Varroa Part Two

The results are in

The weather continues to be unusually dry and warm both during the day and at night.   Our two hives are as busy as ever and we have now finished feeding the two colonies for the time being.

 

The bases of the hives are made of mesh which provides good ventilation but also allows dead Varroa mites and other debris to fall through.   To check the Varroa count, we slide trays under the mesh floors to catch the debris. 

 

When we did this before giving the bees a Varroa treatment, we found a few dead Varroa mites on the Beebettes' hive but none on the G Bees' hive and we wondered why because, this year, according to the BBKA, high Varroa counts have been seen throughout the country.

 

When we put the trays back under the hives for the post treatment count, I was extra careful to create a thick Vaseline border around the edge which is supposed to trap any creatures that have a mind to crawl on to the trays to eat the debris.  I can report that this was spectacularly unsuccessful.   As I withdrew the trays from under each of the hives, earwigs scampered over the Vaseline to escape.  The one earwig that looked trapped in the Vaseline subsequently jumped off and is now living in the kitchen somewhere.

Beebettes

G Bees

 

So, you won't be surprised to learn that we didn't see any Varroa this time on either hive.   On the face of it, the results are what we should expect, that is there are fewer Varroa mites in the hives now than before we gave the bees the Varroa treatment.  However, we have to ask ourselves:

a) Were the things we thought were Varroa mites really Varroa mites?  If we get out a magnifying glass will we see hundreds of smaller mites?   Well, I did this and the answer appears to be no.

b) Is the mesh on the G Bees' hive too small for the mites to drop through?  I haven't been able to check yet as the floor is firmly glued in place with propolis.  

 

Another explanation could be that the Beebettes' brood chamber sits on the hive floor but the G Bees' brood chamber is sitting on top of a super of stores (this being a much bigger colony and needing more food for the Winter) so any debris has further to fall and may have got stuck in the super en route.

 

 

Autumn Feeding

Our experience of Feeding our bees this Autumn

A sunny day
A Miller feeder
An Ashforth feeder
28kg invert liquid feed
Wasps
Michaelmas Daisy pollen

The varroa treatment, a kind of paste that the bees apparently find tasty, has been on the hives for the requisite number of weeks so it's time to take the treatment off and start feeding.  Interestingly, each colony seems to have consumed the same quantity of the paste notwithstanding that there are vastly more G Bees than Beebettes.

So,  now we feed the bees to ensure they have enough stores for the Winter.    We have a rapid feeder for each hive but different designs  Each is made to sit on top of the inner hive.  We pour sugar syrup into the reservoir and it seeps through small slots into a separate chamber where the bees come up to access it.   We have bought invert liquid feed via the local beekeepers' club which is a ready mixed sugar syrup.   It comes in large plastic containers that we can leave in the apiary and with one per colony recommended, we can easily keep tabs on how much each colony has had.   The Authorities are imprecise about how much syrup we should provide for each colony.  There are a lot of variables to take into consideration - the number of bees in the colony, the quantity of stores they already have and how wet or cold the weather is.   We should apparently "heft" the hive, ie lift it enough to judge the quantity of stores that the bees have but as novices we will be learning as we go along.

P was official photographer so dad suited up to help.  The bees were busily going about their business and didn't take much notice of us.      I dribbled some syrup into the hive where the bees should access the feeder because, apparently, they can't smell the syrup and can take the days to find it.  Next morning, we checked to make sure the bees had found the syrup and the picture shows the Beebettes through the Perspex cover of the Ashforth feeder.  If you look carefully you can see a wasp that has somehow got into the hive. The bees showed no sign that they had noticed.

The Miller feeder has a wooden lid and we checked the G Bees were in there but didn't take it off for a photograph.

 

Meanwhile, it was a sunny day and bees were arriving at the hive entrances laden with pollen.  This is most likely Michaelmas Daisy pollen.

 



We've also put the Varroa floors back on the hives, taking care to put on a good barrier of Vaseline. Results next week!

Varroa Part One

The mystery of the missing Varroa Mites

1992 a special year for us and the year Varroa mites were first discovered in UK.

Varroa mites were a known parasite of the Asian bee but they are thought to have crossed over to the European bee in the 1960s. In 1992 they were first discovered in the UK and now they are everywhere.

With average temperatures falling, this is the time of year when Queen B and Queen G are starting to lay fewer eggs but those that they do lay now will hatch to become the bees that will live throughout the Winter. The bees that have been working hard all year gradually die off at the end of their natural lives so the number of bees in a large colony reduces from perhaps 70,000 to 10,000.

It is recommended that we treat the colonies to reduce the number of Varroa mites now so that the over-wintering bees start out with as few pests as possible, giving them slightly less to do as they battle to survive to next Spring. Varroa mites stick on to bees sucking “blood” (actually hemolymph) and weakening them. The open wounds that are left leave the bees more prone to infection. Varroa mites also hop on and off bees so they can transmit disease from one colony to another. They prefer to lay eggs in drone cells but in the Autumn, all the drones are expelled so Varroa mites switch to ordinary worker bees.

Before we start the treatment process, we have to check the number of Varroa mites in the colonies already. Luckily, I picked up tips at the last beekeeping theory class in early August, so a couple of weeks ago we smeared Vaseline round the edge of the boards that slide in under the mesh floors of the hives and sprayed the boards inside the Vaseline liberally with cooking spray – yes the oil you spray on your frying pan. After a week this was the result for Queen B and her colony:

 

 

You can see the stripes of debris falling from the frames. At the front of the hive (top of the picture) there is an area of wax bits and pollen. The bright orange is Dahlia and the less bright orange is Michaelmas Daisy or Aster pollen. The pale yellow is probably Himalayan Balsam.

At the back of the hive is what we’re interested in. Those larger round reddish brown discs are dead Varroa mites. We counted about 16 and did the maths. These bees don’t have a bad infestation but this will give us something to compare with the results after Varroa treatment.

As you will have come to expect, the G Bees are different. On the G Bees’ floor, the stripes aren’t noticeable. I suspect this is because there are so many bees in the colony and so much debris that it spreads out. We might have got stripes if we’d left the floor in for a shorter period, say 24 hours instead of a week. Or, perhaps some creatures breached the Vaseline barrier and ran around on the board spreading the debris about.

 

It ‘s all the more surprising then, given how large the G Bees' colony is, that there aren’t any visible signs of a Varroa! I wonder whether it’s because the board is made of wood rather than metal. Perhaps the Vaseline did soak in more and didn’t prevent earwigs and other bugs from getting on the board and eating whatever they wanted. There’s an even spread of wax bits but not so much pollen either. The pollen we can see is yellow possibly from squashes and almost white. It’s a bit late for sweet corn but there is a field within eyesight and sweet corn pollen is apparently white.

Or, perhaps this colony genuinely doesn’t have Varroa. Any thoughts anyone?

Bee Space and Carpentry

We have to do some carpentry to create a des res for the bees

It is true that P was a rocket scientist when we met but this blog isn't about that kind of space.  

Bees need enough room to move both vertically and horizontally around their hive, in between the frames.   However, if you give them too much room, they fill it with brace comb, i.e. extra wax cells that they use for stores or brood.  This doesn't sound too bad but the brace comb effectively fixes one piece of hive to another making it hard to take the various bits of the hive apart to inspect the bees. 

 

If you give the bees a space that's too small, they fill it with propolis.   Propolis is an extremely viscous goo that stops draughts and glues things together.   When it's soft, it sticks to everything but it sets like a lacquer; indeed, it used to be used by violin makers and it stains the yellowy colour of an old violin! 

 

The perfect bee space is 1/4 inch or 6 - 7 mm and brood chambers and supers that make up a hive come either with top bee space or bottom bee space for the bees to move around below or above the frames.  Bottom bee space is the most common but the Authorities recommend top bee space.  This has the advantage that it's easier to put the bits of the hive together without squashing any bees and therefore seemed ideal for us novice beekeepers. 

When we were inspecting the bees this week, the importance of bee space hit home.   Our first hive, which was a birthday present, was built to order, cost a fortune and has top bee space.  The second hive,  an ebay bargain, is identical to the first hive apart from the brood chamber and it has bottom bee space.  We intended to convert it to top bee space and, since this involves a router, one of P's favourite toys, sorry tools, he made a start by converting the brood chamber to top bee space.

 

When we were frantically adding space for the G Bees a few weeks ago,  we ended up putting supers with bottom bee space over the brood chamber with top bee space.  We coped with bits of brace comb built under the frames in the supers, usually managing to scrape them off before they got too big but after extracting honey, we put the supers back in a different order.   This week we found frames from one super glued to the super above with propolis such that they all came out together when we tried to lift off the top super.  With extra frames hanging down underneath covered in bees, we couldn't put the super with it's undercarriage anywhere except back where we got it from.  



It took me a long time to work out a solution but when I did, the first stage was to build the brand new, flat pack super that came with the ebay hive.





The local beekeepers' association has a carpentry day coming up in October but I had expert help on hand!

 

 

Although the new super has bottom bee space, it didn't matter because I was able to swap it with the super with top bee space that was on the Beebettes' hive to give them space for their Varroa treatment.  There was another top bee space super fulfilling the same function for the G Bees.  Then it was a relatively simple task, to switch the frames from the bottom bee space supers into the top bee space supers.   The result is that we have a spare bottom bee space super for P to convert when he has a minute.  That will be after he makes some more crown boards. 

 

Crown boards sit on the top of the supers or brood chamber under the roof of the hive.  They form a base for some types of feeder to sit on and they can be used with bee escapes to clear the bees down from a super ready for honey extraction.  They are also handy for putting over a super or brood chamber during an inspection because bees are calmer in the dark and for putting in between and on top of stored equipment to keep out wax moths and other pests.   We have realised that one crown board per hive isn't enough. 

 

When we had the bathroom redecorated last month, the builders made a cover to fit over the bath to prevent any damage to it.  At my request, the cover was made from ply wood so it can be cut up to make crown boards.  They think I'm bonkers.........  Luckily, P has the perfect saw for that job too.  

 

I had no idea that so much carpentry would be involved in beekeeping but I am very proud of the frames I made up when we thought we were going to run out of them a few weeks ago.

 

 

All these fiddly bits turned in to 10 frames!

 

 

And I haven't mentioned the gate to the apiary that is made but not hung up or the ekes and the spacers that make incompatible sizes of equipment fit together, both of which we know we need to make over the Winter.

 

 

Late Summer Foraging

These are all our bees (we presume) and flowers in our garden!

 

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For summer has o’er brimmed their clammy cells.

John Keats

My favourite line of this poem has, until now, been the last line of the last verse:

 

"And gathering swallows twitter in the skies."

 

Our swallows left a couple of weeks ago and we miss their twittering but now I see the charms of the last few lines of the first verse, especially with some late summer sunny days.

This is a pictorial blog showing some of the late summer flowers our bees are foraging from.  

They seem to love the borage that has self-seeded around the vegetable garden after being planted to provide flowers to go in Pimms and Lemonade, and in salads. 

 



 

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Nearby are the red flowers of our runner beans and the pink perennial sweet peas.

 

 






























In the river the Rosebay Willow Herb is going to seed and the bees are all over the Water Mint.

In the back garden the Nepeta is coming to an end making a fuzzy-looking picture and there are so many little flowers it was hard to photograph a bee in action.  This is also very popular with all sorts of different bumblebees.











The Sedum Spectabile is just turning pink and it is clearly a bee favourite as they are all over it.











The clearest bee in action photograph is this lovely bee on a Japanese Anemone.

Finally, the photograph at the top of the blog shows a bee on an Aster in the bee bar that I planted specially to provide late summer flowers for the bees this year.  It provides a dramatic splash of colour near the gate.