you must clean the collecting tray at least weekly if problems with wax moth are to be avoided or perhaps leave the collecting tray out altogether.

In the Apiary in April. Nigel Salmon.

1         Carry out thorough inspection of colonies

2         Check for queen cells – swarm control/supersedure

3         Monitor varroa population – mite drop

4         Keep a look out for Small Hive Beetle

The pussy willows have just started flowering here (12^th March) and the bees have started foraging a little more freely. This has certainly been one of the mildest winters I can remember, and one of the driest.

April heralds the start of the beekeeping year insofar as regular inspections/manipulations are concerned. There should be days this month that are warm enough to carry out your first full inspections of the hives; if the bees are active and you feel comfortable in a T-shirt, then it should be alright.  For beginners, it is an excellent time of year to familiarise yourselves with the internal workings of the hive, as bees should behave quite placidly, being far too busy to react to what you are doing. Indeed, I would view any hive that was troublesome at this time of year as not worth keeping, and requeen it immediately – bees that are unmanageable in April will be ten times worse in July!

Make sure you have the smoker going well and gently open the first hive.

As you work through the broodnest you should be trying to answer five basic questions:

1. Is the queen present and laying? If you don’t see the queen, but have seen eggs, one per cell, then all is well. If you do spot the queen, then now is a very good time to mark her – this year’s official colour is yellow.  If you like to clip your queens as part of swarm control, you should do this as well; clipping a queen’s wings will not prevent the bees from swarming, but it will buy you valuable time; just remove about a third of each of the big wings. I have personally only ever clipped a queen’s wings once in the whole time I have kept bees, and they promptly superseded her. However, a good number of beekeepers regularly clip their queens without incurring any problems.
2. Is the colony building up well, or as fast as other colonies in the apiary? When you examine the bees you will probably find a few very advanced colonies, one or two weak ones, but by far the majority somewhere in the middle.  The more advanced colonies may well have one or more supers on already (and will be quick to make swarming preparations once conditions are right) – the medium-sized ones will probably be ready for their first (it is in this group that those bees with a less pronounced tendency to swarm will be found), but it is the weak colonies that demand careful scrutiny to ascertain what is holding them back.  Scattered brood would indicate a poor queen, and a large amount of drone brood mixed in with worker brood would point to an old queen who has run out of sperm, or an imperfectly mated queen from the previous year.  If the colony occupies at least 2/3 of the brood chamber then it is probably worth saving it, and I would either a) buy in a queen (that would have to be an imported queen) and introduce her using an introduction cage, after first removing the old queen (recent research has indicated that there is no need to remove the attendant workers for successful introduction), b) unite them to another colony, so long as both are healthy, killing the failing queen or c) transfer a frame of eggs from one of your best colonies and let them rear their own queen.
3. Are there any signs of brood disease or other abnormality? The advice here is to become familiar with the appearance of normal brood, then anything abnormal should be obvious. Shaking most of the bees from a frame or two will enable you to see the brood more clearly – just make sure the queen is not on the frame.  Most good bee books give a description of brood diseases. If you think you may have a problem, please do ask a more experienced association member or your seasonal bee inspector.
4. Has the colony sufficient room? If the colony occupies nearly all of the available space, then put a super on (above an excluder if it is the first) when you have finished the inspection; bees should not be using all the space available to them in the spring – putting a super on too early is better than putting one on too late.
5. Has the colony sufficient stores to see it through to the next inspection? If in doubt, feed a gallon of syrup.

Swarm control. Towards the end of the month, some of the colonies may start swarming preparations, especially if the queen is in her second full season ( Thorne’s stock a device that can be fitted to a hive to trap the queen if she tries to leave with a swarm – might be worth a try if you are not around for a while and want to ensure you don’t lose a swarm). If you see several occupied queen cells, then you must make some sort of division or the bees will do it for you in a few days’ time.  You can do this by taking the frame with the queen, minus queen cells, and putting her into a fresh broodbox with drawn comb (preferable) or foundation on the original site, moving the old box with queen cells to one side; leave any supers with the old box. However, after several years, I have found that it is more successful to just put the queen alone into the new box, so long as it has some drawn comb and the bees are flying well; a frame of young bees can be shaken in with advantage. Temporarily pinning a strip of queen excluder over the entrance or placing a queen excluder under the broodbox for 24 hours will stop them absconding. These bees should be fed to enable them to draw out the foundation quickly and to prevent starvation should the weather turn bad.  If brood is provided, all the colonies I have dealt with have continued to rear more cells on any young brood, and their ‘swarm fever’ continue unabated.

At the end of a further week, the old box is moved to the other side of the new broodbox, whereupon all those bees that have learnt to fly will return to their old hive position, and thence to the new hive; the supers can now be placed on the new box. You can, at this point, either remove all but one queen cell in the old box, or divide the box into nuclei so that some form of selection can be made from the resulting queens.

Another option when finding queen cells, and my preferred method as it requires far less equipment, is to remove the queen on the frame she is on, minus any queen cells, and put this into a nucleus hive with another frame of sealed brood and two or three empty combs; this lot must be fed if there was not a lot of food on the transferred combs. In this case, the original box is left to rear its own queen, removing all but one queen cell a week later (in this case the bees should go on storing honey). Before removing the surplus queen cells, a nucleus could be made up from a couple of frames with a second queen cell, as an insurance against mishaps.

If, however, you see only one or two occupied queen cells, and these are on the face of the comb rather than on the edge, it is probable that the bees are arranging to supersede their queen. In this instance, I would leave them to get on with the job, but just keep an eye on them in case they change their minds and go the swarming route instead.

Varroa. Keep monitoring the varroa situation, and by far the most accurate way of doing this is by uncapping a patch or two of drone brood with an uncapping fork and looking for mites on the pupae. Counting natural mite fall over a week or two can lull you into a false sense of security and lead you to believe that your bees are fine (see BBKA newsletter for October 2007 – article on use of open mesh floors).  Also, do keep a wary eye out for Small Hive Beetle.

Having experienced such a mild December and early January (current date 10 Jan) our bees have been very active and bringing in pollen (some of it from Snowdrops).

Food stores will have been used during this active period and Lilian and John Valentine together with help from John Eustace, Martin Miller and Jane Greenhalgh have been restocking all our colonies with Ambrosia Fodant and also treating them with Oxalic Acid to knock down any remaining Varrao. Colonies treated for Varrao amounted to 72 including the Association colonies and those colonies left on the Beginners apiary.

Treating with Oxalic Acid

For some of those whose hives were included it was the first occasion they had experienced the winter treatment of Oxalic Acid so it will stand them in good stead for any future treatments. It was evident when treated that most colonies were strong and in some cases there were even 9 or 10 seams of bees. This bodes well for spring and the hope that most will come through the winter, however we have still some weeks to get through before then and at the time of writing colder weather is forecast including severe frosts.

During the next few weeks (subject to weather) it is hoped that the Teaching Apiary can be completely re-fenced with Chestnut fencing. A volunteer working party will be arranged to carry out the work and tidy the apiary for spring. If you wish to volunteer please contact John Valentine, tel 01235 767524.

For those members who know the size of the Teaching apiary, you will wonder how this amount of fencing is being paid for, I can assure you that the apiary is self financing from the sales of honey that was produced at the apiary last year. We do still have a few buckets of Association honey for sale if anyone is interested in purchasing a bucket or two.

During December John Eustace, Ric Hiscott and John Valentine renewed fencing posts and installed a Dutch Gate on the Beginners apiary. Ric spent most of his time on his stomach removing dirt from the hole for a strong gate post which should last for a considerable time and it will now be easier to gain access and move hives on/of site.