It has been a while since the last update, but we have managed to get access to the bees again, and they’re all still alive, though some probably shouldn’t be.
One of the nucleus boxes (a sort of small hive), where we harboured some late queen cells last year in forlorn hope of something, has a few bees left and a drone-laying queen (that’s a bad thing). The other may or may not have a new queen in it, but we’ve not seen evidence of one yet, and it’s been a longer while than it would have normally taken.
The three main colonies, however, seem as busy and active as ever, which I like to think of as a tribute to my talents. Though it might be in spite of them. For there have been things to be done, and I’ve botched at least one of them. First, however, some didactic background:
The most important aspect of the craft of beekeeping is, by definition, not losing the bees. It’s also arguably the most awkward and, possibly, the most controversial. The provision of an attractive, secure, sheltered, clean, tidy and well-stocked home is not enough. Nor is mere expenditure. Bees are, albeit for sound biological reasons, both demanding and fickle, and we must also satisfy their biological urges if we’re to benefit from their presence. Given that, you might think we can learn more about beekeeping from the divorce courts than from libraries.
And you might very well be right. Despite the pain and the tedium and the effort and the expense, most beekeepers persist, as do, by a small margin, most marriages. The key to success in both is the ability to change one’s mind in response to circumstance. The rewards differ, slightly, of course. But both marriage and beekeeping pass the time and that, for most, is what life is all about. Like travellers at an inn, as Pessoa wrote, we wait for the coach from the abyss, and spend the hours as best we can.
At this time of year, those hours are usually spent looking for queens and queen cells through heavy veils and sweat-streaked spectacles. The chief part of swarm control involves the inspection of every frame in every brood box every week. That might not sound burdensome, but without shaking the bees off the frames, you won’t see the queen cells and, if you shake the bees off the frames, you won’t see the queen and are likely to damage any queen cells. For the practical beekeeper, as opposed to the book author, this means inspections take twice as long as usual, are often inconclusive and, given it’s April, frequently interrupted by showers which, in as many cases as not, mean starting again when they’ve stopped, or hoping you’ll find the time (and dry enough shoes) to make the tedious trudge to the apiary again before something dreadful happens in order to start the whole business from scratch. If there is good news, it’s that in April the bees are only half-way through the build up, so there are only half as many bees in the boxes as there will be in July. The bad news is, with the weather being glum, they’re all at home and grumpy.
However, even if queens and queen cells can be found (or evidence of their absence), that’s only half the battle. The next thing is to decide what to do and do it. Swarm control (and/or prevention, depending on whether you’re taking beekeeping exams or not), is a wonderful art involving several complicated methods, based on competing assumptions about bee biology, most of which require rare and expensive equipment, usually in several sizes. Some of them work, some of the time, apparently, but nobody can tell you which.
A Snelgrove Board
Needless to say, we’ve found queen cells more often than queens. Partially as a result of that, I’ve retrospectively decided that one of the methods we’re almost going to use is something a bit like a modified version of one of Snelgrove’s methods (Snelgrove being the beekeeper who thought it up). There are about nine versions of the Snelgrove method, to be used according to taste and personal experience in the case of anyone familiar with more than one of them, or at random by anyone else. All of them, however, like most swarm control methods, require the separation of queen and queen cells, which is why, whichever method we’ve chosen, London’s beekeepers are, in between thunderstorms, up to our soggy noses in grumpy bees.
Regarding the hive I have in mind, things started very differently. For reasons that seemed good last Sunday, we shook all the bees (including the queen, I hope), into two brood boxes at the bottom of the hive, with a small amount of sealed brood, on freshish foundation. All the newer brood (eggs, unsealed and most of the sealed brood) is in the supers at the top of the hive, above the queen excluder. So, in a very real sense, we’ve separated the queen and flying bees from the brood and the nurse bees, which is the chief aim in most swarm control methods. If we’re lucky, given it’s a large, well-stocked hive, the bees upstairs should start making queen cells on their own behalf without the benefit of a board. If they don’t, we can always put a Snelgrove board in. But, for the moment, they have a lot of work to do in drawing out new comb, which should stop them being inconvenient for a few days, at least, and the flying bees should have plenty of space to leave their forage near the bottom of the stack.
Experienced beekeepers may have worked out that this situation doesn’t always arise as the result of careful thought. Brood only gets into supers if you’ve done something unorthodox. Such as when, after a month of finding the queen in the wrong box, you get bored of trying to do a Bailey frame exchange, attempt to restrict the queen to the new brood box and miss. I don’t mean to be more discouraging than grim reality would warrant, but I cannot remember any time, in ten years of playing at beekeeping, that I have got a Bailey frame exchange to work. It looks good in theory, but so does switching gas supplier.
Admittedly, to get the exact results described, a degree of carelessness was also necessary. In theory, when you need to ensure the queen is in a particular place, the accepted method is to find the queen, pop her into a cage (or move the frame she’s on to a place of isolated safety), reconfigure what needs reconfiguring and then run the queen (or replace the frame she’s on) to where you want her. But that assumes you can find the queen, which is by no means certain. The quicker way is to shake all the bees into where you want the queen, assume she’s gone in with the rest of them and slap a queen excluder on top. This is a bit like a shook swarm, but without the precautionary steps or good intentions, and you do run the risk of having the queen, through bad luck or ill will, turning up in the wrong place. Which is what happened.
If you have found any of this confusing, I am sorry. I could have just written that we did a Bailey that didn’t work and a shook swarm that went wrong, and our next trick is something that might be a Snelgrove. But that might suggest a degree of ineptitude that might not be entirely warranted. It might also suggest that situations like this are unusual or abnormal. The truth is that beekeeping is often messy and awkward.
That’s not surprising. Unlike less valiant mortals, whether athletes or gardeners, beauticians or yogacists, philosophers or priests, beekeepers routinely pit their hands and wits against the vast, ungrateful conspiracy of nature in an often futile quest for miserable quantities of what’s only arguably the sweetest of prizes. And that’s bound to be messy.
