Sting the day after

A sting on my chin, photographed the day after visiting the ferocious bees. 

They are usually a bit feisty, but doing the artificial swarm on them sent them mad.

I accidentally put my chin against the veil and they got me.

Photo taken with USB Microscope from Veho.  It has all sorts of uses.

Note to self: must get some of that Grecian 2000.  Do they do it for beards? How come Sean Connery looks good with a beard and I don't?

Artificial Swarm

I successfully completed an artificial swarm last week.

Or so I thought.

The objective is to prevent a colony from swarming - so that you get to keep all your bees and not have half take up residence in someone's chimney.

When you see queen cells being formed, here's what you do:

- find the queen (not easy if she isn't marked and not easy if she is, but slightly easier -- you're looking for one bee in 50,000 at this time of year.  A bit like Where's Wally, only all the faces look the same.)

- when you find the queen, put the frame that she's on in a new hive, with new foundation

- add another frame of brood and a frame of stores to that new hive

- move the original hive (with its inhabitants) to a new position, about (say) 5 metres away.

- put the new hive, now with queen and small retinue, in the old position.

Here's the clever bit.  The flying bees (about half the colony) will go back to the hive in the old position, keeping the queen company and fooling them into thinking that they have swarmed.

The old hive (in the new position -- do try to keep up!) will have nursery bees and the queen cells.  They will raise a new queen from the queen cells.

When you have both hives back to normal, you can either combine the hives to keep your honey production on stream (killing the old queen in the process and keeping the new one), or keep both hives so that you have one more hive next year than you started this year with.

What happened when I did this?

The bees were so ferocious that I forgot to remove a queen cell from the queenright hive and I think they swarmed two days later.  I'm not sure because both hives have lots of bees still.  But the owner of the plot reported "thousands of bees".

I'm going to let them settle down for a week or so and take another peek.

This weather is beyond a joke!

I went to an out-apiary today.  Conditions were not  great -- it was about 10c, but at least the sun was shining and it wasn't raining (for a change).

All the hives are short of stores, and as for filling honey supers -- forget it.

This apiary is sandwiched between two huge fields of Oil Seed Rape (OSR).

Here are the photos.  Can you see what is odd?

See the two bees with the big pollen baskets?  One has orange pollen (source unknown, but I'm sure someone will tell me); the other has yellow pollen typical of OSR.  And many bees have lemon yellow dusting of pollen on their faces that shows they've been in the OSR.

I thought that will such a massive source of pollen and nectar literally metres away, they wouldn't bother with anything else.

But not so.  The books are wrong, or at least, my bees haven't read them.

(Sorry for the out-of-focus photos.  It's hard to get the focus right with a veil on).

Changed back to surgical gloves

At first, I used leather gloves.  Then I realised how impractical these are. You can't clean them!
Then I started to use surgical gloves.  But I got stung through them and my hands swelled into bananas.
So I started to use thick rubber gloves.  But I had to clean them after every inspection, and I was squashing a few bees.
So now I have gone back to surgical gloves. I have been stung a couple of time, but I have discovered Piriton tablets. Two of those seems to reduce the swelling and pain quite a lot.
I just discard them after each hive -- good for the bees.
But I also find that I take such great care not to trap a bee (and get stung) that I am treating the bees with greater care, and they are calmer as a result.
Anyone else find this?  What are your preferences?

Now set up for the spring season

In my last post, I wrote that seven hives had made it through the winter.  Having now inspected all the hives, there are only six viable hives.  The seventh, a swarm from June 2011, has weakened and is now queenless.

There are signs of starvation, so it looks like I didn't feed them soon enough.

The best colony is the polyhive with (traditional beekeepers look away now, take a blood-pressure pill) plastic frames.  I have added a super of plastic frames to it.

The Oil Seed Rape in now in flower -- and there are two large fields of it near my out-apiary that has three good hives.  So I'm hoping for a bumper crop.

7 out of 7 hives are alive!

It's a warmish day - about 11c - with light westerly winds and pleasant sunshine.
I noticed that the bees in the three hives in the garden were active, so Mrs Novice and I went on a bike trip around the other hive sites (about a seven mile round trip).

The polyhives on top the containers at the edge of the field are a-buzzin'.  In December when I applied Oxalic Acid (as a varroa treatment), the polyhive with the plastic frames was the most populated - and today it had a thick stream of bees waiting to get back in through the single bee-space that I had allowed them (to keep out wasps, at first, and then mice).

So all is good.  I will give them a feed in a couple of weeks and add in some pollen substitute to encourage the queen to get laying.

Just finished the varroa treatment

I have just treated the last four hives with Oxalic Acid at 3%.

The instructions are to dribble 10ml per seam of bees.

It's a bit hard to determine a seam of bees.  Is it a seam if they occupy just one third of the width?

Oxalic acid, applied when there is no brood, is very effective at knocking down the varroa.  It erodes their extremities and makes it easier for bees to groom them off.

Varroa infestation is a prime culprit for colonies that do not thrive.  The bees are weakened by the little bloodsuckers and are affected by mite-borne viruses, like "deformed wing virus".

The first three I treated just before Christmas, when there was a calm lull in the weather.  And I was surprised by how active the bees were.  I gave them some additional syrup because the warm weather has made them more active (and hence the consume more).

All seven hives are alive, but a couple are a bit depleted.  They might not make it through the winter.

The biggest (and most active, interestingly) colony is in a polyhive on plastic frames.  Who'd'a thought it?  But that hive has a full width feeder and I gave them a LOT of syrup in later summer and autumn.

The polyhives feel that much warmer and dryer when you open them.

I don't expect to post again before the spring.

I wish all my followers a peaceful and bounteous new year.