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

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

Bees can be active at quite low temperatures so if you’re a bit on the timid side and your bees are on the feisty side – avail of a veil. But go easy on the smoke.

Storm Damage

You just need to check that the hives have not been demolished by falling trees, that the roofs are still in place and that the bees still have enough stores. Disturb them as little as possible. If you haven’t already done so – rope the hives. This will keep the roofs on and if the hives get toppled by storms or livestock it will help hold them together and give the bees a chance of surviving till your next visit.

Check the Stores

To test they have enough stores quietly take off the roof then put a hand under the floor and gently lift or ‘heft’ from the back just enough to test the weight.

Feeding Fondant

If you think they feel light, carefully take a look under whatever you have covered the feed hole with and if the bees are visible place a cake of fondant over the hole – press it through a bit if you can. If you have Ambrosia or other brand of bee-feed, cut a window in the package and slap it on. If you are using baker’s or homemade fondant, first be sure it only contains sugar and/or honey because sometimes there are additives then cover it with something like an upturned plastic tub or a sheet of polythene/clingfilm or it will dry out.

If you think they might be starving and/or too weak to come up to feed or if they are in a part of the hive away from the feed hole whichever way you turn the crownboard, then you will need to place the fondant directly in contact with the bees. Either:

• Remove the crownboard altogether, put the fondant directly over the bees on the top bars then pack old sacks, or socks or your old pullovers around the fondant inside the roof;
• Or place a lump of fondant over the feed-hole but flatten another piece so it will sit directly on the top bars touching the bees and bridging the beespace under the crownboard to draw them up.

You’d be amazed how quickly bees recover with a bit of feeding.

Don’t give pollen substitute yet – wait till February.

Don’t, whatever you do, feed syrup during the winter months.

Invasions

The other things you should check is that the entrance is still clear and has not been blocked with dead bees. Also check for signs of invasion by animals such as rats, or woodpeckers if you are in England – this will be obvious from the outside – there will be a bloody great hole. This is particularly possible with poly hives or wooden hives in a state of advancing decrepitude.

Mice

Mouse invasion is less obvious but should not happen so long as your entrances are no taller than the average biro. If they are you should have them covered with mouseguards. A mouseguard is a sheet of galvanised with holes punched into it which mice can’t squeeze through. Mice, by the way can uncouple the bones in their skullls and flatten their heads!

Click here for more about wintering bees

Click here for Michaelmas, bees and wintering

Click here for Which Feeder

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, 2014.  All Rights Reserved.

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

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

Usually this means constructing a special stand which will accommodate the scales upside-down over a series of mirrors set like a periscope so the daily change of weight can be read from above. If you are manually inept or technologically minded or both, it is possible to buy a special solar-powered, digital scale hive which will allow you to monitor your bees from a distance – probably via a satellite – the mind boggles!

Below is a graph of the data collected from my scale hive over the past 8 years – click it for a better view:

As you can see, 2013 was an extraordinary year when everything went right – it’s the year we will all look back on with misty eyes. I’m doing it already!

But I digress, here are four reasons why you would set up a scale hive:

1. Interest;
2. To detect and record the date and magnitude of a honey flow;
3. To keep an eye on the rate of development and the state of the stores in spring;
4. To see when that swarm left – a great big prime swarm might weigh 5lbs!

During a flow it is interesting to compare an evening reading with the following morning to see just how much water the bees have managed to evaporate overnight.

If you want to set one up – now is the time!

Click here for how to make your own scale hive

Click here for Remote Hive Monitoring

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

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.

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

It has various causes:

• Poor quality winter food such as insufficiently ripened, or ‘wet’ honey;
• Granulated honey.  In winter, the physical properties of granulated honey can lead to a situation where the individual crystals are surrounded by liquid honey which is very much wetter than it otherwise would be.

In both these cases, if the moisture content of the available stores rises above 20% the honey can start to ferment and the presence of yeasts and other fungi could be a contributory factor to dysentery. Either way, there is a build-up of fluid in the gut as in an upset stomach – like if you were to eat too much of something your body wanted rid of quickly.

Another cause of dysentery is stress. Sometimes, in cases of queen failure or if you split a colony and one half is weak you will find signs of what looks like dysentery – or am I wrong there… any of you Bots or Crawlers out there like to put me right on that one?

Signs or Symptoms

In winter or otherwise foul weather, because the bees cannot get out for a crap and because, being clean little creatures, they hold it and they hold it till they’re nearly bursting.  Sometimes they’ll just go and do it in the hive and you’ll find it all over the top bars of the frames. Other times, if they manage to hold on till the weather does let them out they’re so full they can hardly fly. This is when we find the front of the hive spattered with bee muck.

Anyway, dysentery is not Nosema but you can see how the former would spread the latter.

Treatment

There is no treatment as such but there are various things you can do to try and prevent it.

Prevention

Hooper advises feeding two buckets of strong syrup every autumn, whether the bees need it or not, on the grounds that this will then be stored closest to the centre of the nest and as a consequence will be used before any granulated honey and this will hopefully take them into the spring and better weather. That seems like sound advice to me.

Feeding sugar syrup in the autumn while the bees are working the ivy also has the effect of ‘diluting’ the ivy nectar and preventing it from granulating with as much enthusiasm.

If stress is the cause then,  if possible, remove the cause of the stress.

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

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.

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

However this is not always the case and December and January are months when the beekeeper needs to keep an eye on the winter stores. It is not possible to feed bees with syrup in the winter because they are simply unable to ripen it so instead if the hives seem light and the bees are clustered close to the top of the frames it will do no harm to put a lump of fondant over the feed hole in the crown board and cover it with a sheet of plastic to stop it from going hard.

If they seem on the edge of extinction, fondant should be placed directly onto the bees. You need to use your imagination and/or ingenuity here if the bees are not directly beneath a feed hole. It may be possible to turn the crownboard so that they are, or fondant can be flattened to a patty which can be placed under the crownboard.

Alternative place an eke on the brood box, then a cake of fondant covered in plastic is placed directly on the bees and the eke is filled up with old jumpers, blankets or sacking and the crownboard is put onto the eke.

Swienty are now selling 15kg blocks of Apifondant which can be set directly over the bees inside an eke as described above. Click here for details of those things

In February you might like to consider giving the bees a pollen supplement such as Neopoll which will give them an early boost. This is especially useful if you are considering taking bees to the oilseed rape as it should prompt the colony into early build-up. Click here for details of Neopoll from Swienty.

You can feed a light 1:1 (1kg:1litre or 1lb:1pint) sugar syrup from St.Patrick’s day onwards using a contact feeder. If you are using a specially prepared beefeed such as Ambrosia you could water this down with a little water for spring feeding.

Click here for how to prepare Wintering Bees

Click here for Michaelmas, bees and wintering

Click here for Which Feeder

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.