Sublimation
January is a time of year when it is difficult to do anything for your bees due to low temperatures. However, it could be worth putting the inspection board in for a week and seeing what sort of ‘dead mite drop’ you are getting. Bad news if you are getting ten or more. That is because those dead varroa you are seeing on your inspection board are what are called a ‘natural dead mite drop’. They are the indication that there are a lot of live phoretic mites on the bees.

What does this mean for your colony?
In early January in mild winters (so far, we have had a very mild winter) colonies start raising brood after a short brood break between mid-December to early January. If you have the inspection board in you will see debris falling out the hive where the bees have been uncapping their honey. They have been doing this in order to raise the temperature in the brood nest. It is the honey that is fuelling this rise in temperature and allowing new young bees to be raised. However, at this time of year the brood nest is a small one and this can be where the problem is. If you have a heavy varroa load on the bees, and the Queen starts to come into lay again, what happens? The female varroa mites have not been able to breed for a month or so, and so when young larvae are about to be capped the female varroa will dive into the cells, perhaps several breeding female varroa mites to each cell. The implication of this is that the feeding site established on the developing pupa will be being used by the offspring of several mites and the consequent damage to the pupa will be detrimental, and she will emerge with damaged wings soon to be removed by her sisters as no better than a piece of expendable debris.

But I can hear Peter Coxon saying to me that he no longer treats for varroa and that the bees are still doing well. Probably if you have a super strong colony, they will cope but you will have fewer bees in the Spring. The danger will be for smaller units which cannot afford to raise damaged bees that cannot contribute to the life of the colony. It may also be that if you go for no treatment over a number of years colonies will just gradually get weaker. Beekeepers who say they are not treating are probably controlling varroa by other methods. Drone brood uncapping for instance. Or as Andrew Vestrini does at Mount Camphill letting the bees swarm, and then collecting the swarms (swarms leave a lot of varroa behind in the brood box). Or as Colin Stocks does, religiously dusting his bees with icing sugar every week in the summer months (icing sugar knocks off varroa mites).Or as Stuart Goddard does, using ‘hive alive’ on the colony and spraying them with it (this damages the varroa and they fall off).

There is, however, another possibility. Norman Beresford, Chris Chandler and some others in the association have for the last couple of year sublimated their bees. Professor Ratnicks at LASI (laboratory of apiculture and social insects at Sussex university) recommends using a vaporiser which you attach to a car battery. In the vaporiser you place oxalic acid crystals and this when heated becomes a cloud of smoke. This is placed underneath the hive (I hope my pictures will show you how this is done) and this cloud of smoke knocks off the phoretic mites on the bees. Boy is it effective. Be warned however. It is nasty stuff and if, perchance, you breathe in any of the smoke you will seriously damage your lungs. It is not difficult to do but hive types vary, and this may make it more complicated for some to do. I have wooden deep nationals i.e. 14*12 brood boxes.
Below is a picture of some of the brood from hives that were treated 3 times with oxalic acid by sublimation. I did this at the trout farm 2 winters ago. The resultant brood frames the following summer were great with few gaps (this particular picture was of a buckfast colony).

Brood frame

It seems incredible but sublimating oxalic acid does not seem to harm the bees very much and it is quite possible to do it 3 times with no ill effect (not the case if you use the trickle method). The reason for doing it three times is in order to cover a brood cycle. The smoke cannot penetrate a capped cell and if there are varroa mites breeding within the cells (and there will be) they will emerge to reinfect the bees. Hence sublimating the bees three times. Norman says you do the sublimation at 5-day intervals. Although this does not add up to 21 (a brood cycle) these are the time intervals that need to be respected otherwise it is possible that some female varroa will be able to get into a capped cell without having been dosed with your oxalic acid smoke. And then these mites would reinfect the colony. And this would destroy the whole point of the exercise!

Steve with mask

Back of hive and vaporiser

Inspection board and dead mites

What you need.
• A car battery
• A vaporiser
• Oxalic acid crystals (Apibioxal is the licensed product and costs £10 for a sachet to treat 10 colonies. You can see I used something else but of course I am not telling you about that and you did not hear it from me - cost about 2p per colony)
• Sponges to block entrances and the backs of the hive
• A watch to time the process
• A mask to prevent inhalation of fumes (use your common sense and don’t go near the hive when smoke is emerging)
• A bucket of water (after each treatment, cool down the vaporiser in the water ; not a good idea to put oxalic acid crystals on a hot vaporiser thereby creating noxious vapour immediately)
• An inspection board or boards
• Goggles

Oxalic acid crystals

Inspection board

How to proceed
• Introduce wooden inspection board into hive upside down
• Block front entrance of hive with a sponge
• Place a sponge in the back of hive as shown in photo
• Place 1/2 a teaspoon oxalic acid crystals onto vaporiser
• Introduce vaporiser into gap between inspection board and the open mesh floor
• Stuff sponge around stem of vaporiser to seal up the back of hive
• Connect leads of battery to vaporiser
• Stand back and leave for three minutes (after 2 minutes smoke will start to leak out)
• Disconnect and leave for a further 1minute
• Remove vaporiser and dunk in water
• Leave hive sealed up for 10-15 minutes
• Remove all sponges
• Examine inspection board but leave in place to better monitor varroa drop
Malcolm Wilkie 16th January 2018

Notes on some of the beginners group apiary setups

Last Saturday Keith, myself, Lesley, and Steve Davies went to see some of the beginners and their apiary set ups. I asked Steve to write down some comments. These you will find below, together with any further information that I have felt relevant. This will be useful not only for our beginners but also for anyone who is new to beekeeping. Also a reminder to those who are more experienced but have forgotten.

These were Steve's concerns.

1) Apiary locations - although several had taken into account prevailing wind etc, some apiaries could be improved with a little effort.

People forget that winter sun should hit the hive for at least two hours - preferably longer. They site a hive in a cold part of the garden. If it is cold in summer, then it will certainly be cold in winter. A cold damp hive will lead to the bees developing fungal infections.

2) Hive locations - the position of some hives within the apiary need to be reassessed. Some are too close together and others in flower beds making it awkward to work on. As well as providing the best for the bees, the beekeeper needs some TLC as well.

Make sure there is enough space around your hives so that you will be able to place the roof on the ground and then any supers on top of the roof. Make sure there is plenty of space for you to stand behind the colony or to the side of the colony. Make sure there is space to put a second colony.

3) Hive entrances - several hives had the entrances completely open which is harder for  small colonies. I've just had to reduce the entrance on one of my small hives as I discovered a wasp repeatedly going in without being challenged!

We are into wasp season and temperatures have now gone down, so think about reducing the entrances. Small units will find it much more difficult to defend their stores. If you are feeding, you don't really want to be feeding the wasps.

4) Queen excluder - some hives had queen excluders in place with no super above. Perhaps a reminder on when to use them and when to remove?

One of our beginners had the Queen excluder above the frames and no crown board. This is not a good idea particularly as this was an extremely small unit. The bees need the crown board in order to be able to keep the brood warm. A queen excluder should only be added when the bees require a super to put the nectar into. A super should only be added once nearly all the frames in the brood box have been drawn out. Beginners in their enthusiasm to get honey add supers too early.

A lot of our beginners were making this mistake, so I assume a lot of you who are starting out are making this mistake too. If you are now in the scenario where all the frames in your brood box have not been drawn out, and you have a super on top of your brood box, remove the super from the bees and feed sugar syrup (the super can be given back to them once the frames in the brood box have been drawn).Add one piece of fresh foundation  (and I mean fresh foundation, not some stale wax that has been kicking about in the bee shed all summer) at the edge of the brood nest. Place this fresh foundation nearest the sunniest side of your hive next to the brood as the bees will find it easier to draw it out in that position. Once they have drawn this one out, add another piece of fresh foundation next to the brood. This will be an uphill struggle as the bees are less keen to draw out wax for you now that we are getting further away from the summer solstice.  Perhaps the following sentence will help you remember what it is that you should do in future :

"Always make your bees go outwards before you let them go upwards"

In other words, don't put a super on the bees until they have drawn out the frames in the brood box. Or rather almost all the frames in the brood box.

A word of warning - don't add lots of frames of foundation because the bees will just chew them up. Lesley calls them hooligans. Add a frame each time you inspect, and only add a frame if they are working on the previous one that you added.

5) Supers - some hives had one, or more, supers in place even though the brood frames hadn't been drawn. I know both Helen and yourself sent out emails earlier in the year about this but perhaps it needs to be mentioned again (and how to get the bees to draw stores down from a super that will be removed).

This has been partly dealt with in my answer above. If you want the bees to draw down stores into the brood box, then place your crown board above the brood box, reduce the holes in the crown board (where you would place the porter bee escapes if extracting honey),  place an empty super on top of the crown board, add another crown board on top of the empty super and then add your super of stores. And of course another crown board on top of your stores before you put the roof on. You can never have too many crown boards ! The bees think that the super is not part of the hive and so they rob it out. You may need to score a few frames. This doesn't always work but it does most of the time.

6) Small colonies in full hives - what to do if they don't build up in time for winter? Reducing the hive size using large dummy boards etc and why.

Our beginners are still finding it difficult to judge what is a big colony and what is a small colony. Those who attended the whole day of the bee safari will have now learnt what a large colony looks like as we saw two large colonies at the end of the day. If you have a small unit now, you need to work hard. I would make a cellotex dummy board and put that next to the frame of foundation that I was adding next to the brood nest. This will help the bees raise the temperature so that wax can be drawn out. I would place a piece of cellotex in the roof to try and help them keep warm. I would feed, and then not feed, and then feed again. Your work will be cut out.

 Hope this gives you all food for thought. My timely reminder from Bee Craft suggests we should all look for disease in our colonies. If you have a beehive with less than five frames of brood you should consider combining it with another unit if it is disease-free so that you have a large enough unit to get through the winter.

A final word about honey. Unless you are in a particularly good area for forage, you are probably not going to get any more honey. The exception is if you live in or near the Ashdown Forest. Heather has just come into flower and it is possible that you will get a crop from that although it'll be very difficult to extract. Lesley in Saint Leonards on Sea got a late honey crop but I suspect there are a lot of exotic trees and these were expressing nectar. She also had a super strong colony. Beginners, please remember that you are only going to get honey if you have got loads and loads of bees. This is the challenge of beekeeping. You need lots of bees to get honey but when you have lots of bees they want to swarm. However the one comforting thought for all of us is that the swarming season is now over. This doesn't mean that the bees won't swarm but they are much less likely to do so! Remember what Keith says :

                      "Bees never do anything invariably". 

They are, after all, wild creatures. And we are trying to artificially make them do what we want them to do!!

The following are Steve's final comments.

Hope I don't sound too officious and the info is relevant. It would be nice to get feedback from them all next spring to see how they coped with their first winter.

Please thank all of those who opened their apiaries for us, it was immensely rewarding and I thoroughly enjoyed seeing everything (except the rain).

Hope the BBQ went well and I'm sorry not to have been able to join in. Look forward to catching up on Tuesday.

Kind regards

Steve Davies

Malcolm Wilkie July 27th 2017

The crazy nectar flow continues

This is the first time since I began beekeeping seven years ago that I have experienced such a huge nectar flow for such a sustained period of time. When I am out and about gardening there is still moisture in the soil and weeding is not difficult. This is unusual for me as a gardener at this time of year and is a clear indication that plants can get hold of moisture and express nectar. Coupled with high temperatures this is leading to a huge nectar flow.

What is the consequence for our bees? On opening up hives yesterday I have discovered that the bees are chucking nectar into the brood nest. For me this is of concern because I know that if this continues that is going to trigger swarming. Why wouldn't a hive want to divide given the perfect ideal conditions that we have got at the moment? I have already lost a swarm from a really good box of bees and I am just kicking myself. They were congested and I should have known that that was the case. I was also silly in that I left them for one week without checking. A mistake given how strong a hive they were.

So what can you do? As usual you need to respect the adage that the brood box is for brood. Remove frames of stores and place foundation into the brood box. On a hive that is not too strong, place the foundation at the edge of the brood nest. On a hive that is very strong, place the foundation into the brood nest. Remember this is a sin but given the current conditions we had all better sin than not. Then you need to check your supers and, of course, give the bees  a super with foundation so that they can be kept busy drawing out wax.

I refer you all to Willy Shaw's article about how to renew comb. This article is in the current BBKA magazine. On a strong hive he is removing four frames of stores and splitting the brood nest four times. In a week, given the current conditions, a strong hive will draw out those four frames of foundation (Lesley and I have done that on her strong hive and they certainly drew out the foundation no problem. In fact they drew out four frames of foundation placed in the brood nest and a whole super of foundation placed just above the brood box). And that should take their minds off swarming for the week. The other thing that you can do is to extract the honey you have on the hive. This, of course, will give the bees more space. However if these conditions continue, the challenge of  (a) how to prevent them swarming and (b) making sure that they are not congested, is going to continue. Good luck and try not to lose a swarm as I did, particularly as she was my best queen.

Malcolm Wilkie 6th July 2017

'The current crazy nectar flow'

Just a word of warning to everybody with a big prosperous colony. Evidently a lot of nectar has been going into large hives and this has been causing a problem. Do make sure that your bees have enough space. You may have to do as Helen has done below and add a frame of foundation into your brood box

Here is Helen's message sent to me this morning.

On checking my brood boxes yesterday, they were all full of nectar, so I removed a frame and gave them all a frame of foundation to draw out. Nectar everywhere!!! Queen cells also in amongst the nectar, brood pattern a mess as they have filled every vacant cell with nectar!!! I did say there was a massive nectar flow on. I think I got it wrong last week when I realised there was a crazy nectar flow I should have given the bees more to do, i.e. Given them frames to draw out.

Remember bees need a lot of space to process nectar and convert it into honey. Being a good beekeeper involves trying to be aware of what is going on in the environment and what the conditions are like and then responding accordingly. These high temperatures have made the clover express nectar(temperatures need to be above 70degrees Fahrenheit) and the bees have been collecting this in quantity. Extremely high temperatures make plants express nectar like crazy as long as there is moisture in the soil ; that is currently the case.

Do remember Margaret Ginman's advice : 'Keep your bees busy and then that will take their minds off swarming'. She says that if you treat your bees like a bunch of adolescent boy teenagers, then you won't go far wrong. A responsible parent would never leave a bunch of young teenage boys with nothing to do, because if they did so there would be trouble. In other words make sure you give your bees something to do because, just like teenage boys, if they have nothing to do then at best you will have a sticky mess, and at worst you will have to cope with swarming.

So that means putting in a frame of foundation into the brood box, and adding supers, preferably with foundation in them. If your bees are busy making wax, they won't want to swarm. And making wax will use up some of the excess nectar they are finding in the environment during this current nectar flow. If today you are one of the people where there is a heavy downpour, watch out as that will make the nectar flow even more.

Malcolm Wilkie 22nd June

Queen cells

Queen cells usually only appear in your beehive once a year. So sometimes one forgets what one should be looking for.

If the bees are thinking of dividing then at some point you will find a small C shaped larva in one of the Queen cups. My bees seem to enjoy tormenting me and the presence of queen cups is their way of saying "we may be going or we may not be going, it's up to you to find out ".

So you need to be able to recognise when a queen cup is starting to be used. You should be able to recognise a young larva and a greasy white substance in the bottom of a queen cup, which indicates that a queen cell is being started. The larva may only be a very small C shape. If you wear reading glasses, then you definitely need to be wearing them when you look inside this queen cup. It doesn't matter if you slightly (but I do mean slightly) damage the edge of the queen cup  in order to get a better look. In fact it would not even matter if you slightly damaged the edge of an open queen cell about to be sealed.  Bees will usually repair any damage that you do to the outer edge of a queen cell. So be brave and have a good look.

If the sides of the queen cup have not been drawn down to any extent, then the larva is probably only two days old. If you were to go back in three days’ time, however, the bees would have drawn out that queen cup into a queen cell and it would be sealed. The sides of the cell would be much longer. If the tip of the cell is becoming pointed, then the next day that cell will be sealed The process is an extremely rapid one. If you see a charged Queen cell then you probably need to divide the box today and not tomorrow.

If you  artificially divide your box, then the queen cells will be slightly different in that they will be emergency cells. A box that has been artificially divided will have sealed queen cells in two days. I always recommend that you go in three days after you have artificially divided a box and cut out all sealed Queens cells. At this moment you need to mark a chosen open queen cell with a drawing pin on top of the frame. You will then have to go back in another five days’ time and cut out all but your chosen cell. If your chosen cell is no longer there, then you need to choose what looks like a good sealed queen cell. That is to say a peanut shaped medium sized cell, preferably in the middle of a frame where there is no danger of it being crushed when you put the frames back together again. I would never choose a cell that was on its own on a frame. If there are three or four cells  on a frame, then the chances are that all cells have been regularly fed by young bees. And that is what you want! Remember a queen cell is visited by young bees possibly 100 times an hour. It is this constant feeding of the larva which changes it from being an ordinary worker into being a queen larva.

A word of warning. Beekeepers do not seem to understand about Queen cells. Before capping they are fairly robust. Two or three days before hatching they are also fairly robust. However in the two days after they have been sealed it is very easy to damage them. The reason for this is that initially once the Queen cell has been sealed the larva continues to feed off the royal jelly at the top of the cell. Then at some point during those two days the larva turns round in the cell and spins its cocoon. The slightest jolt will cause a queen larva to detach from the royal jelly at the top of the cell and that causes it's death. If you follow my recommended timings above, the manipulation when you destroy queen cells should be taking place when your chosen larva has already spun its cocoon and is now a pupa. This means it will be more resistant if you do anything to jolt the frame on which it is situated.

Lesley had this happen to her bees. The day chosen for selecting Queen cells was only two days after they had been capped by the bees. The new frames in that box were shiny and slippy and  the frame with her chosen queen cell slipped slightly. Initially I did not think anything of this. However as I always try and calculate when a queen cell is about to hatch we went back and looked on the 16th and then the 17th day (in fact it was more rapid than that because the bees choose a two day old larva so it was only 11 days after we had artificially split them). I was worried because the queen cells looked perfect and there was no discolouring of the tip. The bees of course were interested in them and were clustering over the cell even though the contents were dead.

When a queen cell is about to hatch it turns a darker brown at the tip. This was not happening. So alarm bells started to ring and I decided to cut open the queen cell. There was a dead larva inside.

Annoying and frustrating. What are the choices? We could have combined our old queen, who was in a nucleus box, back into the hive. We knew the bees could not possibly make another queen cell because there were no eggs or larvae young enough to be converted into Queens.

However not much time had passed (we had lost about two weeks) and so this is what we did. With a round pastry cutter we cut out a section of hatching brood from the now queenless box. This we got rid of. We then went into the nucleus box were the old queen was laying and we found a small area of eggs. With the aforementioned pastry cutter we then cut out those eggs. These were then placed into the queenless box in the exact position where we had removed a section of hatching brood. The bees will then make more queen cells and we will have to go back and choose one next weekend.

Beginners please take note. It is so important to have two hives because when a scenario like this occurs you can rectify your error. The earlier you rectify the error the better. If this box of bees were to be left queenless for six weeks or more without brood, then they would refuse to make Queen cells. Always check if a queen cell has hatched, and to do that you need to carefully calculate when a queen is about to emerge.

People lament and tell me that the bees have torn down the Queen cell that they ( the beekeeper) left them. I think it is highly probable that the Queen cell in question was dead and the bees realised and so just removed it. This does not happen for a while. Hence the importance of checking on the 16th and 17th day. Hope the above helps and doesn't cause more confusion.

Malcolm Wilkie 8th June 2017