Not had much to say for some months, but I’ve been back to the FreeBees three times now since the last post.

The first two were to give them more food, and since it was getting so cold, this time it was candy, not syrup.  The bees can’t work the syrup once it gets too cold, so you know that stuff bakers put on top of buns?  Yeah, that:

I’d bought a big bag of it some time ago – the Summer BBKA show, I think – so it was just a matter of breaking it up into portions, putting it into sealable sandwich bags, and rolling it as flat as I could, so it would fit in under the lid.  The second picture is of a bag in situe, with a bag they’d previously emptied on the right.  You lay it on the frames, take out a craft knife, cut a big diagonal cross in the bag corner to corner, flip it over so the cut is down over the frames, and put the lid back on on top.  All done, little bother or heat loss to the bees.

On the second visit, the main hive had cleaned out that bag, so I gave them another.  The newer hive had only half-eaten their first bag, so I left them to it.  This third visit today, little more had been taken by either, so I just left them where they were – the hives were very dormant, so they’ve not needed much yet.  This early spring had worried me, but my hives haven’t really woken up yet.

The first thing that met my eyes on reaching the apiary though was the damage done by last week’s wind:
Fortunately I had some cable ties in the car (I’m an engineer – I’m never far from gaffer tape, cable ties and WD40).  So I repaired what I could, using some of the thin bamboo rods stashed at the entrance to try to hive the fence some more strength, like this:

It needs more work, but the wind has died down now, so it’ll do until the weather’s better and I can talk to The Powers That Bee™ about how to fix it properly.

On to the Hives.  I removed the anti-woodpecker wire, noting no sign of attack, opened them up, saw the bees still there (relief) but dormant, and then trickled in some of the acid into each gap, gently trying to get an even run onto the bees all the way along.  I did the main hive first, and put it all back together again before remembering the camera, so all these shots are from the newer hive:

And so that’s what you see here.  The bottle contains the acid.  You squeeze it to fill the little 5ml reservoir at the top.  The nozzle is an unscrewable thing, so you loosen that, and then tip it so that just that 5ml is poured slowly into the gap, onto the bees.  Both hives took 1.5 of these bottles total.  The acid has no affect on the bees, we’re told – and none noticed in the years this has been used by my friendly experts.  But it melts the legs off the mites…

This time of year, there is no brood.  Verroa prefer to live in the cells with growing brood, feeding off them, but outside of season, they have no choice, and life on the backs of the bees in the colony, feeding directly off the adults.  This sticky acid dropping on them then has two effects.  One, it melts the Verroa’s legs, making it far harder to hold on.  Two, it gets the bees to clean themselves, hopefully knocking the Verroa off and out the bottom of the hive.  It should do a better job than anything else in our armoury against them.

Both hives are now back together, treated and fed.  And I’ve patched the fencing.  It’ll be a few more weeks before I return.

One Last Thing – this is a great video of a hornet attack on a beehive.

I went back quickly to the bees this Sunday afternoon, since the weather was fine, and I needed to give them some fondant – it’s too cold now to give them syrup.  I’d bought a big bag of fondant at the Spring show, to get ready, and we used some of that to do the re-queening some time ago.  I also have two boxes of stuff that has pollen in the fondant, but I’ll be using that in the early spring, when they’re waking up.

I cut some of the fondant off, dropped it into a couple of press-lock topped sandwich bags, and rollered them flat.  These I then took with me to the hives.

The original hive seemed happy and healthy, so all I did there was take the feeder tray off, put a bag of fondant on the top of the frames, cut a deep cross corner to corner into it, and then flipped the bag over and left it there.  The clear plastic cover went on that, then the roof on that, and I strapped it back together, and put the woodpecker protection cage back on.

The newer hive was more interesting though:

Sorry about the weird warp in this shot – it bent my photo of the fondant bags even worse, which is why there are none here =O(  But see those bodies on the floor of the feeder tray?  They’re all wasps.  There was one alive in there too – well it was alive for a few seconds after I noticed it still.  Then it was squished.  There’s obviously quite the story here.  How did they get into the tray, how are they all dead (but that last one, which was quite poorly) and how come any bees that had died in the fight were gone, but all the wasp bodies were still there?  I can only surmise that the wasps had got in, smelt the sugar and preferred the idea to the honey, got up there, and then in the sticky open space had lost the battle.  I cleared the tray out and put it to one side, and gave them a bag of fondant too.  I hope they can fight off any other intruders, but wasps seem to be dying off now anyway, and the front door reducer is hopefully keeping mice out, so hopefully they’ll be OK.

So I put that hive back together again too, and was left with this:

Yes, the left hand doweling on the newer hive snapped while I was using it to lift the cage – silly me.  No sign of any woodpecker activity on either hive, but then the hives without any protection in the apiary look fine too, so all I seem to be achieving is scratches in my paintwork.

That’s it now I think.  I may need to check again, and maybe replace the food, but I don’t really want to let the cold in, and they seem fed enough.  Between Christmas and New Year we’ll re-visit, feed again, and use the mite leg disolving acid treatment thing on them.  More on that when it happens.

Another couple of weeks, during which Emily has headed off to University, and Lucy has gone to Marchent’s Hill with school for a week, so we’ve had a very quiet house.  But I’ve visited the bees a couple of times, mainly to do what Simon wrote about in his last entry here.  So I’ve now got the Supers beneath the Brood boxes on both hives, but once again I’ve over-engineered my woodpecker protection in comparison – mainly because I have chicken wire left over from building the chicken coop.

So last year, I had a bigger stand, and the wire could be stood on it too.  This year, all the Training Apiary hives have smaller stands that fit tightly into the base, and so I came up with this idea of using two doweling rods per hive to hold it up.  And I’ve not allowed the wire to get too close to the sides of the hive.  There ‘s a frightening photo in this month’s British Beekeeper’s Association Newsletter of a hive wrapped tightly in chicken wire, that a woodpecker just used to get a better footing when it attacked.  There’s a large missing section in the side of the brood box, with lots of comb exposed =O(  I don’t want that to happen to mine.

I also fed then thick sugar syrup again.  They seem to be lapping it up.  As you can see above, the feeder boxes are still on top of both hives.  And I removed the last of the ApiGuard, and topped up the powder in the bottom.   And that’s it.  A few more visits to feed them and check they’re OK, and we’ll be into Winter.  This Thursday is also the Fleet Beekeeper’s meeting and competition.  I’ve not decided whether to enter one of our jars of honey yet =O}

Today we were back in the training apiary continuing to prepare the bees for winter. The Apilife VAR anti-varroa treatments have been in place now for almost 5 weeks and the smell has permeated the entire apiary. The mite drop count has come down on all but the largest hive which still has a lot of dead mites appearing on the removable tray. Never mind, we will have to leave them until the Oxalic acid treatment in December.

Having hefted all the hives, last week we identified a couple that required feeding with syrup. Today all the syrup had gone and so we will top them up again later tonight. Those hives that have a full super of stores plus loads of food in the brood chamber were “flipped” with the super placed on the floor and the brood chamber on top. (Note how clean the floor is) We have done this process for a few years now and it pays huge dividends in a number of ways.

When the bees cluster as it gets colder they will start at the bottom (in the super) and work their way upwards into the brood chamber by mid-winter. When we trickle the Oxalic acid anti-varroa treatment into the hive after Christmas, the syrup will trickle straight onto the brood and be far more effective.

Also in past years, the Queen typically starts laying eggs in February when its still too cold to do an inspection and in the past that has meant that we end up with the queen laying eggs and raising brood in the super which is very difficult to deal with. With this method, the Queen ends up laying eggs in the brood chamber where we want her to. Rapid feeding is also easy as you can simply place a slim pack of candy on top of the brood chamber close to the bees if we need to. This method gives us time in the Spring to wait for a good warm day before conducting a full inspection at our leisure, reversing the hive back the normal way with the super on top and Queen excluder in between.

We have also had a report of woodpeckers attacking a members hives nearby and so we also showed how to protect a hive from these critters who can rip through a hive in seconds if they want to. In the past, I have wrapped hives in chicken wire, but whilst this works, it’s really difficult to store the chicken wire away from the hive.

So now I use plastic garden mesh (20mm) that is easy to cut to size and can be rolled up and put away when not required. The mesh is simply wrapped round the hive and secured with wire wraps as shown above. Heather Morss suggested a little twist at each corner against the hive roof to stop the mesh falling down. It also means that the wrap can be lifted off the hive in one piece if we need to get inside the hive for any reason.

The bees in the training apiary (including the FreeBees) are located in the middle of an old orchard which is absolutely perfect for the bees. It’s warm and sheltered with a little stream nearby and lots of local forage, and we use it rent-free in return for helping to restore and maintain the orchard. The orchard is planted exclusively with apple trees, but none of them produce apples that you might see in a supermarket. They are clearly very old, but how old? What varieties are they? and how do we look after them?

Well, to find out we contacted Gerry Edwards, fellow beekeeper, Chairman of the RHS Fruit Group, apple guru and all round top chap to give us some advice. Gerry is passionate about the preservation of old orchards and estimates that most of the trees in the orchard were planted in the 1890′s using many old varieties. He first visited the orchard in March to advise us on how to manage the trees as they had not been pruned of otherwise maintained in decades.

So yesterday, myself, Gerry and Lisa the landowner had a wonderful time going through the orchard tree by tree, mapping their location and attempting to identify each variety by picking sample apples for Gerry to look at. This was not easy as many of the trees are only producing fruit at the top of the tree, requiring the use of an apple grabber deployed on a long pole.

As the trees are so old, most of the fruit is a bit deformed and so it took time to find a suitable reference apple from each tree in turn. Gerry can identify most varieties by their shape, smell and taste, but some required reference to his apple book and he also took away a carrier bag full of apples for further research.

It turns out that most of the apples are cooking varieties and it’s likely that this was previously a commercial orchard, providing fruit for local markets. The apples he has so far identified have wonderful names such as Warners King, Laxton Superb, Lord Derby, Ashmead Kernel and the Rev William Wilkes. There’s a great website here with descriptions and beautiful pictures for those that want to know more

Simon

So over two weeks since the last entry, mostly because what we’ve been doing is barely worth writing about.  Other than the eating of honey.  We’ve been eating a lot of our honey.  1/2 a jar a week between us.  We’ve also given some away, and everyone really likes it.  I’m getting used to sentences starting “I never used to like honey, but I tried some of yours and…” =O)

So, the last 2 weeks with the FreeBees have been all about feeding and trying to get the Verroa numbers down.  The first by making and delivering more syrup, and the latter by putting in more ApiGuard.  The syrup, it turns out I’ve been making too weak.  So the load I delivered this weekend was 2lb of sugar per litre of water.  Boil the water, stir the sugar in, leave to cool.  One fellow beekeeper at the Apiary meeting 2 weeks ago – James, who I used to work with on the Farnborough airfield some 20 years ago, coincidentally – suggested fixing a wooden spoon into the chuck of an electric drill to do the stirring, but I’ve not made any that thick yet.

So, here’s an ApiGuard pack on top of our second hive, along with 2 frames of foundation from the Super.  You rip off the lid, place it in the hive and squish the pack.  The idea is the bees hate the smell, the Verroa hate it more – to the point of death.  The bees collect it up, and drag it through the hive to get rid of it.  Trailing it over the comb, and thus clearing the mites out.  I’m on the third pack in the main hive, the second in this.  And both are showing a lot of mites on the tray under the bottom of the hive, so it’s working.  But not enough yet – the drop rate is still to high.  So we’ll be putting more packs in for another week or 2.  One or two weeks per pack before they empty it.

I’ve not been too impressed by the powder I put in at first.  I’m sure it works, but the bees haven’t been carrying it up into the hive, so it can’t do much harm =O(

I got Lucy to do most of the inspections this time – and we still have some capped brood in one or two frames, but the queen is really cutting down for winter.  And we’ll be needing to fit the cages to keep woodpeckers off soon.

But that’s about it.  The Honey show is coming up.  Not sure I’ll put one of my jars in.  But I’ll be there for the tasting =O)

Due to other commitments on Sunday, I didn’t get along to the Apiary session with everyone else, and went on Monday instead, mainly just to check them over, change over their Verroa treatment, and feed both hives.  I only made up 2 litres this time – the bees are still happily collecting pollen, but we stole a Super from one, and the other is still a very new colony, so making sure they’ll get through the Winter starts with making sure they have enough food.  Above is the feeder on top of the newer colony, with about a litre of syrup in it.  This is one pound of sugar to one litre of water, which is just what works for me.  You can see the climbing wall behind the plastic on the left – sand rubbed onto the fresh paint to make sure the bees could climb down to the water surface without falling in.

I also replaced the ApiGuard on the first hive with a second one, squishing it flat between the Brood box and the Super, under the queen excluder.  They’d completely emptied the first, dragging the smelly stuff out the entrance, smearing it everywhere as they went.  The Verroa fall on the tray at the bottom was high, so it worked.  I’d lost the tray for the second hive, so didn’t put an ApiGuard in there last week, but the new one arrived by post during the week, so that went in, and the first treatment went into the second hive.  Shown on the right above, with the lid off, and the feeder just filled.

Both hives seemed happy and healthy, so I left them alone, other than a quick look through.  Less laying this week, more stores in the cells in the brood box – they’re really getting ready for winter.

Other than that, I got my honey back from Simon this week, after he put it through his Warmer, to help clear it.  Most of the wax has now risen to the top, but as I picked hexagonal jars with twist lids, he wasn’t sure of the water-tightness of them, and did them on top of his, with the lids above the water line, just to be sure.  Thanks for doing that, mate =O)

I got about 36 jars total.  Here are two, and one of the squeezy teddies we got from the Spring Show earlier in the year.  Now we just need to make up some better labels.  And yes, I did run out of honey before the bear was quite full =O(

Due to holidays, it’s been a while since I updated here.  First the good news – we went back to the bees just before we went on holiday, and the new queen in the main hive has been laying.

That’s what we needed to see – lots of capped brood, with still to be capped larvae around it, and honey stores going in at the top.  So our new queen is preparing the colony for the winter.  We returned the Super we’d harvested to the top of the hive for them to clean, and then when we returned this weekend, our main job was removing it again, to leave each hive with just one Super.  This is easier for them to keep warm over the winter, while giving them enough room to store the food they’ll need to survive.  And we also needed to give them another Verroa treatment.  Next week, we’ll need to feed them.

A lot of us met up at the Training Apiary where my hives are kept, as Simon wanted to treat is as a learning opportunity too, and he had a new treatment he’s trying on some of the other hives.  I’m still trying out the mite powder I bought before, but since the main hive seems to be quite bad, I also put in some ApiGuard squished between the Super and the Brood boxes.

The main problem we had though was getting the bees to leave the frames we were taking away from them.

Above you can see my Super of frames, which had been pretty well cleaned out over the two weeks, with one of Simon’s behind it.  Between them is a Queen Excluder in a pillow case, sprayed with Bee Gone again – basically almond oil.  As with when we harvested, the bees hate this smell, and tend to go away, but I never did get them all to leave, so we had to drive home still suited up, and put the 2 boxes I took in the garage still with bees attached.  The other Super hadn’t had much work done in it – it’s the one we put on to replace the main box when we harvested – so they didn’t stay quite so attached to that.  And although the window is open, I still have bees in the garage.

But both hives are now just the Brood and Super boxes, as on the right above.  There were clear signs of laying going on in the second hive, too.

I got around 30 jars of honey out of this harvest.  I’ve handed some of them out, but the rest are at Simon’s being heated gently, to help clear them.  The twist lids don’t seem to be completely vapour proof – possibly because I over-heated them when I sterilised them, possibly just because the thread isn’t complete like normal jars.  But that’s making it harder for Simon and Caroline to heat them through.  Sorry guys =O{

I used two of the Teddy squeezy containers, and the rest in jars.  Once I have them back and labelled, I’ll post a picture.

But just to finish this posting, here’s a close up of the top picture, showing larvae in some of the still-open cells.

See that? That’s frames of comb going into the centrifuge extractor. Not mine, these are from Alyson’s hives, we did her’s first, so I had more time with the camera then. Alyson, my two daughters and I met up on Simon’s on Friday night at 7, and started extracting the honey from the supers we’d harvested from our hives previously. I’d collecting the Association’s extractor from Maria on the Monday evening, so we were ready to go. Alyson had about one and a half supers of frames to spin, but her supers were far smaller than ours, so it didn’t take long, and she didn’t get as much honey. But what she did get was the clearest, most beautiful honey I’d ever seen straight out of the comb, and tasted amazing. Probably there’s a lot of rape seed nectar in there, so it might crystallise later on. I saw a jar of it today, and it’s just as beautiful. Simon’s came out far darker, but clear, and mine started out quite creamy, though it seems to be clearing now.

Anyway, so the process to get the honey out starts with taking the frames from the supers one by one, cutting off the cappings, and stacking them in the extractor as above. Then you turn it on:

This is Emily doing a far neater job of the de-capping than I can manage, although Caroline is still the expert here, she can cut it away as thin as paper. Years of practice. Once the extractor is full, and balanced, you turn it on, spin it up slowly at first but speed up as the comb gets lighter, and stand on the legs so it doesn’t walk around the room. Then put it in reverse, about 10 minutes each way. There are lids for either side of the motor, but it’s off here so you can see it throwing the honey against the side of the barrel, and it gathers in the bottom. Along with anything else in and on the comb – wax and the literal “bees knees”. Or, if you’re unlucky, one of the combs will be unable to take the G-Forces and pop:

This is an extreme example, where the foundation wasn’t wired for strength. On of mine and one of Simon’s also went, but the wire kept the damage down to a third of the frame or so. Doesn’t make the frame any more usable afterwards – you still have to take the comb out and put a new sheet of foundation in. But it does keep the wax out of the honey, and simplifies the filtering, which is the next step, and what we did Saturday afternoon:

Here the honey heater is bringing it gently up to 40 degrees Centigrade. Warm enough to make it flow easily, but not too hot to Pasteurise it or even melt the wax into the honey. I stirred it regularly to keep the heat even, while Caroline and Simon span out the rest of their own frames. One thing I have learned is to only ever wash up after wax and honey with cold water. Hot water just spreads it thinly and makes it next to impossible to remove. Cold water dilutes it down and it just breaks down and runs away.

Anyway, once it was runny enough, we opened the tap in the warmer, and ran it through the filters – two metal sieves with a very, very fine nylon-like mesh sheeting between them, doubled up, to remove all the anything-not-honey from the mix.

There was some very fine wax in there, but nearly all of it was captured in the various filter layers. The usable stuff went into the cappings bucket, at the bottom of the picture on the right. That we will let settle, and remove the wax for candles and hand creams, etc, and honey for Mead. Below you can see the filter system letting the final honey through. We put the medium bucket inside the big bucket, so we could rest the filter on top of the rim of that, and left it to finish seeping through. You can see the honey collecting in the bucket at the bottom:

We then sealed both buckets ready for the journey home. For the safety of the car, really. But the big bucket wedged nicely between the front seat and the dash, so it didn’t go anywhere. The honey still looked quite cloudy, but it cleared as we watched, so we’ll let it settle for a few days. We will then drag any remaining wax off the top, pour it into the bucket with the tap on, and then from there start filling jars.

Finally we took the supers and frames back to the hives. Here my main hive back at full height:
We’d put a replacement Super on when we harvested this one, and since I’d used Simon’s dark green paint for my first hive, but have been using the paint I bought from Modern Beekeeping on everything I’ve bought since, we get this stripy effect.

I then did a quick inspection of both hives. The bees don’t seem to mind the new anti-Verroa powder, and about half of what I left on Wednesday was gone. I checked the Verroa board, and there was some, but not much, droppage. But then there’s still no egg-laying going on in here, so maybe that’s affecting the mites too? We saw the new queen hatch and run off only a few weeks ago, so it’s too soon to expect her to be laying yet, and the bees didn’t seem too unhappy, so we’ll leave it until next week before we start to panic… =O}

And I now have about 50lbs of honey in a bucket in my garage, nearly ready to jar up. More on that next week.

We returned to the Apiary Wednesday night to finally take away the full supers of honey.  Simon knew he had at least 4 or 5 full, and we knew we had the one on top of the first FreeBees hive that has been full for a while.

So, like last time, we put a pillowcase on a queen excluder, sprayed in with almond oil, and put that on top of the super we wanted, with the lid back on top, and left it a while.  The bees hate the smell, and move down through the hive, and after a couple of minutes, we can take the super away with very few bees still in it.  This was then carried over to the boot of Simon’s car.

In the end we did this six times.  Ours is the one bottom left.

I’m pretty sure it was the heaviest, too.  In amongst all this waiting and carrying, we also inspected both our hives.

The newer one was doing very well.  We took out a frame from the brood box and replaced it with the end board I finally got around to making for it.  It had very little building going on on it anyway.  There was plenty of laying going on in the other frames though, and in the super, they’d started building out nicely.

The first hive was less happy though.  Although we saw the new queen 2 weeks ago, there was no sign of any new laying, and no brood left.  It was all open cells and stores.  We didn’t see the queen, but if she’s new and just mated, then maybe she’s not laying yet.  We’ll leave her another week and see.

We then got to put in the new anti-Verroa treatment I got from Modern Beekeeping.  I cut the trays to fit the entrance of the hives, filled them with the powder and slid them in.  The bees walk in this and carry it into the frames, where it kills the mites.  It’s supposed to be otherwise harmless, but I didn’t want to use it before we took the honey away.  I then put the entrance restrictors on, to help protect them from wasps.  Geoff had warned everyone earlier that wasp attacks are on the increase, and there was some odd shaping to the comb of one of the end frames in the 2nd hive that could suggest wasp attack.  They tend to eat right through from one side of the frame to the other, after the honey.  Hopefully this will protect them – it makes the entrance slot too low for wasps to get in.

Friday evening we’ll do the honey extraction, so we should have some buckets full by the end of the day.

Finally, I’ve found another – better – bee blog:  http://communities.canada.com/vancouversun/blogs/honeybee-zen/default.aspx