SPRING IS COMING

Well, hello again and welcome!

I ended my last blog saying I’d hoped to have images of flying bees by the next time I wrote and, hey presto, the weather warmed up and my bees were out and about and, as you can see, I wasn’t far behind with my camera.

We’ve gone from mild weather to torrential rain, followed sub zero temperatures and back to mild again… talk about changeable. Throughout all of this, the honeybees are working hard; flying and foraging as soon as the sun comes out and then back in their hives, when the temperature drops, to keep the temperature inside the hives steady. “Do they hibernate?” is a question I’m often asked and as I said in my last blog… they do not! And, I’m always delighted when someone who has read the blog comes back with feedback. Thank you Colin Baldock.

February and March are definitely NOT months to become complacent about our bees. They need regular checking with minimum disturbance. I’ve been looking in on mine on a weekly basis and this is a video I made showing how I - like the bees - waste nothing. If you ever spend time with the honeybees you’ll soon learn - waste not want not…I make sure, by the way, the fondant icing I re-package goes back to the hive it came from, and is topped up with fresh fondant, just in case of diseases! (Apologies for the spelling of ‘whale’ in the video… I am dyslexic after all!)

Here’s something I didn’t know but was delighted to find out:

The roots of Valentine’s Day date back to the year 496, when Pope Gelasius proclaimed that February 14 would be the feast day of St. Valentine of Rome, taking precedence over Lupercalia - a pagan Roman fertility festival - long celebrated from February 13th to 15th.

Besides couples, love and happy marriages, you might be surprised to know, as was I, that St. Valentine is also the patron saint of beekeepers—charged with ensuring the sweetness of honey and the protection of beekeepers.

Well, thank you Heifer International for that piece of information!

Interesting Zoom Talk the other night hosted by The Ludlow and District Beekeepers. The speaker, Andrew Durham, gave a talk about the Asian hornet, which is a big enemy of the honeybees. Round about now the Queens, who mated last year, start to come out and build their paper nests and begin laying. They prey on honeybees by hovering outside their hives and capturing them while in flight. They excrete a pheromone marker on the hive that sends out a signal to their colony that the hive is a target.n their Native country, the eastern honeybees have devised a strategy to protect themselves from the Asian hornet by darting, really quickly, in and out of their hives. However, our honeybees have not adapted any such like strategy and they become very distressed and withdraw into their hives. The queen will eventually stop laying, which in turn weakens the colony which will, in due course, collapse and die.

This is the time to keep an eye out for them. Between now and May, if you spot any nests, call someone in to extinguish them. They’re not pleasant at all. I don’t like the thought of killing anything, but the honeybees come first!

As we gallop towards spring, here are a few preparations I’ll be making to ensure a smooth transition into the coming months.

1. Making sure I have enough brood frames filled with fresh foundation in readiness for shook swarms. A shook swarm is a way of getting the honeybees on to fresh comb. I’ll explain more about this nearer the time, i.e., why it’s done and hopefully I’ll do a video showing how it’s done. It should be done early on in the spring, when the weather is forecast to be good for a few days so the honeybees can quickly work at pulling out the fresh comb for the queen to lay eggs and and the flying bees can fill it with pollen, (their carbohydrate) and nectar, (their protein), to feed to the brood. When we give them fresh come we give the bees a sugar syrup solution to give them the energy boost and strength they need for the work ahead.

2. Doing a varroa count. The Varroa mite (Varroa Destructor) is an external parasitic mite that attacks and feeds on the honey bees. It attaches itself to the body of a honeybee and sucks on the fat thus weakening the bee. It can wipe out whole colonies if not monitored regularly. Last year I didn’t do a Varroa treatment in the winter as I had a very low count, (nearly all hives have them), so it’s important I do one asap. Again, this is something I’ll talk you through in my next blog.

3. Ensure spare hives are clean and ready for use. It doesn’t take long before one hive becomes two, so it’s important I have all the right equipment to hand! I already have a spare hive and this year I’m investing in a new hive which is very exciting, (I know… sad) as I haven’t bought one for some time now.

So, my lovely friends, here I am in Herefordshire, with a beautiful new Apiary site and, so far, four busy hives. I’m really looking forward to the coming year and sharing it with you all. Every time the sun shines and you go into your garden or out for a walk and you spot the honeybees dancing around your plants, you will know that the queen has started to lay eggs and what you are witnessing is the flying bees gathering food for the brood as the new lives begin to take over and the old ones, that have kept the colony going throughout the winter, start to depart. It’s the circle of life - nature's way of taking and giving back life to earth. Something the honeybees have been doing for 100 million years.

Now here’s a thing, it’s not just the honeybees who are clever, the plants are too! I read this article in the ‘BBKA NEWS’ - a wonderful magazine that you won’t have heard of unless you’re a beekeeper! If you weren’t in awe of nature you soon will be after you’ve read this:

POLLEN DOSING

A new study from the University of California Santa Cruz, has examined a mystery that has vexed botanists since Darwin as to why some flowers have two distinct sets of anthers. Most flowering plants depend on pollinators such as bees to transfer pollen from male anthers of one flower to the female stigmata of another flower, enabling fertilisation and the production of fruits and seeds. Bee pollination, however, involves an inherent conflict of interest, because bees are only interested in pollen as food source. The new study, published in the the ‘Proceedings of the Royal Society B,’ proposes a fresh explanation highlighting how it works in species of wildflowers in the genus Clarkia. Lead author, Kathleen Kay, explained: “If a flower doses a bee with a ton of pollen, the bee is in pollen heaven and it will start grooming and then go off to feed its offspring without visiting another flower. So plants have different mechanisms for doling out pollen gradually; in this case, the flower is hiding some anthers and gradually revealing them to pollinators, and that limits how much pollen a bee can remove in each visit.”

https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2020.2593

On that awesome note I will leave you with a few more images I’ve been taking when the sun’s been shining.

Have a wonderful March!