Bait Hives

Given that everyone except us seems to have massive colonies of bees at the moment (I'll whine about the shook swarms that were done on both colonies leaving us with little room for manoever later) and is preparing for swarming season, we've put a bait hive out with our spare frames.

When we finally took over the apiary we discovered, in the back of the shed, a pile of old frames complete with old, scabby comb. While our aim is to get these cleaned up and ready for new foundation we decided to place a couple of these in the bait hive following a bit of reading that suggests a swarm looking for a new home likes to find a bit of old comb, presumably as it signals that bees once managed to live there successfully. We've also used a bit of Lemongrass scattered across the top bars. I know it should be oil, but we didn't have any and that was the next best thing.

We've got more spare broodchambers, but no spare foundation to fill them with, but I do have a scabby old home made nuc on site that we could fill with new frames and a couple of scabby ones, wonder if a Nuc would do as a bait hive?

Now we wait and hope we manage to attract a passing swarm.

[edit] A nucleus hive (Nuc) is too small apparently to be an effective bait hive, it needs to be about the size of a broodchamber and I just happen to have two kicking around that I was going to clean up. I'm going to put a couple of frames of the old comb into the "dirtiest" box containing a good amount of brace comb, propolis etc, and try and get hold of some lemongrass oil and see what we get. If I manage to get a swarm, then the other box will be cleaned up and ready to go by then (I hope).

Everyone is interested...

I've done my share of wierd activities in my time. I SCUBA dived for years, Mountain biked, pottered around in the Territorial Army and a few other bits and bobs here and there. Nothing, however, has piqued people's interest quite as much as when it emerges that I keep bees.

There's not one person that I've spoken to when it's come up that hasn't stopped dead in their tracks and wanted to know more. In some cases it's been related to the "OMG teh Bees are dying!!1!" coverage in the press, but for the most part people are just fascinated by these little insects and want to know more about the hive and, especially, the bees themselves.

There's also a, to me, surprising number of people who want to come along to my apiary and watch what I'm doing, I guess I need a spare veil.

Lots of Bee Stuff on the BBC at the moment.

Apparently it was first shown last year but caught "Jimmy and the wild honey hunters" where they packed some pig farmer off to Nepal to have a go collecting honey off the cliff bees (Apis laboriosa) which build huge combs hanging off cliffs.

Some amazing photography in the programme. with the combs out in the open, the bees flick their abdomens to warn off predators which results in these amazing "waves" rippling across the combs. Looks like an awful lot of work for a bit of honey though, don't think I'll be swapping my hive for a cliff face anytime soon.

Leaky Feeders

Two of the three hives on site, that aren't mine, have contact feeders in place. Both of these feeders have leaked and there is a [not so] nice wet spot of syrup leaking from the brood chambers of both hives. Wandering around yesterday I noticed a big fat wasp competing with the bees for a share of the sugar.

My concern now is that we're advertising the apiary to all and sundry with a taste for sugar that there's free food going and that hence there's a danger of the hives getting robbed out. I'm trying to get the other beeks to replace these feeders, or just remove them, as soon as possible.

The quickest inspection in the all the world...

I've been up to the apiary and while I technically did open the hive to stick a dummy board in, I didn't do a full inspection. As much as I wanted to from a personal interest point of view, I didn't see any reason to do it.

I know my colony is small, I know that this weekend is when the first of the new brood is starting to emerge so it's no surprise that just a quick visual check down the frames as I swapped a frame of foundation for a dummy board showed no immediate sign of expansion. That being said, they seemed "happier". There were more foragers coming and going and there seemed to be more bees on the two frames of brood.

My Varroa count has also nosedived. This has been a big concern to me over the past few weeks; the count I have, going by the books, indicates potentially big problems. But, I have a very small colony so I'm limited in what I can do. I've no drone brood, only a couple of frames of brood, Apiguard carries a risk, however small of stopping the queen laying and we're pyrethoid resistant in this neck of the woods.

It has been suggested that I might have a very high mite count because I have "hygenic bees". Yesterday I had two immature mites on the tray under the open mesh floor (it's permanently in place at the moment to try and help the bees warm the brood) from the past week. Today I had two, apparently adult mites on the floor.

Right now I don't know what to think.

In other unrelated news, we cut back the ring of brambles that surrounds the hives and discovered blackcurrants fighting for their lives, DIY ribena coming soon.

A New Home?

This blog was originally posted on the Avon Beekeeper's Website. I'm playing around with Blogger to see how it goes and whether it provides some of the shiny stuff that we don't currently have. I'm in the process of dragging some of the original articles over, kicking and screaming, and attempting to re-organise them so apologies if some of the original text doesn't quite "fit" the new format, I'll re-edit and update as necessary once I've figured things out a bit more.

"Who killed the honey Bee?"

An interesting documentary on BBC 4 last night. From within the beekeeping forums that I frequent however there is not a great deal of sympathy for the commercial 'keepers based on how the colonies were being treated and the state of the combs.

I also managed to catch, on the signzone, this week's Country File which was possibly a little more representative of the state of play in the UK, a shame the feature was only a couple of minutes long as it was perhaps far less gloomy.

Marking Some Queens

On Saturday afternoon we came back to work on two other hives in an attempt to find and mark the queens. We managed to find and mark one queen, the other proved a little more elusive. While we did find her, she scurried away before we could trap and mark her, with the smoker inevitably going out and the bees starting to get grumpy over the intrusion, we closed up and left her for the time being.

Why mark the queen? Here's a frame fresh out of the hive. Somewhere amongst that lot might be the queen, marking her makes it, in theory at least, that much easier to find her. It also lets you verify that the queen that you're looking at is the same one you saw in the last inspection:


In this hive the Queen was obligingly wandering around in a clear space:


Using a Press in cage to trap the queen:


And applying the mark, there is a colour scheme normally used to mark queens:
White for years ending 1 or 6
Yellow for years 2 or 7
Red for years 3 or 8
Green for 4 and 9
and Blue for 5 and 0

We'd lost the red pen and felt that a marked queen, even not following the above scheme was better than no mark at all:

Shook Swarming

Finally! After months of reading up we made the most of the nice weather and got stuck in with two afternoon sessions to get things prepared for the new season. My first hands on effort working with my bees and I think I'm hooked. I will admit to a degree of trepidation that having spent all this time and money getting things set up that I'd end up surrounded by bees and panicking or simply just deciding that I didn't like it.

The first task was to do the shook swarm into my new brood chamber, freshly converted back to bottom bee space.


1) Preparing the new Brood chamber to recieve the bees. What we've got here is one national brood chamber on top of a queen excluder, so it acts as a queen includer and reduces the chance that the colony might abscond as a result of the shook swarm. This will be removed once the bees have had a chance to establish their new home and give the queen somewhere to lay new brood.




2)The old hive, mid swap


3) Shaking the bees off the old frames into the new Brood chamber


4) All done, the brood chamber with an Ashforth feeder on top of the Brood chamber to give the bees some sugar syrup to encourage them to draw new comb on the foundation and make sure they've got something to eat.