Are we trying to force a round peg into a square hole?

A straw sun hive, allows honey bees to be themselves and build a warmer egg-shaped home. Here’s how to make one.

When German sculptor Günter Mancke set out to design the sun hive – his impetus came from:

 “… the need to free the bees from a principle at once earthbound and cuboid, one that goes against every law of form – we are dealing here with laws that are particular expressions of a creature’s life. There are many reasons for bees’ present-day afflictions. We can be sure, however, that one of these reasons is that the creature, as a physical and ethereal entity can no longer live its life as it is meant to.” 

So his sun hive is egg shaped, like a giant queen cell in fact, with thick straw walls for warmth and no cold, damp corners. Essentially it is two skeps, clamped together above and below a central division board with an entrance at the bottom, over an ornate funnel-shaped landing board. It is intended to be hoisted 8ft into the air – the height that Tom Seeley has determined is the bees preferred residential height. 

But this is not just a large, airborne, double-decker skep. It has removable ‘frames’ so beekeepers can carry out some inspections if need be. It will also accept a feeder, a super and some varroa treatments too.

You can’t buy a Sun Hive so if you want one you have to make it yourself.  Full instructions can be found in – ‘The Sun Hive’ by Günter Mancke. Unfortuanately it is no longer available but it was published by the Natural Beekeeping Trust and they may be able to help you to source a copy or perhaps a course. Contact form here: https://www.naturalbeekeepingtrust.org/contact

Then came the Virus and with it, those sunny Lockdown days when we all had time to step aside from the real world for a while and do other things.  So we decided to make a Sun Hive.

There are lots of components to consider:

• Wooden parts; 
• Canvas hood;
• Skeps;
• Entrance Funnel;
• Siting and weathering.

1. Wooden Parts

At the heart of the sun hive are the nine comb arches. They stand astride the circular hole in the centre of the division board with their little, shaped feet in the arch-foot-recess. The bees hang up on the arches and draw their combs downwards through the central hole and into the lower skep. The arches and the attached combs are removable – with care and a prong to hang them on.

2. Canvas Hood

The arches are enclosed in a tailored, three-piece cover-cloth made of coarse canvas. The cover cloth has a dual purpose: 

• to prevent the bees from building comb between the tops of the arches and inside of the over-skep; 
• to encourage propolising.

The canvas cover is made up of three pieces cut to size and shaped to cover the hemispherical top of the arches. There are two pieces shaped rather like a very flared skirt with semi-circle cut out of the upper edge. Together they enfold the flanks leaving a circular aperture like a neck hole on top. This is covered with simple circle of canvas. The circle can be removed if a feeder or a super is to be added.

3. Skeps

There are two skeps:

• The over-skep sits on the division board enclosing the arches and canvas cover;
• The under-skep is pegged to the underside of the division board by four wooden pegs.

The two skeps are built around templates because their sizes and shapes are important. 

The over-skep houses the arches so the template is a simple hemisphere with diameter two bee-spaces bigger than the arches.

But the under-skep will house what are essentially wild combs drawn down free-style by the bees and suspended from the arches so the shape of under-skep-template is more complex. It is formed by attaching the ends of a chain to two points 36.5cm apart, on a vertically held sheet of plywood. The curve formed by the chain hanging under its own weight is called a ‘catenary’.  The shape is traced onto the plywood which can then be cut out.

The reason Günter Mancke gives for this requirement is that when bees are drawing wax, they hang in chains and the shapes they make under the influence of gravity are catenary curves.. 

The start of each skep is a straw rope stitched around a wooden ring. 

After a single lap, the wooden ring is then clamped onto the template and further laps are formed around the template.

4. Entrance

The wooden ring at the base of the under-skep is equipped to hold the entrance funnel which is essentially a decorative, woven landing board. The bees walk up the outside (not the inside) to an entrance which encircles the top of the funnel-neck housing inside the wooden ring. It’s held in place by wooden sticks, which go all the way through so the funnel will stay put whatever the weather. 

This funnel is a bit too long in the neck – aesthetically speaking – but the bees seem to like it. When they are very busy they sometimes tumble as they’re making their way up in a hurry but the flared skirt catches them nicely.

5.  Siting & Weathering

The sun hive book offers several suggestions on how and where to house a sun hive. Mostly they are rather elaborate gazebos with steps and thatch but allowing the sun hive to be hung up quite high and under cover.  A gazebo like this would need a lot of forethought, skill and possibly even planning permission. 

Alternatively there is a sort of high table, about a metre tall and the sun hive sits in the middle of it. In fact if you type ‘sun hive’ into Youtube you will find a video of a man in shorts, somewhere hot and sunny going through his bees. Or see below. His sun hive sits on just such a table but the entrance is quite close to the ground and the hive is out in the open.

Straw skeps do not weather well and will rot if exposed to wet weather so, here at the wet end of Europe, some sort of protection is essential. 

In days of yore, skeps were housed in purpose-built recesses known as ‘bee boles’.  Or they would be plastered with a stiff mortar of cow dung, hardened with gravelly dust and ashes (or lime) known as cloome or cloame.

Another alternative is a hackle which is a sort of thatch made from bundles of reeds or wheat straw, stitched together into a mat then curled around into a teepee shape.  A flower pot placed on the top will direct rainwater away from the centre.  A metal or willow ring sized to sit halfway down the cone-shape can be used to attach ropes and anchor the whole structure for the winter.

However, sometimes it’s better to be pragmatic so the sun hive goes into winter inside a WBC. The table seems to be enough to protect the  bottom half from the elements.

Click here for more about skep beekeeping

Click here for more skeps

Click here for how to make your own skep

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Éanna Ní Lamhna will give a talk on Biodiversity and the Importance of Pollinators.

There will also be a skep making demonstration – that’s me, that is.

Map here:

Origins

The word skep is thought to have come from an Icelandic Norse word skeppa meaning a straw basket. Their original purpose was as a half-bushel grain measure. Saxon beekeepers are thought to have been hiving bees in skeps since early Christian times. They came to Britain after the Romans left, around 400 A.D. and they brought their skeps with them. Presumably they came to Ireland at about the same time.

Before skeps the only purpose-made hive in these parts was the alveary: a sharply conical willow or hazel basket weatherproofed with a layer of green cow manure mixed with ashes or lime. The word alveary has Latin roots but despite these origins there is no evidence that the alveary was a Roman invention.

Although eventually superseded by the skep, the process was not immediate and the alveary was still being used by some beekeepers into the 19^th century. The earliest mention of skeps in Ireland was in the 500’s when they were used by the beekeeping St Gobhnait, head of a convent at Ballyvourney, Cork who drove off cattle thieves by hurling skeps of bees at them.

Skep-beekeeping

Having no built-in floor, skep hives were placed on either rush mats or hardwood platforms to keep out the cold. In addition they were often tucked into purpose-made alcoves in stone walls known as bee-boles. In winter, straw was stuffed around the sides for insulation and some bee-boles even had wooden doors which could be closed in foul weather. There is nothing new in the molly-coddling of bees!

Then, as now, beekeepers were fixated with swarming but whereas we are intent on preventing swarming, the skep-beekeepers depended on their bees to swarm and indeed encouraged it by careful choice of the size of the skep – colder and wetter northern and western regions tending towards a smaller skep to ensure the necessary congestion for the native bees.

Throughout the swarming season, beekeepers would catch and hive swarms in vacant skeps, the more the merrier. At the end of the season they would select the heaviest and the lightest of their stocks and stupefy the bees to remove the combs of honey.

A method outlined by Keys in his 1814 Treatise (see below)  involved placing skep and bees over a custom made fume box where smoke from smouldering slices of giant puffball,  would stupefy the bees which would then obligingly fall from the combs allowing the beekeeper to remove the honey.  After 10 minutes or so, the bees would recover and go about their business as before.

The remaining mid-weight hives were taken through the winter for the following year.

An alternative method was to ‘drive’ the bees from a full skep into an empty one. The full skep containing honey and bees was turned upside down – the domed top wedged into the top of an iron bucket.  An empty skep was then set at an angle to the open end, fixed firmly in place with skewers and the whole arrangement covered with a cloth.  The sides of the upturned full skep were then vigorously drummed. The  drumming noise would drive the bees up out of the full skep and into the empty one leaving the combs of honey behind for the beekeeper. Unlike the fume method – the bees would be angry for 3-4 days afterwards.

Into the present

Skep beehives were in common use all the way up until the beginning of the 20^th century when the advantages of wooden hives with removable frames based on the bee-space discoveries of Rev. Langstroth in 1851 saw the wooden National and Commercial hives finally take over. Even in the face of this competition, the skep was slow to go and the records of the Cumberland and Westmorland Beekeepers’ Association for 1906 show that 25% of colonies were still housed in skep hives.

Sources

Alston, F, Skeps, Their History, Making And Use. 1987. Northern Bee Books. Hebden Bridge.
Jones, S., Skeps, tools and accessories. 2007. IBRA. Cardiff
Keys, J., A Treatise on the Breeding and Management of Bees. 1814. London

Copyright © Beespoke.info 2014.  All Rights Reserved.

Click here for the sun hive and how to make your own

Click here for more about Skep Beekeeping

Click here for How to make your own Skep

Click here for more about my skeps or to order a handmade Irish skep

The four quarter days are:

• Lady day or the Feast of the Annunciation 25th March;
• Midsummer’s day around 25th June;
• Michaelmas 29th September;
• Christmas 25th December – lest we forget. Fat chance.

They all approximately coincide with either an equinox or a solstice.

Equinoxes

An equinox is when day and night are of equal duration. There are two of them – spring and autumn:

• Spring equinox 21st March;
• Autumn equinox 23rd September.

Solstices

As for the solstices there are two of these too – summer and winter.

• Summer solstice (longest day and shortest night) 21st June;
• Winter solstice (shortest day and longest night) 22nd December.

Christmas

Nobody knows the day or the month when Jesus Christ was actually born. However, the Feast of the Annunciation falls on the 25th March which is when Christians celebrate the day Gabriel called on Mary to tell her she was to be the mother of the son of God.

Imagine that!

Christmas is exactly 9 months after the Feast of the Annunciation. That’s biology for you.

Christmas also coincides approximately with the Winter Solstice on 22nd December. Also known as The Shortest Day. Now there’s cause to celebrate.

Christmas Traditions

You don’t need me to tell you about the ‘traditions’ of Christmas. Suffice to say, it is cruel that we have to bear it in the middle of the darkest, wettest and most depressing time of the year. It’s enough to push you over the edge!

We can never really know what Jesus might think about Christmas traditions, However, we do know what happened when he discovered the merchants had set up shop in the temple, so we can guess:

‘But what about the bees?’ says you…

Us beekeepers are fortunate because there is a lot of stuff out there to be getting on with at christmas.

Treat them

The bees should have been fed and treated for Varroa after the honey was extracted at the end of summer. However, midwinter is the time when the queen bees should be off lay and there should be a short broodless period which is ideal for a backup treatment with Oxalic acid. I say should be because it is not always the case especially in a mild year or where they ivy bloomed late. So long as there has been a bit of cold weather – below 15 degrees – and a decent interval since you last saw yellow ivy pollen going in to the hives – Christmas should be perfect.

Click here for how to do that.

Click here for more about Oxalic acid for Beekeepers.

I should add that midwinter treatment may not be necessary if you are confident that the conditions in autumn were good enough to allow your thymol/MAQS to work properly.

Feed them

While you are out there – check the feed status of your bees. Heft the hives to assess the weight and if they seem light put some fondant on. It won’t do any harm and if they need it later – it’s there.

If the bees seem weak and are clustering close to the top of the frames you could choose to remove the crownboard and place the fondant directly onto the bees where they will find it easily. If you do this – add an eke and pack the space around the fondant with old jumpers, sacking or some other cosy stuff.

Don’t put pollen substitute on yet – too early – wait for February.

Apiary Watch

Make sure the hive roofs are weighted down with stones or tied with ropes – winter has hardly started and there could be gales. And there could be animals.

Maintenance

Mend broken equipment. Treat spare boxes if they need it. Make up new stuff but don’t put wax into new frames till spring or it will just lose its fragrance and go all crispy then the bees won’t work it properly – they’ll draw all that abstract stuff with holes and buttresses.

All your equipment, supers, spare brood boxes etc could all do with a good scrape down – propolis flakes off well in the cold weather.  Save all the little bits of beeswax you will be amazed how it mounts up.

Click here for how to tackle your beeswax mountain.

Strip down old frames with black, knackered or holy wax. Holy wax is comb with holes in it. Burn the really black horrible wax – use if for lighting fires that’s the only thing it’s good for.

Save the paler, cleaner wax and render it:

Click here for how to render beeswax.

Then do something interesting with it but take care not to set fire to yourself:

Click here for beeswax polish recipe

Click here for beeswax lipbalm recipe

Click here for beeswax handcream recipe

Click here for candle making

Click here for soap making

Wax Moth

If you are storing used brood frames and you know you have a  wax moth problem you might like to take this opportunity to treat them with acetic acid. Acetic acid is not the stuff you put on your chips – treat it with respect.

Click here for how to do that thing

There is also a biological control agent from Vita which uses a micro-organism to attack wax moth.  The product is called Certan and the micro-organism is called Bacillus thuringiensis.

Click here for Certan information

Christmas Forage

There is very little floral forage out there for the bees at Christmas. This year there is quite a lot of gorse in bloom. In some years there may be the dregs of the ivy. Also some winter garden plants such as Mahonia or even snowdrops.

• Ivy pollen is yellow
• Gorse is orange/brown
• Snowdrops pollen is orange/brown too
• Click here for more about ivy
• Click here for how to take a crop of ivy honey.

Happy New Year!

Copyright © Beespoke.info, 2017.  All Rights Reserved.

Manx Horse Power

Personally I was charmed and delighted by these lovely Clydesdales trotting along the promenade on hairy great feet with their ears all pricked and eager. In fact I was so charmed and delighted by them I looked them up on the Blithering Internet when I got home and was incredulous to discover that the Powers-That-Be in Douglas are planning to scrap them!

Click the photo above for a close up, look at that lovely, lovely horse and ask yourself how on earth can that be?

Antique

After 140 years of service up and down the 1.5 mile long Douglas promenade linking the two antique railways, one steam and one electric, which terminate at opposite ends of the bay – six ‘surplus’ tram cars have been auctioned for a total of £10,000 and the purpose built stables have been sold for ‘development’.  Exclamation mark!

I don’t know about you but I’d travel a long way to see working horses but I can see ‘Development’ anywhere and everywhere. Don’t tell me it’s progress lads. Progress is when change leads to improvement or betterment otherwise it’s just change for the sake of it and that is stupid.

Unique

For a small island in the middle of the Irish sea, relying strongly on the tourist trade I’d say this is just the type of thing to cherish and promote. Because it’s unique and it’s different and because the Isle of Man doesn’t get enough sunshine to compete with Capri or Maderira etc and lovely as it is, the scenery does not compare to the dramatic beauty of the Hebrides, the Aran Islands or even the Isle of Arran.

Nutshell

My sharp-as-she-ever-was 83 year old mother put it in a nutshell for me when I was talking to her this morning on the phone and said I had been to the Isle of Man. Before I could say anything else she said, “Have they still got those horse drawn trams?” She has been to the Isle of Man but so long ago she can’t remember when she went, how she got there, who she went with or what they did when they got there. In fact she can’t remember anything else at all about it except the horses.

So at the next Council meeting in Douglas – when the horses come up for execution again – remember that or the day may come when nobody remembers the Isle of Man at all!

Reprieve?

I should add that there has been stay of execution and  the horse trams are to continue for another two years – that’s to 2018 but what happens then is blowing in the wind.

Click here to become a Friend of the Douglas Bay Horse Tramway

For more on the Horse Trams:

Friends of Douglas Bay Horse Trams:

Website: www.friendsofdbht.org/horses 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/friendsofdbht/

Isle of Man Government Information:

https://www.gov.im/

Isle of Man Old Horses Retirement Home 

One day either November 19 or 20th, 2016 to learn the techniques and make a small demonstration piece.

or

Both days to make a full size skep.

Tools and materials supplied.

Use the contact form below for further information.

Benefits

The main benefit to a mesh floor is that Varroa falling from the frames above drop through the metal mesh and meet a chilly end in the grass below. It is thought that up to 20% of hatching Varroa may drop out of the hive this way. All well and good.

Varroa floors can also be fitted with a removable slide below the mesh floor. This can be used to count the mite drop on a daily or weekly basis to assess the mite level in the hive and to decide when to treat.

Mesh floors also allow the much of the hive debris to drop through so there isn’t that accumulation you see on a solid floor and this helps to inhibit wax moth hell and other hive floor creepy crawlies.

Snags

Most of the snags with mesh floors relate to the fact that the bees can smell their colony through the mesh. If you move a hive up onto a taller stand, the bees will return to the vacant space where the entrance used to be and then go and hang up under the mesh floor. They will eventually re-orient on the new entrance but when carrying out such manoeuvres – it is best to temporarily put the insert back in or set the hive on a sheet of plywood or similar.

A more challenging variation on this theme is when a clipped queen tries unsuccessfully to swarm but then manages to crawl back up the legs of the stand. Gradually most of the bees in the hive follow her and a new colony sets up shop right there under the floor.

This can also happen when a virgin queen flies out to be mated and on her return she can’t locate the hive entrance; instead she goes under the floor and mooches about under the mesh. These cases are only resolved by finding the queen and transferring her into the hive.

It can be some time before the beekeeper realises something is wrong though – mostly the conclusion he or she comes to in the meantime is that the hive has gone queenless because there are no eggs and the bees in the hive are cranky and dwindling. Of course the colony under the floor expands, they draw wax, rear brood and eventually the ball of bees becomes visible to even the most short-sighted of beekeepers. Me for instance:

Within the wild comb is quite a quantity of capped brood so these bees must have been there for some time:

Thoughts of fixing these combs into frames was dismissed when we saw the shocking amount of Varroa present in the brood. Click this photo below for a close up – the white specks you can see on the inside of the cells are Varroa crap:

Sadly there was nothing for it but to dismantle the lot, gently shake the bees into the hive and destroy the brood which is more or less a shook swarm and an effective but drastic way of removing a load of Varroa.

Flaw in the Floor

This case illustrates the unexpected flip side to mesh floors – the heavy level of infestation is due directly to the mesh floor! As the remaining brood in the parent hive above hatched out – with their Varroa (because this is late June and like it or not Varroa levels are high), the Varroa either dropped from the frames through the floor into the lovely, fresh new colony or more likely were drawn down like BIsto Kids by the enticing smell of the brood.

Had these bees hung up under a solid floor they would have been mostly Varroa-free. The Varroa would have been marooned above in the empty hive. Mind you – if you had a solid floor they would have been less likely to hang there in the first place.

However – it has to be said cases like this are relatively rare and the benefits of mesh floors far outweigh the disadvantages.

Sometimes though – it feels like you can’t win.

Click this for more about the life cycle of Varroa

Click here for how to breed Varroa resistant bees

Click here for Winter Oxalic acid treatment

Click here for Summer Oxalic acid treatment

Click here for Oxalic acid for Beekeepers

Click here for Shook Swarming

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Since I installed it 2 months ago, apart from a sudden vertical jump when I put a super on to accommodate the growing population, it had been recording a steady decrease in weight but for the last 3 days it began to register an increase!

Here, have a look at this…

So I filled the van with supers and just as well because all the hives there were working very hard. From a distance I had thought there mush be rape in flower close by but no – from the grey green pollen loads I have to conclude that sycamore is coming in.

Click here for Bee Trees: Sycamore

Click here for How to Set up your Arnia Monitors

Click here for How Install your Arnia Monitors

Click here for more about Remote Bee Hive Monitoring and applications

Click here for Arnia Remote Hive Monitoring Data

Click here for Arnia website

Click here for a video overview of the Basic Hive Scale

Click here for video instructions on how to assemble your Basic Scale

Click here for How to Make your own Scale Hive

Click here for Bees, Honey and a Scale Hive

Click here for Remote Hive Monitoring Action

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Earlier this week my hive monitors raised 2 causes for concern plus a puzzle.

Here’s the graph. Click it for a close-up:

Key

• The two uppermost lines are plots of the brood nest temperature in two hives at a distant apiary – green = Hive 1, yellow = Hive 2;
• The black line is the hive scale under Hive 2;
• The pink line is the ambient temperature (outside the hive).

As you can see from the pink line, the weather has been chilly for all of April, rarely above 10 degrees, so opening hives has been out of the question.

The comforting part – up until the 8th or 9th April was that despite the cold weather – the temperature in the brood nests of both hives was well above ambient and pretty steady.

Also – the weight of hive 2 was only going down very slowly. Nothing to worry about there.

However…

Concerns

1. Around 5th April the green line started to fall suggesting something amiss with the queen in Hive 1;
2. The weight of stores in Hive 2 is steadily going down – there was a 5 kg drop  in the last month and that’s 11lb which ever way you look at it. How much of the remaining 27kgs was stores and how much was the weight of the hive?
3. Hive 1 is running a degree or so cooler than Hive 2. This could be a quirk in the works or something else… what though… That’s the puzzle.

Fortunately the weather improved slightly this week permitting a hive inspection.

Hive 1

• One yr old Queen present and laying;
• The reason for the dip in temperature was that the brood nest had moved away from the probe, leaving it stranded at the chilly perimeter;
• Apart from that there is no obvious reason why this colony should have a cooler brood nest than hive 2.

Hive 2

• In this hive is a 3 year old queen – very strong;
• Plenty of stores so no need to worry about that;
• In fact – it needs a super.

Brood nest temperature and the Native Bee.

The gap on the graph between the two brood nest temperature plots is probably an anomaly but is interesting if it isn’t.

The best thing to do would be for me to swap the two monitors to test it. If they continue more or less the same then there is a quirk in the system. If they cross over then Hive 1 really is running cooler than the other.

Lower brood nest temperature could be a characteristic of native bees and monitoring might be a way of picking them out. It just so happens that the queen in Hive 1 is a queen I bred and reared here. The queen in Hive 2 isn’t.

What next?

Rightly or wrongly I clipped the blue queen in Hive – after all it was quite warm and the bees were calm. If I have damaged her then it will show in the brood nest temperature.

It remains to be seen if the bees actively more the nest away from the sensor again.

I can continue to monitor the weight of Hive 2 from this distance and now that I’ve hefted them I know they can lose another 5kg before I need to worry.

Conclusions

Remote hive monitors can give reassuring information but there are limits.

You need to know:

• the baseline;
• that the  sensors continue to be correctly positioned;
• the monitors are functioning properly or you will get false alarms.

Click here for How to Set up your Arnia Monitors

Click here for How Install your Arnia Monitors

Click here for more about Remote Bee Hive Monitoring and applications

Click here for Arnia website

Click here for a video overview of the Basic Hive Scale

Click here for video instructions on how to assemble your Basic Scale

Click here for How to Make your own Scale Hive

Click here for Bees, Honey and a Scale Hive

Click here for Useful Arnia Hive Scale Data

Copyright © Beespoke.info, 2016.  All Rights Reserved.