It contains everything you need to know about the Native Irish Honey Bee – from evolution to genetics and into the future with conservation and ‘how to’ sections from commercial beekeepers.

Includes a practical section with step by step instructions on queen rearing and bee-breeding techniques.

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Click here to buy the Native Irish Honey Bee Book

But before you  test the bees – always check she’s not in the supers! Even with an excluder in place, it’s surprising how often the queen can find her way upstairs and build a lovely brood nest in the honey.

Also consider just how long it takes for the bees to make a new queen cell from scratch, for the virgin to emerge, to mature, to get mated and to start laying. Remember, the weather has a lot to do with how quickly she can get mated.

Look at the diagram below and use it to manage your expectations. Don’t panic till week 6.

If you still think your bees have no queen – here is the test for queenlessness:

Queenlessness test

• Make absolutely sure there aren’t already queencells tucked away somewhere;
• Add in a frame of young larvae (<3 days old) from a different colony.  Nurse bees will sometimes eat the eggs of other bees but will happily draw emergency cells from small larvae;
• Come back in a week;
• If there are no queen cells they either have a queen or they think they have a queen, there is a difference; they could have a drone laying queen or laying workers (see below);
• If there are queen cells – they are queenless;
• Remove the queen cells and the colony is now hopelessly queenless and should be ready to accept a new queen using the method of your choice.

Drone laying queens

A drone laying queen is a queen that didn’t mate properly and her spermatheca has run dry. That’ s the little vessel inside herself where she stores the sperm from when she got mated – each time she lays a worker egg, she fertilises it with sperm from the spermatheca.  If it runs dry she can only lay unfertilised eggs and these, of course, become drones. Because she lays drone eggs into worker cells the drone larvae rapidly outgrow the cells and  the result is horribly distorted comb.

If you have a drone laying queen you will have to find her and kill her.  Once you’ve done that you can introduce a new queen.

Laying workers

When a hive has been queenless for a while, the broodless state causes one, or some, of the younger workers to start laying eggs. Of course these workers have never mated so can only lay unfertilised eggs which will hatch as drones.

The egg laying pattern of laying workers tends to be crappy and there may be several eggs scattered in each cell.

The best thing to do in this case is to add in one or two frames of young larvae (from another hive). This tends to rewind the situation, the laying workers are ‘reset’ and  you can introduce a new queen.

Click here for how to introduce a new queen

Click here for how to introduce a queen using the matchbox method

Click here for how to introduce a queen using the postal cage

Click here for how to introduce a queen to an Apidea

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Perfect supersedure is where the old honey bee queen obligingly remains in-situ, laying to the best of her abilities, until the new queen is up and running – before gracefully fizzling out.

This is a sought-after trait for obvious reasons and if you find it in one of your colonies you should definitely factor it in to your bee improvement assessments. Click here for Bee Improvement and to download Assessment sheets.

Here are some fuzzy photo’s of a perfect supersedure in one of our hives yesterday (20.5.19)

Click here for Fighting Queen Bees

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Click here for more about the life cycle of honey bees

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Click here to order for 2018

Selected for sweet nature, low-swarming, productivity and Varroa resistance.

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His sisters have two sets of chromosomes – one from their father and one from their mother – mutations tend to be recessive and are masked by the dominant allele on the other chromosome.

This is a clever mechanism for wiping the genes clean so defects like this don’t get passed on. White eyed drones are thought to be blind so their chances of finding and mating with a queen are slim – but sometimes chance and lady luck conspire…

This drone has only one white eye so he’s not completely blind and perhaps he’s not so helpless!

If he were to stumble on a tired or confused queen or if she were to pass by his good eye he might get lucky and we might find white eyed workers. Like this one:

Lovely brood pattern – nothing suggest inbreeding there.

Click here for more about Drones

Click here for more about Worker bees

Click here for more about the Queen bee

Click here for more about the Colony

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 Arnia System

• Hive Monitors – one per hive;
• Weather Station – one per apiary;
• Monitor Gateway – one per apiary;
• User Interface – one per user;

Hive Monitors

• Brood temperature;
• Hive temperature;
• Hive humidity;
• Colony activity;
• Weight.

 Weather Station

User Interface

• At the top, left to right, is weather data for the past week followed by battery status and signal strength;
• Interlocked cogs icon – far right – accesses User Interface Settings;
• The number of bees hovering over each hives indicates the degree of activity per hive;
• The different coloured icons pinned to each hive access detailed graphs of brood temperature, humidity, activity and the ambient temperature of each hive;
• The two hives on the right (below) are fitted with hive scales and the black icons access weight data.

How do you use it?

• Comparison
• Management
• Alerts

Comparisons

With a system like this which gathers and stores so much detailed information the possibilities for analysis and comparison are endless.

In addition, your own hive inspection data such as queen ID, colony assessment and appraisals, disease data, Varroa counts etc etc can all be added into the pot.

Comparisons between hives, between apiaries and between years are vital to both short and long term projects such as bee breeding, research and good old-fashioned curiosity.

Here are a few possibles:

• Comparison between hive types – poly or wood, commercial or national, mesh floor or solid in terms of humidity and temperature. This data could also be useful in conjunction with your own disease data i.e. chalk brood, Varroa, Acarine etc.;
• Comparison between colonies in terms of timing and speed of build up, activity, colony size, swarming behaviour, honey production – very useful when selecting breeding material – especially in conjunction with queen lineage information;
• Comparison between apiaries – to pinpoint best aspect, altitude, temperature, shade etc to maximise productivity vs swarm reduction etc.;
• Comparison of weight data between years in conjunction with weather data and times of day when foraging is at a peak could help pinpoint tantalising stuff like the ideal weather for fickle nectar flows such as hawthorn or heather;

Management

Monitoring can give indications about what is happening out there in your out-apiaries and what you might be needing in terms of equipment, time and energy. Weather data can be used to see if it’s worth going at all!

• Queen Status

Brood temperature is steady at 34 degrees C and is tracked by the monitors. This means you can spot a failing queen and/or monitor a virgin to see when she gets going and see that she keeps going. How annoying that is, when you find that the new queen you thought was going like a train and had left alone accordingly actually fizzled out two weeks ago.

Sudden erratic brood temperature also occurs if the queen gets into the supers – that’s annoying too – specially when she puts 2,000 eggs per day into your precious cut-comb?

If you treat your bees mid-winter with oxalic acid you will know that it is vital that the bees be broodless and the hive monitor will tell you this. Even if you were to monitor only your strongest hive going into winter it would give you some idea of the state of the brood in the others.

• Weight Data

• Activity Data 

Acoustic data can be used to detect robbing. I’ve heard it said that robbing doesn’t matter – you’re going to take the honey anyway but that’s not quite the point. For a start, the robbing might be by somebody else’s bees!

The other evil with robbing is that it can lead to the death of a nuc headed by a valuable young queen. It’s something that needs to be be nipped in the bud that is for sure. Early detection could be very useful.

Downloadable Data

SMS Alerts

Now this could be very useful.

A variety of systematic SMS or text message alerts can be set up by the user to warn of things such as unstable brood temperatures, humidity or sudden increases in weight which can indicate robbing or a prodigious flow.

Automatic SMS alarms will also go out when a monitor detects something such as theft of a hive or when a hive is overturned. Hives are often overturned in winter when branches fall or stock get in amongst; if the boxes burst asunder the bees can die of exposure if not found quickly. Like taxes and death – thieves are always out there!

As luck would have it – Arnia.co.uk have lent me a monitoring kit so a road test will follow. Watch this space…

Click here for how to make your own scale hive

Click here for more about scale hives 

Click here for Remote Hive Monitoring Action

Click here for Useful Arnia Hive Scale Data

Target Colony

There are many reasons for replacing a queen during the course of the year:

• You may want to replace a bad queen for various reasons;
• You may have a queenless colony;
• You may have a drone laying queen or
• Laying workers.

Each situation requires different handling so knowing the exact status of your target colony is essential.

Bad queen

The colony may be aggressive, they may have overmuch chalk brood or the queen may just be plain weak. Whatever the reason find her and take her out.

• Either come back in 7 days, remove queen cells and use the Introduction cage method;
• Or if you feel brave – use the Matchbox method or the Paper Bag method after about an hour;
• Alternatively – if the bees are unnaturally strong and/or aggressive you could introduce your new queen to a nuc then unite the nuc with the strong colony on day 7 after you have removed those queen cells.

Queenless Colony

Sometimes, although you may be sure a colony is queenless unless you killed the queen yourself or saw her die you can’t be certain unless you test them.

Before you  test them – always check she’s not in the supers!

Queenlessness test:

• Make absolutely sure there aren’t already queencells tucked away somewhere;
• Add in a frame of young larvae (<3 days old) from a different colony.  Nurse bees will sometimes eat the eggs of other bees but will happily draw emergency cells from small larvae;
• Come back in a week;
• If there are no queen cells they either have a queen or they think they have a queen, there is a difference; they could have a drone laying queen or laying workers – see below;
• If there are queen cells – they are queenless;
• Remove the queen cells and the colony is now hopelessly queenless and should be ready to accept a new queen now using the method of your choice.

Drone-laying queen

If there is a drone laying queen – the bees will not draw cells on a test frame.

A drone laying queen is either a young queen that was not mated properly or a queen that has become very old. Either way, the sperm she stored in her spermatheca when she mated has run out and she is firing blanks – she is laying unfertilised eggs (drones) in worker cells.

• In this case the brood nest will be ugly and distorted by the larger drone larvae outgrowing the worker cells they were laid in;
• Cells will have domed drone cappings throughout;
• Eggs may appear to be laid in a good healthy looking pattern especially if the queen is a young one.

Either way – you will have to find her and remove her then you should be able to introduce a new queen immediately.

If you can’t find her it is possible she has gone. It is also possible that they are superceding her. You could add a test frame  (see above).

Laying workers

Laying workers occur where the bees have been queenless for some time.  In the absence of brood and when a colony has become hoplessly queenless, the ovaries of young nurse bees can swing into action and one or more of them will start to lay eggs. None of the eggs laid by workers are fertilised and the result is dwarf drones – a last desperate bid to get the genes out there in the pool.

The condition can be recognised by an erratic laying pattern and there will be a scatter of eggs in each cell. If you are minding your bees you should be aware of the status of each of your colonies and alert to the possibility of laying workers in colonies that are vulnerable.

The condition can be reversed by the addition of a frame or more of young larvae and eggs – they probably won’t make emergency cells in this case.

Alternatively, drag the hive away 100m and shake out all the bees into the grass. Only flying bees will return. Laying workers are young bees that have never flown and will die out there in the cold. That’s the theory anyway. And it’s brutal, brutal brutal.

This is the worst condition to find in your bees –  by the time they get laying workers they are usually very weak it is best to just unite them with a queen-right colony or a nuc.

The state of your queen

The queen you intend to introduce may be one of the following:

• Laying queen;
• Postal queen;
• Virgin queen.

They will all need slightly different considerations. In theory, the queen cage method is the safest and often recommended. However – read on…

Laying Queens

A big fat laying queen, straight out of an Apidea, will be exuding calming queen substance and as such will have strength and fertility written all over her – just what a queenless hive is looking for. In fact sometimes, a very strong queen seems to be unable to turn off the stream of eggs and will continue to lay as you handle her.

Such queens should be the easiest to introduce – to a desperately queenless and receptive colony.

However – she will still smell wrong because she has been fed by other bees and the reception committee will notice – big time!

Postal Queens

A queen that came in the post was a laying queen when she went into the cage but she is no longer a laying queen when she gets to you.

The smell of queen substance may be diminished and the bees may develop the opinion that she is in fact failing.

In addition she will smell wrong because she has been fed by other bees and as before – they’re going to notice.

After she is accepted, it will take a little time for her to get into the full of her lay and the bees may draw queen cells in the interim thinking that she is failing rather than getting going. Check she’s still there and laying properly then just knock them off.

Virgins

A virgin can be the most challenging of all. There is no scent of queen substance to calm the reception committee but there will be more to it than that – perhaps they can smell her genes and her potential to supplant their own; they probably smell a cuckoo!

And of course she has been fed by other bees and will smell wrong for that reason as well.

Which Introduction method?

There are many ways to introduce a queen bee and the choice is all yours. But remember:

The main reason you can’t just walk a new queen into the hive is because she doesn’t smell right. The thing is to get the bees to feed her before they kill her.

To do that you can either:

• Cage the queen and stick her in the hive. That’s the Introduction Cage method;

Or:

• You can cage some bees, confuse them, then stick the queen in with them. They are too confused to kill her but they will feed her. That’s the matchbox method.

Alternatively:

•  If your target colony is very strong or aggressive or just plain scary – you can introduce the queen to  nuc and unite the nuc with your target colony. It seldom fails – nucs are pussy cats.

Click here for the Introduction Cage Method

Click here for the Matchbox method

Click here for the Paper bag method

Click here for How to Introduce a queen bee to an Apidea

Click here for how to introduce a queen bee from a postal cage

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Preparation

Dequeen 7 days in advance of the new queen’s arrival;

Or:

If you have colony you think is queenless – you need to be sure. Add in a test frame with young larvae – not just eggs – they will eat alien eggs but will adopt alien larvae and draw queen cells from them if they are queenless. If they do not draw queen cells they are not queenless.

One Week Later

Either way – 7 days later, go carefully through the colony again and knock off all of the queen cells.

• Gently shake the bees off so you can be sure you them all – if you miss even one crappy little thing they will not accept the new queen;
• Your new queen will be accompanied by an escort of worker bees. Let these girls out of the cage – your queen must go alone into her new home. In the cage that is!
• Make sure the candy cavity is plugged with candy.
• Remove the protective plastic gate so the bees can chew their way through the candy to get to their queen;
• Suspend the cage from a frame near the middle of the brood nest – where the bees would expect to find her. Most postal cages are equipped with a little loop so you can do something imaginative with a matchstick or some local twiggery;

Leave the bees seriously alone for a week – then:

• After a week go carefully through the colony.
• Look out for the queen – she should have been marked by your supplier. If you can’t find the queen – look for eggs, as long as there are eggs all is well; close it up and leave it alone.
• Look for queen cells and don’t panic if there are some. Sometimes the bees mistake a queen newly coming into lay for a queen going out of lay and prepare to supersede. Just knock the cells off and as long as you have seen eggs – walk away;

Occasionally, the bees have not released the queen – perhaps the candy is too hard, the queen is off lay or they don’t understand the principle! Carefully release her – they should have got used to her after a week and usually she just runs down between the frames to the manner born.

Click here for the Basics of Queen Bee Introduction

Click here for the Matchbox Method of Queen Bee Introduction

Click here for the Paper Bag Method of Queen Bee introduction

Click here for How to Introduce a Queen Bee to an Apidea

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Monitoring Mite Fall

This involves counting the daily mite-fall by examining a greased slide placed below the mesh floor. It can be done once a week or every few days and the total divided by the number of days since the last count.

The National Bee Unit has an online Varroa Calculator – feed your data into it and it will tell you when you next need to treat.

Click here for the Varroa Calculator

Bear in mind that the daily mite-fall varies wildly thoughout the season depending on: how strong the colony, how much brood, how much drone brood, have you split the colony, has it swarmed, is it queenless not to mention the whether the weather…

Apart from counting the mites here are some other things to look for…

Signs of Grooming

The dead mites can be closely examined with a magnifying glass. If mature mites – dark reddish brown in colour – are found with bite damage such as missing legs or damaged carapace you can conclude that some grooming is happening. Don’t leave too many days between your counts or you may find yourself looking at Varroa corpses damaged by the generalist invertebrate detritivores that inhabit the dark cornersof the hive floor.

If you divide the number of bitten mites by the total number of mites and multiply by 100 you’ll have an idea of the percentage of grooming activity in your colonies.

Signs of Hygienic Behaviour

Signs of hygienic behaviour to look for would be bits of dismantled pupae and immature Varroa (small pale coloured). Click here for Illustrations

An indicator of possible generalist hygienic behaviour is Chalkbrood, or rather a lack of it in the brood nest when it is present in other colonies in the apiary.  Look for umpteen grey mummies on the floorboard and lack of it in the brood nest.

Measuring Hygienic Behaviour

It is possible to assess the level of hygienic behaviour in your bees by adding a frame of capped larvae which contains an area where all of the the pupae have been killed.

• You can either kill they by piercing them with a slender needle – sharp or crewel;
• Or if you prefer to live dangerously, get hold of some liquid nitrogen and use it to freeze-kill an area of pupae;
• Either way – mark the area and count the killed cells;
• Come back in 24 hours and count the number of cells the bees have broken into and removed the dead contents;
• Divide the total removed by the total killed and multiply by 100 to get your percentage hygienic behaviour.

A word of caution here – it is possible that the bees respond to different cues with these tests. Just because they are acutely aware when a pupa has been lanced or frozen doesn’t necessarily mean they would notice when a Varroa laid an egg in a sealed cell.  It would give you an idea of general hygienic behaviour but not necessarily Varroa Sensitive Hygiene (VSH) which is different.

Again this is time consuming.

Icing Sugar Test

For most stand-alone beekeepers – the bottom line is how many Varroa are in the hives at the end of the active season after the honey has been removed and before the bees are treated.

If this can be determined, it is possible to make a decision about whether to treat or not to treat. A relatively simple test is the icing sugar test.

By the way, if you are going to do this – only test hives that have not been treated since the spring. Also – did you split them during the year because this could have a bearing on the count.

Here’s how it’s done anyway…

Materials

• A big plastic bucket suitable for shaking bees into;
• Plastic beaker with 300ml level marked;
• Perforated cap to fit or a bit of net curtain with holes smaller than bees but bigger than varroa and a rubber band;

• If you sign up to help NIHBS and NUI Galway find the Varroa Resistant Native Irish Bee you’ll get a free, custom made beaker like this one above. Details here: http://nihbs.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Breeding-for-Varroa-Resistance-in-Ireland-Final.pdf
• Icing sugar;
• A tablespoon;
• A white plastic bucket with water innit.

Method

• Find your queen and isolate her;
• If you can’t find her, take a frame from the centre of the brood nest and make sure she’s not on it;
• Shake the bees off the frame into the bucket;
• Scoop 300mls of bees into the plastic beaker and put the lid on;
• Shake in a tablespoon of icing sugar through lid;
• Tumble the bees around till so they are well coated;
• Leave them alone for 5 minutes;
• Tumble them around gently for a count of ten then;
• Get your white bucket with water innit;
• Invert your beaker over it and shake till no more Varroa fall out;
• Count the Varroa – they show up very well against the white bucket;
• Divide the number of Varroa by 3 then, if there is capped brood, multiply by 2 and that’s your percentage infestation. If there is no capped brood don’t multiply by 2, just divide by 3.

The people from Galway tell me this test, although indirect, is a very accurate measure of how many Varroa are in the actual hive.

Their advice regarding treatment is that if there are 2 or less mites per 300ml of bees you probably don’t need to treat but if there are 3 or more you should treat.

Bond Method

The Bond Method seems to have evolved in Germany. The name derives from the James Bond film Live and Let Die. Dr. John Kefuss is a scientist and commercial beekeeper who lives in France and who has decided for one reason or another that treating for Varroa is a fools game. He took a calculated plunge and stopped treating his bees. He had thought long and hard about it and was prepared for a 90% loss so was pleasantly surprised to lose only 60%.

That might seem catastrophic but since then he has bred from the survivors using ‘caveman genetics’ and is now back to full strength. However, he now no longer treats – AT ALL.  He loses on average 15% per year but this is not out of line with his neighbours who do treat.

As somebody who lost 50% of her bees in the endless winter of 2012-13 I know a bit about losing lots of bees. 50% is catastrophic but I was back up to full strength again by the end of that year. You know yourself – bees really go for it when they can.

While it may seem very drastic to allow your bees to be decimated in this way it should be borne in mind that not only are the bees decimated but the most virulent strains of Varroa are decimated also. Virulent strains are failed parasites if left to their own devices because they take so much from the host, the host dies and the parasite dies with them.  As long as we blanket-treat all our bees we are helping these strains to survive.

When you stop treating your bees, eventually you are left with the most capable bees and the least capable Varroa

But this could take years. Here’s a way of speeding it up.

Bond Accelerated Test (BAT)

This method was devised by John Kefuss. It is where the Bond selection method is speeded up by adding frames of infested brood to survivor colonies. The effect is to accelerate the selection process – killing out non-resistant strains of bees more quickly – 6 months rather than 3-4 years. You need a heart of stone for this stuff – but that’s science for you.

Soft Bond Method

This method is a variant of the above method for those who lack the nerve or the confidence or the sheer numbers of bees to try the hard versions. It involves selecting a portion of your stocks to experiment with and say to yourself ‘I could afford to lose this lot’ – accept it and carry on.

Here are John Kefuss’s Soft Bond Method Instructions for Big Beekeepers:

Procedure for the selection of up to 20 breeder queens from an apiary of 500 (!)

• From the initial group of 500 hives, select the 100 best producing colonies;
• On those, perform 24-hour hygienic tests;
• Select the most hygienic 40 for Varroa count;
• Spread this breeding material by rearing daughters and requeening in all bee yards to produce selected drones;
• Leave the best 20 of the selected hives without treatment – the Bond Test to produce breeder queens.

There now – gird up your loins.

Soft Bond Method for Small Beekeepers

For those of us with too many colonies to count mites and not enough to do a full Bond or BAT test here’s something we can do.

• Use the Icing sugar method above for as many of your colonies as is practical;
• Resolve to count and examine mite-fall in the best of these next year;
• Add all of this data into your Colony Assessments and Colony Appraisals and use all the data to select queens to breed daughter queens and colonies to raise drones;

Click here for more on Colony Assessment

Click here for more on Colony Appraisals

• If you have the nerve – stop treating the best of them and see what happens;
• If you don’t have the nerve or the numbers of bees to play with, then at least get in touch with NIHBS and join the Ireland Varroa Monitoring Programme.

Click here for more about Grooming and Varroa Sensitive Hygienic (VSH) Behaviour

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