Things to do in February | Beespoke Info

Beekeeping for Beginners Course 2015

Gimlet — Thu, 12 Feb 2015 15:59:41 +0000

The South Kildare Beekeepers Association – ‘Beekeeping for Beginners’ Course starts on Monday 23rd February 2015 at 7.30 in the Church of Ireland Hall, Athy, Co.Kildare.

Includes talks, hands-on practical sessions, honey extraction and SKBA membership.

For further details:

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How to improve your bees

Gimlet — Wed, 11 Feb 2015 17:41:44 +0000

There are all sorts of bees for sale out there – Buckfast, Carniolan, Italian, Russian, Greek – you name it but how can they possibly be better than the locals on their home turf? Think about it, think about the risks in importing diseases and god knows what-all else. Don’t import bees – improve your own.

Click here for more information on the Native Irish Bee.

Here’s how and it isn’t difficult. In fact it’s fun and very rewarding – you will see real results year on year. We used to have some really horrible bees here and only a few hives of them but each year they would chase us round the garden. Now, in the middle of summer I have around 25 hives of bees here and stings are rare.

So make a start this year.

Colony Assessments

First you will need to record aspects of your bees behaviour for an entire season. You will need to record this data because you will not be able to remember it. Click here for a link to a downloadable Colony Assessment record sheet and some instructions.

Colony Appraisals

Once you are armed with a sheaf of these – all filled in from the previous year – you can sit, midwinter, by the fire manipulating your data and transferring it into your Appraisal Sheet. Click here for a link to a downloadable Colony Appraisal sheet and some instructions.This sheet compiles all of your seasonal data from the previous year and tabulates so you can compare your colonies objectively. Here’s one of my completed Appraisal Sheets for last year (2014). Click it for a better view.

From Data to Action…

How you filter your data to pick out the best colonies to breed from and those to cull is up to you. Here’s what I do – nice and simple:

Hightlight (yellow) all cells in the ‘cells’ column with an N in other words all the colonies which didn’t make queen cells.
Then highlight (yellow) the top 10 or so cells of the Docility, Pattern and Total columns.
You can then pick out the best 30% of your colonies – the ones with 3 or more highlighted cells per row – Pink
Then the bottom 30-40% of your colonies – the ones with one or less highlighted cells – Blue
Bring all of your breeder colonies to your breeder apiary
Take all of the indifferent – neither blue nor pink – colonies to out-apiaries and requeen when your Apideas start to bear fruit;
Cull all the queens in the blue highlighted colonies but don’t do this until you start to see drone brood. If you cull queens at this time you take advantage of all their brood and bees which you then unite with your breeder colonies. Take care when you do this and make sure to leave them queenless for a week and knock off every single queen cell before you unite over newspaper. Do not look at this as losing colonies of bees because you are not – in a very short while the very strong doubled-up colonies you have created will be ready to split – using the method of your choice and you are back where you started but without those horrible queens.
Avoid inbreeding by either buying in a few native queens or alternatively take a few of your Apideas to another beekeeper to get mated and/or swap grafting material. Make sure you like his bees, and the cut of his jib, first though!

In addition – you will have favourite queens which may not feature highly in this scheme but there are things about them that you have noticed. If this is the case you should take special care to note where they are (record it on the assessment sheet) and how they do and don’t just cull them because they didn’t score high enough.

Drone Rearing

Have as many bees as possible in your home apiary so there are lots and lots and lots of drones. With luck, the place will be so drone-heavy your virgins will get caught on the way out and won’t go straying with the blithering Buckfast boys. As you know – apiary vicinity mating is a characteristic of the native bee: in this way they manage to get their queens mated in those short flashes of sunshine that occur during otherwise extensive periods of foul weather such as we experienced in the summer of 2012.

Get your drone rearers making drones about 5 weeks before you are due to start your first grafts. Do this by adding in drone frames late March, early April and FEED. In this part of the world it is customary to use two brood frames – each fitted with half a sheet of wax – the bees will draw out drone comb to fill the gap. If you have frames that have holes in the bottom half but are otherwise good – cut the bottom half out with a stanley knife. Add them at each side of the brood nest – about 3 frames in from each side. If you are on double brood boxes add in two per box.

Some people put two super frames into the brood box and allow the bees to draw drone comb off the bottom bars of these but in my experience the bees don’t seem to know when to stop and attach the combs to the sides of the box which can leave you with a right mess.

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How to Feed a Winter Apidea

Gimlet — Sat, 10 Jan 2015 14:42:32 +0000

If you are overwintering an Apidea you will need to keep a close eye on the stores – especially in a mild winter when the queen may start to lay early. This one in the picture above has a double brood box and was well stocked with ivy honey in autumn but it felt a bit light so I fed it today. If you are wondering why the air vent is left open – that’s because they have it completely propolised and I don’t want to leave the front door wide open.

Here’s what to do with the feed though:

Get a spare roof…

… and pack the roof cavities with fondant.

Remove the roof from your hungry Apidea…

… and fold back the the little flap in the crownboard.

Quickly put the spare, fondant-packed roof in its place and replace the brick. The bees will access the fondant through the feed hole and eat their way through the galleries and channels in the roof which holds about 150g or 6oz of fondant.

Another alternative might be to remove the crownboard altogether but I haven’t tried that yet and wonder if the fondant might ooze down into the cluster?

Keep an eye on it:

If the bees are using the fondant you will see water carriers unless it is very cold in which case they will use very little.
If the weather is mild and the bees are active you might want to check it but give it a couple of weeks and bear in mind – when you lift the roof this time, the crownboard will almost certainly be stuck to it so there will be disturbance. Choose a mild day and be ready to prise it off with your hive-tool. Have a spare crownboard and the other roof at hand – packed with more fondant or Neopoll if we’re into February.
Neopoll is a pollen supplement with a similar consistency to the fondant but more like marzipan – it’s delicious!
If it still feels heavy – leave it alone;
Do not feed syrup in the winter – the bees will not be able to ripen it.

Click here for instructions on How to Overwinter an Apidea

Click here for full Apidea instructions

Click here to listen to Piping Queens

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Winter Losses

Gimlet — Tue, 18 Mar 2014 17:51:48 +0000

It has been a good winter for the bees and there have been very few losses. However, what do you do if you find a hive of your bees has died out?

Well, the first thing to do is find out why they died because whatever killed them could still be lurking in there; if you can pin down the cause of death then you will know what to do with the hive.

Look for the two most obvious things first:

Starvation
Poor queen

Much will depend on the time of year they died…

Starvation

This happens particularly in winter but if spring is cold and endless or summer is unusually shitty and you forget to feed them, they could have starved – so the first thing to check is have they got any stores?

Nucs are particularly vulnerable to starvation – they can be robbed out by strong neighbours or be simply not strong enough to sustain themselves.

Are there any stores?

No…

If there are no stores it will be likely they starved. If so, there will be a pile of dead bees on the floor and on the frames there will be clusters of dead bees with their heads at the bottom of the cells where they died trying to find the last little bit of food. If they are mouldy it’s because they starved some time ago and moulds moved in because that’s what moulds do.

However, bear in mind that they could have died of something else and bees from other hives came and robbed the stores later.

Yes…

If there are plenty of stores, they may still have starved. If the cluster of bees is too small and the weather is too cold for too long they will lose contact with their stores and ‘starve in the midst of plenty’. Otherwise the symptoms will be the same.

In either case, there will be no brood.

Poor queens

Another common cause of winter mortality is poor queens. Since the import of Varroa and the extinction of all the wild bees, the associated problems with drones and not to mention the weather – there have been problems with queen mating. Sometimes a poorly mated queen will make it into the winter but she won’t make it out the other side.

What happens is that she will lay what she thinks are worker eggs in worker comb but because she has run out of the store of sperm in her spermatheca, the eggs are not fertilised and are therefore drones. Because drone larvae are much bigger than workers, their growth and development in worker cells pushes the cells out of shape and the comb is distorted and ugly.

The remaining adult workers wear themselves out rearing the drones and there are no young workers to take their place. The colony fizzles out during winter.

Also, when a queen is unable to lay fertilised eggs, the colony is unable to replace the queen and is doomed.

Distorted comb?

If you had a drone layer, there could still be that lump of dead bees on the floor and the mats of dead bees with their heads in the cells. In addition there will be distorted comb and in amongst it will probably be a few unhatched pupae. Despite being worker cells they will have the domed cappings of drone cells.

Queen present?

Sometimes a colony like this can still be found limping along in the early spring. There will be a little cluster of bees with what looks like a fine strong queen but if you see that misshapen comb and domed cappings you will have to harden your heart and knock her on the head. Unite the remaining bees with a stronger neighbour.

Disease

If there are no bees left in the hive but there is capped, pepperpot brood and the combs are dark and there is an old fashioned gluey smell – beware. Do the matchstick test. It might not have been American Foul Brood (AFB) but if it was me I’d burn all those combs even if I did the matchstick test and couldn’t find a gooey cell – it might be that they just dried up. The procedure for disposing of a colony with AFB is outlined here.

Checklist

Are there any stores left?
Are there any dead bees left – if so, how many are there and what do they look like?
Are they in a lump of bees on the floor or have they all got their little dead heads buried in the cells?

If so they probably starved.

Look at the comb. Is there any capped brood left?
If so is it ragged and domed?

If the answer to the last two is yes, the bees probably went into the winter with a poor queen.

Or is it gappy and are the cappings perforated?
Is the comb old and black?

If the answer to the last two is yes – this could be American Foul Brood. Do the matchstick test or send for analysis. If so burn it.

Are there signs of dysentery in the hive?

This could be Nosema or stress from something else – such as loss of the queen.

Take a close look into the debris on the hive floor – are there a lot of Varroa about the place?
Take a closer look at the dead bees, are there a lot of shrivelled wings?

If the answer to the last two is yes, your colony could have died of Varroaosis.

Is there a big pile of dead and dying bees below the entrance – all about dead about the same time? If so suspect pesticide poisoning – but this is only really a summer problem.
Are there lots of dead bees outside the entrance, crawlers on the floor and K wings? This could be Acarine.

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Hibernating Queen Wasps

Gimlet — Tue, 04 Mar 2014 17:22:30 +0000

Keep an eye out for hibernation queen wasps like these two in your hive roofs during your winter checks. Note the poor squashed bees – sometimes this is unavoidable.

What you do with them is up to you – it’s always a dilemma for me. Remember that each one has the potential to create a huge wasp colony of perhaps 15,000 individuals and if you’ve had real wasp problems in the past you know what this can mean for the bees. However they are great in the garden in the early part of the year and only come into conflict with the bees in the late summer. If the bees are strong and you get your entrances narrowed down in time they will be able to defend themselves.

If there seem to be a lot of them you could prune them.

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Acetic Acid Fumigation

Gimlet — Wed, 26 Feb 2014 18:43:46 +0000

If you have old brood frames it is always a good idea to fumigate them before using them again to kill Nosema spores and wax moth. However, be sure they don’t come from a hive where the bees died of AFB. If you aren’t sure, or if frames contain patches of old sealed brood it’s probably best to burn them.

If the wax is old and very black it is best to strip these frames down and add fresh foundation in the spring – you’ll seldom find AFB in nice clean frames.

Here’s what to do:

First of all, be aware that acetic acid is not a nice chemical and the sort you need is 80%, which is much, much stronger than vinegar. It will burn you if you get it on your hands and have similar effect on your eyes so wear gloves and goggles. If you inhale it, it could strip your lungs as well so don’t inhale.

Also, it will rot concrete or metal if you spill it so don’t.

Set the brood box filled with the frames you want to fumigate on a solid timber floor with the entrance blocked off with foam.
Disposable nappies make great fume pads. Take a disposable nappy/fume pad and spread, it absorbent side up, across the top bars. Pour 120ml acetic acid onto the nappy.
If you have more than one box, just stack them up on top of each other. A nappy and 120ml of acetic acid on top should be enough for a 3-4 box stack.
Add a shallow eke, upside down, empty section-crate or an empty super then cover with a solid roof or crownboard and make sure there are no leaks for the fumes to escape.
Leave for one week. Don’t leave for much longer or the acid will get to work on your frame nails.
Remove the fume pads and allow the boxes to air for a few days before using. If you’re not going to use them for a while just stack them away and they’ll be grand.

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Spring Pollen Substitute

Gimlet — Tue, 11 Feb 2014 09:18:12 +0000

This is a recipe for an emergency pollen substitute (adapted from a Scottish Beekeepers recipe) I used last year. It saved several hives which would otherwise have fizzled out. This is for early spring use or when they have run out of pollen.

Please note – when bees become very weak they will not take a pollen substitute; they seem to lose the will to live and only sunshine will save them.

Ingredients

300g Soya Flour
100g Brewers Yeast
100g Skimmed Milk Powder
1kg honey

Method

Mix together all the dry ingredient;
Warm the honey just enough to make it easier to mix;
Pour the honey into the dry ingredients and mix it all together into a stiff paste;
Shape it up into patties slim enough to fit beneath the crownboad;
Place each patty on a square of oiled greaseproof paper and stack them into a poly box or similar.

This quantity would make about a dozen patties.

To feed the bees – place the patty directly onto the bees underneath the crownboard. Leave the paper in place to stop it drying out.

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Beeswax Soap Recipe

Gimlet — Thu, 06 Feb 2014 17:15:54 +0000

I used to think that homemade soap would be a great way to use up some of that beeswax mountain. That is until I started to look into the subject and it turns out to be a bit more complicated than I thought.

For a start there’s the matter of CAUSTIC SODA. Note the capital letters there; those are there as a mark of Respect. When using Caustic Soda, be on your Toes because it is a VERY NASTY chemical indeed. Wear gloves, don’t spill it and don’t blame me if you do.

When mixed with water it gets hot and when you then mix that solution with a mixture of fats and oils you get a very strong chemical reaction during which more heat is produced and the end result is soap.

Then there’s the beeswax. Beeswax, as we know, is about the most recalcitrant substance known to man so don’t spill that either. It is also flammable – click here for more beeswax facts. Its effects on soap and the making of it, even in tiny quantities are profound.

For a start, in order to melt the beeswax you have to heat the oils much hotter than you normally would. Then, even a 1% addition of beeswax will cause the soap to thicken very quickly. If you are an experienced soap maker you will have gathered I am not! Nevertheless, here is a recipe for beeswax soap I’ve concocted – it works, it makes a lovely sudsy soap and I’m still here to tell the tale.

Ingredients

65g NaOH (Caustic Soda),
116g Water;
70g Olive oil;
263g Coconut oil;
112g Sunflower oil;
10g clean, grated Beeswax;
2 tsp Lavender oil.

Method

Put beeswax, sunflower, olive and coconut oils in a pan and heat very gently till the beeswax has melted;
Weigh the water and put it in a pyrex jug or similar;
Get your rubber gloves on;
Carefully weigh caustic soda;
Carefully pour the caustic soda into the jug with the water and stir with the butt end of a wooden spoon – get all the grains aloft and swirling then put the jug somewhere safe and leave it alone;
Grease your soap mould – such as an old loaf tin – with a lump of coconut oil;
Get your hand blender ready;
When the beeswax has melted, stir the oils with a spatula just to get them well mixed;
Allow the mixture to cool a little, you can stand it in water bath or just let it cool naturally, till you see it beginning to congeal on the base of the pan;
Pour in the caustic soda/water mixture and stir gently (with the mixer turned off) then add your lavender;
Now turn the mixer on and give it what-for. It should turn a nice golden colour and start to thicken;
When it looks like a cake batter, pour it into your soap mould;
Wrap the whole thing in clingfilm and old towels to keep the heat in and leave it till it’s set;

Once set and still a bit warm turn it out of the mould and cut it up into bars. If yours is like mine you will notice that the lovely golden colour has gone away and the soap is now a warm ivory.

If you are unsure of what quantities of ingredients to use, there are several online resources for soapmakers. soapcalc.net has an online soap calculator which allows you to add in your oil ingredients and water as percentages of the total oils and it will give you the correct amount of caustic soda to use.

The table below shows the output when I input the oils and beeswax in my recipe above. The pink row (Lye – NaOH) shows the amount of Caustic Soda to use.

Soap calculator output for the recipe above

Click here to go to the soapcalc soap calculator

Click here for simple beeswax wraps

Click here for how to render beeswax

Click here for beeswax facts

Click here for beeswax lipbalm recipe

Click here for beeswax handcream recipe

Click here for beeswax furniture polish recipe

Click here for beeswax soap recipe

Click here for beeswax candlemaking

Click here for emergency home dental repairs with beeswax

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Bee Basics – Which Beehive?

Gimlet — Wed, 05 Feb 2014 17:57:41 +0000

Choosing which type of hive to use is like getting married – get it right from the start and stick to it; if you go messing about later, it will come back to bite you and you’ll regret it. Not all hive parts are interchangeable and you’ll end up in a right mucking fuddle.

In this country the two main types of hive in use are the National and the Commercial.

National

National hives are slightly smaller and much lighter to handle but they are more difficult to build. The construction of the hives means they have a very good handhold to lift them with and the frames have a long lug which makes them easy to grip. The recessed wall on two sides also means they are almost a double wall hive if you use a deep roof in the winter. Two of the hives in the photo above have deep roofs. This photo was taken midsummer (obviously) so they have been split over Snelgrove boards and supered but you can imagine how far down the brood box such a roof comes and the insulation it provides to the sides of the brood box when the supers are off.

The small size makes the National hive the better bet for the Native Irish bee. If you were to use a Commercial hive with these bees you could end up with all the honey in the brood chamber.

Commercial

Commercials are big hives. The name somehow suggests you’ll get more honey – not the case, in bad year the bees will put all the honey in the brood chamber. They are a very heavy hive when full but they are easy to make. They have very small handholds which are difficult to grip so you end up having to twist the hive and grab it from underneath. The frames also have very small lugs to you need the grip of a rock-climber to haul a full frame up and out.

Which is the best hive for this climate is a debate for the pub.

It is possible to operate using National brood boxes and Commercial supers – that way you have the best of both worlds but it would be inadvisable to have both National and Commercial brood boxes on the go – sooner or later that becomes a nuisance.

New or Second Hand?

Hives are available new or second-hand or can be made relatively easily and cheaply by all but the accident-prone or manually inept but be aware of the beespace. New hives are more expensive but they come disease-free and with a longer life-expectancy. Old hives are cheaper but, again, the beekeeper should be aware that disease could be lurking in old hives. A pertinent question to ask the seller would be – what happened to the bees?

It is recommended to flame the interior of old hives with a blow lamp as a way of sterilising but some diseases, such as American Foul Brood (AFB), have tough resistant spores which can survive for up to 40 years and could be tucked out of reach in tiny crevices. If such was the case then these spores could germinate and infect your lovely new bees at a later date. This would be more the case with brood boxes but second hand supers would hold less risk. For brood diseases anyway.

If you do decide to go for second hand boxes, make sure you check they are waterproof and bee and wasp proof. As hives age they tend to give out at the joints and small gaps appear. The metal sheeting of roofs can split at the corners or be otherwise ruptured.

If you are good with wood it is a good idea to buy a good, brand-new, flat-packed hive. That way you will know what the best looks like, you can copy it and the dimensions will be correct.

Material

Hives are available in cedar, deal or plywood.

Cedar is durable so hives are indestructible by the weather and need not be treated.
Deal is cheaper but unlike cedar it is not durable and hives need to be treated with a wood preservative (one without insecticide) or painted.
Plywood is the cheapest but my advice would be – avoid it. Marine ply is extremely heavy. The other stuff will very quickly succumb to the climate how ever carefully you paint it.

Polystyrene hives

I bought a few of these. I found them relatively cheap. They came flat packed but slotted together very easily and didn’t need to be glued or anything.

To paint or not to paint?

You don’t have to paint polyhives but they will last longer if you do. Look closely, the polystyrene consists of lots of little balls all pressed together. If you don’t seal the surface, a thin film of water can get betwixt and between and if it freezes – the ice expands and weathering can begin. I used one coat of gloss – no undercoat – is fine has lasted for at least 5 years now.

You can see some of them in use in the header picture – the green boxes.

They have advantages and they have disadvantages:

Advantages

Relatively cheap
Flat packed but slot together very easily with no need to glue or nail. That’s not so silly as it sounds – they are very dense and will take a nail so long as you don’t ask much of it.
Lovely and warm for overwintering or drawing wax and heathering.
Great for supers where little manipulation is required.

Disadvantages

Granted, this poly box took the brunt of this fallen branch but the front wall just popped out and the whole thing was a write off.

If you drop them and they land wrong they’ll just burst!
Cannot be scorched to sterilise eg AFB etc. Instead, you need to scrape clean then scrub with a strong household soda solution then sterlise with bleach.
They won’t take much scraping, there are weak places which show wear quite quickly.
Not great for manipulation – the frame lugs sit flush and get propolised so less good as brood boxes.
There is a new generation of polystyrene hives now which do have a rail which is good but they are less robust than the previous type.
The Varroa floors are not great – having a rather small mesh area but you could always use a timber one.

I would buy more polystyrene supers but I prefer wooden brood boxes.

A word of warning – whichever hive you buy – don’t go knocking up all those frames before you need to or the foundation will go all hard and the bees won’t draw it properly.

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Beekeeping for Beginners Course 2014

Gimlet — Tue, 28 Jan 2014 15:43:02 +0000

Anybody out there looking for a Beekeeping for Beginners course?

Look no further:-

http://southkildarebeekeepers.weebly.com/beginners.html

Or there’s a poster here – click it for a closer look.

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