2015

After the very cold July and August this year (2015) and the almost total failure of the main crop (blackberry Rubus fruticosus and white clover Trifolium repens) the bees were very light at the honey harvest with almost all of their stores in the supers and next to nothing below!

Varroa

As soon as the honey is off – you can think about treating for Varroa but that subject deserves a post of its own.

Feeding for winter

It is vital to always check how much stores the bees have in the brood box when you take off the supers and best to feed them immediately. Not only does it gee them up wonderfully but it helps you with that horrible guilty feeling you get when you take their honey away.  You just never know what is round the corner and when you will next get the chance to feed them.  You could break your arm like I wot I done once. Fortunately I had someone to feed and treat my bees for me.

Don’t depend on the ivy (Hedera helix) for winter feed. Although it is quite reliable it isn’t a certainty and if it doesn’t yield you’ve put your bees up shit creek without a paddle

Winter Feed

In Autumn feed a strong syrup – 2lbs sugar : 1pint water or 2kgs : 1litre. Heat the water or you’ll be stirring for ever. Make sure all the sugar is completely dissolved or it might granulate in your feeder.

Alternatively use a special bee feed. These are more expensive than sugar but they have advantages which make them worth it.  They are very strong syrups and use inverted sugars which are easier for the bees to digest. And of course you are spared all that heating and stirring.

Sugar Syrup vs Bee Feed

If you feed the bees sugar, aka sucrose, the first thing they do is manufacture and add the enzyme invertase which inverts the sucrose molecules to fructose and glucose.

Click here for more on Bees and Enzymes

Ambrosia and Apiinvert are syrups of fructose and glucose so that first step towards storage is done for them.  It is also a very strong syrup – 70% fructose/glucose and only 30% water.  If you think about it they only need to remove one third of the water content – 10% of the bulk – to store it. And just think of all that stirring you don’t have to do.

By the way – it doesn’t granulate and is ‘microbiologically stable’. Now what does that mean I wonder? I think it probably means it’s sterilised and contains no fungal spores. Unless you add some …

… I bet I could get it to ferment – a nice champagne yeast, a scatter of dried elderflowers and yeast nutrient and bob’s your uncle.

Feeder

Whatever type of syrup you are feeding, use a rapid feeder – Ashforth or Miller type for Autumn feeding. These feeders provide  a great long trough allowing hundreds of bees to come up after the feed and take it down rapidly. Hence the name. ‘Rapid’ that is.

Contact feeders – the bucket type with the circle of gauze or the home made ones with pinpricks – are slower and less suitable for winter feeding. They are designed for spring feeding where a slow drip feed of a light syrup can mimic a nectar flow and stimulate the queen into lay.

Contact feeders also work less well with a heavy syrup and a smaller number of bees are able to drink at one time.  If you have made a sugar syrup it can granulate on the gauze. Of course if you’ve nothing else – a contact feeder will do but keep an eye on it because the bees tend to propolise the holes up as part of their winter waterproofing regime.

Supersedure

Colonies undergoing late supersedure may show a lack of interest in their lovely syrup until their new queen gets going. Bear it in mind before taking feeders away altogether if some seem slow.

October

This year (2015), in some upland parts anyway, the ivy has been a damp squib so even more important to check early that the bees have enough stores  to carry them through the winter.

October is the last month for the beekeeper to realistically feed the bees up for the winter – weather depending.

As the temperatures begin to fall regularly below 15 degrees, the populations of bees dwindle and those that are left spend more of their time clustered so feeding syrup is no longer an option. Eventually a point is reached where it is taxing to ask winter bees to ripen stores – remember these are the bees that have to go through to March – best not to wear them out.

Any hives that are still light could be bolstered with some frames of stores from elsewhere.

If there is a mid-winter stores crisis – fondant can be applied.

Gales

A rock on a hive might keep the roof on in a gale but if the stand is toppled the hive will burst asunder and the bees will be exposed to the weather so rope or strap your hives if possible.

Even if the hive is knocked off the stand by livestock a rope will keep the boxes together and perhaps save the bees till after you’ve surfaced after christmas.

Hive Stands

While hives can be happily stood on low stands for the summer it is better if you can, to get them up onto high stands for the winter. Remove tall weeds from around and under the hives to allow a free flow of air  – bees do not thrive in damp conditions. Chalkbrood does though!

Check for rot in your stands and exchange for sound ones now. Drag the rotten stuff home to dry, ready for repair and wood preservative of your choice.

Mice

They say a mouse has the ability to uncouple the plates of bone in its skull and flatten its head to pass though holes bigger than the thickness of a pencil! Any entrances thicker than that will need mouseguards. A mouseguard is a strip of metal perforated with bee-sized holes which can be pinned over the entrance to prevent mouse invasions.

Mice can destroy a hive of bees in the winter.

Click here for Bees and Michaelmas

Click here for winter feeding of bees

Click here for How to Winter your Apidea

Click here for How to Feed a Wintering Apidea

Copyright © Beespoke.info, 2015. All Rights Reserved.

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 and 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 – winter and summer.

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

Michaelmas Traditions

Falling on the 29th September close to the autumn equinox, Michaelmas marks the end of the old agricultural year and the beginning of a new one. It is the time when the harvest is in (or should be in) and when farmers traditionally pay their debts and renew their leases.

In days of yore, after the harvest, the geese were turned out into the stubble fields to fatten up on the fallen grains of wheat or barley and one of them would be killed and eaten to celebrate Michaelmas. Hence its other name – Goose day.

Hence also the header here. It is by the Scottish painter James Guthrie who painted it in 1883 when he was just 23. It is called ‘To Pastures New’ and hangs in the Aberdeen Art Gallery. That looks like a September sky don’t it though? And the little girl has her hat, shawl and boots on. I think she’s propelling those geese to the stubble fields.

Presumably the geese would go in after the gleaners. The gleaners would be sent in to pick up the ears and grains missed by the harvesters. This picture below is ‘The Gleaners’, painted in 1857 by Jean-François Millet. It hangs in Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Click it for full size image.

Now that’d wreck yer back I’d say!

‘But what about the bees?’ says you…

Michaelmas for the beekeeper, is more or less the same as for the farmer. The end of the beekeeping year comes with the honey harvest and preparations for the next year start with wintering. You need to have your winter preparations more or less complete by Michaelmas. Your bees should certainly be fed and treated for Varroa.

Temperature and Population Effects

The Autumn equinox has passed so the nights will be getting longer and colder from now and the days shorter and they’ll be colder too. All the way to Christmas and beyond.

Each time the temperature drops below 15 degrees centigrade the bees begin to cluster and become less and less active. This is why your Apiguard won’t work below 15 degrees so you’d better hope you’ve treated them by now.

They have also evicted their drones by now so they don’t have those lovely big fat boys to help keep them warm either.

The populations of worker bees in the hives are dwindling rapidly so what with that and the colder weather, it becomes more and more difficult for them to process syrup and ripen it for storage. Hence a strong syrup (2:1) or special bee feed such as Ambrosia for autumn feeding – less water for the bees to get rid of.

Remove it if they won’t take it down – it’s a big chilly thing to leave in a bee hive even if it doesn’t ferment. If they’re still a bit light you may need to give them fondant mid-winter.

Michaelmas Forage

There is very little floral forage out there for the bees at Michaelmas – just the ivy, the dregs of the heather and some autumn garden plants such as Mahonia or the Michaelmas daisies.  And there is always the gorse of course.

• Ivy pollen is yellow
• Bell heather is whiteish
• Ling heather is pale beige
• Gorse is orange/brown

The bees can bring in a surplus of ivy nectar if mild weather and the ivy flowers coincide but only pollen and a little nectar from the rest.

Last year the ivy came into bloom in August and flowered all the way to November. The bees were strong after that fabulous summer of 2014 – will we ever forget it – and they worked the ivy well so they went into winter strong and well fed. A crop of ivy honey was almost inevitable and created its own problems this spring – but don’t start me.

If spells of mild weather coincide with the ivy – we will know all about it. Perhaps prepare for a crop of ivy honey.

Click here for how to take a crop of ivy honey.

This year (2015) however, flowering is very late and it looks like there could be very little ivy honey this year.  All the more important they are well fed beforehand – although the ivy is reasonably reliable it is not to be depended on.

Michaelmas daisies

These are Michaelmas daisies. I just noticed they were coming out today – 29th September. Perhaps that’s where they get their name! The bees visit these for pollen and on a sunny autumn day they’ll be alive with bees.

Fail to Prepare – Prepare to Fail

It can be difficult to summon the energy to prepare the bees properly for the winter but wintering prepares the ground for spring. Remember – the better you prepare your bees for the winter, the more you will have for next year.

Click here for How to Prepare for Winter

Click here for Winter Feeding of Bees

Click here for Which Feeder

Click here for How to Winter your Apidea

Click here for how to feed a wintering apidea

Click here for mid-winter feeding of bees

Click here for mid-winter oxalic acid Varroa treatment

Copyright © Beespoke.info, 2015.  All Rights Reserved.

Most advice is to set the Apidea over a nuc and unite the two but this often comes to one sort of sticky end or another and is less viable when you have a number of them.

Here’s a neat alternative:

The Quandry

At the tail-end of last year’s queen-rearing season I found myself with a bunch of sad, queenless and broodless Apideas and one queen-right Apidea with no home to go to.

It occurred to me that the solution was staring me in the face. This method is more or less the same we use to create Apideas and hinges on the ‘Third Box Principle’ of uniting bees.

Click here for Apidea Instructions.

Click here for more on the Third Box Principle.

Here’s what to do…

• Find the queen and put her into a matchbox;
• Gently shake all of the bees out of all of the Apideas into a plastic bucket spraying them lightly with water;
• Find a nuc box, block the entrance with foam then add two frames of stores, a frame of pollen and leave a space in the middle;
• Pour the bucket of bees into the space, give them another bit of a spray if they’re coming up at you;
• Drop the queen in on top of them then carefully add two empty, drawn frames into the space;
• If you are worried about your queen, cage her first and suspend the cage between the middle frames;
• Close it up and take it away;
• You can feed it but be careful – this is the robbing season.

As I say, that’s what I did last year. That nuc came steaming through the winter and is now into a full box. Of course I could have been just lucky but I’ll try it again and let you know how I get on.

An alternative is to overwinter a queenright Apidea and decant it into a nuc in the spring.

Click here for more on how to overwinter an Apidea

Copyright © Beespoke.info, 2015.  All Rights Reserved.

• 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

Copyright © Beespoke.info, 2015. All Rights Reserved.

Heather honey is much sought-after (lovely heather honey recipe here) and commands a great price but to get a crop is not easy so the beekeeper needs to know about the Known Unknowns and Known Knowns. Not to mention the Unknown Unknowns.

The Known Unknowns

There are factors the beekeeper knows about and knows he can’t do anything about – basically the heather and the weather:

• Heather is flakey – it doesn’t always yield nectar;
• Even if the heather does yield – the weather in the hills at the end of summer can be flakey too.

The Unknown Unknowns

There are also factors he doesn’t know he doesn’t know about. Heather is just part of a complex ecosystem consisting of all sorts of things you might not  have heard of, some or all of which may have profound effects on the honey flow or lack or it. Click here for more on the Calluna vulgaris ecosystem.

The Known Knowns

But there are things the beekeeper can do to maximise the chances of a crop despite the known unknowns: – pay special attention to the known knowns:

• Queen age;
• Colony size;
• Hive material;
• Feed;
• Exclude the excluder;
• Foundation;
• Lowland sites vs Upland sites.

Queen Age

Queens need to be young – preferably mated in June of the same year. Such queens will be just building up and will expand the brood nest in response to a flow and honey will be readily packed into the super. This expansion of the brood nest will also provide the colony with a strong, young cohort of workers to take them through the winter.

Older queens, even one-year olds, may have been laying since March and are tired. Their brood nests will be contracting and the workers will be getting ready for winter; any heather honey brought in will be packed into the brood box rather than up in the super. Bringing in a crop of heather honey will also deplete the winter bees and the colony under a tired queen will not be able to replace them. This is probably behind the notion that heather honey is bad for winter bees.

Colony Size

The colony needs to be as strong as possible. The best bet is to unite two colonies then clear them into a single National brood box and, if necessary, requeen with a young queen. If you use Snelgrove Boards then these management methods will provide you with colonies in perfect condition under new queens ripe for the heather. Click here for more on Snelgrove

Commercial boxes are too big for Irish conditions and you will almost certainly find most of your heather crop downstairs in that enormous brood box.

Don’t be greedy. Only put one super on at a time. If you put two on, not only are you asking for more than you are likely to get but also you are putting a great big draughty attic above the bees when what they need is warmth to draw that lovely white heather wax. And you do want your honey capped don’t you? If there is a huge flow you can always add another super later.

Hive Material

Polystyrene hives have advantages and they have disadvantages but for the heather they’re perfect because they are so warm. This is important because it can be cold in the hills and the bees need warmth to draw wax and ripen the honey. More on hives and materials here.

Feed

Feed the bees really well for heather – you want them stuffed to the gunwales. Remember they can be up in the hills for up to 6 weeks and it might rain for the duration. I’ve known this to happen and brought them back pitifully light, with no brood at all and not a grain of pollen.

So give them 2 gallons of strong syrup or 7 litres of Ambrosia or other beefeed before you put the supers on. That way they will pack it down into the brood chamber filling every cell so if there’s heather then it has nowhere to go except upstairs.

Whether you feed them at home before you take them to the hills or take them to the hills and feed them up there is entirely up to you – it’s as broad as it is long. That said – if it turns cold in the hills – and it often does – they probably won’t take their lovely syrup down. Best feed them as soon as possible after removing your summer honey.

Exclude the excluder

You shouldn’t need a queen excluder – especially if you have fed them well and the bees have a good arc of honey across the top of the brood nest – the queen will be unlikely to cross this barrier unless seriously disturbed.

Instead, spread a square of plastic film/polythene across the top bars of the brood box leaving about an inch all the way round. This will give the bees free access to the super and the queen is unlikely to come up round the edges.

If you are uneasy or jinxed put the excluder on – it just doesn’t give the bees such easy access and they may be reluctant to go up into the supers. In which case remove it till they go up then replace it – make sure the queen is downstairs or you’ll be spitting fire.

Foundation

Use unwired thin foundation for cut-comb honey but trim off a half inch strip so there is a gap above the bottom bars of the frame. This ultra-thin foundation stretches in the heat of the hive and if you don’t trim it, it will buckle where it comes up against the bottom bars of the frames and you’ll have an unsightly pleat in your lovely honeycomb.

You can use wired foundation if you like, or just put your summer supers on straight after extraction. However, you won’t be able to extract it and will either have to cut the comb and wires from the frames or scrape the honey off the midrib with one of those sturdy scrapers for taking the ice of windscreens and then shove the lot through a heather press. Either way – it’s a terrible waste – good, drawn supers are valuable.

Another alternative is to simply give the bees a 1 or 2 inch starter strip of foundation. If there is a flow, they will draw comb down from these. If there isn’t – nothing is lost. However, they will be burning precious heather honey to make more wax so if you give them foundation of some description – again you are maximising your potential honey crop.

Lowland vs Upland Heather Sites

There are two sorts of heather sites – Upland and Lowland.

Upland sites are up there in the hills where the bees have their feet in the heather. The first obvious advantage is that they are right there in the crop. The second advantage is that the higher up they are the more pure your crop is likely to be and the less likely you are to get ivy, late blackberry or fireweed mixed in with your crop. Pure heather honey is beautiful beyond compare and furthermore – it doesn’t granulate so is perfect for cut comb.

There are disadvantages though. The weather can be very bad up there – windy and wet – and bee-casualties are high. Such sites are seasonal and as such you are faced with moving bees all at once at the end of the summer when you are probably running out of energy and may have to cope with your main summer honey crop all at the same time. There is a lot of work involved in moving bees – especially if you want to do it properly.

Lowland sites are (obviously) sited down the hill in the balmier conditions but within reach of the heather. They have the advantage that they can be used the whole summer long so you can be getting your bees ready for the heather without having to move them. However, if the blackberry is late and/or the ivy is early you will not get a pure crop. Lowland sites can be much warmer and sheltered so the bees might get up earlier in the morning and work later but they are almost certainly going to have further to fly – however, it’s all downhill on the home flight.

The other type of lowland site is bog heather. I have to confess I don’t know much about bog heather honey but it is almost certainly less pure than hill heather and will contain bell heather (Erica spp.) as well as Calluna. Also, bog heather is even flakier than hill heather. More of this in the upcoming piece on heather ecology.

In a nutshell…

Upland sites are difficult: they are hard to find, access can be challenging, security can be a problem and bees need to be moved.

Lowland sites are easier in all respects but the honey is less likely to be pure.

We’ve covered the Known Unknowns and Known Knowns but to really get to the bottom of heather you need to know about the Unknown Unknowns – click here for Heather Ecology and the Unknown Unknowns.

Click here for how to prepare colonies for the heather

Click here for the heather ecosystem

Click here for more on good heather sites

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