Gracious words are like a honeycomb, sweetness to the soul and health to the body.

Proverbs 16:24 

GRACIOUS WORDS

Thank you to all the honeybees who have worked so hard this year to give us the wonderful flowers that brighten our world, fruits and vegetables that enrich our diet and the honey we enjoy! So thank you all… the drones - who are the males - without whom we would not have life in our hives, the queen who works alone and tirelessly to provide us with all the honeybees we need and to the incredible workers, who are the girls, who work unremittingly and selflessly to ensure the survival of their species and happenstance ours. Thank you. Thank you all.

AUTUMN FEEDING

After an unpredictable August we have had a September that has been kind. The honeybees have been busy filling their brood boxes with the remaining nectar for the stores they need for the coming autumn and winter months and we beekeepers have been busy helping them. By that I mean feeding them with the sugar syrup they will undoubtedly need. Why do we do this? Well, the obvious answer is “we’ve taken their stores” but that’s not always the case. Some beekeepers leave a super of honey with the bees and they either put it underneath the brood box or on top. I don’t do this because…. I have known beekeepers who have left supers above or below the brood boxes and gone in to look at them in the early spring and the bees have died. The reason for this is because - when the temperature drops - they cluster around the queen keeping the temperature of the hive constant. If it gets too cold for them to go and get the honey from the super they won’t leave the cluster so they become weak and eventually die. It’s a distressing sight. You think you’ve done the right thing and discover dead bees. So, mostly all beekeepers will top them up with sugar syrup which they store in the brood box. Like gardeners or any hobbyist, I have my own method of dealing with this. I leave a super on - mid September - when the forage begins to run out. I put an empty super between the brood box and the full one. This way the bees don’t connect it with their hive and they take the honey down in to the brood box. I then top them up with sugar syrup.

There is a caution here. You cannot just assume they have enough. It’s important to go through the brood box - on a nice day - (the bees won’t be thrilled with you about this. I think they’re thinking “we’ve done our bit, you’ve had your reward for looking after us, now buzz off… we’re busy getting ready for winter!” ). On the whole they’re ok, just a tad buzzy. But, as I said, you need to go through the brood box and check how many frames of stores they actually have. You’re looking for about seven frames of stores. Seven frames equals roughly 35/401b which is what they need. You don’t want more than that because they need about four frames for the queen to lay her eggs so she has enough bees to get her through the coming months.

However, having done this you still have to keep an eye on them. You still can’t just walk away and think - job done -

If it’s a mild autumn they will carry on flying and foraging for pollen and doing this will use up their energy so they will eat into their stores. We don’t want to disturb them any more so we heft the hive - (test the weight by lifting) - every now and then to check the weight. If it’s light we give them a pure fondant icing just above the cluster so they have easy access to a food source. I tend do this throughout the winter months - (heft the hive) - and by January I give them the fondant anyway. They won’t take it if they don’t need it. It puts my mind at rest!

UNITING A HIVE

A friend needed a queen and Challis and I had two good laying late queens. By that I mean, the queens had not been in residence long and therefore the hives were not strong i.e., both hives had about five full frames. So we decided to give one of queens to our friend and unite our two together. And so I had to find and catch my queen and pop her in a queen cage, together with some worker bees and fondant icing and hand her over to her new guardian! I’ve never done this before and here is a little video of the performance. Please don’t shout at me fellow beekeepers, if I haven’t exactly followed protocol but no bees were harmed and it worked!

And so to the uniting. I knew the queen had gone from my brood box and therefore it was a simple case of putting a queen excluder on top of my brood box so I’d know when I came to actually uniting them which box the queen is in and then laying newspaper over the top so they have to chew through to meet each other. We do this to hopefully prevent them from (a) fighting and (b) killing, what would be - to the bottom brood box -the new queen. They’re not always grateful to have a new queen - they have to get used to the idea! Once the paper has been laid, the brood box with the queen in is placed on top, followed by the statutory crown board and roof. You leave them like this for about 2 days and then remove the chewed paper and the queen, (I just pop her in the queen catcher and put her in my pocket). I shake the bees in together and take away the box I don’t need, pop the queen back in and job done!

Spot my mistake, if you please, in the video and the picture below - which highlights it beautifully. I forgot to put on the queen excluder which meant I had to go through both brood boxes to find the queen before I could finally shake them all together… doh!

MINING BEES

As you walk through the gate to our house, on the right hand side is a large area of sloping grass, or, I should say, was a large area of sloping grass. It is currently a large area of clumpy mud. We had made arrangements for it to be rotavated and raked ready for planting a wild flower garden. However, a couple of weeks prior to rotivation we spotted hundreds of bees flying in and out of tiny holes in the mud! Being environmentally friendly people, my husband and I decided to cancel the arrival of Jason and his rotavator and allow the mining bees to carry out their work. I knew it would only mean a couple of weeks delay as they’d been their quite a while.

So what are mining bees?

Here’s a link to The Honeybee Suite who explains it perfectly!

https://www.honeybeesuite.com/mining-bees-are-wild-bees-that-live-underground/

AND SO…

I’ve frozen all my super frames and stored them in the plastic boxes. We freeze them to rid them of any diseases and wax moth, ready to be given back to the bees to be filled again next year. I still have a few jobs to do. Remove the wasp prevention guards. Put up the mouse guards. Strap the hives down and then cover them in the thermal outer casing. Later on next year I will be cleaning the super boxes ready to be filled up with the frames again. A beekeepers work is never done. I will miss them. I will miss their buzzing and the wonderful smell of the wax and honey that exudes from the hive when you lift off the roof. But we all need a break… the bees and the beekeepers. I will continue with these blogs through to the spring when I will start all over again. The blogs will be shorter as there is less to do so I will miss doing these too.

Remind me of that next year when I’m complaining about my lovely bees!

FINALLY

As always I like to leave you with an image that makes me smile. As if the honeybee doesn’t always make me smile. I love these girls. When I took the supers off that I’d given them to clean out these two ladies were not coming off until they’d well and truly finished the job!

See you next month.