Nucs for the 2013 season

And so production begins for the 2013 season.

I have cut the timber for the first batch of nucleus hives into flat pack ready for glueing and pining.  I usually build nucs and hives in batches of four, it is a monotonous job, I find four is enough to keep me interested, any more and it becomes a bit of a chore.

Once the nucs are glued and pined all that remains to be done is to tar the roofs and melt the felt into it for a weather-tight lid, and paint with five coats of exterior wood preservative, and of course the endless job of building frames.

This first batch of nucs, each with a colony installed, are for orders already taken.  Even now it looks as if 2013 will be sold out very early.

Taster days, courses and colonies

Another year about over, and for beekeepers what a dreadful year its been, the worst I can remember.  But already I have to make plans for the coming season.

I don't start advertising colonies for sale until late January early February, I have a better idea of how my bees have come through the winter by then, but I have orders for hives and nucs with colonies already.  And the course that I run for absolute beginners is also becoming booked up early. The beginning of the season used to be the start of April for me, I had a couple of colonies that were hugely productive, varroa was in the distant future, summers were always sunny, winters were mild...... Must stop wearing those rose tinted glasses.

My early nuc and colony queens were ordered two months ago and most of those have already been sold with the colonies they will head. I start building hives and nucs the first week of January and I don't really stop building frames.  I am going to severely restrict the number of colonies I produce this coming year, I have, unfortunately, a lot of non-beekeeping work to get through in 2013.

This year I am going to be offering people who like the idea of beekeeping but who have never had the chance to see what is involved, 'Taster Days', these are an opportunity to inspect a hive or two with me to see if beekeeping is something they would like to take up. I will be providing all the kit they will need, so the outlay is minimal and greatly reduces the risk of starting something that they may not actually like.

For those wishing to read up on beekeeping through the winter in preparation to start keeping bees in the spring, two books that I use and recommend,
Practical Beekeeping by Ted Hooper and A Guide to Bees and Honey by Clive de Bruyn.  Both appear from time to time on auction sites,  as with all hobbies/pastimes its much easier to understand when you have had hands on experience.

Winter preparation

The first frosts have arrived as usual in the first week of November, its the time that I rearrange the hives in readiness for winter.
All supers and queen excluders are removed from the top of the brood box and a full super is given back to each hive, but placed under the brood, the fifth of November was a lovely day, just right for such an operation.

As soon as they are rearranged, I put fondant on every hive.  I make the fondant in half kilo tubs, this is placed upside down over a feed hole on top of the crown board.  this allows me to monitor the bees through the winter without going into the hive.




It doesn't take long for the bees to find and start using this food source.  Some of my colonies get through large amounts of fondant, others barely touch it, but it is always there if they need it.

Replacing a queen

JZ/BZ (open) & push in cage

I have been asked to do a post on how I would replace a queen, known as requeening, more specifically how I would replace a queen in an aggressive colony.  In truth, this is is the method I use no matter whether the colony is aggressive or not.

To carry out a requeening I use two queen cages, a small travelling cage which I think is a JZ/BZ and a larger press in cage.
If I purchase a queen from a supplier then she will arrive through the post in a JZ/BZ or something similar and the escape tunnel will be sealed with candy or soft wax.  If I am using one of my own queens she will have to be encouraged into a JZ/BZ, not always the easiest of tasks, but once she is in the cage I seal it with a plastic plug, she will only be in there for the journey to her new home.

Queens as they arrive in the post

JZ/BZ sealed with plastic plug 

Queen sealed in with wax

One way or another you now have a queen in a travelling cage, I keep her in my suit pocket until I am ready, it keeps her in the dark and warm, less stress.

In the colony you are to requeen you have to find the existing queen, you then have to decide whether to kill her or keep her with a frame of bees in a nuc as an insurance policy, even a nasty queen is better than no queen.  Either way she must be removed from the colony

Now you have to look for a suitable brood frame for the press in queen cage, the comb has to be flat, there must be no way that the colonies workers can easily crawl under the edges, if the workers manage to get in before they should you will have a dead queen.  It should have a section of honey at the top and emerging brood just under, that is brood that will hatch over the next week.

Shake all the bees off the frame and take it somewhere where you can work on a flat surface, push the queen cage firmly into the comb, top centre, until the edges are in full contact all the way round.  I also use two elastic bands to make sure it cannot move.

Remove the entrance plug from the press in queen cage, take the queen from your pocket, remove the plastic plug and quickly put the escape  hatch on the JZ/BZ into the entrance of the press in queen cage, keeping it raised just enough so there is room for the queen to crawl out and onto the comb.

 Replace the entrance plug on the press in queen cage and take the frame back to its colony.
I usually leave them for a week, sometimes longer before I inspect. If the queen is still in the cage after ten days, brood should have hatched in the cage and she will be their queen and it will be safe to let her go.
I requeen every swarm I collect, so I have done this more than a few times.
This is the only system that has worked every time for me.

A beautiful day

Its Sunday October 7th, here in South Lincs its a beautiful day, the sun is shining, the wind is almost non existent and the bees seem to think its summer.  On this apiary the bees have a couple of acres of this small yellow dandelion like flower to go at, I think its Hawkweed, and I can't remember ever seeing the field looking like this so late in the year and a real bonus for the bees, because whatever it is they are all over it.

Queen rearing

I have built the prototype for my Queen accommodation block.  The unit is a standard national super which has three snug fitting separators  splitting the box into four equal compartments, each compartment can take 2 super frames and space for a queen introduction cage.  Because all the work is in the base and I have not altered the super in any way it could be used as a normal super once queen breeding is finished for the year.

Each compartment has an entrance hole in the floor, each at right angles to the next, so there should not be a problem of the bees getting confused about which entrance is their own.  There will only be a few hundred bees in each compartment, just enough to see the queen mated and into her laying cycle.  She will then be introduced into one of my nucs or colonies or sold.

All I have left to do is make four individual crownboards with an 8mm thick edge to create top bee space, and a standard national roof.  I need perhaps five of these for my first year queen breeding, judging by the interest so far.  Not a bad effort for the first attempt, I'll have a think to see if it can be improved or made easier to build before I make any more.

Last crop of the year

Its midday on September 26th, its miserable, close to raining, 14C at best and yet the bees are working their socks off.  The reason for all this activity, Ivy.  It started to flower really early this year and looks set for another couple of weeks.







On this apiary there are a few big old trees that are covered in ivy, and I have never seen so much flower on it.  As all the hives here are right under the ivy I guess the poor weather is not preventing the bees from flying.

Queen Bee production

The kit has started to arrive so that I can hopefully produce my own Queens for sale next year.
I have reached the stage where I have all my colonies producing huge broods, that are very calm and this season,  swarmless, just about an ideal combination.

On the right is a pile of artificial queen cells and the 'hair curler' queen cages that prevent the emerging queens from escaping into the colony and fighting each other.

This is a single artificial queen cell assembled, once the cell has been capped the ' hair curler' cage is placed over the cell and is a tight fit to the beige plastic cell outer casing.

Grafting tools, these are used to scoop up from the donor colony a one day old larvae along with its royal jelly, then push the larvae gently into the artificial cell.  My wife is going to be doing the grafting, I have big fat 'blokey' fingers, which renders me incapable of carrying out such a delicate operation, apparently.

A national brood frame with ten cells that I have attached ready for next season.  I am going to be using the Ben Harden method of queen rearing, a well documented way of producing queens in queenright colonies.

I am designing a 4 compartment mini nuc box, so that the entrance for each small colony is at right angles to the next.  Pictures will be up as soon as I produce the first one.

Supercedure

supercedure cell

If left to their own devices bees can and will make some dreadful decisions, as one of my best colonies has demonstrated by trying to supercede in the second week of September.  Supercedure cells differ from swarm cells in number and placing.  Generally supercedure has only one, sometimes two queencells, and they will be in the middle of a frame.  Swarm cells are usually built in numbers around the edges of a frame.  I have to use generalities because with bees there are always exceptions to the rule.
This one though is a textbook supercede, a single queen cell in the centre of a frame. A month ago I would probably have allowed this to carry through to its natural conclusion, which can mean two Queens occupying and laying in the same brood box, the old queen and her daughter.  This is not as rare as you might think.
But this late in the year and with the weather about to go downhill it is unlikely that a new Queen would be successfully mated.

caged mated Queen

For whatever reason the colony knows, or thinks their Queen is failing, which is why they are trying to replace her.  So before the colony decides to do something even more drastic I stepped in to manage the situation and remove the resident Queen.
Its for occasions like this that I keep mated Queens banked away in mini nucs.  This is my last spare Queen of the year, so fingers crossed that there are no more mishaps.
In a large busy colony like this one I like to introduce Queens using this type of cage. The cage with the new Queen inside is placed over a patch of emerging brood.  As the young bees hatch they automatically take the new Queen as their own and after a week or so the Queen can be released into the colony.
I have had a 100% success rate with this type of introduction..........so far.

First orders !!!, Last swarms ???

What a year, I have never known anything like it.  Bees virtually starving at the height of the season, now the ivy is coming into flower a month early and the girls are going for it, all my colonies are heaving and supers filling.  No swarm calls for over a month and then two on Sunday 19th, that is just about the latest I have ever collected a swarm, surely coming to the end now, there comes a point when even the bees must realise that its getting too late for a swarm to survive and the princess to mate.
Its too late for the swarms I collected to follow my normal procedure, by the time they go through a brood cycle it will be late September, way past the time of year I would consider uniting.  So they will have to manage the winter as they are and be requeened in the Spring, one of them has eggs already, I will check the other tomorrow.

And I have just had the first orders for colonies for early May 2013, I don't even start to advertise until November.  Its easily the earliest I have taken orders. The advantage early orders get is that they can choose their colony, do the last few inspections of the year with me, be there when I treat with oxalic acid, decide if they would like to keep the overwintered Queen or have the colony requeened in April, and they have a price fixed at this years rate.  It helps me loads, judging how many hives I need to construct and how many Queens to organise for next year.  I will be producing Queens in numbers next year, I usually only keep enough to get me through the year, but next year I will be producing a surplus to sell.

BBC CBeebies

The site at 8.15am

On Sunday we manned the stand for our local beekeeping club, Boston.  It was a CBeebies day.

We arrived at 8.15am to a fairly calm and organised site nearing   completion for the one day event in Kings Lynn.  Amy was running the show and seemed relieved that we had arrived, but she was very organised and soon sorted everything we needed.

Our marquee

Dawn andAmy

All our kit

All The kit was offloaded near our allocated area,  opposite the newts and beside the slugs and snails, don't ask, I didn't.

Candle rolling

My wife Dawn was in charge of candle rolling and I was to look after the
observation hive and honey tasting
Set up was straightforward and by 10am when the first batch of 500 children with their parents were let in, we were ready, or at least I thought we were.  By 11am they were three deep around the stand and I was beginning to feel a little shell shocked, at 4pm we ran out of everything, by 5pm when it finished my brain had melted.
I didn't know that many children existed and they kept coming, thousands of them.  We actually managed lunch at 5.15pm,

But it was a great day and a fantastic way to get children involved.

Uniting

Joining two colonies together, or 'uniting' is done for various reasons, a colony has become queenless and there are no spare queens available, or it is too late in the season for the colony to build before winter.  uniting may give one large colony a better chance of going through winter rather than two medium colonies.  Re-uniting after an artificial swarm, 'AS.' Or the reason I usually unite is to absorb swarms into my apiary.
All the swarms I collect are treated for varroa and isolated from my other colonies, they go through at least one brood cycle to make sure they are disease free, they will then either be requeened or united into one of my colonies, depending on time of year and availability of new queens.  It has been a particularly difficult year to produce good quality well mated queens, so just about all the swarms from this year are being united into my overwintering hives.

This is the way I unite, it is not the quickest and not the way most books or other beekeepers will do it, but it has over the years been 100% successful for me, with minimal loss of bees in the uniting process.  On the right in the first picture is a working colony with a Queen in, Queenright, Q+ are the ways to show a colony with a Queen.  On the left of the first picture is one of this years swarms, the Queen has been removed.  Between the two hives is a crownboard that has been modified to work like a Snelgrove board, the feed holes have been covered in varroa mesh and there is an adjustable opening in one side of the board.  It isn't a Snelgrove board exactly nor is this the purpose a Snelgrove board was meant for, which was a form of swarm control.

The board is placed directly on top of the
Q+ brood chamber.

The Qless brood chamber is now placed directly on top of the board with the entrance open and at right angles to the Q+ entrance.  The bees can smell each other through the mesh but are not able to do each other harm and they can remain like this if necessary for weeks.  The pheromones from the Q+ passing through the mesh seem to suppress the urge for the Qless colony to produce a drone laying worker, or at least I have never had a colony in this situation produce one.

Once the two colonies have had a few days to get used to one another I replace the board with a thin piece of card that has been slashed with a craft knife.

It takes the bees a couple of days before the bees eventually break through and by this time are already one colony.

You can now either run this as a double brood colony or shake all the bees into one brood,  This will depend on time of year, weather, and your own preferences.

I normally keep very large single brood chamber colonies, I manage my bees to be on 11 full frames of brood throughout the summer.

The Heckington Show

I spent a really enjoyable day on Saturday at The Heckington Show on  the bee stand.
Considering Heckington is a village in rural Lincolnshire, it is a huge show which runs over a full weekend.  It has been going in excess of 100 years and judging by the numbers there on Saturday will continue to do well.

The bee stand was continually busy from the time the show opened until I caved in at around 5pm.  So many inquiries it was difficult to fit in the odd cup of tea, and the odd cup of tea is an essential as far as I am concerned.

The observation hive was a great favourite, everyone trying to spot the Queen, especially the children, and although the Queen
was marked she still proved illusive.

An incredible amount of interest, no doubt driven by the media focus on bees and their plight over the last couple of years, its nice that people care enough to ask how the bees are coping.






Its very rewarding helping and passing on knowledge to new beekeepers and those wishing to become beekeepers.
With luck I will be at the show again next year
and will see some of you there.

Wannabee a beekeeper 3, The Bees

As a new beekeeper, your first colony is very exciting and therefore deciding on which option to go for requires a lot of thought.

I collect quite a few swarms during the course of a season, they are isolated from my working colonies they are treated for varroa and requeened.  For this reason I have always been opposed to beginners collecting swarms, as age of Queen, temperament of the colony and level of desease/varroa are all unknowns and not something that you should have to deal with as your introduction to beekeeping.

Do you purchase a Nuc ( nucleus), a mini colony ready to move up to a full hive, should it have a new season or late autumn overwintered Queen.  Top right is one of my stock 5 frame nucs, they will have starter colonies installed late in the year with a new Queen.  These are overwintered and form the basis of my earliest nucs and colonies. I also produce early nucs with current season Queens.   With a nuc a new beekeeper can grow in confidence as the colony expands, and if acquired early enough may produce a crop.

or

Do you buy a colony that has recently moved up from a nuc and is now on 6-7 frames of brood, very soon it is likely to require a Queen excluder and the first super, with the right weather conditions and a good flow it will be thinking about swarming.  Its a fast learning curve with this option, things move very quickly in the hive and the bees don't wait while you stumble over decisions.  A mentor who can help you through the first season is an essential.

or

Do you purchase a full working colony at its height. This is for either the brave or foolhardy, possibly both.  There will be 60-70,000 bees, 11 frames of brood, supers filling.  You would have to deal with probable Queen cells, artificial swarming and then uniting, no amount of book reading or course attending can prepare you for dealing with a colony in full flow on your own, it has to be experienced and for a beginner it would be daunting.


Wherever you buy your bees from, you should visit the apiary, at least once.  You should handle the bees you are going to buy, the actual colony.  The beekeeper you buy them from should be happy to mentor you through your first season or at least be at the end of the phone if you need help/advice.

Pollen

Some of my colonies are bringing in  huge amounts of pollen right now, I'm sure they know what they are doing.  The picture is from a brood frame in one of those colonies.
The enormous variations of colours shows what a diverse range of plants the bees are foraging from.
The lightest is almost white to the darkest black, which is almost certainly poppy.
There is a colour chart in Wikipedia and although it is probably North American and incomplete for the UK, it does give a guide to what is coming in.