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.
Swarms can also be upsetting for the public. In the countryside, a swarm doesn’t matter very much but, in towns and cities, they’re often more obvious than they should be. Ten thousand bees standing still wouldn’t take up more space than a toaster, but they can cover a lot of sky when you’re under them, and they buzz a lot.
Even worse, towns and cities contain lots of places that bees can live in, most of which aren’t trees. Chimneys and roof-spaces, for example, make tempting homes for honeybees. Sometimes, this isn’t a problem. The bees keep the spaces clean and well-ventilated, and the householder doesn’t notice and, possibly because of varroa or other pests and diseases, it’s a fair bet that a colony that’s not kept in a hive won’t last more than a year or two.
But a lot of the time, it is a problem. By which I don’t mean it’s actually a problem, but that London seems to harbour many people who have forgotten that the planet contains other lifeforms, and want their airspace as clean and sterile as their concrete lawns. And who’ll run screaming to the council if it isn’t.
For these reasons, its better for the bees, better for householders and more peaceful for beekeepers if we can find ways to discourage swarming. There are some exceptions to this philosophy, and every few years a growing movement of ’natural beekeeping’ emerges, who aim to let nature take its awkward course by omitting the ‘keeping’ part of ‘beekeeeping’. This is rarely very successful, as the only difference between ‘natural beekeeping’ and sitting in a chair is how annoyed the neighbours get, and adherents quickly learn to drop the ‘bee’ as well.
Controlling swarming is a tricky business, and it requires constant vigilance. Every hive must be inspected every week to check whether the bees are up to anything and, if they are, to do something about it. And even then, we may miss something, and find the bees will swarm anyway, which is when we’ll get the call about our bees being a nuisance and then we have to leave work to try to catch them or, just as often, watch them disappear over the rooftops.
Happily, there are some things we can do that seem to reduce the urge to swarm. One thing we can do is keep the bees busy, and a way of doing that is by refurbishing their home with fresh, clean frames for them to build wax in. It will only work for a while, but as old wax comb can harbour bee diseases, it’s a good idea to change all the frames every year or two, in any case.
There are two ways of changing the frames in a hive. One is to prepare a whole new box of clean frames and to shake the bees out of the old box into the new, and destroying the old frames. This is very hygienic, but it does mean getting rid of all the baby bees, which isn’t nice. We sometimes use this method, but usually only when the hive is obviously suffering from a serious disease.
Bailey Frame Change - part 1
The second method is called the ‘Bailey Method’ after the Bee Inspector who invented it. Very simply, it means putting a new set of frames above the existing one and, when new wax combs have been built and the queen is laying eggs in them, putting in a barrier to stop her going back to the old frames. Then, when all the larvae have emerged from the old frames, the whole bottom set can be removed and cleaned or disposed of. It’s not quite as good for getting rid of diseases as there’s a time when both the old and new frames are in the hive together, but it’s a reasonable compromise in many cases.
We have now started this on the middle hive (pictured) and it’s not going to plan. After a week, the bees have managed to completely ignore the new box. However, they’re not showing any signs of swarming, so it won’t matter too much if they take their time. The disease we’re most worried about in this hive at the moment is nosema, and changing the frames all at once might have helped get rid of that. However, strong colonies seem to cope with nosema, and this colony has a lot of larvae developing so, on balance, I think this colony is better off with the Bailey method.
As the remaining hives were established in the middle of last season, the frames in those are fairly fresh in any case. For those, we’ll replace frames more gradually through the year. And use different swarm strategies. But I’ll have to write about those later.
