Back to Bees

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.

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Spring

Since the snowy excitement of last month, we’ve had a heatwave, some rain and, now,  sunshine. The tree outside my window is vigorously preparing a new crop of leaves to capture the life-giving rays and restore some useful gloom to my squalid lodgings. But if I were it, I wouldn’t bother. For, in spite of rising sap and bursting buds, a planning application has been lodged demanding, in almost as many words,  its stump on a plate.

There is a lesson in that somewhere. Perhaps it’s just the unfailing truth that, whatever we think the future holds, the chances are it won’t. And as for trees, so for bees.

That’s been particularly the case for the last few weeks, as the Brockwell Park Community Greenhouses Regeneration Project has trundled into it’s final inconvenient phase which has both denied us access to our precious little charges and, almost inevitably, over-run. Moreover, as rain put our  final Sunday out of use, we’ve not seen the bees for three whole weeks, and that’s given us a lot of time for worrying.

We took some precautionary measures before our exclusion, adding a little more fondant in case the weather resumed its normal springtime flavour. But it hasn’t. And that raises the prospect of swarming.

It is a bit early for swarming. But that’s what we thought when, at the end of February, we found our little nucleus box curiously short of bees, but in possession of a charged, but unsealed, queen cell. We found only one, so closed it all up  the hive and went away to read our books (not to much avail). I’m not convinced they’ve swarmed, but I’m in the minority.

It was, admittedly, unseasonably warm for the end of February, and that, combined with s regular source of food (albeit from our fondant rather than the blossomy benificence nature), persuaded them that springtime had happened. This is, according to older and potentially wiser beekeepers, a risk.  Leading them on with easy sugar risks turning their minds from wintry thrift to sultry reproduction, and the sensuous combination of tepid air and a bucket of fondant does for bees what a hot-tub and a pitcher of lager does for humans.

The solution to this, according to the sages, is to feed only intermittently through early spring, in the hope that waving the shroud of imminent starvation will keep the bees focussed on life’s tedious mundanities. Whether it works or not is a matter of debate, however. And in this case, it’s purely academic. To feed intermittently, you need at least some access to the hives, and we’ve not had any.

However, I’ve just been told that we will be able to visit them again this coming week. I’m not counting on it, but it would be nice to see if we’ve any bees left and, intriguingly, what’s been happening in the mystery box. It might not all be bad news.

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When blood is nipp’d, and ways be foul…


Despite the weather, it was busy in the park this Sunday, as crowds arrived to build snowpeople, toboggan down the slopes and make what they could of the last few hours of daylight they’d see before reporting themselves snowbound on Monday morning.

Beekeepers, on the other hand, were noticeably absent and you might be tempted to think there’s not much to be done save leave the bees alone until the weather improves. At these temperatures, the bees will be clustered and, provided they have enough stores, they’re best left undisturbed. Continue reading

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A month since Christmas

At this time of year, when the frost makes sparkles in the sunlight, and songbirds flit merrily across the azure vault, baroquely ornamenting the stillness of the frozen air with their cheerful tootling, the gravid fronds of the mournful willow and the bright petals of the virgin crocus herald the great reawakening that foreshadows spring.

Perhaps. Though, for the most part, the frost has a tinge of brown to it, the low-hanging sky shudders clammily to the borborygmic rhythm of Heathrow and the cold, greasy air congests the lungs like something out of Hogarth. It is a time of coughs and colds and tax demands and even the most conscientious beekeeper can find few reasons to stir themselves. Continue reading

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The Age of Austerity

Fog

Fog

There comes a time in every year when, according to the instructions of our betters, and on pain of chastisement, ostracism, death or humiliation, we have to account for our actions, or the lack of them.

As it is with the Revenue, so it is with the London Beekeepers, and I was looking forward to drawing up the accounts of the apiary, which I confidently hoped would show a respectable surplus on the apiary activites and, more importantly, give me at least a hint that the worrisome trudge through this mortal vale of misery would at least have kindled a spark of warmth in the heart of the LBKA Treasurer, which, while not exactly making life worthwhile, would temporarily blunt its remorseless futility. Continue reading

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More Excuses

I know it looks like we’ve been doing nothing since July, but we’ve been very busy.

At the end of July, we took our final harvest. This time, it was liquid honey rather than cut-comb, and that involved a lot of equipment that we hadn’t seen for a year, much of which hadn’t been returned by whoever had borrowed it last August, and taking it, together with the honey boxes, to somebody’s kitchen (and even that’s not simple, as you can’t just borrow anybody’s kitchen. To stand a chance, you’ve got to target people who’ve never extracted honey before.) Continue reading

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A bit of a harvest

The gathering crowds.

The Lambeth Country Show is a surprisingly large event, considering that Lambeth farmers, on the whole, prefer anonymity.  It’s also interestingly diverse, hosting a host of diversions including a Punch and Judy show, an onion contest, piglets, dodgems and a cider tent, in roughly ascending order of popularity.

It comes, approximately, two weeks before the average urban beekeeper starts panicking about the honey harvest, but as the London Beekeepers Association had booked a stall, it seemed sensible to harvest some of our cut comb, and see if anyone would buy it. Continue reading

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Since I last wrote…

Signpost

Where the hives are

The bees have done well, and we have three good colonies, two of which are very strong, and all of which look well set to take advantage of the main honey flow which should be happening now.

A small, fourth colony has been put in a glass-fronted box for display at the Lambeth Country Show, which runs over this weekend. All being well, it’ll take pride of place at the London Beekeepers stall in the Farm Zone behind the Hall in Brockwell Park. We’d be delighted to see you there.

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Missing biscuits

Bee on Hand

What's she after?

Have you ever sat down with a mug of coffee and wondered where the biscuits are? And, then, why you’ve got crumbs down your front? Or how you got home on a Saturday night?

A bee’s life is a bit like that, but without the wondering. We know they can learn things. They can be taught to stick their tongues out in response to a certain smell, or to go to a certain place to find food, and it’s easy to suspect that shows an ‘intelligence’, but learning is only a part of intelligence.

I’ve been thinking about this because, over the last couple of weeks, we’ve had a couple of instances of ‘following bees’. Sometimes, when we’ve inspected the hives and left the apiary, we’ll find bees hovering about our heads for several minutes afterwards and, if we move away, they’ll follow us for 20 yards or so. It’s easy to think the bees have developed a grudge, or are being wilfully mischievous, or trying to drive us away, but I’m not sure that would be right.

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The Season Starts

Frame assembly

We’re told that April is a cruel month and, for beekeepers, that’s true. Not as cruel as May or June, perhaps, but not very nice all the same. As buds burst forth to leaf and flower and the sunshine tempts the idle into parks and gardens, the beekeeper is stuck in a morass of procrastinated and unpleasurable chores. But the regrets of the wasted winter and the reproach of unsiezed days are nothing compared with the ghastly spectre ahead of us. For April heralds the arrival on nature’s stage of the errant bugbear of swarming.

From April till the end of June, honey bees are inclined to swarm. This is perfectly natural and it’s expected of them. If they didn’t swarm, they’d never start new colonies, and honey bees would have gone the way of the Great Auk. But, like all natural urges, swarming is inconvenient and annoying for everybody else. For the beekeeper, it means losing half the bees in a colony, and much of the productivity of a hive.
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