That Reminds Me

I’ve decided to start keeping a beekeeping blog.I’ve been doing this in the form of my beekeeping notes, and other rough scribbles, so this post, while being the first, will be preceded with older entries made up from these. Hopefully this will prove a useful resource to both myself as an aide-memoir, and possibly to others interested in beekeeping.

Time to take away the varroa strips before the winter.Its important not to leave the strips in, as this can encourage mite resistance (which is already prevalent in many parts of England and Scotland).

It was also time to ‘bed in’ the bees for the winter - gave the poly bees an extra feed of candy as their stores are still very light, and made sure that mouse guards were fitted properly, strapped down the roofs and other such things. Hopefully there won’t be any problems in the hives over winter, but I will need to check for isolation starvation and general starvation in the poly hive.

Since we were tidying up for winter, we also took floorboard scrapings (from the varroa tray inserts) to send off for analysis. This is a free service provided by the Scottish Agricultural Science Agency to look out for bee diseases and monitor their spread.

Edinburgh University’s Doors Open Day takes place at the end of September every year.This year we were involved in ‘showing off’ our bees to members of the public doing tours of the Ashworth Museum and other buildings at KB. We used a perspex observation hive, so that people could see the bees at work up close and get a feel for what goes on inside the hive. We saw over 350 people across the day, many with interesting questions, ad all with concerns over the future of bees - helped by the repeated highlighting of common issues in newspapers and the media. It was a very tiring day, but also very enjoyable, and hopefully we can be involved again next year, possibly even bigger and better!

Time to feed the bees their Autumn sugar syrup.The weather has been really miserable in July and August, meaning that there hasn’t been a summer flow harvested. So the feeding begins - 1:2 syrup (2kg sugar to 1litre water) from now until they stop taking it down and storing it. Given the lack of honey in both hives, there’s going to be a lot of feeding going on!

Time to add the apistan varroa strips to help reduce the mite population in the hive.2 Strips are added to each hive - the strips are coated in a miticide, which transfers onto the bees as they walk across them. The strips will come out in 6-7 weeks, and hopefully the mite population will have been decimated. Of course, resistant mites aren’t far away…

The quen cell is gone, and the old queen is still alive!There must have been a failed attempt at supersedure, with the old queen winning out. Either way, the hive is very busy, with added aggression, presumably due to the season drawing to a close.

Disaster! A capped queen cell found on one of the edge frames today.I’d not inspected for 8 days, and today found the capped queen cell. A search of the hive found no sign of the old queen, but also no sign of a swarm - the population was still as large as the week before. Have to assume that the queen has been killed, damaged, or there are plans to supersede her.

There’s only the one queen cell, and it looks of the emergency type (central on the frame, not at the bottom, and long and thin, not short and fat).

Time to seal up the hive for a month to let the new queen hatch, and get mated. Hopefully the wet weather won’t interfere with this.

My second colony arrived today - hereafter to be known as Poly since I’m planning on housing them in a polystyrene hive.They arrived on-site in a smith hive, and were left in this in-situ for 24 hours to acclimatise to their new home. They were then transferred into the polystyrene hive on national frames, with some of the smith frames (carrying honey stores) coming with to give them a boost. They seem very quiet and not at all aggressive like my ‘wood’ colony.

Gave the bees a final feed today.They’ve been taking down pretty much every feed offered - this year the Sycamore seems to have failed to flower at all, and I suspect that the rate of laying has outstripped the number of flying workers bringing in food for the nurse bees.

The June Gap is the time of year when there is a drop in available food and pollen between the end of the spring flowering plants, and the start of the summer-flowering ones.Since the bees had come from a nuc, the colony was relatively small, so hadn’t had much time or workers to bring in nectar and pollen to keep up with the rate the queen was laying. Thus I decided to feed heavily over this week. The bees took down around 4 litres of 1:1 syrup (1kg sugar to 1litre water) in a week, showing they obviosuly needed the food. With hindsight, it would have been worth feeding the colony as soon as it was brought onto the site back at the start of May.