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.

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.

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.But someone’s got to check they’re well-fed and undisturbed Even if it means a five-mile walk through thigh-deep snow just to carry out a half-minute check rather than soaking up a decent Sunday Lunch in a nice warm pub The shivering dreams of the conscientious beekeeper should be full of woodpeckers, mice and vandals, and their every waking hour haunted by the prospect of starvation.

It is perilously easy for beekeepers to see themselves as mere landlords for the bees, extorting honey in return for the bare minimum of accommodation. Letting the weak die off helps nature sort the wheat from the chaff so, in a sense, it does everyone good in the long run. But beekeeping is not just a hobby, it’s husbandry, and we must care for our little charges, even if it goes against every principle enshrined in law or practice. Although caring might seem entirely unnatural for those proponents of ‘Natural Beekeeping’ and wilfully perverse to those who have human tenants, there are precedents, and they’re not bad ones.

Cold is not normally a problem for bees. They are naturally cold-blooded, and although cold might slow down their metabolic processes, that doesn’t do them much harm. What is a problem, as for most tenants, is damp.

The damp comes from three sources. The first is the bees themselves, who create water as a by-product of being alive. The second is their stores. Although honey is only 20% water, that’s still water that will be released as they eat it. The third is the air. This last is the most important because damp air won’t carry moisture out of the hive, but will instead encourage the formation of condensation on the inner surfaces of the hive. Again, as most tenants will know, condensation is what allows the proliferation of moulds, and it’s the moulds that stain walls and pervade the air and cause respiratory problems.

The only known solution for condensation is adequate ventilation. Heating and insulation can help, but just being alive creates moisture and that’s got to be taken out of the home or the hive at some stage. Unlike human tenants, who can sometimes scrape together enough to buy a dehumidifier, bees have no money and no access to electricity, not even through rigged meters.

The responsible beekeeper must, therefore, ensure there is sufficient ventilation for the bees. This might seem odd, given that most responsible beekeepers keep their bees on open mesh floors but, unfortunately, the floors aren’t where the problem usually is. The problem is usually near the ceiling, where the warm air rises to and that, for the usual physical reasons, is nowhere near the floor. The amount of ventilation required will depend on the number of bees, how greedy they are, the humidity of the air and the relative temperatures within and without the hive. It can probably be calculated, but nobody’s ever bothered because all of those factors are affected by the weather which, sadly, changes.

Trial and error is as much fun as it sounds, but it is the only affordable method currently available (hygrometrically controlled ventilation systems are practically, but not economically, possible). The method we use involves a simple condensometer mounted above the crown-board that, cunningly, doubles as a feeder. In most cases, a lunch- or take-away box does well enough, as can be seen in the picture below. We have two working together to make top-ups a bit easier – trying to get bees off fondant is no fun.

Here, a roughly measured dose of the fondant, or candy, is crammed into the condensometer which is then placed over the feed hole of the crownboard. To test the sufficiency of the ventilation a brief visual inspection is made of how much water has condensed within the device. In the above, levels were found to be slightly elevated, and an adjustment made to the size of the ventilation hole in the crownboard, by means of the moving of a purpose-built adjuster crafted from a piece of estate-agent board. In this case, the bees were active, which they had no right to be, so the adjustment was a little less that it would have been if they hadn’t. Whether this makes any difference, given the whole hive has a lid on it with unadjustable ventilation slots, is possibly a matter for debate.

What is clear is that condensation is forming, and that means mould is almost certainly building up on the underside of the crownboard which may, or may not, have a deleterious effect on the bees. Some of the moisture, incidentally, will be absorbed by the candy, which might make it liquify. If it gets too liquid, it may trickle away through the hive, so it’s worth checking under the hive (if a mesh floor is used) that any missing candy has been eaten, rather than just fallen through. Fondant that’s too damp can also ferment, though mould growth is usually visible well before that happens, especially in cold weather.

If crownboards are getting visibly damp, or obviously mouldy, it is possible to exchange them by gently pushing the old crownboard across the top of the hive with a clean one, but it does involve some disruption, and some loss of warmth to the hive, so that’s best done when it’s sunny and warmish.

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.Even so, every week, the Brockwell Apiary gets a brief inspection, if only to check the hives are still there, and not been destroyed by woodpeckers. We also check if they’ve got enough fondant to eat (they have), and that the bees are still alive (not that we can do much with them if they aren’t) . It’s a good thing to do, though dull and cold. Which is why, when anyone else is unwise enough to get within reach, we try to dress them up in bee suits and make them help. This year, we’re using transparent boxes to hold the fondant, so visitors can take the roofs off and have a chance of seeing some bees without much risk of anything happening. We all pretend it’s fun.

A couple of things have brightened the gloom, however. We applied oxalic acid  a few weeks ago, in an attempt to put a further lid on the varroa. It’s not advisable to use oxalic acid when the bees still have brood (partly because it’s not very good for the larvae and partly because the varroa hide in the sealed cells and escape the treatment), but most of the colonies seem to have brood all year, now, so there’s no helping it, unless we can think of a better  treatment for this time of year, which we can’t.

In theory, we could just leave them alone and hope, but varroa can build up quickly, especially in a weakened hive, and also spread on the bodies of drifting, robbing or swarming bees, so the threat isn’t just to our own bees. For this reason, we try to treat our bees at the same time of year as other beekeepers in the area, and thus keep the overall levels down. Maybe it works and maybe it doesn’t. It’s not exactly fun, but it makes a change.

We also had the Winter Fair, where we sold nearly all of the honey, which had set beautifully, lightening to a glorious beige and frosting the jars with tiny crystals of perfect sweetness appropriate both to the season and its sentiments, leaving a modest quantity for distribution to our deserving helpers.

The judges at honey shows would be less than impressed. Frosting, to them, is a defect that ranks alongside a wonky label or a dent in the lid. When honey crystallizes it shrinks (unlike water, which expands) and, unless the crystallization happens very slowly and evenly, it will pull very slightly away from the sides of the jar, and that’s what causes the frosting. Only by keeping the honey at a constant temperature (of around 10 degrees Centigrade (or 10 Celsius, in memory of the Swede who didn’t quite invent it), will the crystallization be slow enough to allow the honey to settle back as it sets. Which is why, if you want to win prizes for crystallized honey, it helps if you have a wine-cellar.

Anyhow, that was almost fun, though as it was other, presumably responsible, people doing the selling, all we could do was lurk in the cafe until it was finished.

Finally, possibly very finally, we’ve been anthropologized. Perhaps it’s just London, but it’s difficult to do anything these days without some sort of student wanting to gather material about it, whether it’s a culinary ethnographer lurking at the greengrocer’s or a geological videographer taking pictures of your boots. It’s all got very technical. Once upon a time, the worst you would face was a gaggle of GCSE geographers who were supposed to ask if you were visiting the butcher or the baker, but tended to just giggle and make it up instead. Presumably they’re all running think-tanks now.

Anyhow, one such request managed to slip through the net at the LBKA, Which is why, last week, what with it being cold and dull outside, we found ourselves being grilled for a thesis or something on, chiefly, the politics of beekeeping. I am hoping the reassurances of anonymity hold water as, if they don’t, someone else may shortly be taking over the joyful task of remembering to write things for this blog.

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.For up till now, and in reality as well as on paper, the apiary has been something of a loss. This is unsurprising. For most beekeepers, beekeeping is a hobby and, like origami or bog-snorkelling, neither actually nor intentionally profitable. This is why the tax inspectors don’t allow anglers, for example, to offset the cost of maggots against tax.

However, against expectations, we have had two productive seasons in a row, and we’ve been able to sell a respectable amount of honey. Not, perhaps, the tons of honey that the people who write the books confidently predict, but enough to impress anyone who hasn’t got to put the stuff in jars, and that’s the main thing. Competence is always an illusion, of course, but there’s still some pride to be had from maintaining it.

So, after today’s largely foggy and mostly pointless apiary session (no mentees turned up, and the only task achieved was the insertion of a clearer board for, I hope, better reasons than fellow beekeepers will suspect), I pedalled home with the intention of finding solace and fulfillment in the preparation of the accounts. It is very easy to become intoxicated with optimism and, I’m afraid, I fell victim to that curse. Not, perhaps, as badly as the panglossian figment that’s our current Mayor, or the rattlingly chirpy Lord of Locog, but enough to put me off my guard.

To cut a long, and astonishingly tedious, story short, the upshot is that I seem to have thought rather much about all the money we’d had rushing in, and not enough about all the money we’ve had rushing out. The upshot is that we are, at the time of writing, short of Micawberish happiness by around a ton. There is some uncertainty about this, given that some of the relevant receipts have been printed with vanishing ink and others have gone missing in action. But it’s not an uncertainty I’m planning to allow the Treasurer.

However, even if it all works out as bad as I think it will, we do have a secret weapon of sorts. In a secret location known only to a trusted few, are around three-dozen half-pound jars of honey, crystallising nicely, ready for labelling and taking to the Friends of Brockwell Park Winter Fair on December 11th at Brockwell Hall, where we’ll be selling the last few jars of this year’s honey. If my calculations are correct, then that will break us even, whatever the Treasurer thinks.

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.)However much or little honey there is, extracting honey is hard work, especially when it involves a steepish hill, a manually-operated extractor and an upstairs kitchen. Even at home, all those buckets and and strainers and implements will need cleaning and putting away and, naturally, hardly any of them will fit in a sink. And that’s before we’ve even thought of working out how many jars and lids and labels we’re going to need.

Honey Pyramid

While all that’s happening, the bees need preparing for Winter. Towards the end of summer, we have to inspect all the bees for diseases and decide if action needs to be taken. Some diseases we have to notify to the Bee Inspector, some we can treat against, and some we can safely ignore.

This year, the Bee Inspector made a visit, so we got to see how it’s supposed to be done. We got the all-clear for foulbrood diseases, but our varroa levels were very high, so we began treating the hives for that. Varroa treatment is relatively simple – we just place trays of thymol-containing gel in the top of each hive – but it takes up to six weeks, and only works if the weather isn’t too cold, so it needs to be done before autumn has a chance to get nasty. It also means, for our hives at least, making little wooden frames to make space for the trays to sit in as, with grim inevitability, we’d lost the ones we made last year. There are other threats to worry about, too, and precautions against both wasps and mice need taking. (The cat, incidentally, is mostly gratuitous. This year we’ve spent money on mouseguards.)

So, all that, together with the London Honey Festival (we won no prizes), is why I didn’t find time to write much in August.

An Early Harvest Festival

September is the month that beekeeping really turns from a quietly antisocial hobby into a social maelstrom of gladhanded cheeriness and cut-throat competition. It’s the month when all the local end-of-summer shows and events seem to happen, including the Thames Festival, the Bromley and Orpington Honey Show (we forgot to enter) and, closer to home,  a series of cookery demonstrations, plant sales and workshops at the Community Greenhouses. And it’s not just beekeepers who have to travel. You might have seen some of our bees at the Bermondsey Street Festival, for example, and they don’t always go quietly.

Even October is relatively packed with tempting events that add to the pressure on time and the number of chores. We failed miserably to enter the Brockwell honey for the London Honey Show on account of misreading the form, and we’ve missed the deadline for the National Honey Show at the end of October. Our excuse for that is that the honey is beginning to crystallize already, so we can’t tell if we should be entering it as ‘clear’ or ‘set’. It’s not a very good excuse, but I can’t think of anything better (except for the excuse we’ve got for not entering the cake. Very tasty it was). We’re also having to prepare more sugar syrup than ever – we usually use this just to feed the smaller, weaker colonies that haven’t managed to store enough honey to meet their own needs, but this year we’ve heard that even large colonies have been starving. For some reason, colonies didn’t bring in much nectar in September, so we’re helping them make up the difference.

But, if I’m honest, my only excuse is that, although preparing sugar syrup isn’t a very exciting pastime, it is more urgent, and apparently more fun, than cobbling together a blog.

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.

I was hoping to take some pictures of the process, but it’s a sticky business and I like my camera, so the best I could do was the picture below, which is what we start with.

A frame of comb honey.

This is a frame taken from one of the honey boxes on our hives, and it’s full of honeycomb, all sealed over with wax. Not all of the frames will be like this, and nearly half of those we looked at weren’t fully covered. When you’re extracting liquid honey, you can tolerate frames where a small percentage isn’t capped but for cut-comb it’s all got to be just right. If it is, all you need to do is cut it out.

A key point is not to cut it out from frames with wires in. Frames that we’re extracting for liquid honey contain wires to hold the comb together in a rotary extractor but they are no fun to cut through, and even less fun to eat. As you can’t see from the picture, it’s not always obvious which frames have wires, so it’s important to mark them when they go into the hive to save any bother later.

The actual harvesting of cut-comb involves a sharp knife, a steady hand and a cake rack so the slices of comb can drain nicely, without getting everything sticky. You also need gloves, a hat and, if necessary, a beard-guard, together with clean hands and a basic knowledge of food hygiene. But that’s the same for any sort of honey harvesting.

Comb honey in boxes

After that, you just need some boxes to put the slices in, and some labels. It all sounds ridiculously easy, and it is, apart from the wasps, which usually take a profound interest and are even more difficult to keep out of buildings than bees.  It’s so easy that some beekeepers only ever extract cut comb. But liquid honey is easier to spread on toast, especially in the winter months, so most of us concentrate on that.

After harvesting, there’s usually the problem of finding somewhere safe to store the honey, but this time, we just took it over to the stall where, despite the poor weather, it all sold gratifyingly quickly. Of course, not everyone at the show could offer a pure, natural product made at the showground itself, or even in Lambeth, so we had a slight advantage.

The money it raised just about covers the cost of the frames we bought last winter, which is a good start. If we’re lucky, we might cover the cost of the two new hives and all the new honey boxes, in which case, the strange prospect of a surplus might arise. There again, it’s best not to count chickens before they’ve hatched.

Brockwell bees on holiday

It wasn’t just honey from the apiary that went to the London Beekeepers’ stall. They also had an observation hive, stocked up with bees from the Brockwell apiary. It got a lot of attention, and it’s always nice to be able to show people what bees look like, or at least, what wasps don’t look like. I was a bit worried that the bees might resent their confinement, but they were happy enough when we returned them, and don’t seem to have come to any harm. Normally when we take bees to shows, we have to ferry them across London, but for these bees it was, literally, a walk in the park.

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.

In other news, we’ve had a number of disease alerts from the National Bee Unit on outbreaks in the area, though we’ve not found anything very nasty in our hives yet. We’re still checking for swarming preparations – although July is a bit late in the year for swarming, the season got off to a fairly late start in London, so there’s still a chance of some nonsense. We’ve not had anything like the problems we had last year, but two of the hives swarmed, nevertheless. However, as one of those was a cast from an artifical swarm, which is almost excusable, and the other was swiftly caught and rehomed, we’ve had no disasters.

From now on, we’re now preparing for the harvest at the end of the month. Or, more accurately, leaving the bees to themselves for a couple of weeks while we run around sorting out jars and labels and buckets and extractors. And, of course, taking a little time out to enjoy the Lambeth Country Show.

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.

The theory is that some colonies of bees are naturally ‘followers’, and the solution usually recommended is to replace the queen and hope that her children won’t follow us so much. But I’m not convinced by this, and there are seven reasons why:

1. out of several tens of thousands of bees in a colony, only a handful ever bother doing any following at all.
2. they only follow after the hives have been disturbed.
3. they don’t stop following if the beekeeper removes their protective clothing.
4. when they follow they tend to circle round the person’s head.
5. if you pass another person, they will often switch to follow them instead, even if they’ve not been near the hives and no matter what they look like or are wearing.
6. although followers can sting, they usually land on the person quite placidly, and it’s only after getting tangled in hair or swatted at that they will sting.
7. following seems to happen most in ‘non-ideal’ conditions – that is when it’s a bit cold, a bit damp, a bit windy. a bit late in the day or the hive has been open for longer than usual.

So, what can be tempting the bee to follow? It can’t be any smell left on the beekeeper, or their clothes, by the bees, or else they wouldn’t switch to another person. Nor can it have anything to do with clothing or hair-styling products. The distance they follow for isn’t great, either. Is that because they imagine they’ve driven off a threat? Or is it simply because, after a certain distance, they start relying on fixed landmarks for navigation, rather than heat or smell?

If you stand by the lake on a summer evening, watching the ducks or whatever, you will sometimes find a cloud of midges has sprung up around your head. And, if you move, the midge-cloud follows. This is, apparently, not because the midges like you, or enjoy being a nuisance, but because clouds of midges base themselves on visible landmarks. If you’re the landmark and you move, then the cloud will move also.

I think something similar is happening here. The books claim that, at short distances, bees rely on smell more than vision for navigation. But it might also be possible that returning bees might navigate by warmth. Perhaps some of the returning bees, attracted by the smell of the open hive, don’t fly to the usual hive entrance, but towards the top of the hive, where the warmest thing they’ll find is a beekeeper’s head, and that’s what they latch onto. After all, the brood nest of an active colony is roughly the size of a football, and 35C in the middle. A human head isn’t much different.

It’s just a thought, and I have no idea how I might test it.  We could, I suppose, experiment with refrigerated hats, or boil basketballs for bait. Any practical suggestions would be welcome.

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.