Returning

Slow blogging from me lately as I have been caught up with other activities. But I have been amazed at the response to the bell jar bees. A German beekeeping magazine expects to be featuring the pictures, so I look forward to that.

I've had an interesting email from Manuel in Portugal who tells me that as an amateur beekeeper with 100 colonies, he is concerned with the attitude of his government to beekeeping. As a result he thinks beeekeeping is not financially sustainable in Portugal and that consumers tend to look at honey as a medicine rather than an important food.

The gold rush is gathered

The 2007 harvest is almost in -- just a bit more heather honey to come and a lot of ivy nectar being gathered which I will certainly not extract as it has the most disgusting taste I have ever encountered from a honey.

From an initial six colonies I have extracted something between 400 and 500 lbs (approx 200 kg) of honey. The bees have grown to eight colonies having already united some colonies and given away a couple of others during the course of the year. I'm pleased with the harvest since it has been such a poor summer after a terrific spring.

I now want to reduce further to six colonies, expecting that I may lose one or two over winter from the various ailments abounding. (I am about to treat for varroa -- a little late some would say, but this time of year works for me in this area.)

BTW, for those new to Propolis, attracted by the bell jar picture links, you might be interested to see other images including lots of close-ups filed under the my pictures keyword.

Bell jar bees -- the slide show

Lots of nice comments coming in about the bees in the bell jar (via howithappened, boingboing and elsewhere) -- but regular readers might have missed the slideshow of progress over the past couple of months. I see how I can try to help the bees improve the design -- and just this morning was given another bell jar. So roll on next season!

Bell jar bees complete the task

The bell jar bees have finished the job -- with one fatality left entombed in gold (second photo). (For progress at each stage, click the bell jar bees keyword.)

 

 

 

 

Raining bee poo

First a heard an excess of buzzing in the garden, then smelt honey and then saw rain glistening against the clear blue sky. A swarm was leaving, the smell was honey from the bee poo raining from the outer edges of the swarm. I've never seen or smelt that before.

The swarming season should have finished be now, but in my deliberately cramped nucleus hive the bees hadhad enough of the congestion this lunchtime and decided that it's time for half of them to leave. They might have had the decency to poo outside the garden instead of over the washing and the bikes.

Blog idle

From a completely different Irish context: "I haven't gone away, you know." But I have been blog-idle. So here's a little update before I depart for another couple of weeks.

The bell-jar bees are progressing slowly. But it's not as if there are not enough workers! I'm surprised they can breathe in such a crowded house. Nectar seems to be scarce, but it is dribbling in and being stashed in the cells. Hardly any is yet capped. I had planned to remove the jar before departing, but despite the travel-staining of the walk-about bees I think I should let them finish the job.

 

Bell Jar Bees Day 12

Even though the season is nearly over, the bees continue to work in the bell jar and are now starting to store honey. If you look very carefully in the second picture, you'll see some very peculiar bee legs.

 

 

Bell Jar Bees Day Seven

Steady rather than spectacular progress probably because the weather has not been the best for nectar collection.

 

Bell jar bees: day five

The infrastructure cells are now being constructed to contain the honey. But it is a race against time: I expect the nectar flow to slow down soon and the bees may even be thinking about swarming because this is the last empty part of the hive and they must be feeling a little cramped.

 

Busy as bees in a bell jar

It's day three in the bell jar and the bees are showing considerably more interest in their new home extension.

The decoration hasn't really begun -- this is more like the undercoat being applied. They walk around, chewing a bit here and there and generally casing the joint. They still have some comb building to complete in the super below, so no clusters of wax builders have yet appeared in the bell jar. (They will cluster to raise the temperature to enable the wax to be excreted and built.)

Incidentally, the jar is kept wrapped in an old t-shirt and there is a hole in the top of the jar to prevent the build-up of condensation.

 

Will they or won't they?

It's been a miserable early summer in southern England and with only about ten days of the nectar flow to go, I've at last been able to put the bell jar in place.

I've stuck small strips of foundation to the inside of the jar and the idea is that the bees will join the dots and make a pretty picture. So far, so good. Within a few hours, they seem to have accepted the jar as a potential nest extension and haven't been put off by the strange new environment. But will the good weather hold and will they take up the challenge?

 

 

Dismal June

Wimbledon fortnight has begun, so the weather is grim. My bees are ready to go, with the main nectar flow expected to end about mid-July. But the weather is not good, so nothing is happening .... yet.

Synchronised fanning

My bees were taking time out today to practise for that famous sport of lining up your stripes with the grain on the wood of the hive:

 

Earliest harvest

All quiet on my blogging front for a few days because amongst other things I've been busy extracting -- or trying to extract fast-crytallising oil seed rape honey. I've never extracted so much (healthy bees, too much oil seed rape!) so early in the year (good weather). I'm beginning to sound like a real farmer -- grumbling about the harvest whatever it is.

OSR is a pain! As it crystallises, it won't spin out or, if it does, it clogs filters. I know I could melt down the combs in a pratley tray, but I'm reluctant to do that because I hate over-heating my honey.

I tried Bee-Quick for the first time to clear the supers. It worked quite well, but next time I'll know to brush the bottom of the supers before loading them into the car -- bees run away from the almond-like smell of Bee-Quick but a lot gather at the bottom of the super frames. Fortunately, there were not too many neighbours around when I offloaded honey -- and quite a few bees -- from the car at home.

The Queen and her retinue

 

I clip my queen's wings so that they don't get far if/when they swarm. Swarms in chimneys and elsewhere can be quite anti-social, so I try to make sure that my swarms don't upset the neighbours. Some people object to clipping -- but I see it as the lesser of two evils.

Obviously the clipping cannot do the Queens much harm -- if done delicately. This happens to be the only Queen that has stayed with me over two winters. On all other occasions, my Queens have left me withing one year. Older beekeepers talk about three, four and five year old queens, but they seem to be becoming more short-lived. Some suspect that, for whatever reason, mating is not what it used to be! Some think that drones are either fewer or less fertile.

The constantly changing workers around the Queen are sensing her Queen pheromone with their antennae and spreading it around the colony so that everyone knows that mummy is at home and keeping well. It's thought that if her pheromnones fail, or if the colony is too congested, her scent does not impregnate the colony and the workers then start making a new queen.

In, out, shake it all about, oooohhhh ....

That mating nucleus in my garden has been teasing me for three days. It's just below my office window and six times in the past three days it has attempted to swarm. No, let me correct that -- five times it attempted to swarm, the sixth time it was successful.

The fifth attempt ended up in my next door neighbour's garden. But they returned, presumably because the queen decided not to go with them.

The sixth, successful, attempt ended up three gardens away. I have caught it in a skep and wonder if they will stay there until dusk.

My questions: why did it take six attempts to swarm? Is this a regular occurrence? Do beekeepers tend to miss this because they are not so close to their hives during the working day? Perhaps they only tried three times and two of the attempts were actually the returning queenless swarm? And did I miss any attempts? And, and, and ...

My twenty-year-old cat, however, seems to have a sixth sense. She knows about 15-30 minutes in advance of when they will swarm and beats a retreat indoors from the garden. Perhaps, she smells the swarming pheromones, assuming there are such things.

The fifth, queenless swarm that returned from its birch tree hang-out:

 

My apiaries

I have four apiaries (just one or two colonies in each), so I thought you'd like to see where they are. They are in little gaps in the woodland in the right of centre of both pictures.

 

 

Coming out to face the day

 

How on earth do bees walk with feet like that?

Drifters

It's big boys' hive time again -- and it's only April! The hive on the right has been snelgroved and has two entrances -- one at the side of large box on top.

A few bees in the second picture are confused. The picture is taken from the back of the hives and shows that the six or seven bees on the right clustered up the side of the box have gone to the wrong hive. It's the one on the left which has the side entrance. It makes you wonder just how many bees drift from hive to hive by mistake.

 

 

Calling back the troops

Either a virgin queen left on a mating flight today or she left with a swarm.
Here's the hub-bub at the entrance to the nucleus hive. And below are workers calling in the troops in the aftermath sending their nasinov marker pheromones into the air.

I had a similar incident last year, but this season's is two months earlier. We've had an extraordinary spring with average April temperatures 3C above the monthly average.