Buzzing along (guest post by AJLR)

Since I started learning to keep honeybees, just over two years ago, the learning curve has been extremely steep. Still, at least I know a little more than I did 24 months ago and I have successfully helped my two colonies through this last long and cold winter.

When I first wrote about beekeeping, here on Robin’s blog, I was almost overwhelmed with the amount of information one needed to keep in mind if one was to nurture honeybees effectively. I still feel like that but I’m now at the stage where I’m starting to ‘read’ my colonies a little more – what the proportion of brood in relation to the number of flying bees means, their temper, their health, how they react to certain stimuli – rather than just reading the text books. I’m very fortunate in belonging to an active group of local beekeepers, most of whom are fountains of knowledge (even if, occasionally, conflicting knowledge) and willing to share information. I would hate to have to go it alone – the mistakes I could have made, either through action or inaction, would not have helped the lives in my care. And I do find that caring for the bees is my main concern; getting some honey is good and I’m hopeful of getting a reasonable amount this summer but it’s the bees themselves that I find fascinating and that motivate me to keep learning. (Plus, being on a long-term diet I find it’s not helpful to think about honey too much…)

I started beekeeping, following on from an introductory course in late winter 2011, using a single Commercial hive. There are numerous different configurations of hives and they all have their advocates among beekeepers – here in the UK, the Commercial, British Standard, Langstroth, WBC, and Dadant are among those in use as you can see from this page of a large company selling beekeeping supplies. They are all structured on the same principle, however, that of ‘bee space’ and making sure that the bees have just enough space to move around in to do whatever they need to do but not so much empty space that they build comb or propolise in a way that means one can’t take out individual frames to inspect for health, production, etc. I decided to use the Commercial hives from the start because I wanted the slightly larger brood box (where the queen lives and lays eggs and so where all the young bees are raised) it offers rather than have to use the ‘brood box and a half’ that some of the other hives are configured around. Some beekeepers are less keen on Commercials because the individual frames inside the brood box, or the supers, have slightly smaller lugs (the bits that stick out at each end of a frame and by which one picks them up) and that can make it a bit more difficult to manoeuvre when they are heavy (up to 8 lbs if full of brood or honey) and covered in bees. So far, so good.

The young colony I first started with almost drove me mad in the summer of 2011. They kept doing things that they weren’t ‘supposed’ to do (or at least, not at that particular time of year). My mentor beekeeper kept telling me that bees don’t read books but coming from an academic background I find it makes me really anxious if one can’t rely on the text! Still, after I’d allowed the colony to replace the young queen they came with (I don’t know why they didn’t like her, they just didn’t) we started a period of reasonable stability and I’ve still got the queen from then in my original hive. She’s been very good and calm, which makes all the bees in that colony calm and easy to handle. When we inspected that hive 10 days ago there were a lot of bees and brood in there and they were showing signs of building up to a swarm by building queen cells. So I have now taken out all the queen cells but two and put the frame they’re on and four other frames of worker and drone brood, plus a couple of frames of stores (honey/nectar and pollen) into a ‘nuc’ box next to the original hive. That way, if all goes well and one of the queen cells produces a viable queen, I may soon have three colonies rather than two. My original queen is happily (I hope) filling up the empty replacement frames I put in her hive at that time and is no longer looking ‘swarmy’.

Last year, when one of the other colonies in the apiary where my hive was situated, swarmed while we were up there having a meeting, I was offered the swarm (it’s the old queen that leaves a hive during swarming and she goes with all the ‘flying bees’, ie those more than about three weeks old – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarming_%28honey_bee%29) and later hived them and they have just about come through last winter although not with any great vigour. So last weekend I removed the old queen, having first checked to make sure that she had laid eggs within the previous 24 – 36 hours and so the workers could turn one of those eggs into a replacement queen, and am currently waiting and hoping that I will have a newly hatched virgin queen in about eight days from now. She will then need to go out on a successful mating flight (good weather is helpful so fingers crossed) a few days later and should start to lay a couple of days after that. A young queen at this time of year should really start laying fast if she’s any good, so if everything works as it should the colony will have better vigour to go into the autumn with.

It’s a somewhat nerve-wracking time though, with major interventions in both of my colonies at the same time. I’ve taken several short courses this last year, to learn more about specific aspects of good beekeeping, but learning about it and actually doing it with real live beings is not the same. Please keep your fingers crossed for my bees. :)

So, some of the extra things I’ve learned in the past year:

a)      Whatever piece of equipment you have left behind when you go to inspect your hive will infallibly be the one you need;

b)      Honeybees, and other bees, have a lot of threats facing them and need as many people as possible to keep them actively in mind when gardening, using horrible chemicals, developing houses on greenfield sites, or just generally being around them;

c)       The importing of queens from other countries is not a good idea, generally –  locally-bred bees are better adapted. Also, breeding replacements locally removes the risk of parasites or illnesses being imported along with the queens;

d)      It is impossible to look calm and collected when hopping around on one foot, trying to get one’s other foot out of the thrice accursed leg of a recalcitrant bee-suit;

e)      Pollen colours cover an extraordinarily wide range, from almost white, through yellow, orange, red, to pure black. They, and nectar, all have slightly different chemical breakdowns and the bees need as wide a range of plants as possible to choose from to keep themselves healthy;

f)       The BBKA website and the National Bee Unit are great resources but fellow beekeepers can say ‘there there’ at the same time as passing on info;

g)      Locally produced honey can be quite expensive to buy but at a time when some countries aren’t particularly scrupulous about how they regulate and inspect their commercial honey businesses, it’s likely to be better for you.