• When one of them is queenless;
• When one of them has a vile queen and you are about to make them queenless;
• When one or both colonies are too weak in the approach to winter.

Most bee books will tell you to unite the two using the ‘newspaper method’ This is where a sheet of newspaper (or two), primed with a pinprick (or two), is placed between the two colonies to be united – one on top of the other of course.

The rationale is that the newspaper prevents immediate contact between the two and acts as a sort of a timer – the bees can smell each other through the paper and by the time they have chewed their way through they ‘know’ each other and will not fight.

Generally, it works well but there are certain criteria for a successful outcome:

• One of the two colonies should be queenless;
• Any queen cells must be removed from the queenless half or the bees may not be receptive to the other queen, they might initiate supersedure and they might even swarm;
• There must be no open brood with the queenless colony – or they might build queen cells before they unite, then swarm or use these cells to replace your good queen when they do;
• And you’d better check there’s no queen cells in the other half either – you know what they’re like!

But there are other reasons for uniting bees and there are other ways of doing it…

Click here for the Third Box Principle

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Admittedly the earliest flowering ivy was a few miles downhill from here and we are on up on the north face of a chilly hill where most things are late, however – it’s still quite a spread you must admit.

Every warm day now, the bees are all over it gathering pollen and whatever nectar there may be. Spot the bee – click on the photo below for a better view.

Some of the flowers in this picture were pollinated some time ago and you can see the berries developing, russet now but black later. Some are still in full bloom and others are only buds. These last will almost certainly not open at all.

Here is the quandary I found myself in this year: I had several sad little queenless Apideas and two other strong ones, each with five frames (feeder removed) and with good laying queens in them. I can never quite face shaking the poor queenless bees out, nucs weren’t possible and there’s nothing so sad as watching an Apidea dwindle its way into winter with laying workers and a bellyful of slugs.

So here’s the recipe:

Ingredients

• 5 queenless Apideas
• 2 queenright Apideas
• 1 nuc box
• 2 fat frames of stores
• 1 frame pollen
• 2 empty drawn frames
• 1 spare Apidea body box
• 1 Apidea Miller feeder
• 1 large plastic bucket
• 1 water sprayer
• Foam
• Travelling mesh

Method

• Take the nuc and add in the two frames of stores one at each side leaving a good gap in the middle;
• Bung the entrance with foam;
• Now the brutal bit – take the plastic bucket and and lightly spray the inside of the bucket;
• Shook all the bees out of the queenless Apideas into the bucket and tumble them around together spraying a bit more water to keep them flightless;
• Once these are completely mixed shake in all the bees and the queen from the weakest of the strong Apideas. Do this as gently as possible especially once you’ve found the queen – be sure to shake that frame with the greatest care. If you can’t find the queen just be careful with all of them;
• While you are doing this sort out the frames of brood from the shaken queenright Apidea and the best frames of stores from the others and put them into the spare Apidea body box;
• Pour all the bees into the nuc and carefully put the other 3 frames in on top of them;
• Fit the crownboard covering the feed hole with travelling/ventilation mesh then take it away to an out-apiary and feed it feed it feed it, but keep the entrance as small as possible to deter robbers.

My nuc is now as strong as a horse, queenright, stuffed with ivy honey and ready for the winter.

Now for the rest:

• Take the spare Apidea body box and equip it with the frames of brood we mentioned earlier and the best two frames of stores;
• Set this box on top of the other queen-right Apidea;
• On top of this, fit the Miller feeder. If you’re using these be aware that you will need to throw in a handful of straws or wood-shavings or similar as the bees have direct access to the syrup and will float off and drown otherwise. Unless, of course, I’m doing something bloody silly in which case, Dear Reader, I ask you to correct me using the comment form at the bottom of this post.

By the way the Miller feeders come with a strip of queen excluder to pin underneath to keep ‘Herself’ out of the syrup.

The perfect place to overwinter an Apidea is the sort of south facing windowsill that is really too hot in summer – like the one in the pictures above.

I should add, I have overwintered Apideas on a single box in the past but you need to have them very well provisioned, you need to pack the roof space with fondant and you need to keep a close eye on them especially in the early spring.

Click here for instructions on how to feed an overwintering Apidea

Click here for full Apidea instructions

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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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For the beekeeper, honey is probably the most profitable part of the harvest but it is not the only one. The next most important crop, for most, is beeswax, of which there are three sources:

• Cappings from your honey extraction;
• Old combs;
• Scrapings from hive.

Beeswax has a thousand and one cosmetic and domestic uses but unless a good price can be assured the most fundamental use for the beeswax crop is as new foundation.

What is Rendering?

Before the beekeeper can embark on any wax venture he/she must render the wax. Rendering beeswax means to melt it and separate it from physical impurities such as propolis, mouldy pollen, larval moults and chalkbrood mummies. Once rendered, spores of disease-causing organisms such as Nosema and American Foul Brood are harmlessly encapsulated within the body of the wax. Eggs of things like wax moth are killed by the heat.

What temperature?

To filter out the rubbish, the wax must first be melted so that it is runny enough to be strained. Beeswax melts at 62ºC but this temperature is not hot enough for it to run through a cloth or other strainer – it will just cool too quickly and clog up before you can say knife. If melted in water or in some kind of a water bath then the heat cannot rise to instantly damaging temperatures. In fact you can take it all the way up to close to the boiling point of water without damage then it will run through your cloth no problem. However it is damaged by prolonged or excessive heat and will discolour to a murky olive – so don’t leave it boiling for ages and ages. Oh and by the way, it will ignite if presented with a naked flame – so don’t do that either.

Once melted, the wax can be separated from the aforementioned detritus by some sort of straining method.

The horrible stuff left in the strainer – that dark brown mess of dead larvae, pupal shirts (yes – ‘shirts’) and old chalk brood etc is called ‘slumgum’. Slumgum is a disgusting mess but great for lighting fires or priming swarm catchers: just slap it around the insides of your bait hives – while still warm of course.

How pure does it need to be?

Rendering beeswax is the first step in the purification process. The cakes of wax from this first straining are only partially clean – see header photo above – but beekeeping equipment suppliers will accept this standard of wax in exchange for foundation.

I should add that you won’t get much wax like this from combs as grotty as those above. Old comb is a great firelighter and that’s what it’s best used for but unless you want a chimney fire make sure your flue is clean because it burns ferociously. For the finest purest beeswax, stick to the burr or brace comb you have scraped off the hives during the summer or better still the cappings from your extraction.

To get really pure beeswax is a two step process. Render it first to get rid of the big rubbish then if you want it pure enough for soap or cosmetics – break it up, melt again and strain through a very fine cloth.

The Process

Here are some of the many ways of rendering beeswax for foundation where priorities are sterilisation and economy:

• One of the simplest rendering methods must be Witherell’s boil-up-and-strain method. The combs are placed in cold water and brought to the boil, once melted the whole lot is strained through a 3mm mesh. When the ‘liquor’ cools the wax will set in a slab on top of the water.
• A variation of this is Witherell’s submerged sack, or boil-in-the-bag, method. Here the combs are tied up in a sack and plunged into a vessel of water which is then brought slowly to the boil. The sack is given the odd poke with a stick to let the wax float free.
• Witherell’s third method involves wrapping an entire brood box, full of old combs in their frames, in 3mm mesh then plunging the whole lot into a vat of water and soaking from ‘several minutes to several hours’. The water is then brought to a slow boil and allowed to cool so that the wax hardens on the surface of the water. That sounds impractical to me – don’t you think?
• A simple one, for small-scale bits and pieces, is the water bath method (Williams). The wax cappings etc wrapped in a pair of old tights or similar are placed in a jug which is in turn placed in pan of water. The water is brought slowly to a gentle boil and when the wax is melted, the tights (containing the debris) can be removed and the clean wax can be poured into a suitable mould for use later.
• The solar extractor is an insulated wooden box with a double glazed glass panel for a lid. Inside there is a metal tray emptying into a removable container. The old combs are placed inside and the whole box is angled to catch as much sun as possible. If the combs are wrapped in muslin then the wax will come out ready filtered. According to Hooper the sun will produce temps of 71-88ºC, however he is talking about the broiling south east of England – temperatures in Ireland could be expected to be a bit lower. The heat produced will also sterilise frames of Nosema spores and wax moth eggs. The solar extractor only extracts 20-50% of wax (Witherell) but it has the advantage of low operating costs.
• A steam wax extractor is a bit like vegetable steamer in that there is a lower vessel containing the water above which, is a steamer containing the vegetables or in this case the wax. When the water is heated to boiling, the steam is forced up into the steamer, the wax is melted and it is run off a side vent into a suitable container. Steam wax extractors are not cheap – but they do have the advantage that they can extract almost all useable wax.
• A variation on the steam wax extractor is the steam press. This is like a steam extractor in that there is a lower water container but the upper chamber consists of a press. The combs are wrapped in the filter cloth of choice and placed in the press then the water is brought up to boiling. As the steam rises up and starts to melt the wax, downward pressure can be applied to the bag of combs to force the wax out of the slumgum.
• Mr.R.O.B.Manley had one of the above but was rather disenchanted with it so he used it as a press only. He would just toss all the bits of old comb into the 20 gallon boiler he used for syrup along with gallons of rainwater. As it melted he would scoop out basins full of ‘mush’ into a sack. The sack was then put into the press under a specially made, round, flat, disk and pressure applied by means of “the heavy lathe cut screw and its spider”. The wax was run out into a large tank of rainwater “where it would solidify in all sorts of queer shapes”.
• Witherell mentions a variation of the steam extractor that instead of pressing the slumgum, spins it to extract the remaining wax centrifugally – this is the Heated Centrifuge Method. It finds little favour with Witherell though; he describes it as messy and cumbersome and more for use by professional rendering plants. Dear oh dear.

The Kochstar Melter

The ‘New’ Kochstar Wax Melter (as described in the Thorne Catalogue) is a thermostatically controlled tank to heat the wax to between 30 and 100ºC. It comes equipped with two taps, one near the bottom to run the water out and another about 4″ up to run the wax from off the top of the water because as you know – like butter, beeswax floats on water.

I bought one of these and I remain disenchanted with it. Thorne’s have instructions on their website and I’ve followed them to the letter without success. The taps have a very narrow bore so they are easily blocked by even one little cocoon and if you do want to run wax off through the top tap you will need to get it very hot or it sets in the tap and blocks it. I made a lagging jacket for it which helped a bit but not much.

My Process

Nowadays I put a trivet into the bottom of my Kochstar boiler then drape a large cloth (old net curtains from charity shops are great) with 2-3mm mesh over the top which I the fill with the various horrible bits of old wax followed by a gallon or so of rainwater and press the lid down with the edges of the cloth still hanging out over the edges. The trivet is necessary or the cloth will sink to the bottom; the element heats the bottom of the tank to a very fierce heat and if the cloth is synthetic it will stick and then it will melt and then it will burn despite the water – much like an overheated stew. This is the bitter voice of experience of both those things.

Once the beeswax is well-melted you can lift the cloth up and hold it aloft to drain a bit then slap it onto a cold concrete floor – mind your shoes – where the slumgum will solidify and can be peeled away from the cloth in the morning.

Don’t do this in the kitchen!

Don’t overheat beeswax or it will turn nasty shade of olive.

Pour the beeswax and the water into a plastic bucket, put a lid on it and let it cool. The wax will rise to the surface and set in a cake. Once it is completely cold you can tip it out. Scrape the crud off its bottom and it should look like the ones in the header photo above. That’s Millie in the background.

Further info:

Click here for beeswax facts

Click  here for a simple way to make beeswax wraps

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 home dentistry with beeswax

Sources

Hooper,T. Guide to Bees and Honey. Blandford, London. 1991.

Manley,R.O.B. Honey Farming. Faber and Faber. London. 1946.

Witherell,P.C. Other Products of the Hive. In The Hive and the Honey Bee. Ed. Dadant & Sons. Dadant & Sons. Hamilton. Illinois. USA.

Williams,R. Beeswax for Show. In Bees, Hives and Honey – The Beekeeper’s Companion. Ed. Eddie O’Sulllivan. FIBKA. Ireland. 2000.

http://www.thorne.co.uk

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It’ll calm your hair down in an emergency as well.

You can add a few drops of the essential oil of your choice – lavender is good, it has healing properties. Some people prefer peppermint. Or there’s always orange. Put essential oils in last of all and don’t get your mixture any hotter than it needs to be or all those special properties will vaporise.

Ingredients

• 65g sunflower oil;
• 25g clean beeswax – grated;
• vitamin E oil as preservative – about 10 drops;
• essential oil of your choice – about 12 drops. Lavender is very healing – I recommend it.

Method

• Put oil and beeswax in double saucepan or water bath;
• Heat gently until wax is just melted;
• Add vitamin E and optional essential oils and stir;
• Pour into pots – this will make enough for about 15 x 10ml pots.

As always be careful with beeswax and heat.

Click here for beeswax facts

Click here for rendering beeswax

Click  here for a simple way to make beeswax wraps

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 home dentistry with beeswax

Copyright © Beespoke.info, 2014. All Rights Reserved.

Only use genuine turpentine – it’s expensive but it smells lovely. Don’t be tempted to use white spirit in place of turpentine or it will smell horrible. Do remember turpentine is an extremely volatile substance – keep well away from naked flames and work in a well ventilated room.

Beeswax is also very flammable so don’t get that near naked flames either.

Just be careful and don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Carnauba wax is a hard wax of plant origin which will help make the shine last longer. It is available from beekeeping suppliers such as Thornes.

Ingredients:

• 8oz clean beeswax
• 1oz carnauba wax
• 1pt pure turpentine

Method:

• Melt the waxes together in double saucepan/waterbath;
• Warm the turpentine;
• Pour the turpentine into the melted wax;
• Stir and pour into pots or tins.

Click here for beeswax facts

Click  here for a simple way to make beeswax wraps

Click here for beeswax lipbalm recipe

Click here for beeswax handcream recipe

Click here for beeswax soap recipe

Click here for beeswax candlemaking

Click here for home dentistry with beeswax

Copyright © Beespoke.info, 2014. All Rights Reserved.

If you’re not planning to eat it you could add fragrance but it’s lovely as it is. Just apply sparingly as possible and try and keep it off your palms because it doesn’t contain those chemicals that make it vanish into your skin.

If you do get greasy palms – rub it on your head. Your hair will be glossy as a colt’s back and even on a very windy day – it’ll hold it all down nicely.

Weigh everything including the water.

Ingredients

• 50g spotlessly clean beeswax
• 200g jojoba oil
• 200g almond oil
• 200g soft water
• 10 g borax

Method

• This will make 9 x 50ml pots so get them ready first;
• Measure oils into a pyrex bowl;
• Break up beeswax and add to oils;
• Set pyrex bowl in pan of hot water and set on low heat to melt wax;
• When beeswax is melted put water and borax into a jar, mix then warm this mixture so it is the same temperature as the oil etc;
• Pour oil/beeswax mixture and boraxed water both together at the same time into a bowl and stir;
• A creamy mixture will form and you need to get it into pots before it sets and it will set quite quickly.

Click here for how to render beeswax

Click here for simple beeswax wraps

Click here for beeswax facts

Click here for beeswax lipbalm 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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He begins with queen rearing. Every aspect of queen rearing, from the selection of a queen rearing method, selection of starter and rearer colonies, queenright versus queenless, selection of eggs and larvae or queens and drones, even selection of the right bees for mini-nucs all is gone over with meticulous attention to detail, logical consideration and backed up with scientific study.

Detailed information on the mechanics of the various queen rearing manipulations is also supplied.

After pointing out the difference between queen rearing and bee breeding he moves on to consider which bee to breed from and points out that only breeding within a pure species will result in traits which are heritable. Good qualities often found in hybrids are not passed on reliably to the next generation so: “The starting point in breeding must therefore be the race, that is to say, a combination of genetic qualities sieved and tested by Nature herself.”

There is variability within each race, the performance of colonies can be evaluated and stocks either included or excluded from the breeding program depending on their characteristics. He gives six factors to be evaluated –

• Honey production;
• Spring build up;
• Urge to draw foundation;
• Absence of signs of inbreeding – gappy brood;
• Gentleness;
• Steadiness on the comb.

The identification of the chosen species is vital of course and much information is given on the methods such as observable characteristics such as colour, size and hairiness and less obvious features which can only be detected by more scientific methods such as wing morphometry.

I’m not going to go into wing morphometry here except to say that it is the study and and measurement of the veins and panels in the wings of the honeybee. From a distance this can look like a bottle of smoke until when you realise that these measurements are calibrated against those of preserved museum samples of bees from as far back as the Vikings – long before the importation of bees was thought of.

A chapter on bee genetics is never going to read like a bodice ripper but there should be a better way of getting this message across. Simply put – inbreeding is to be avoided or you’re going to get sluggish bees with gappy brood that don’t build up, can’t be bothered to go out to work and don’t overwinter with thrift or efficiency. Ring any bells?

This book is no walk in the park, nothing containing this level and amount of detailed information could be, but it is a vital reference-section occupant for the beekeeper’s bookshelf and for anyone serious about conserving their native bee it is essential reading – however difficult.

Good luck!

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The first beekeeping book I ever read was Ted Hooper’s ‘Guide to Bees and Honey’ which is still the best book for beginners in my opinion. It’s so well written I sat down one week in winter and read it from cover to cover like a novel. The following spring I got bees and the fun began.

After a couple of years struggling with swarmy bees, I bought L.E.Snelgrove’s book ‘Swarming – its Control and Prevention’ which summarises the causes of swarming and the traditional means of prevention and also introduces the ingenious and adaptable Snelgrove board – a piece of equipment no beekeeper should be without.  For those unfamiliar with it, it is a division board equipped with a central hole covered with wire grille, through which the bees may communicate, and 6 little side-doors which are opened and closed sequentially. It is used to split a colony in a double brood box and operates like a cross between a cuckoo clock and an advent calendar, bleeding bees from one box to the other and thus preventing a swarm. If the timing is right and the weather kind, it will rear a good quality queen into the bargain. Towards the end of the season the new queen is heading up the original strong colony all ready for the heather and the old queen is ticking away in a nuc. At the very least it can be used as a spare floor or to perform an artificial swarm vertically under one roof.

Snelgrove doesn’t mention what sort of bees he had but he is wearing them on his face on the cover of this book so they must have been placid ones; I couldn’t do that with my bees! Mine are in need of improvement which is why I read this next book – John Dews and Eric Milner’s ‘Breeding Better Bees using simple modern methods’. For those still unsure about which bee is the best bee – look no further than the first 20 pages of this book for a clear and convincing argument in favour of the native bee (of any country) as the best bee for the climate, having been honed by thousands of years of natural selection. It also explains how the importation of foreign bees louses things up, why it is that breeding from hybrids is unpredictable and why it is therefore essential to seek out ‘pedigree’ native stocks. The identification of A.m. mellifera and the use of wing morphometry is dealt with in the second half of the book.

John Dews and Eric Milner refer to 6 texts, two of which I hope to read this winter – Beowulf Cooper’s ‘Honeybees of the British Isles’ and F Ruttner’s Breeding Techniques and Selection for Breeding of the Honeybees. A third book is ‘The Introduction of Queen Bees’, also by L.E.Snelgrove. I noticed it at Gormanstone and on flicking through it I noticed a chapter entitled ‘The Snelgrove “One Hour” Method’; with next year’s queen-rearing debacle in mind, I bought it. This is it condensed:

Before dusk:

1. Dequeen the stock;
2. Put 20-30 bees (from the same stock) into a matchbox and put it in your pocket for 10 minutes;
3. Place the new queen into the matchbox with the bees and put it back in your pocket;
4. After 50-60 minutes, blow a little puff of smoke gently into the feed hole to send the bees away then carefully open the matchbox enough to let the bees out, place it face down over the feedhole and cover with a cloth.

I tried it on 3 hives by shuffling queens from hive to hive to hive, taking the final queen from an Apidea. To my astonishment – it worked on 2 out of the 3 and it has to be said – the one that failed was an evil queenless nuc which had already killed 2 previous queens.

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