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. 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 – summer and winter.

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

Christmas

Nobody knows the day or the month when Jesus Christ was actually born. However, the Feast of the Annunciation falls on the 25th March which is when Christians celebrate the day Gabriel called on Mary to tell her she was to be the mother of the son of God.

Imagine that!

Christmas is exactly 9 months after the Feast of the Annunciation. That’s biology for you.

Christmas also coincides approximately with the Winter Solstice on 22nd December. Also known as The Shortest Day. Now there’s cause to celebrate.

Christmas Traditions

You don’t need me to tell you about the ‘traditions’ of Christmas. Suffice to say, it is cruel that we have to bear it in the middle of the darkest, wettest and most depressing time of the year. It’s enough to push you over the edge!

We can never really know what Jesus might think about Christmas traditions, However, we do know what happened when he discovered the merchants had set up shop in the temple, so we can guess:

‘But what about the bees?’ says you…

Us beekeepers are fortunate because there is a lot of stuff out there to be getting on with at christmas.

Treat them

The bees should have been fed and treated for Varroa after the honey was extracted at the end of summer. However, midwinter is the time when the queen bees should be off lay and there should be a short broodless period which is ideal for a backup treatment with Oxalic acid. I say should be because it is not always the case especially in a mild year or where they ivy bloomed late. So long as there has been a bit of cold weather – below 15 degrees – and a decent interval since you last saw yellow ivy pollen going in to the hives – Christmas should be perfect.

Click here for how to do that.

Click here for more about Oxalic acid for Beekeepers.

I should add that midwinter treatment may not be necessary if you are confident that the conditions in autumn were good enough to allow your thymol/MAQS to work properly.

Feed them

While you are out there – check the feed status of your bees. Heft the hives to assess the weight and if they seem light put some fondant on. It won’t do any harm and if they need it later – it’s there.

If the bees seem weak and are clustering close to the top of the frames you could choose to remove the crownboard and place the fondant directly onto the bees where they will find it easily. If you do this – add an eke and pack the space around the fondant with old jumpers, sacking or some other cosy stuff.

Don’t put pollen substitute on yet – too early – wait for February.

Apiary Watch

Make sure the hive roofs are weighted down with stones or tied with ropes – winter has hardly started and there could be gales. And there could be animals.

Maintenance

Mend broken equipment. Treat spare boxes if they need it. Make up new stuff but don’t put wax into new frames till spring or it will just lose its fragrance and go all crispy then the bees won’t work it properly – they’ll draw all that abstract stuff with holes and buttresses.

All your equipment, supers, spare brood boxes etc could all do with a good scrape down – propolis flakes off well in the cold weather.  Save all the little bits of beeswax you will be amazed how it mounts up.

Click here for how to tackle your beeswax mountain.

Strip down old frames with black, knackered or holy wax. Holy wax is comb with holes in it. Burn the really black horrible wax – use if for lighting fires that’s the only thing it’s good for.

Save the paler, cleaner wax and render it:

Click here for how to render beeswax.

Then do something interesting with it but take care not to set fire to yourself:

Click here for beeswax polish recipe

Click here for beeswax lipbalm recipe

Click here for beeswax handcream recipe

Click here for candle making

Click here for soap making

Wax Moth

If you are storing used brood frames and you know you have a  wax moth problem you might like to take this opportunity to treat them with acetic acid. Acetic acid is not the stuff you put on your chips – treat it with respect.

Click here for how to do that thing

There is also a biological control agent from Vita which uses a micro-organism to attack wax moth.  The product is called Certan and the micro-organism is called Bacillus thuringiensis.

Click here for Certan information

Christmas Forage

There is very little floral forage out there for the bees at Christmas. This year there is quite a lot of gorse in bloom. In some years there may be the dregs of the ivy. Also some winter garden plants such as Mahonia or even snowdrops.

• Ivy pollen is yellow
• Gorse is orange/brown
• Snowdrops pollen is orange/brown too
• Click here for more about ivy
• Click here for how to take a crop of ivy honey.

Happy New Year!

Copyright © Beespoke.info, 2017.  All Rights Reserved.

So which feeder?

Types of Feeder

Bee feeders fall into one of two categories:

• Rapid feeders
• Contact feeders

Rapid Feeders

Rapid feeders are used to get feed (syrup or inverted sugar bee feed) into the bees as quickly as possible – generally after the removal of the honey harvest and/or in the autumn before winter sets in. A strong 2:1 syrup is easier for the bees to ripen – less water for them to remove. Bee feeds such as Ambrosia are thicker still and the inverted sugar is better for the bees.

Mostly, the design is that of a waterproof box with the same horizontal dimensions as the hive type so it can sit like a super – over the brood box and under the roof. These feeders have the greater feed capacity. There are various clever ways of admitting bees and preventing them from drowning.

Types of Rapid Feeder

There are many different designs and materials to choose from but they can be expensive to buy and difficult to make. Here’s a selection:

Miller feeders and Ashforth or Rowse-Miller feeders

The best of these feeders have a capacity of about 2.5 gallons so a winter feed can be given in one go.

They each have feeding gallery consisting of a slot running the complete width of the box to allow many bees up into the feeder where cunningly spaced baffles prevent them from drowning.

There should also be a beespace underneath which allows the feeder to be seated quickly and properly atop the brood box without crushing bees and avoiding the need to scrape off every little knob of beeswax.

If there is no bee space, these feeders will need to be  carefully set so the feed slot lines up correctly to allow bees access especially if you are using castellations.

Miller Feeder

A Miller feeder has the feeding gallery running across the centre of the box with feed chamber each side. These feeders are the most rapid of all rapid feeders because each of the two chambers has its own 420mm long feeding gallery – that’s 840mm altogether. If you allow a generous 4mm per bee that’s space for 210 feeding bees at any one time.

Ashforth Feeder

The Ashforth feeder has the feeding gallery at one side so there is only one feed chamber and only 420mm of feeding space. That’s 105 bees at any one time.

Advantages

• Robber proof.
• Hold a full winter feed in one go.
• Will accommodate the highest number of feeding bees at any one time.
• Very fast.

Disadvantages

• Expensive to buy and quite difficult to make;
• Wooden ones need maintenance unless they are cedar.

Polystyrene is available and can be cheaper than wooden alternative but there are particular snags with these:

• Can  be flimsy;
• May not be as compatible with conventional hives as you might think;
• May not have bee space underneath.

Budget Plastic Rapid Feeders

Plastic rapid feeders are now on the market. They have evolved from a design originated by Brother Adam and incorporate a centrally placed conical, access chimney topped with a diving bell-like cap which allows the bees up and at the feed without them drowning.

They come in two sizes  6 litre/10.5 pint rectangular round 2.25 litre/4 pint. Both designs can be placed on top of a standard crownboard over the feed hole.

The larger size can accommodate up to 85 bees feeding at one time and the smaller one only about 50 so neither of them is anywhere near as rapid as the Miller or Ashforth feeders. Only relatively rapid!

Advantages

• The advantage of these feeders is they are lightweight and cheap.
• They are small enough that you can keep a few tucked away in the van at all times just in case.

Disadvantages

• The larger of these feeders is not quite big enough to give a full winter feed so would need to be topped up;
• The smaller one would need to be topped up several times and if you let the feed run out in between top ups – you’ll need to prime it again;
• Another possible disadvantage, unless you have lovely deep roofs is that these feeders need to be placed inside an empty super.

Frame Feeders

Another type of rapid feeder is the frame feeder. A frame feeder, as the name suggests is a narrow box shaped like a frame and designed to sit inside the brood box. Frame feeders are equipped with a raft-like float that sits inside the feeder on top of the syrup and prevents the bees from drowning.

The interior dimensions allow for between 80 and 160 feeding bees – assuming the float hasn’t washed up tight against one side or the other and the bees are feeding from both sides. That’s quite fast!

Advantages

• As these feeders are tucked away inside the brood box they are less likely to attract the attentions of robbers;
• They are particularly useful for feeding nucs and observation hives.

Disadvantages

• Disruptive. The very small feed capacity plus the large number of possible feeding bees means these feeders need to be topped up often and this involves disturbing the bees each time.

Good Old Fashioned Bucket of Straw

This is the cheapest of all rapid feeders. Get a plastic bucket and sit it on the crownboard inside an eke – either an empty super or broodbox. Pour strong syrup into it till about three quarters full. Get a good double handful of straw and plunge it into the syrup then pull some sodden straws out and drape them over the lip of the bucket so they dangle into the feed hole. Primed thus, the bees will come up pretty quickly and soon drain the bucket. The straw will stop them from drowning. Don’t over-prime or you’ll have syrup running through the mesh floor and that will attract robbers.

Advantages

• Cheap and cheerful;
• Very fast feed-speed in good weather.

Disadvantages

• You’ll have to mess about with ekes;
• If the weather is chilly the bees will be unwilling to climb all that way up into the attic to feed.

Contact Feeders

Contact feeders can be used in autumn but they are better for spring or stimulative feeding.

Stimulative feeding is where you are trying to mimic a nectar flow and get the queen laying so you are aiming for a slowish drip feed with a weak 1:1 syrup.

They consist of a bucket or other container with a gauze window or perforations in the lid. When inverted over the feed hole in the crown board, the vacuum inside the container prevents syrup running out. A lid with a good airtight seal is essential. These feeders can be purchased in several different sizes or are easy enough to make at home.

According to Hooper they are called contact feeders because you can invert them directly over the top bars of the brood box. If you do this you will need an eke – obviously – and you will need to pack the space around the feeder with sacking or old jumpers.

Advantages

• Better for spring.

Disadvantages

• Prone to leak if not airtight or hive is sloping;
• Slow;
• Bees won’t use them in cold weather and may propolise them in a long cold spell.

Entrance Feeders

They are similar to contact feeders in that they consist of a container with a gauze window or perforations in the lid through which the bees can take syrup when the container is inverted. The container has an attachment so it can fit in the hive entrance like a baby’s dummy.  Entrance feeders are only of use in summer, or other warm weather, as bees will not otherwise leave the cluster, let alone the hive.

Advantages

• Don’t have to open hive and disturb the bees when checking levels or refilling.

Disadvantages

• Small capacity – need refilling regular and often;
• Can attract robbers and are difficult for the bees to defend being outside the hive;
• Bees will only use it when it’s warm and will not otherwise leave cluster.

Gravity and Feeding

When feeding bees check for slope. If the hive is sloping when the feeder is placed on top, gravity will act on the syrup and unless the feeder goes on the right way round it can leave a pool out of reach of the bees.

When using contact feeders the hive should be as level as possible as there can be dripping followed by trickling and it’ll seep out all over the place.

Take a marble with you – it’s smaller than a spirit level.

Before the days of mesh floors, it was recommended that hives always slope slightly to the front so water couldn’t run in or if it did get in – it could run out again.

If you have solid floors you should do this as bees hate damp but chalk brood and acarine love it.

Click here for more about wintering bees

Click here for Michaelmas, bees and wintering

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.

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.

by Dorothy Parker

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.

Of course neither begging nor borrowing is open to them but they know how to steal!

Once robbing has started it is very difficult to stop so the best thing to do is try and prevent it from starting.

Here’s how:

How to Prevent Robbing

• Close entrances down to a couple of inches (or less) as soon as the summer flows have stopped. The smaller the entrance the easier it is for the bees to defend it.  The wider the entrance the easier it is for robbing bees or wasps to slip in unnoticed and a habit is established ;
• Set up a wasp trap but set it up well away from your bees or it will just attract every wasp in town – don’t bait it with honey or you will find it full of your bees;
• Keep all doors and windows to your honey house tightly closed!
• When you feed your bees, feed in the evening so that more bees will have discovered the exact location of their feed during the night and have stopped hysterically doing the round dance;
• The round dance is the dance the bees do to tell each other that there is a huge quantity of this thick nourishing 2:1 syrup really really close to here. When bees witness this dance and receive a sample from the dancer they immediately rush out the door and try and get in next door or the door of the weakest hive;
• It’ s bad practice for disease prevention reasons – but if you deliberately set things out to be robbed make sure it is more than 100m from your hives or the bees will do the bloody round dance and all go robbing each other instead of the thing or things it is you want cleaned;
• Don’t go slopping feed about the place;
• Don’t go to the apiary with an open bucket of oozy beeswax scrapings all reeking of honey – the bees will go mad in quicksticks. Get a cover for your bucket and keep it covered;
• If you have weak colonies – turn them ‘the cold way’ for the robbing season and narrow the entrances to about half an inch. This way robbers at the entrance are facing down the centre frames of the nest – and all the bees are looking back at them! A weak colony set up ‘the warm way’ will not notice robbers slipping in through the entrance and running up the inside of the front wall;
• The cold way is where the box is placed on the floor so that the frames are perpendicular to the entrance block;
• The warm way is where the box is placed on the floor so that the frames are horizontal to the entrance block.

How to Stop Robbing

Once robbing has started your haven’t really got many options.

• You can bung the hive up and take it away;
• You can let the bees rob it out completely – then when they’ve stopped, quietly slip in some frames of feed from elsewhere before they starve;
• Using your imagination and whatever materials you may have at hand – build a little tunnel just one beespace wide and a couple of inches deep at the entrance. Robbers hate the thought of a long dark corridor. Seriously, this can work but only if you have the time, you like a challenge, have a particularly precious nuc and no other options.

Click here for more about wasps

If you’ve got something there I’ve missed – please add it here because it really is a scourge – there’s a contact form at the bottom of the page.

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.

… bees cannot live on honey alone. While the sugars in honey supply the bees’ energy needs, in addition they require the protein, fats, minerals and the miscellaneous dietary supplements found in pollen. The protein content of the pollen of different plants is variable but generally very high, containing amounts comparable with peas and beans (Witherell), or seeds and peanuts (Dietz).

Protein is important because it is the building material for growth and tissue repair. As a measure of the importance of the protein in pollen, it has been shown that the amount available to a colony influences the size and quantity of the emerging brood. In fact it has been calculated that the amount of pollen required to rear a bee – from the hatching of the egg to the emergence of the adult – is between 120 and 145mg.

But it doesn’t stop there because young bees continue to grow after emergence. On average, emerging bees contain 13% protein (Witherell) but by the time they are 5 days old, the heads, thoraxes and abdomens of young bees contain 93%, 38%,76%, more protein respectively than those of the newly emerged (Dietz). This huge increase is brought about by a massive consumption of pollen which is initiated within a very short time from emergence, perhaps as little as two hours, and rises to a peak at about 5-9 days old before gradually diminishing and eventually tailing off at 15-18 days (Dietz). However not all this protein intake is used in growth of the bee or development of the hypopharyngeal glands because it is on about the 3^rd day after emergence that the bees are directly employed in brood rearing, an activity that continues up until about the 13^th day (Gary) and involves the passing on of pollen-derived protein to larvae in bee milk.

During brood rearing, a nurse bee needs to digest about 10mg of pollen to produce 4mg of protein per day in brood food which is produced in the hypopharyngeal glands. The more protein that is available to the nurse bees either by concentration in, or sheer bulk of, pollen the more larvae a bee is able to feed.

The likely effects of a shortage of pollen in late summer and autumn are…

…that the amount of pollen the bees manage to store will be insufficient to take them through to April and the start of the season proper. The significance of this is that the queen perks up and starts to lay, albeit at a slow rate, very early in the spring and long before fresh pollen becomes available in any sort of quantity. At this time nurse bees need to increase their pollen intake to kick-start their hypopharygeal glands so that they will be able to feed the emerging brood. If the required pollen is not there, it could mean that the colony will be unable to feed the larvae properly resulting in small bees and a possible late start into the season.

The bottom line of all this could be a reduction in colony strength especially if spring, and summer for that matter, are delayed, poor or cancelled altogether. A late start to the season could also mean them failing to make the most of the early flows such as dandelion and even hawthorn. More generally it could leave the colony weakened and vulnerable to all of the assorted brutalities of nature.

This situation arose in the spring of 2013 which became very cold and continued forever. The effects of this were made worse because it followed a miserable autumn where the bees failed to work the ivy to any significant extent. And of course the autumn of 2012 followed the most disastrous summer for beekeeping in history with record breaking queen failure because of the atrocious, striped weather. But don’t get me started.

It is advisable to keep a stock of pollen supplement or substitute for situations such as this. In that terrible spring it was impossible to buy supplement or substitute because of course everybody was in the same boat. Click here for a recipe for pollen substitute from the Scottish Beekeepers but be careful to buy GM free ingredients.

 Some sources of pollen in Ireland …

… in this locality sources of pollen include:- Snowdrop, Crocus, winter Ericaceous heathers Hellebore, Gorse, Hazel, Willow, Dandelion, Currants black and white, Oilseed rape, Hawthorn, Apple, Pyracantha, Cotoneaster, Sycamore, Horse chestnut, Clover, Raspberry, Lime, Blackberry, Thistles, Ragwort, Knapweed, Native Ling and Bell heathers, Ivy, Mahonia.

Principal constituents of pollen…

…in addition to protein and lipids (fats) pollen contains:

• free amino acids;
• carbohydrates (sugars, starch and cellulose);
• minerals (calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, iron, sodium, potassium, aluminium, manganese, sulphur and copper);
• vitamins – pantothenic acid, nicotinic acid, thiamine, riboflavin, ascorbic acid and small amounts of vitamins D and E;
• enzymes and coenzymes;
• pigments xanthophyll and carotene;
• sterols (Witherell).

Because these ingredients are so variable between different pollens, it is thought that bees need a good mixture of pollens to be sure they are having a balanced diet.

An example of this could be bees in America where they tend to have single species diets for blocks of time throughout the year due to migratory beekeeping and very regimented agriculture. This is thought to be a contributory factor in Collony Collapse Disorder (CCD).

Click here for more on pollination.

References and Bibliography

Dietz,A. Nutrition of the Adult Honey Bee. In The Hive and the Honey Bee. Ed. Dadant and Sons. Dadant Publications. Illinois. USA. 1979.

Gary,N.E. Activities and Behaviour or Honey Bees. In The Hive and the Honey Bee. Ed. Dadant and Sons. Dadant Publications. Illinois. USA. 1979.

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

Witherell,P.C. Other Products of the Hive. In The Hive and the Honey Bee. Ed. Dadant and Sons. Dadant Publications. Illinois. USA. 1979.

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• 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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Once upon a time I used to keep mice. They don’t swarm but they are territorial and they do fight. If you try to introduce two mice, of any or either sex, by simply dropping one into the cage of the other they will fight. However, if you put the two of them together in a third cage they will get along like a house on fire. This is what I call ‘the third box principle’ and the same thing applies with bees.

Before we go any further I should state that the Third Box Principle is not an explanation of bee behaviour but it is a mental model which helps the beekeeper to ‘put a handle’ on what is observed. It is also a particularly helpful thing to know when you are in the thick of the latest bee conundrum and wondering what the hell to do next – it can give you extra options.

Here are some useful things to do with it:

Nucs

This is great when making up nucs. As you know, for a nuc you need a queen, 3 frames with brood on, 1 frame of stores and 1 frame with lots of pollen on it. Using the third box principle you can take frames of bees, pollen and stores from 1, 2, 3 or even 4 hives of bees to put into the nuc and they won’t fight. If you are afraid they will then just hold two frames together and watch them. If you want to put a queen in then it is probably best if you take her and the frame she is on and put her to one side of the nuc and then put another frame of her bees and brood next to her. Then fill the nuc with bees from several different hives. This has never failed with me.

Queen Rearing

If you are into queen rearing and want a really strong colony for your cell rearer then you can take a spare hive or two out with you to your out-apiaries fill it/them with frames of bees and brood taken from each of your strongest hives. Just make sure you know where your queens are! You can then quietly unite these boxes of confused bees with your rearer hives using the newspaper method.

Re-queening

This can also be used in requeening – which can be ticklish enough. If you have your new queen in a nuc:

• Move the nuc to one side:
• Place an empty, full size box and floor in its place;
• Transfer all the frames from nuc to the back of the full size box;
• Fill the space with bees from another queenless hive or bees you have gathered as per the method above.

This will work also work with bees which have resorted to laying workers.

Apideas

You can also use it combine Apideas, say one with a laying queen and two that you have removed the queens from – 9 frames in all. In this case you’ll  need a fourth box: a fresh empty Apidea plus an empty Apidea super.

Do this on the site of the queen right Apidea.

• Move the queen-right Apidea to one side and put the fresh empty box in it’s place without the feeder;
• Load the 3 frames, including the queen into the fresh box then fill the   remaining two spaces (where the feeder isn’t) with two frames and the adhering bees from one of the queenless Apideas;
• Set the super (extension – whatdoyoucallit) in place and fill it with the remaining frames and bees from the queenless apideas;
• Spray any bees remaining in the apideas with water, gently tumble them into a corner and pour them into the new double decker;
• Put an empty frame in the remaining space;
• Walk away and don’t look back.

Test it

If you are in doubt about this – don’t take my word for it. It works with my  bees but it might not work with yours and there are always exceptions. So test it – get your third box and put a couple of frames into it from different hives – but not too close together – then watch as you push them towards each other…

And always be aware of where your queen/s is/are!

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