“Shopping list for Heathfield” - by Malcolm Wilkie

Here are a few ideas for anyone who has just started keeping bees or has only been keeping bees for one or two years. It will help you plan for the season ahead. Perhaps also a reminder for those of you who have kept bees for a longer time.

Essential

• Apiguard (a type of thymol gel) to treat colonies in August for varroa.
• An eke for each colony (to apply the Apiguard). If you are good with your hands you can make one yourself.
• Super frames and wax foundation (in the hope your bees will make you some honey). Make up the frames but don't add wax until you are ready. Keep the wax indoors in a dry but cool place but not near a heat source. Under a spare room bed is ideal.
• A contact feeder. Everyone should have one. This is the feeder with the fine mesh covering a central hole. To use you need to have an empty super placed on top of the crown board.
• 2 Queen clips. Make sure the spring works really well. If in doubt ask Helen or Keith.
• A spare hive tool. As brightly coloured as possible.

What would be good

• A polystyrene nucleus box. Contact Paynes beforehand so that they put it on their lorry. Specify size i.e. ordinary national, deep national, commercial, WBC. The owner of a nucleus box can get themselves out of so much trouble. Every new beekeeper should have one. They are not that expensive
• A plastic rapid feeder for each colony. Never buy wooden; they leak and that causes robbing. Make sure the feeder you are buying is the right size for your hives!

What I would be cautious about buying

• Bad quality equipment in the auction.
• A honey extractor in the auction that does not work. Why do they allow them to go into the sale?
• A colony of bees without a Queen. How can beekeepers allow a beginner to waste their money in this way?
• A colony of bees on the wrong sized frames for the hive type you have purchased. Only a strong colony can be shook swarmed.
• If you are thinking about buying bees at least check on the Internet what price a colony or nucleus usually is going for. Don't pay a lot more than you need to pay. Don't get carried away by the fact the bees are being auctioned.

As far as equipment to make increase is concerned, far better to wait until October and get the equipment at the national honey show, or wait until one of the autumn sales and buy the equipment at a fraction of the price at that moment (unless you have a strong colony and will have to divide it to stop swarming). But a nucleus box would get you out of this difficulty. Remember most beginners who manage to buy a whole colony at this time of year lose most of them in a swarm about a week after they have bought them. Your choice, but not having the possibility of dividing a colony will get you into trouble. Beginners you are warned.

Paynes 01273 843388

Ben and Maggi Pratt 01323 841249

And finally, some plants for the bees. Or just some plants. Keith always comes up with something quirky.

Malcolm Wilkie 15th May 2019

“Oil seed rape honey - a blessing or a curse?” - by Malcolm Wilkie

(Comb I have cut up)

(A frame I have spun and then cut in two to show you how much honey is left in the comb)

In my opinion, after having tried to extract 13 supers of the bloody stuff, it is definitely a curse. My bees are right next to 6 or seven fields of oilseed rape and ,of course, they have been busy taking advantage of this bonanza.

Traditionally one waits for the flowers of rape to start to go over before taking the honey and extracting it. However I knew I had a lot of capped frames and so on Tuesday I decided I would have to do an extraction. The disadvantage being that they are still going to collect more of the stuff and I will have to do another extraction in a week or two. Now I knew that the problem with oilseed rape is that it granulates in the frames. What I did not know was that even when granulation hasn’t fully taken place the honey still will not spin out of the frames. Below are two of the frames that have already been spun and ,particularly in the top frame, the honey just won’t come out! Even in the bottom frame about 40 to 50% of the honey would not come out!

The trouble for me is that the honey in those frames is going to set rockhard and that means that those frames won’t be able to be used by the bees later in the season to collect me another crop. That’s what I mean by a curse! We all know how costly it is for the bees to draw out wax and once one has drawn comb that is a real blessing. How annoying to find that all of that has been destroyed by this crop of honey.

The other problem is that I was unable to pass the honey through a double sieve because of the granulation that was present already in the crop that was coming off the frames. This means that I am going to have to put my honey buckets into the warming cabinet and once I have warmed this honey I will then be able to pass it through the finer part of my double sieve. Of course I had no idea about all this until I spoke to our honey Queen. I had also unwisely and in desperation used a spatula to try and pass the honey through my coarse sieve. This means in some buckets there are fine pieces of wax. If only I had been a bit cleverer and when I decided to use a spatula I had then put the sieve over a fresh bucket and then kept back that honey for my own consumption! Easy to be wise after the event!

I asked Helen what I should do with these frames. To be honest smashing them up and warming them gently in the oven just didn’t seem an option. After all there were 13 supers of the bloody stuff! What I have done, and I don’t know if that is a good idea, is that I have cut up some of the worst offending frames and put them in buckets. I intend to give this back to the bees when there is the June gap. Let’s hope they will be able to lick it all out at that stage!

(Combs cut up to put in a bucket to feed back to the bees)

The difficulty for me does not even end there. With rape you really need to soft seed in order to get an acceptable granulation, so I will have to be using my warming cabinet and using some of last year’s soft set heather honey (what a shame! ) to turn this crop into something more acceptable for sale.

A curse or a blessing? Definitely a curse!!! I may have 160lbs worth of honey but I wish I hadn’t got it.

Malcolm Wilkie 9^th May 2019

“Swarming” - by Malcolm Wilkie

Hi everyone,

All my colonies are in one apiary and every single one is now making preparations to swarm. They are just next to acres of rape seed oil. Yellow as far as the eye can see!

Temperatures are not ideal and Saturday it is wet and windy. However everyone would be well advised to carefully check their colonies as soon as they can. 13° with sunshine and not too much wind makes it possible to go in and have a look. You really need to look into those queen cups to see if there is an egg.

My own colonies on 14 x 12’s have between seven and nine frames of brood. There is an amazing amount of nectar in the environment currently and they will be off. Be warned!

If you have sealed Queen cells don’t dig them all out and render your colony queenless. Someone has already done this, much to my own despair. Just remember the colony won’t appear to have swarmed because there will still be thousands of bees but if you have sealed queen cells the Queen has GONE. You cocked up this time. Not a problem as long as you learn from your mistake.

Malcolm Wilkie 26th April 2019

“How to do an Artificial Swarm” - by Malcolm Wilkie

Just a reminder to everyone about doing an artificial swarm using the Pagden method.

Below is a link to my Topical Tip from last year, which includes a video:

Malcolm’s Topical Tips – 2018 May 03

However I repeat to you what I do differently from the video. And I shall explain why.

Once I have the old Queen in a new box on the old site, I add a piece of plastic Queen excluder over the hive entrance (not sure this will work on a poly hive). This is because if I have transferred her to the new box on a frame of eggs and these get chilled, the bees will probably abscond; there will be no brood to anchor them to the box. By placing a  bit of plastic Queen excluder across the entrance they cannot leave as Queenie cannot get out (unless you are a bad carpenter and there is another hole in your box somewhere). Or you have a leaky WBC hive! The disadvantage (there is always a disadvantage) is that the drones cannot get back in. The old Queen in her new box on the old site is the box I feed generously with sugar syrup. Those of you at the swarming session saw how big my feeder was. This is logical; you have put her in a box with frames of foundation and they have no frames with stores  on them.

I remove my bit of Queen excluder after three days.

The youtube video suggests that you should put the super on the old Queen in her new box on the old site. Rubbish. When I did that the bees didn’t bother to draw out the foundation as there was drawn comb in the super above the Queen excluder. They cleared out space in the super for the Queen to lay not understanding that there was a Queen excluder preventing her from getting upstairs. Remember you understand that a Queen is too big to get through a Queen excluder but the bees do not. And you risk the Queen impaling herself on the excluder in her effort to get upstairs. Even if there is one frame of brood downstairs they tend to ignore it. Look at it from their point of view. There is drawn comb already in the top box(super), stores to keep the new brood warm and they don’t need to draw out all that new wax which is stressful for them, particularly as the bees are mainly older foragers and these are the ones that are not such good wax makers. Why wouldn’t they try and make a brood nest upstairs? The only thing that is preventing them is your bloody Queen excluder! And they don’t understand excluders. They are clever creatures BUT NOT that clever.

Helen taught me to put my super on the ‘parent box’- in other words the box with all the brood and the Queen cells (there is a very good reason why I call Helen ‘Our honey Queen’, just remember that).

Why does this work? Because if you do the manipulation correctly and only allow one Queen cell there will be thousands of bees hatching who will have nothing else to do but collect you honey. A virgin takes at least 3 weeks to come into lay (and if you have a big box of bees, sometimes even longer) and so what do the bees do while waiting for her to start laying eggs? They go out searching for nectar. Make sure you give them enough supers though because if you don’t they will fill up your brood box with honey and there will be nowhere for a new queen to lay eggs!

Although you should never disturb a box with a new virgin in it, you can look at the super without any danger of crushing her and if they are filling it up you MUST give them another empty super, preferably just above the brood box.

Malcolm

P.S. I hope the above is clear. It should be clear at the very least to those who came to my talk on swarming. I suspect many of those who are inexperienced and didn’t come to the talk will be blissfully unaware of what is about to happen and what to do about it! Perhaps the video below may help you.

P.P.S. Remember capped queen cells means there is a 95% chance that the Queen has swarmed with half to three quarters of your bees and your honey crop has disappeared over the hedge. Sorry, you cocked up this year, better luck next time!

8^th April 2019

“First Inspections” - by Steve Davies

Hopefully all of your bees came through winter successfully and are now bringing in lots of pollen. Please do keep a check on their food stores as there is still a risk of starvation, especially if we have a cold snap and there are more mouths to feed. If needed, you can either continue with fondant or give them a thin syrup mix (25% water).

With the improved weather you should be able to carry out your first inspections. Choose a dry (sunny?) day, 12 degrees or more and no wind. I use cloths to keep the frames covered and only expose one frame at a time. Although the queen should be easy to find, the reason for the inspection is to confirm the state of the hive.

1. How many frames of brood are there and in what stage (eggs, larvae, capped)?
2. Is the brood healthy or are there any deformities?
3. How many frames of stores do they have?
4. Importantly, how much space is there for the queen to lay? If all frames are full, remove one frame of capped stores (or pollen) and replace with a fresh frame of foundation. Put this next to the brood. If an outside frame has space, move this next to the brood.
5. Consider putting on a super. If the brood box is cramped then this is a must. As well as storing fresh nectar, the bees will move honey up from the brood box creating space for the queen to lay.
6. Finally, check for play cups / queen cells. There is an expectation that the swarming season will be early this year so you need to be prepared. Have you got equipment ready for immediate use and a plan of action in place? When I checked my hives yesterday, one colony had eight large play cups (almost queen cell sized)!

I hope you all have a successful season and get pleasure from your Beekeeping.

Steve Davies 29th March 2019