Bee Weather

Why we had to mend the outdoor thermometer and hang it near the kitchen window

We find that we are watching the weather forecast with increasing interest.   What seemed like endless Summer days have started to feel crisp and fresh and night time temperatures have sunk to single figures.   Ordinarily, we wouldn't take much notice except to switch to a warmer duvet at night and go back to wearing jackets for work.   This year it's different because we have to think about the bees.

 

According to The Authorities, the temperature should be over 17C if you want to open the hive to examine the bees.  If you have to examine the bees below this temperature, it's recommended that you work quickly and only do essential tasks to minimise disruption to the bees.  They shouldn't be examined if the temperature is below 10C.  

 

Individual bees adopt the temperature of their environment but they can generate heat through muscular activity.  At 8C an individual bee freezes.   Apparently therefore, when the average temperature falls below 18C, they begin to huddle together in the hive forming a ball amongst the frames.  When average temperatures reach 13C all the bees are in this cluster which enables the bees to regulate their temperature by expanding and contracting the cluster and eating more or less honey so they can engage in wing fanning activity which produces heat.

 

All beekeepers want to avoid Chill Brood which shows as white cells in the honey comb and results from the larvae being exposed to the cold for too long.  These larvae never hatch.

 

Our bees show no signs of starting to cluster yet but we have mended the out door thermometer and hung it up where we can see it from the kitchen window.   It is taking noticeably longer for temperatures to climb in the morning now and temperatures seem to be falling faster in the evening.

Wind and wind chill

If you have to open the hive on a colder day, it's best to choose a calm day, at least then wind chill does not make the bees even colder.   Even on a warm day, if the wind is gusting it seems to disturb the bees.    Our apiary is almost completely surrounded by hedges, raspberries, shrubs and a fence which together act as a wind break and filter but we have postponed opening the hives several times because there was a brisk wind.  For flying, wind direction is more important than wind speed.  A strong wind blowing straight along the runway is perfect but a lighter wind blowing across the runway makes taking off and landing a challenge.   Gusting wind, especially wind that is gusting and changing direction makes taking off and landing really hazardous, at least for people with my limited experience.   Personally, I like laboratory conditions for landing, i.e. no wind at all.   Often here the wind drops in the early evening and we have a still period but I am certainly paying more attention to wind speed in the weather forecast and the dilemma is do we wait for the wind to drop and run the risk of the temperature dropping too?

 

Clouds and rain

The standard bee examination templates all seem to include a space to record whether it is cloudy.  That must be for a reason.  It transpires that bees seem to know when it's going to rain and they don't like thunder or rumbly vibrations of any sort.  We chose our apiary site to keep the bee hives well away from the lawn mower and we seem to have got that right as the bees take no notice if it.  We had heard horror stories of bees chasing lawn mowers.
 

Our records of cloud conditions aren't illuminating so I think we will have to dust down P's aero weather text books and accurately record cloud conditions to learn more about how clouds affect bee behaviour.

 

 

All of this makes me realise it was a big mistake not to buy the weather vane I saw at yesterday's country show.  There were several designs - a witch flying on a broomstick ( you might think that appropriate), a chicken ( my favourite) and a tractor, all complete with little wind cups to indicate (but not measure) wind speed as well as showing wind direction. 

Honey Part Two

12lb 10 oz of honey

It took four attempts to get the top super off of the hive.  Perhaps the Porter bee escapes we put on were not adjusted properly allowing bees to move up into the super as well as down out of it.   However, we have learnt that the G Bees are much cleverer than we are, so we are inclined to believe that they wedged open the porter bee escapes with wax and propolis.  Whatever, it wasn't until we switched the porter bee escapes for carefully adjusted ones that the number of bees in the super reached a level where we could brush off the few remaining bees, load the super into our wheelbarrow and fold the sheet around it quickly to prevent any bees (or wasps) coming with us.  The rest of the operation went smoothly and we got the super into the kitchen with no problems.

An oilcloth tablecloth spread over the floor was essential

P took on the uncapping.   When the bees have filled the frames with honey they seal each cell with a wax cap.  These caps have to be removed before the honey can be extracted.   The traditional technique is to slice the caps off with an uncapping knife.  We don't have one so P used a ham knife. An alternative technique gaining currency is to use a paint stripper to melt the wax caps but P found slicing the wax caps off with the ham knife easier. 

Then the frames were loaded into the honey extractor borrowed from the local beekeepers club. What a fantastic resource.   I loaded and held it down while P wound the handle to spin the frames .  The clear plastic lid allowed us to observe the honey spinning out of the frames and hitting the walls of the extractor before oozing down to settle in the bottom. Plenty of weight on the top of the extractor helped stop it "walking" across the floor.  

Once all the frames had been through he extractor, we lifted it onto a stool and opened the tap at the bottom to let the honey pour through a sieve into a settling bucket.  My kitchen sieve wasn't really up to the job.   Ideally, the sieve catches bee legs, wings, bits of wax, pollen, dead bees and goodness knows what else but we ended up with slightly speckled honey. 

 

I managed to borrow a much finer sieve when I delivered Liz's birthday present.   I put the wax cappings that P had sliced off into the oven to melt the wax and separate it from the honey that had been cut off with the cappings and poured the whole lot through a sieve.   This yielded three pounds of honey from the wax cappings.   The honey in the settling tank strained through the finer sieve yielded a further 9 and a bit jars making a whopping 12lb 10 oz of honey and we didn't expect to get any honey in our first season!  

 

By the time we had finished, the kitchen floor was spattered with honey, wax and propolis.   All of these stick to the soles of your shoes and are further spread around. Thankfully, the whole operation had taken place on an oilcloth table cloth.   I wouldn't fancy scraping wax lumps sticky with honey off the floor itself! 

 

Honey for lunch

P and I had bread and honey for lunch - what a treat! 

The honey extracted from the wax cappings is slightly darker and I will keep that for cooking.  The rest of the honey is runny, medium honey coloured in the jar, pale on a spoon and a nice delicate flavour.  The viscosity of honey depends on the where the bees have been foraging, the weather and the age of the honey.   We haven't heated ours to delay the crystallisation process that eventually makes honey creamy but we don't expect it to  last long!     At short notice, the only labels we could source were for "English Honey" .   And that is what it is.

Honey Part One

2 stings

A hearing aid

A bed sheet

And a wheelbarrow
 

Planned like a military operation.......
 

We didn't start keeping bees because we like honey.  We realised that it would be most unlikely that our bees would produce enough honey for us to take some off in their first year but at the last inspection we had 2 supers full of honey  and one of them is the super that used to be a brood chamber ("STUTBABC"). The frames in STUTBABC are old and need to be replaced with fresh frames.  So, we might as well spin out the honey then we can melt out the wax and, hopefully, exchange the old wax for new wax foundation for frames next year.

 

Taking off honey has to be planned like a military operation.   It is, after all, stealing stores from the bees.  They don't know that we plan to take less than half of their stores and to supplement their remaining stores with food to make sure they have enough for the whole winter.  We have to expect them to defend their stores and see off all attackers.

Phase One - reordering the supers

The first step is to make sure that the super we want to take off is at the top of the hive and has no bees in it so we don't have any G Bees "helping" in the kitchen with the honey extraction.    In our case, STUTBABC is the bottom super so we planned to the change the order when we put the supers back during our regular hive inspection.  We also planned to put a clearing board under STUTBABC.  This is a solid board with two gadgets fitted in to it that allow bees to go down into the supers below but not come up again.   

 

During the inspection, there were a lot of wasps around, they were also after the honey our G Bees have made and the G Bees were more agitated than usual, pinging our veils.    (Yes, I do mean they fly straight at the veil hitting it with a "ping" and bouncing off.)   Unfortunately, they also pinged the official photographer who, used to the normal gentle behaviour of our bees, was standing perilously close, and he wasn't wearing a veil!   He was stung - twice.

 

Later in the day when he went for a shower, he noticed that he had lost a hearing aid.  A finger tip search of the garden eventually turned up the hearing aid which was dislodged in his rapid retreat to a safe distance.  It is a miracle because it's one of those tiny hearing aids.   Phew!

Phase Two - take the super to the kitchen

The weather forecast was not good.  We had only a small window to work with the bees so after they'd gone to bed and it was nearly dark, we went to take off STUTBABC.   We took along a wheelbarrow with an old bed sheet spread out in it, planning to sit the super in the bed sheet and quickly wrap it up to make it bee proof in case they tried to follow us to the kitchen.    

 

We had also planned what we would do if there were still bees in the super.  We had with us a large feather for brushing the bees off of the frames in front of the hive entrance and a fine water mister to spray to convince them it was starting to rain and they should go inside (and not follow us).    But when we opened the hive there seemed to be just as many bees in the super as before Phase One.  

 

We thought we hadn't given them enough time to move down in to the hive so we left them for another 24 hours.

Phase Two - again

Once again we had to find a tiny suitable window in the weather to go back to the apiary equipped as before.   This time when we opened the hive and saw all the bees in STUTBABC we realised we had another problem.   STUTBABC came from the bee rescue (see the Blog for 20th July) and is a slightly different size to our other supers.  We thought we had positioned it to ensure there were no spaces that bees could slip through but we hadn't.   Instead of only being able to exit STUTBABC via the bee escapes in the clearing board, they had been able to slip in and out of the sides.  That didn't help them much because that just got them in to the space in between the inner hive and the outer casing but they had plenty of stores in STUTBABC and it's still warm so they had no incentive to go down to the nest in the brood chamber.

 

We have now taken all the frames out of STUTBABC and put them into one of our spare supers and put that on the hive over the clearing board.   It fits neatly.   Why didn't we do that before? We're going to give the remaining bees plenty of time to make their way down into the hive before we try again.   I'd better get a veil for the official photographer too.

Bees and Robbers

Who likes honey and will risk a few bee stings to steal it?

• Badgers
• Bees
• Green woodpeckers
• Hornets
• Wasps
• Winnie the Pooh

At this time of year bee hives attract the unwanted attention of wasps and hornets on the look out for a ready source of food for their own brood and even lazy bees who are looking for an easy source of stores for the Winter.   Having heard distressing tales of hives that have been robbed and colonies of bees exterminated by predators, we were concerned to see wasps lurking around our own hives, clearly looking for entry points.  Lately, during inspections, we have spotted wasps among the frames (and we go to great lengths to evict them before reassembling the hive).

The Experts say that it takes seven bees to see off one wasp, so you can imagine that in a small colony such as Queen B's, they would struggle to defend themselves if we didn't do as much as possible to help them.  I have to say that the G Bees appear capable of putting up a good defence but there seem to be limitless wasps.  So what to do?

We have reduced the size of the entrances to each hive.  If only one bee can get in at a time, the same applies to marauding wasps and the guard bees defending the hive can be lying in wait in just one place, or a reduced number of places.   For the novice beekeeper judging the exact amount of entry space to leave is difficult and we have no idea whether we have got it right.  Time will tell, I suppose.

Dealing with whole nests seems to be the best way to deal with wasps in large numbers.   We spotted one wasp nest in a hole in the ground earlier in the summer.  It was close to where we sit outside and that was flooded.  Let's hope the torrential rain deals with any other nests in the ground that we haven't found.  

Glass wasp traps are surprisingly effective.  This is where you can help.   You mustn't put honey or sugar in them because that would attract bees. A suitable recipe for a 12cm diameter glass wasp trap is:

1 tsp jam
1 tsp alcohol (the dregs from last year's Christmas sherry would be perfect)
A little boiling water for mixing
Enough cold water to make up to a 1/4 pint

Make sure the cork bung is securely in the neck of the wasp trap.  Invert the trap and sit it in a container to hold it steady.  Pour the liquid into it through the hole at the bottom, then carefully turn it upright taking care not to lose too much of the liquid.  Hang the trap at about head height.


I wasn't sure that our bees would not be trapped so I tested the recipe with one trap and carefully observed the inmates.  There were no obvious bees but as some inmates were still alive I dunked the whole trap in a bucket of water so that any remaining live creatures drowned quickly.   When I emptied the contents into the bucket, we had trapped lots of wasps, one hornet, lots of big black flies and some little shiny chafers.  I didn't see a single honey bee or bumble bee.


We don't get badgers in the garden - they are prone to knock over hives to break in to them with brute force and their pelts are thick enough that they can ignore stings.  Our hives are protected to an extent in that they are surrounded by a hedge.

We do have green woodpeckers nesting in the garden so we know that a job for the Autumn is to construct some kind of wire mesh covered frame to fit over the hives to stop the woodpeckers from pecking holes through the sides of the hives.

It is more of a challenge to defend the hives from Winnie the Pooh.  Our current plan is to distract him with a game of Pooh Sticks on the bridge.