Stung
I was stung today. The bees are grumpy. I could tell they were not in the good mood when we opened the hive and they were batting into me constantly knocking so hard I could feel them through my thick white bee suit. Its ok, …
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The Queen might be dead….long live the Queens!
Our queen cannot be found, we just can’t see her. She has a great big yellow paint spot on her back so it’s not too hard to see her. In addition to that we have an excess queen problem. Last time we looked we had …
The New Apiary – the rules
The new apiary is at the back of a private housing development. It is closer to where we live and seemed easier to get to. it is a beautiful setting with the hives facing a small lake along a row of ancient hawthorns and just past the old wall from a Victorian walled garden which is now laid to lawn. However the residents are very clear about the circumstances under which we can be there and require us to park in the visitors spaces – which are the furthest spots from the hives and to text one of them when we intend to come. They have all our details – car reg, numbers, names etc so they can check our cars against the list and be sure that our car is meant to be there. It feels a bit like the wearing of enormous white bee suits might be a give away but they don’t see it that way.
Not long in to having the hive up there, one of the residents called to say there were a-lot of bees going in and out of our hive and were we aware of this. Well, this is good news isn’t it? It did tell us however that they had been up having a little look-see at our hives, not sure what we thought about that but I guess if a deer had knocked it over they would have let us know that too.
It has been eventful in other ways. On one visit we had the boy beekeeper and the newest littlest bee-keeper too with us. Now there is something very sweet about a 5yr poppet in a bee suit and I agree with that. We were walking – the long walk from the visitors spaces to the hives – when we heard a lady calling after us. Breathless she approached to say we had been walking too fast for her to catch up with us, okay I am thinking now, who is this woman?
‘I just need to take a picture’ she says to us, ‘can you stand there?’. Well, we were too surprised to ask why or what she intended to do with our picture and stood in a line whilst she took our photo. I still think she cut hubby and I out to focus on the boy beekeeper and the littlest bee-keeper. Afterwards of course we realised we could have say no to a picture of our children but it all happened so fast we didn’t think at the time.
The beauty of bee suits is you cannot see the faces of the people inside them, they will be great Halloween costumes, so we are not that worried.
Walking to the hives, along the old walled garden boundary
The littlest bee-keeper, aged 5yrs
Hubby and the boy bee-keeper on the long walk
We have moved! Farewell to our first apiary
So much has happened since April. We have moved apiary after being evicted from our spot in the grounds of a country house. We have moved in to the new apiary and alas, though it will do for now, we do not like it that …
It’s way too cold!
So right now I would be looking to think about opening the hive. This time of year we need to take a quick peek to check what is going on and work out what to do next but it’s way too cold, or raining, or both!
Beekeepers have to wait all winter to see if the hive has survived. If we open too soon the bees could die of cold and if we open too late, they might have all kinds of issues going on in there- varroa, more than one queen, getting ready to swarm – who knows what!
This winter as many of 23% of hives were lost over winter (BBKA 2018) in the South East of England for example and though this can be for many reasons the weather is a definitely a factor. in our beekeeping association one very experienced beekeeper lost 4 out of 5 hives.
We don’t know until we open if there is anyone in there and we are hotly anticipating our opening!!
New Season New look
Hi, we are getting ready for a new season right now. There’s so much to that I am on a course to make sure I remember it all! Hubby has to do Rainbows ? and Cubs pickups so we can fit it all in. Anyhow …
What makes up the hive?
We have to get the new hive out of the box soon. It’s been so cold here and yesterday we had intended to take it up to the apiary but it snowed. Now, I happen to know that some of you reading this are in Alaska and are probably thinking ‘Why would this stop you?’ since really it was just English snow – maybe 6ins covering but as anyone living in England knows a little bit of snow is enough to bring most of the country to a standstill.
In our defence the apiary is up a tiny track, behind a beautiful but very old – we are talking 16th century church and down a footpath between huge trees. It would have looked fantastic covered in snow but it would have been inaccessible.
So, back to whats in the box. We have a Thorne National Hive (feel free to advertise Thorne!) with DN4 frames. Oooh, that was a bit technical. Let’s start with a rough idea of what we have. The diagram is a National hive, usually the most practical, cheaper and easiest hive, in my humble opinion. There is much discussion amongst beekeepers as to what is the best hive. It’s not a conversation to start if you need to be somewhere else anytime soon. The National one looks like a pile of boxes, rather an a beehive. Not the pretty white pitch roofed affair you imagine or have seen in Winnie the Pooh!
The top has a metal outer cover, to protect against weather and robbers. Then there is the crown board, known in the diagram as the inner cover. Next follows the extracting super which we just call the super – but this is where the honey comes from – and then the Queen Excluder. This last item is really important as it stops the queen from getting into the super and laying eggs. Once she does that you cannot have the honey unless you like eggs and larvae mixed in with it.
The brood chamber is where the queen is supposed to lay her eggs and where they grow into new bees. This is all we have just now, we don’t have a super as we are establishing our hive. In the summer the super will go on. The bottom board might be solid or a mesh (ours is a mesh) and the hive stand keeps the whole thing off the ground and dry, away from predators and helps your back when you are bending over the hive as it makes it a bit higher.
I mentioned the DN4 frames. We have chosen these are they are self spacing – it they leave just the right gap between each one for the ‘bee space’. Bee Space is between 6 and 9mm, the gap needed between the frames for bees to work, get past each other and generally do their thing. The exact figure is also hotly debated but anything smaller gets filled with propolis and anything larger gets filled with comb. This seems to be the space that bees work best with and is observed in wild colonies.
If you look at the top of the frame it is wider than the bottom, this creates the space.
Getting the hive ready for winter
We looked at sorting some bits out at the apriary this weekend. There are a few tasks to undertake to make sure that the hive is protected, the bees are happy and they stand the best chances of surviving the winter. Even for our little …