Accidental Warré Update

Over a bank holiday weekend where Yorkshire hosted an amazing first Tour de Yorkshire bike race (woo... go Wiggins), my daughter got scarlet fever, and I failed to get anything done other than eat and drink. I did get the chance to visit the bees on a small respite from the rain.

So last year in June a tiny caste swarm moved into an old box in my apiary. The box is deralict with the side not meeting properly and more hole than the proverbial sieve. This swarm was very small and although it managed to just about fill the box did nothing more that year. They refused to grow into the a box below deciding instead to stay put. I at least gave them a decent quilt and roof and offered them my best wishes. Against all odds they managed to make it through (an albeit mild) Yorkshire winter which managed to be the downfall of larger colonies. This a brief video of them:

Good work little bees!

When wondering what to do with wax

Any natural beekeeper practising a crush and strain approach to honey harvest,  any who have removed warped combs, or just downsized for winter by removing empty comb, will at some point find themselves with something of an abundance of wax.

Annoyingly, when I was starting out last year wax was something I coveted only slightly less than bees. Wax enabled me to weatherproof my hive (by mixing with linseed oil), to rub around the inside of the hive to make a more attractive home to the bees, to
embed upon the comb guides to aid in straight comb. All of this I could buy but what I wanted more than anything was some old comb to include in bait hives.  Old brood comb above all other things (including queen pheromone) is most successful in attracting a swarm.

Looking back on this shortage is a little odd now I have wax coming out of my ears (apologies a poorly chosen euphemism *yuck*). I harvested a relatively modest amount of wax this year in reducing the hives for winter (about 15 combs in all).

First I tried just melting it all in a saucepan of water. I do not suggest using your best saucepans! Anything you use to prepare wax should be something that you never want to use again for anything else... ever.. I also used a camping stove so as not to ruin the range cooker. Once melted pour the contents through a sieve (that you never want to use again for anything else) or some cheese cloth. Anything that will filter out the particulates.

For a few combs this works just fine. As the wax cools it floats to the top with any remaining rubbish on the bottom. Bigger projects however require bigger thinking.
If working with wax is something you're interested in there are plenty of plans on the Internet for wax extraction in solar and steam (using wallpaper steamers) extractors. Here is my home-made attempt at a steam wax extractor using a packing box and a wallpaper stripper. It worked surprisingly well and cost nothing beyond what I already had.

Next year I intend to build an extraction hive I can put the combs in and attach the steamer to. Once you have your wax it's fun time. I am by no means an expert like Judy Earl (as reported on Emily Scott's blog) but have really enjoyed tinkering.

My first wax product attempt was a basic lip balm.
1 tablespoon of wax
4 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil (so it would be green).
1 teaspoon of honey
5 drops of peppermint oil.

It was a little experiment using things i already had. I mixed them together in and old (but cleaned out) sauce jar in a saucepan of water on the hob. I was quite pleased with the outcome, as were many of my work colleagues who got a free gift the next day. My wife however was ridiculously excited. The next day I came home to an ebay bill for the following products.

Six different essential oils, cocoa butter, jars of different sizes, borax (tut tut), three different carrier oils (?), a kindle book of bee products. Beekeeping has thus far failed to interest my wife in any way. The making of home-made cosmetics however...that she could get on board with.

Next up. My wife wanted to make a body butter (I don't really know what this is). We found a recipe, pinterest appears to be a huge resource for this, and set to work. The recipe called for water and borax to be added. As a biochemist I recognise water as a possible source of bacterial contamination and borax as something you use to scrub your steps. The borax is probably to emulsify the oil and water allowing them to mix. I wasn't too happy with this so thought of a different way. So was born the 'Lavender and Vodka Body Butter'. I am told it works well, though for what I am still unsure :)

Taking this another step I thought a lighter lip balm could be approached the same way. Behold the resulting Sloe gin lip balm.

This is:
1 tablespoon wax
3 tablespoons oil (in this case white grape oil but olive is fine)
1 tablespoon sloe gin.
This mix requires whisking as it cools (I used 2x bamboo skews). This made 4x 5ml pots and apparently is more of a lip gloss! Who knew!

We have also managed to make a sleep balm, containing oils from lavender, chamomile, valerian, bergamot, and orange.

To be honest whilst making it the smell was so powerful as to be nausea inducing. The following day when the mists had cleared and the wax had set the smell was much more pleasant.

For a beekeeper the winter is a time of fretting and carpentry. Both could well be aided by some well worked wax.

Don't Warré Steve

(Title dedication: Julie of Happy hour at the top bar hive).
As I hinted in my last post they has been some change in my warré circumstances.

My own warré remains consistent.  They are still just within one box but show good activity even with the ailing weather. So what has changed?... August Cottage has some lodgers!

BACKGROUND
Steve is a natural beekeeper based in York who I met as we were both starting out last year. Him with a warré, me with a kTBH. Unfortunately
his hived swarm was robbed out quite quickly and didn't make it. This year, through the biobees forum, Steve was the lucky recipient of bees from Barbara, who is an extremely experienced kTBH keeper who has been treatment free for varroa for more than 5 years. Newly (and beautifully) built warré in hand Steve collected his bees. All went well until 6 weeks later the bees swarmed again. A classic case of false floor syndrome perhaps. So the swarm's swarm was hastily housed in the spare box and one Steve had to hand.

Fast forward to today and Steve is in the throws of a house move with no where to put the hives.  This is where I ride in on my white charger to save the day. Since there is plenty of room where I keep my bees I am keeping an eye on his hives until after Christmas.  By that time Steve is hoping to have orgainsed an  allotment in which to site the hives.

The reswarming has left the both colonies a little on the small side going into the back end of the year. On a positive note the hives are certainly well built. The wood is two inches thick with generous windows so you can keep an eye on things.  Not sure I would want to lift them when full of honey but I'm sure the bees will appreciate it during a Yorkshire winter.

Change of weather, Change of fortune

I have been keeping an eye on the hives of late but not messing about with them too much. The weather is flowing inevitability towards autumn and with the shortening of the days comes the slowing down of the hives.

I can no longer inspect (open inspection) the hives after work in the evening. It is just a little too cold for my conscience to allow. That only leaves me with weekends to open them up, and the weather in Yorkshire is.... unreliable.

Formally Phoebee
This hive swarmed whilst I was on holiday and I have been waiting for signs of a laying queen. Whenever I have tried to inspect this usually placid colony has been extremely reactionary. A change in temperament like this was not a good sign but I hoped for the best. The activity in this hive however has continued to drop off. I managed to fully inspect the hive this weekend and things really don't look good. There was the crack of propolys on opening, a further sign of the march towards winter. Once open the bees gave me no trouble and appeared listless. There were bands on honey at the top of 22 combs and I removed any empty to reduce the hive to a more manageable size for them.

I have never been a whiz at queen spotting but this hive's queen (and her daughters) are particularly hard to spot. Their markings have all been VERY similar to the workers and are all quite skinny.  Still I looked hard and found not a monarch.

The brood pattern was spotty and very bumpy suggesting drones.  Whether this is a drone laying queen or a laying worker at this stage I think it is unimportant.

You get an idea of how they feel from this comb really. Queen cup anyone? I fear I may have to shake these bees out in front of another hive one evening so they can find a new queenright home. It is just too late in the year for a brood transfer.

Boudica's bees
It might not be summer anymore but someone forgot to tell these girls. On sunday it was grey and overcast with a little mist in the air. Boudica's hive was as busy Heathrow on a bank holiday.

Opening up I notice there were still a few squatters in residence. I am afraid I had to well and truly block their route of entry this time as I will be putting the insulation board in later this week.

is that one pulling out a pin?

On opening the hive I noticed the propolys was still very soft and sticky. The colony is obviously having no trouble maintaining a good temperature. The bees were still festooning in places suggesting comb building is still underway. There is still a solid brood pattern and fresh eggs.

I removed the remainder of the comb from the brewery bees. You can see in the picture below how they chewed down the comb to expose the larvae. This reduced the hive to 18 bars. Not all of the bars are fully built out so they should have plenty of space for the rest of autumn but not too much to keep warm in winter.

All in all I am really pleased with this colony.  After the shaky start we had we are getting on well and the bees are doing well.

I ended up with quite a bit of empty comb from both hives. Any good empty comb I placed behind the follower boards to help out next year. I only removed the comb that was very old, wonky or had high drone cell content.

My wife has a fancy to make lip balm but we shall see! Next update on Warré hives in a few days...yes... I said hive's'!

By eck it's bin awhile

I think I need to start this blog entry with an apology.  I have been remiss in my duties as a blogger. I started a new job in July leaving me less opportunities for online time. I am sorry for not keeping you all up to date on my poor long suffering bees and the meanderings of my mind. To try and make up for it (and because this blog post is quite light pictures) here is a photo of a bee taken at The Eden Project in cornwall.

The combine of the queenless brewery bees and boudica's hive seemed to go well. There was certainly no bad behaviour externally that suggested the colony was undergoing internal struggles. I left them alone for a full two weeks before sticking my nose in for check up. They were no more defensive than usual and I noticed all the comb from the brewery bees was empty. All the stores were gone, presumably moved. More surprising though was all the drone brood was gone too. Looking at the comb which contained the brood I noticed it had been chewed in. This may have been bees harvesting the wax to use else where but there were small white blobs on some cell edges (not varroa btw). On one of the combs that contained younger brood when I put them in, there were a few larvae with the cell chewed down around them (so they stuck out) with workers nipping at them!  Admittedly I am not that experienced but I have never seen anything like this. The colony has appears to have decided that the drone brood was just unacceptable. Why bother to wait and have to evict the drones when you can eat them and get a bit of protein into the bargin. I didn't disturb the brood nest at all and removed the crosscombed bars from the brewery bees hive.

I hope to do a proper inspection this weekend and update on all the hives so stay turned.

Hop Queen the Drone layer

Well Kyle's first supervised inspection took place on friday. He inspected the brewery bees headed up by the Hop Queen. This was a swarm that arrived on the day we visited the Great Yorshire Brewery.

It was clear during Kyle's inspection that there was much more drone brood than any recently arrived swarm has any right to have. As such I went in and checked myself without my "helper" :)



Solid drone brood and a beautiful pollen pattern



As you can see there is 100% drone brood. The drone brood is also housed within worker cells so it isn't something the colony has chosen, it is something forced upon them by their situation. There are a few reason how I know this a drone laying queen rather than a laying worker:

1 - There is a roughly normal brood pattern. Laid as closely together as the drone sized brood allows. With a laying worker it would be a lot more scattered about the place.

2 - The eggs are one to a cell and laid in the bottom. Laying workers will lay mulitple eggs and lack the full length abdomen required to reach the bottom of the cell so the eggs are on the sides.

3 - Oh!.... and we saw a queen in there on friday. If I am honest this is the main way I know, but it is worth considering the other points too :) But then you'd know that if you'd read my last blog :p



Some cross comb. Lots of drone brood and a hopeful queen cup.



It is a real shame that this queen will come to nothing as the way in which the bees have laid down their pollen stores, in a circle around the brood rather than just arching the top, is a trait of the british black bee suggesting these bees might have had some genetic link. The cross-comb shown in the picture above is minimal and only covers two bars so I can easily remove it and attach it to a seperate bar and let them join up the gap. What you may notice on that cross-comb is a hopeful little queen cup.

So the bees clearly recognise the problem. In fact the roar from the hive was alot like the one I heard in a hive I had that went queenless a while back. So what are my options:

1 - "let nature take its course". In time these bees will simply die off leaving empty comb which can be donated to another hive. 

This seems a little unfair to the bees and waste of a potential workforce (bad manager!).

2 - Donate some brood. Given some eggs and young brood the bees could raise a new queen albeit not 'their' own genetically.

There are a few problems with this idea. Firstly and Majorly they won't have a queen for another month. With it already being August this does not give them enough time to build up for winter. There is also a danger they would swarm again and further weaken themselves. A lesser problem is that I was only intending to keep this colony for genetic diversity within my queens (and therefore mating drones). This would give me another queen with the same/similar genetics before I have decided which queens I want to propergate from. It would also slightly weaken the donor hive at a time when they need all the bees they can get.

3 - Buy a queen. Queens can be easily purchased on the internet to arrive the following morning in an inroduction cage. They cost between £30-40, which in bee keeping terms isn't a lot. After a brief introduction period the queen is released and can begin laying right away.

Hmmmm I think the purchasing and import of genetically pure races of bee is shady at best. I truely believe local bee populations should be able to stabilise genetically which will allow them to properly react to selection pressures provided by their environment, diseases, pests, and (hopefully) to a lesser extent the beekeeper.

4 - Combine with a queen right colony. This would involve removing The Hop Queen (drone layer) and transferring the comb into another hive that is queenright. The bees need to be 'introduced' or they will fight. A traditional method is using a newspaper combination. A sheet of newspaper is put between the two colonies with a few slits cut in it. By the time the bees have chewed through the paper the scents in the hive have equalised and everyone lives happily ever after. This works well with conventional vertical hives but is a little tricker with a horizontal hive. It can be done though with either a modified follower board (hole in the middle with some newspaper covering it) or simply by masking taping a sheet of newspaper in place between the bars. Since the fighting is triggered by scent I have heard of people spraying the bees with air fresher *eeek!* and walking away. My current preferred method is to dust the bees with icing sugar (powdered sugar), as well as a few combs worth of bees at the end of the hive you're adding it to. This works well in a horizontal hive as sugar dusting is easy, does a improntu mite treatment, and by the time the bees have finished licking the sugar from each other they are all friends (or at the very least work colleagues). You should remember though to buy sugar free of caking agents, or grind your own. This way of combining will also allow you to put the combs within the relevant part of the hive rather than only at one end.

This will ultimately not result in me having another colony but it can potentially strengthen another colony on the approach to winter. However, this comb contains a lot of drone cells which the colony would have to look after and feed.

5 - Make them queenless and then shake them in front of another hive. This would involve removing the queen and leaving them without her for a few days. Theoretically, I can wait till the evening and empty the bees from the comb anyway from the current hive. Without the hive to return to (because I will have moved it) the bees will return to any queenright hive in the area strengthening their workforce. Again theoretically, that volume of flying bees entering a hive in the evening should mean there is no fighting. I could then feed the drone brood to the chickens.... they are in support of this plan.

This has the benefit being able to temperarily bolster any of my hives. The comb could then still be donated to another top bar hive for them to use for stores.

I am currenly torn between options 4 and 5 and would be interested in hearing peoples opinions so please comment.

In other news on checking Boudica hive to see if it would be able to provide a brood donation look who is back!

I had (I thought) removed these critters from Boudica's hive roof but as it happens they have managed to find another way in and rebuilt their nest. This is one of the babies all grown up. All six of the babies were present so either they hadn't left home or they were dropping off some washing for mum.  

Fairwell Phoebee

I have today (fri 1st aug) returned from a week away. I have inspected the hives and…..

Big beautiful boudica is being elusive but the hive is growing well. We saw brood in all stages and nectar is obviously coming in. Since their dramatic arrival as a swarm they have built 14 combs, 9 brood comb, and 5 honey combs. The brood pattern is solid and their temper is much better. Their tenant Mrs Fieldmouse was however looking a little lonely. Her children all grown up had now left home which unfortunately meant eviction for her.

Mata hari’s sneaky bees have been steady growers and there appears to be a bigger cloud outside the entrance everytime I visit. The viewing window tells me though that they still haven’t moved down in their warré. They must be reaching critical mass. Will they swarm? Will they grow down? Every day seems to tip the odds a little more in favour of the former.

Kyle did his first supervised inspection on the brewery bees. He did well,  though I had to take over when there was some cross comb. They have 7 combs, 5 of which are complete. We saw the Hop Queen herself but since the colony is a new swarm and are still so small there was a surprisingly large amount of drone brood, any would be a lot at this stage. There also appeared as though there may have been a couple of queen cells. It is possible this an old queen or at least poorly mated queen and she is running out of fertilised eggs. Hopefully the bees will manage to supercede her successfully.

The bees of the poppy hive, like their Warré neighbours, are showing no signs of moving down either.  As such I have made a cowardly decision and supered the previously nadired box *blushes shamefully*. There is still time for them to build up that box and hopefully by spring the bottom box will be empty where they have moved up with the stores.

And finally the headline story :(
I checked my large top bar hive before I went away on holiday. There was minimal young brood, pollen and nectar being placed in comb previously packed with brood, and of course queen cups. Eh oh, the dreaded swarming preparation. I have to admit I was surprised, the combine I had performed provided them with quite a lot of empty comb they could use but other than a few bees hanging out down there they hadn’t used it to store a thing. I was short on time and I fear a little late in the day. I moved a little of that unused comb (brood type) down into the brood nest hoping to give the queen some laying room.  I made sure I had some swarm traps primed and ready and went on holiday.
I returned to a hive containing some capped brood a LOT of stored nectar,  a number of capped queen cells, and empty swarm traps. Having never checked them I don’t know which queen cells are occupied so have decided to let nature take it’s course.  Queen Phoebee was my first queen. She arrived on the 27th July last year as a very small cast swarm. Her leaving marks the 1st anniversary of me as a bee keeper. I wish her well and hope she finds a good home. Fairwell Phoebee, you were a good queen and taught me much.