The Uffington White Horse Show takes place every August Bank Holiday (this year is its 40th Anniversary and it’s on Sunday 28 and Monday 29 August) and is a traditional two day country show.
The Show is located in farm meadows overlooked by the famous bronze age chalk stone figure of the Uffington White Horse, which is over 3,000 years old.
The Vale & Downland Beekeepers’ Association is once again taking our usual stand so we hope many of you will look in for a chat.
Having noticed one of my hives robbing another, I wondered if perhaps there wasn’t enough forage for them at the moment. But after watching the front of Hive 1 for a while they seem to have given up their life of crime and got back to proper work. Many of the bees were coming back laden with pollen which I tried to identify against the Bristol Beekeepers’ Association pollen chart:
orange pollen - dandelion?
The dark orange could be asparagus or dandelion, the pale yellow honeysuckle and there’s lots of white – especially noticeable was a big white mohican stripe down the back of many of the bees which I found out comes from Himalayan Balsam. Here’s a short video showing the white stripes:
This is a controversial flower – an invasive and aggressive non-native species which crowds out the native plants, then dies down in winter leaving soil susceptible to erosion. It prefers damp conditions and is quite common now on riverbanks. I know there are regular “Balsam Bashing” sessions in Abingdon along the River Ock (which is probably less than 500m from my apiary “as the bee flies.”) However, the bees seem to love it and apparently it makes excellent honey too.
The bees are also all over my lavender at the moment and all the gardens in town are no doubt supplying them with many other garden plants to forage.
Working the Lavender
However, having looked at a map to see how far the river was from my apiary, I was surprised to see how close some agricultural land is. I noticed a bean field near Shippon recently, which is only about a kilometre away. Bees mostly forage within 1km of their hive but apparently can travel up to 5km. I live in the centre of Abingdon so always thought of my hives as “urban bees” but they could be flying out as far as Boars Hill, Radley, Culham or Marcham for particularly tasty forage – no doubt next Spring’s oil seed rape will tempt them out of town.
With still no sign of a queen, eggs or any brood (bar the odd drone) last Sunday my original hive (Hive 1) was not looking good. Fortunately Michael from the Vale and Downland Beekeepers’ Association also lives in Abingdon and kindly offered to give me a “test frame” of brood. The idea of this is that if my hive is really queenless they’ll make a queen cell on this frame. Having checked them today, a week later, there was no sign of any queen cells being drawn which means there must be a queen there somewhere AND I was pretty excited to see eggs! At least I hope it was eggs – it was really sunny and very hard to see into the well-polished cells. I tried to take photos to enlarge to double check but its still not clear.
eggs on the test frame?!
Not only did Michael step in to save the day with my hive, I also had a phone call on Tuesday from the Association Chairman, Lilian who offered me a virgin queen – she’d found five that morning. As I already had the test frame in I wasn’t sure what to do but Lilian suggested taking out two frames of bees and setting them up in a nuc box with the new virgin queen. I took the nuc over to my mums to prevent them drifting back into my hive. The bees were roaring, obviously already missing having a queen. I put the queen into the nuc protected in a cage stuffed with fondant which takes a couple of days to chew through, by which time the bees will be accustomed to her smell and more likely to accept her. I checked after two days and the cage was empty and the bees seemed much calmer. I closed them up and will leave them for a week before checking again – hopefully they haven’t bumped her off.
Mo guarding the equipment
Back at home my poor pathetic little swarm (Hive 2) is still struggling. I gave them 4 pints of syrup last weekend and found that it was empty midweek. Stupidly, against all advice I decided to be really careful and refill it in the afternoon (should ideally be done after they’ve stopped flying to prevent exciting robber bees/wasps). A bit later I noticed a lot of activity around the hive – great gangs of bees bunching up around the front and many others bobbing around and diving in. After watching for a few minutes it was pretty obvious that a lot of bees were coming out of Hive 2 and darting back the very short distance to Hive 1 with their booty! The lazy devils were robbing Hive 2 blind. No wonder they’ve been filling up another super – no doubt with sugar syrup rather than proper honey! After a quick bit of research on the internet the quickest/easiest suggestion I found was to cover the robbed hive with a wet sheet which confuses the robbers, making them give up after a couple of days. Lets hope so; as if this wasn’t bad enough I also noticed ants running up the side (put some ash down around the stand to deter this) AND found a wax moth in the hive during inspection.
a wet sheet to deter robber bees
This week I also finished mosaicing my second stepping stone for the apiary – a swallow this time. It’s supposed to look like a tattoo swallow (to match the first one I did – a sugar skull). Anyway, I’m pretty pleased with it and I’m now working on a bee drinking dish with lots of raised pebbles etc for the bees to stand on in the water.
Last year i lost a number of queens in August and so thought I would raise some more queens in case they were needed to make sure colonies had good queens to go into winter. If they are not needed for re-queening colonies i can make them up into nucs.
Today i have split my queen rearing colony for the second and final time this season. The aim is to produce 4 large nucs from the double brood colony that will be strong enough to go through the winter. Over the past 2 weeks i have been repeating the process i undertook in May using a Cupkit and Cloake board. So far i must say with more success, as this time i have produced 7 out of a possible 10 queen cells, each quite large and beautifully drawn out on the cell bar. 3 frames of brood and 2 of honey/nectar along with a queen cell have been put in national hives placed on top of each other in two stacks on the same site as the original colony. Yesterday i removed the queen and placed her in a nuc box with the frame she was on and 2 other frames, filling the remaining space with 2 other fames.
In addition 2 of the remaining queen cells were placed in mating Apidea. I have not used these before and wanted to try them for queen rearing. Each was filled with fondant and a cup full of bees. I hope they will draw out some comb from the small starter strips placed on the tiny wooden frames. These have been left closed up in a shady spot on the apiary, i will open the door to let the bees fly on Friday. Finally the colony that was the swarn that set up home in the spare equipment has lost its queen already and so i placed the last queen cell in this colony after destroying a number of poor queen cells that had been drawn out.
The queens are due to hatch on Thursday and if the weather holds there are still plenty of drones about. It will be over the next few weeks that the last of the drone brood emerges and then begin to be evicted from hives by the workers to preserve fruits of the summers labour. Let’s hope the weather holds for successful mating.
The Vale & Downland Beekeepers’ Association will be holding one more evening meeting during this season for beginners and public. The meeting will be held on Wednesday 17 August starting at 1900.
If you know of anyone who would be interested in attending any of these meetings please contact Lilian Valentine 01235 767524. Venues for these meetings will be decided upon nearer the time. If you cannot make a Wednesday evening please contact Lilian and we will see if we can arrange another evening.
I put a clearer board on the hive yesterday to clear the honey super but found there were loads of bees still sitting on the honey – next time I’ll give it 48 hours. As usual they were very good tempered and I just brushed them off before taking the frames into my (very clean!) kitchen to do the extracting.
I borrowed the Vale and Downland Beekeepers’ Association extractor which was probably a bit big for my needs (just six frames). The cat seemed to like it for some reason though!
Mo sleeping under the extractor!
After slicing the cappings off the honey, we put the dripping frames into the extractor:
Frames in the extractor
Then we got spinning! Fortunately I had a some help – my Mum, son Noah and nephew Louis taking it in turns to turn the handle – it was actually surprisingly hard work.
Mum tells Louis to give it some welly
Finally, we opened the valve and out poured my beautiful, golden honey.
Honey pouring out of the extractor
I should perhaps point out that I didn’t expect to have enough honey to sell in my first year; it will all be for personal consumption (plus a bit for friends and neighbours). I do realise I may be breaking a few health and hygiene rules here (eg. jugs on the floor/cats/no hats etc.) but if and when I have enough honey to sell in future I will obviously adhere strictly to all hygiene regulations!!
Well, I got quite a few jars (17 of various sizes) and, even though these won’t be for sale I made a label to finish the job. Again, as these aren’t for sale I haven’t checked that they comply with all the rules and regulations, but think I’ve included most of the info required.
I’ve been keeping an eye on the swarm, which seems to have settled in OK and taking plenty of syrup. But there’s not been much general activity to be seen, unlike my original colony which is always very busy “front of house”. Nine days after I collected them I took a look and was pretty disappointed to see how few bees there were – almost certainly not as many as we collected in the swarm.
The swarm
They have begun to draw out just three frames, with no sign of any brood yet but I was very pleased to see a nice big queen. I now wonder if perhaps they did swarm from my hive and some have now drifted back. I gave them more syrup and hopefully she’ll start to lay and build up the colony in time for winter – if not I reckon I’ll have to unite them with my original colony.
In my original hive all is not well either! For the second week I didn’t see the queen and hardly any brood either – no eggs, no open larvae; just a sprinkling of sealed brood. This suggests there’s no queen which, as I knocked out all the queen cells I found last week, is a bit of a disaster. There were a couple of tiny play cups but both were eggless. It is possible that there’s a newly mated queen in there which I failed to find (which if my suspicions that the swarm was from this colony could be the case). If that’s so she probably isn’t laying yet. The colony was particularly quiet and docile today – I understand that a queenless colony is usually bad tempered, so that’s a good sign. At least there is a queen in with the swarm which gives me some options; I can unite them with the original colony or, assuming she starts laying soon, “borrow” a frame of brood to produce a new queen.
I was also worried to notice one or two bees with ragged wings:
Ragged wings
I’ve never noticed this before and have heard that Varroa mites can cause “Deformed Wing Virus”. I googled this however, and it looks quite different – the wings really do look deformed and withered rather than just ragged. It seems that some old bees get ragged tips to the end of their wings – just wear and tear I guess. Hopefully that’s all it is!
Well the good news is that the honey in the super is looking great; mostly capped and ready for harvesting so I’ve booked the Association’s extractor for Thursday!! Very excited for this – bought a big bucket, bought a big sieve, ordered a few nice jars and asked my mum to come over and help. What could possibly go wrong? Hopefully won’t be too sticky to take photos so I’ll let you know!
I got up this morning and just couldn’t wait any longer. I went down the bees and stole one fat frame from the super – I just had to have some honey for my breakfast! It was amazing – absolutely the most delicious, fragrant honey I’ve ever tasted (I bet every beekeeper says that). Very pale in colour; the taste reminded me of elderflowers. Here’s a picture of the frame before I tucked in:
A frame of sealed honey!
I filled two half-pound jars and my cute honeypot which I bought from the bootsale last week!
The honeypot!
As if that wasn’t enough excitement, I looked out of the kitchen window at lunchtime to see a cloud of bees in the garden. I immediately assumed taking the frame of honey was the last straw and they’d decided to swarm. I got my protective suit on as quickly as possible and rushed out to watch where they went. After a bit of swirling around the garden they settled on a very high branch in Janet-next-door’s apple tree (very fortunate as neighbours the other side had their grandchildren visiting – I could hear them in the garden. Doubly fortunate because Janet is away on holiday.) I lit my smoker and had a quick look in my hive – absolutely chockablock with bees; so the swarm was almost certainly not mine – looked like I was about to gain another colony!
My next move was to phone John and Lilian – leaders of the local beekeeping association for advice. John said that bees do attract other bees and if any were swarming in the vicinity then they would be attracted by the smells of beeswax and honey from my hive. He talked me through what to do to catch them – I already had a fair idea from the BBKA course I attended last year, and had been lucky enough to be present when a swarm was “walked up” into a hive last summer at the association apiary so decided to give it a go (or, should I say, tell my husband Ian what to do and let him give it a go!)
Here he is going up a ridiculously tall ladder in the apple tree. The swarm was about the size of a football – not huge so not sure if it’s a prime swarm:
Ian in the tree
Here he is shaking the bees into a cardboard box:
Catching the swarm
And here he is taking all the credit:
Gotcha!
As my spare hive was just a few metres away over the fence, I decided to wrap the bees up immediately and take them straight away next door to hive them. Rather than shake them straight in I thought it would be nice to let them walk in up a ramp to the hive. It took a bit of shoveling, but they got the idea eventually and trooped into the hive.
Follow the leader.....
Throughout the whole operation the bees were very good tempered (as were my original colony just a few feet away). Ollie and Gus were on hand taking photos/holding ladders etc. throughout without any protective clothing and no-one was stung. How smug do I look in this photo?! I just hope the bees like their new home and decide to stay.
The weather has been pretty good this week and allowed the bees to make the most of the lime trees that are grown across the estate. The chestnuts have just come into flower this week and so this combined with the field beens means there is plenty of nectar around, at least for the next week or so.
The queen rearing has provided me with less colonies than i had hoped, however they are all doing well, the new colonies all have 5 or 6 frames of brood, with a really good laying pattern and plenty of stores. The strongest of these new colonies is in a double brood box with the bees already and up into the super.
Unusually i had not required any of these spare parts in the other hives, so after checking through the colonies i decided to see what all the fuss was about in the corner as the activity had not lessened.
I took off the two spare roof’s and for some reason felt the need for caution when lifting of the floor that was on top of an empty super. It felt heavy as i levered it up with the hive tool, to find a large cluster of bees clinging to the bottom of the floor. I had to grab my camera and think what to do.
I have never seen a swarm of bees before let alone handled one. I suppose this was not strictly a swarm. None the less, it was not a colony all neatly tucked up between 11 frames in a box 18 inches square.
My approach required little thought, put it in a brood box and hope for the best. Lifting of the floor, super and crown board below, i placed it on an upturned roof. This gave me access to the two brood boxes below that has drawn comb and some frames with foundation. In these boxes i also found the new residents had filed 3 frames with nectar and began to draw the foundation on the frames on the opposing sides. I lifted these frames into a single brood box and placed it onto another floor. Into this i shook the bees that were clinging to the underside of the other floor and then filled the brood box with frames. On top a queen excluder, super (to give them the enough space if they need it) and a crown board completed the bees new home. There were three pieces of freshly drawn comb stuck to the floor where the bees were clustered, this was full with nectar and pollen, i laid these on the crown board to allow the bees to clean these up and placed the other spare hive parts on top.
Hopefully they will settle in nicely to their re arranged home, after all it does have a great view and good neighbours.
