'Brood boxes are meant for brood'

Now this statement might appear blindingly obvious but as a beekeeper it is easy to lose sight of the fact that the brood box is meant for brood. And I have just seen so many hives where there is no room for a queen to expand at all and the beekeeper just seems to be unaware of that fact.

We encourage beekeepers to inspect their colonies once a week during May and June which are the prime months for swarming. Each one of you should be asking themselves about whether a queen has enough space to lay eggs every time they go into a colony. Well it is all fine and well to ask yourself the question, but what are you in fact doing to give her enough space? Here are some ideas which might help.

1. Is there some empty drawn comb that could be moved next to the brood nest?

2. Is there a frame of pollen near the brood nest that could either be removed from the hive or moved next to the hive wall? Some beekeepers talk about a pollen barrier. The Queen finds it difficult to cross the pollen barrier and expand her brood nest, and you as a beekeeper can help by moving it out the way or removing it completely.

(If you find a pollen barrier in your hive it is easy to recognise; pollens of different colour covered by honey. The frame on which you find  the pollens looks sticky and is gummed up. This is because  the bees have made bee bread which is their way of storing the pollen and keeping it fresh. However what it is important to bear in mind about such a frame is that it is nigh impossible for a queen to put eggs into it. So do something about it.)

3. Should you add a frame of fresh foundation? This should be placed next to the brood nest or if you have an extremely prosperous colony you can commit the  ultimate sin and split the brood nest with your frame of foundation. Only do this if they are really strong.

4. Perhaps your scenario is very different. Perhaps you have split a colony and they are desperately trying to expand but just don't seem to be getting on very well. Are you using a dummy board, preferably made from cellotex? Just give them one frame of foundation to work on at a time. Put your cellotex dummy board next to that piece of foundation. And then I would also feed such a small colony. However don't make the mistake of feeding continually because they will just fill every frame with sugar syrup and then the Queen will have nowhere to lay. Remember a small colony does not have enough young bees to draw out much wax so this is going to have to be a gradual process. Often with a small unit what you would like them to do in one week is realistically going to take them two. If you can get your head around the fact that bees are programmed to take advantage of a nectar flow and so will collect your sugar syrup and stuff it anywhere they can, even putting the queen off lay, then you will have grasped that too much feeding in one go may be counter productive. It is also jolly stressful for a small unit that has not yet reached the tipping point needed to easily expand, if you are continually pouring sugar syrup all over them. For a colony that needs to expand, feed and then don't feed, and then feed again and then don't feed, and then feed once again. Work put in by you in June will pay dividends in September. The longer you neglect supporting a weak colony, the more difficult it will be for them to grow into the box you have provided for them. Of course if you have drawn comb, by all means use that but beginners don't usually have the luxury of drawn comb.

Space in the brood box is fundamental. Congestion in the brood box can lead to swarming. And as beginners are rapidly finding out once the bees have decided to swarm there is  nothing you can do about it except manage that swarming instinct. Just remember, please, a brood box is for brood.

Malcolm Wilkie 15th June

Queen cells

Queen cells usually only appear in your beehive once a year. So sometimes one forgets what one should be looking for.

If the bees are thinking of dividing then at some point you will find a small C shaped larva in one of the Queen cups. My bees seem to enjoy tormenting me and the presence of queen cups is their way of saying "we may be going or we may not be going, it's up to you to find out ".

So you need to be able to recognise when a queen cup is starting to be used. You should be able to recognise a young larva and a greasy white substance in the bottom of a queen cup, which indicates that a queen cell is being started. The larva may only be a very small C shape. If you wear reading glasses, then you definitely need to be wearing them when you look inside this queen cup. It doesn't matter if you slightly (but I do mean slightly) damage the edge of the queen cup  in order to get a better look. In fact it would not even matter if you slightly damaged the edge of an open queen cell about to be sealed.  Bees will usually repair any damage that you do to the outer edge of a queen cell. So be brave and have a good look.

If the sides of the queen cup have not been drawn down to any extent, then the larva is probably only two days old. If you were to go back in three days’ time, however, the bees would have drawn out that queen cup into a queen cell and it would be sealed. The sides of the cell would be much longer. If the tip of the cell is becoming pointed, then the next day that cell will be sealed The process is an extremely rapid one. If you see a charged Queen cell then you probably need to divide the box today and not tomorrow.

If you  artificially divide your box, then the queen cells will be slightly different in that they will be emergency cells. A box that has been artificially divided will have sealed queen cells in two days. I always recommend that you go in three days after you have artificially divided a box and cut out all sealed Queens cells. At this moment you need to mark a chosen open queen cell with a drawing pin on top of the frame. You will then have to go back in another five days’ time and cut out all but your chosen cell. If your chosen cell is no longer there, then you need to choose what looks like a good sealed queen cell. That is to say a peanut shaped medium sized cell, preferably in the middle of a frame where there is no danger of it being crushed when you put the frames back together again. I would never choose a cell that was on its own on a frame. If there are three or four cells  on a frame, then the chances are that all cells have been regularly fed by young bees. And that is what you want! Remember a queen cell is visited by young bees possibly 100 times an hour. It is this constant feeding of the larva which changes it from being an ordinary worker into being a queen larva.

A word of warning. Beekeepers do not seem to understand about Queen cells. Before capping they are fairly robust. Two or three days before hatching they are also fairly robust. However in the two days after they have been sealed it is very easy to damage them. The reason for this is that initially once the Queen cell has been sealed the larva continues to feed off the royal jelly at the top of the cell. Then at some point during those two days the larva turns round in the cell and spins its cocoon. The slightest jolt will cause a queen larva to detach from the royal jelly at the top of the cell and that causes it's death. If you follow my recommended timings above, the manipulation when you destroy queen cells should be taking place when your chosen larva has already spun its cocoon and is now a pupa. This means it will be more resistant if you do anything to jolt the frame on which it is situated.

Lesley had this happen to her bees. The day chosen for selecting Queen cells was only two days after they had been capped by the bees. The new frames in that box were shiny and slippy and  the frame with her chosen queen cell slipped slightly. Initially I did not think anything of this. However as I always try and calculate when a queen cell is about to hatch we went back and looked on the 16th and then the 17th day (in fact it was more rapid than that because the bees choose a two day old larva so it was only 11 days after we had artificially split them). I was worried because the queen cells looked perfect and there was no discolouring of the tip. The bees of course were interested in them and were clustering over the cell even though the contents were dead.

When a queen cell is about to hatch it turns a darker brown at the tip. This was not happening. So alarm bells started to ring and I decided to cut open the queen cell. There was a dead larva inside.

Annoying and frustrating. What are the choices? We could have combined our old queen, who was in a nucleus box, back into the hive. We knew the bees could not possibly make another queen cell because there were no eggs or larvae young enough to be converted into Queens.

However not much time had passed (we had lost about two weeks) and so this is what we did. With a round pastry cutter we cut out a section of hatching brood from the now queenless box. This we got rid of. We then went into the nucleus box were the old queen was laying and we found a small area of eggs. With the aforementioned pastry cutter we then cut out those eggs. These were then placed into the queenless box in the exact position where we had removed a section of hatching brood. The bees will then make more queen cells and we will have to go back and choose one next weekend.

Beginners please take note. It is so important to have two hives because when a scenario like this occurs you can rectify your error. The earlier you rectify the error the better. If this box of bees were to be left queenless for six weeks or more without brood, then they would refuse to make Queen cells. Always check if a queen cell has hatched, and to do that you need to carefully calculate when a queen is about to emerge.

People lament and tell me that the bees have torn down the Queen cell that they ( the beekeeper) left them. I think it is highly probable that the Queen cell in question was dead and the bees realised and so just removed it. This does not happen for a while. Hence the importance of checking on the 16th and 17th day. Hope the above helps and doesn't cause more confusion.

Malcolm Wilkie 8th June 2017

Queenright or Queenless? (Article sent to the improvers group last year)

A lot of Beekeepers have colonies at present that have been split or have swarmed. A new Queen takes at least three weeks to come into lay and this is a tense time for the beekeeper and for the bees. Many beginners assume they have no Queen and quite often go and purchase one needlessly from a beefarmer.
If you know that your box has swarmed, you will roughly know when this happened and so will know when you can start to look for eggs and young larvae. i.e.three weeks after your Virgin has hatched.
A box that has swarmed or has been split and is raising a virgin, should initially be left well alone. You don't want to confuse a virgin returning from a mating flight. If she gets lost due to your 'fiddling', you will then have a Queenless colony. However once those three weeks have passed you do need to start to look.
If you see eggs and larvae, then all is well and you will then need to assess the brood pattern. However more often than not you will find no eggs or larvae. This does not mean that your colony is Queenless, however.This is the moment when you need to carefully inspect the brood frames. Blow or smoke the bees out of the way.
A Queenright colony will be preparing a brood nest for their new Queen and everything is alright if you see an area of cells on a couple of frames that have been cleaned out and polished in readiness for the new Queen to start laying. There will probably be pollen above these cells and stores in the corner of the fames. In other words the bees are organising themselves and it is order that you will see within your hive. But if you do not see this order after three weeks and and you can still see nectar chucked randomly into cells, then there may well be a problem and you should give them a frame of eggs from your other hive. If they raise Queen cells, then evidently they were Queenless. If they seal the brood without creating Queen cells, then you may have a virgin or you may have cussed bees who have decided they no longer want a Queen.
If you get into this scenario, and still after several weeks you can find nothing, then your only hope is to try and get hold of a failing old Queen from someone and come and ask me how to introduce her. She will have low pheromone levels and could possibly be accepted by your Queenless colony. Once the old lady starts laying it will then be possible to bump her off and introduce a Queen. A scenario to be avoided if at all possible as it is difficult to bring back a colony from the brink.

Too much fiddling can be disastrous for your bees

I have just been to visit a couple of our members in Crowborough. They are a couple who have not done our beginners course and despite keeping bees for three years they still do not have a sense of what a strong colony should look like.

Those who do our beginners course should by the end of the summer have a sense of what a strong colony looks like. They should understand how many bees a 14×12 brood box can contain. They hopefully gain an understanding that the bees need to expand over nearly all the frames in the brood box before a super is added. If you put a draughty super above a queen excluder on a small box of bees there is no way that they are ever going to use it! Please, please remember that everybody.

The scenario that I saw yesterday is similar but different. For a start the colony was on a brood and a half. The beekeepers in question had in their enthusiasm taken out drawn frames from the brood box into which the Queen might have been able to expand and replaced them with foundation.  Wax is an insulator and the result of removing the drawn comb was to create an even colder unit for this poor colony. Now the litany of poor decisions doesn't stop there. They had also added a super to allow the Queen to expand. Please don't add supers if the bees have not drawn out almost all the frames in your brood box. Experienced beekeepers know that a queen always moves upwards so it is important not to add a super until most of the frames in the bottom box have been drawn out.  They had furthermore added a queen excluder and another super on top of that for good measure. Then to compound the difficulty for that poor colony, they had taken a frame of foundation and placed it in the middle of the brood nest. We have been having really cold nights,even if the daytime temperatures have been quite unseasonably mild, and in consequence brood in that colony was chilled and had died. The bees had just been unable to cluster over the brood. The owners of the colony thought there must be a problem with disease. I'm afraid the only problem was the poor decisions that they had made. They are the ones who are responsible for that brood being chilled and dying.

The Queen looked lovely but there were very few eggs because the bees were struggling to keep the cluster warm. You may think from what I have listed above that not much else could be going wrong. Well, you are wrong. Because the bees are on a brood and a half, the beekeepers in question had unfortunately rearranged the brood frames in the super so that they were no longer above the frames with brood in the bottom box. They had not grasped the fundamental idea that the brood nest is rugby ball shaped and the bees only expand the brood nest when there are enough of them to keep the young larvae warm. I know I have talked about splitting the brood nest with a frame of foundation in one of my emails. Perhaps I was unwise to do so. The only time that you can commit this sin is when you have got an extremely large and prosperous colony and you want to delay them from swarming. Please note that the act of adding a frame of foundation is a "sin". Only sin if you are absolutely sure that the bees can cope with it! In other words be really really sure that the colony is big enough. If in doubt, don't do it!

It is so hard for beginners when they do not have the experience of handling different boxes of bees. It is a privilege for them if they manage to get a nucleus from one of our members and beginners really do not realise how difficult it is to get them bees. In their enthusiasm they can fiddle and over fiddle and this is not always good for their charges. A colony expands gradually and reaches, at some stage, a tipping point. Once you get to the tipping point it's very tough to hold them back. And a colony that is rapidly expanding needs a huge amount of space. But the inverse is true. A small, struggling colony needs to be left alone so that they can get on with what they do best which is build up on a nectar flow. You can try feeding but if a colony is really small even that will stress them out, particularly if the temperatures are really cold. Sorry to have a rant. If the cap fits, wear it and do something differently in the future. Needless to say I shall be checking that colony and their owners every week from now on. The bees deserve better.!!!

Malcolm Wilkie May 11th 2017

Swarming is now going to happen in urban areas

Those of us who have hives in the countryside where rape seed is still in full flower will have had to cope with swarming. Those of you who are organised will probably have split strong colonies before they make a queen cells themselves.

Now it is the turn of those beekeepers in towns to have to cope with swarming. i.e. Crowborough, Heathfield and Uckfield. Beginners and even those of you who are very experienced often make a classic mistake when doing an artificial swarm. Those of you who came to our session on swarming will know that the easy bit of splitting a colony by doing an artificial swarm is by putting the old queen in a new box on the old site. I won't insult you by going through that part of the artificial swarm again.

However it is the second part of doing an artificial swarm that leads to so many people ending up with a small box of bees and potentially a runt Queen. Study the development of a virgin queen below.

Day 1 egg

        2 egg

        3 egg

        4 larva

        5 larva

        6 larva

        7 larva

        8 larva Queen cell sealed

        9 larva still feeds off royal jelly

        10 larva turns round and detaches from royal jelly and spins cocoon

        11 prepupa

        12 prepupa

        13 pupa

        14 pupa turns darker colour

        15 pupa : tip of queen cell turns a darker brown

        16 virgin  queen emerges

Now this is where we all go wrong. When doing an artificial swarm the brood and young bees are moved away from the original site. It is this box that poses the real problem in this manipulation. You need to go into this box twice in order for there to be only one queen cell for this colony. If you don't do so it is likely that they will cast, perhaps several times! And you then end up with a useless box of bees, perhaps without a queen.

In an urban setting you are probably best, when the colony has really built up well, to split the bees before they make queen cells. By doing this you force them to make emergency queen cells. They usually start the process by taking larvae that are two days old and converting them into Queens. This is okay because ordinary workers and queen larvae are fed in the same way for the first two days. However there is  a danger that they will be panicked into choosing a three day old larva. A three day old larva would make a runt Queen as she won't be fed royal jelly for long enough and this is one of the things that you need to avoid.

So the initial problem you have is one of timing. Once you have split the bees you need to go back three days later and cut out all sealed queen cells. This will get rid of any of the three day old larva that you panicked them into choosing.

At this stage you should mark with a drawing pin on the frames two open queen cells. I would try and choose queen cells that were on frames with other queen cells. Think about where the cell is positioned so that it is as protected as possible by any of your manipulations. At this initial stage I would not destroy other open queen cells. They may have to be your fallback position.

Now for the tricky bit. Look carefully at the life-cycle that I have listed above. The bees can continue to make queen cells for a considerable number of days. You removed the Queen to force them to make emergency cells but on the day of removal there are still eggs in the hive. Those eggs could take three days to hatch and there are a further two or three days when they can still be converted into a queen. So six or seven days after the split you must, and I repeat you must, go in and cut out any unwanted Queen cells. Now the bees are very clever and they cluster around the Queen cells. On the frame with your chosen queen cell carefully touch the bees to check that there is no other queen cell other than the one that you have chosen. Hopefully this is the same cell as the one you marked three days after the split. If not it will have to be one of the other cells on the frame. If there are no other cells on that frame, then you will have to go and search for another good looking queen cell somewhere else in the box. The frame with the chosen queen cell must not be shaken but must be examined carefully so that you do not leave two or three queen cells on it. That would be a disaster as the bees would cast.

Now for the bit that you all don't do. All other frames must be shaken free of bees. The bees are very good at hiding queen cells as they cluster around them. You really must be brave and shake all the bees off the frames that do not contain your chosen Queen cell. Destroy all queen cells except the one on the frame you have chosen, hopefully the one you originally marked. 

Good luck Urban beekeepers.

Malcolm Wilkie 4th May 2017