Bees for Sale and now we are going Top Bar

This year has been the first year I have sold bees and I used a wonderful site called Bid4Bees. I had created 2 Nuclei colonies especially for this purpose both of these colonies have prospered and hugely benefited from the oilseed rape crop (Canola) which has allowed the bees to make loads of comb and the new queen to lay lots of eggs therefore producing lots of bees so I think my customers did well.

spot the queen

A polystyrene nuc box

So I spent the proceeds of the sale on procuring a cedar top bar hive.

Top bar bee-keeping is becoming very popular at the moment and many people are choosing this type of hive as it considered more natural. Certainly the bees do build their colony as they would in the wild but it is not a system for producing lots of honey as it you can't easily extract using a centrifugal extractor so you need to press the honey out of the comb or use it as cut comb honey. This means that the bees lose the wax when you take the honey where as in hives set up for honey you spin the honey out of the frames and the frames can go back to the bees so the can refill (this can happen over a few years saving the bees a lot of work). I see the top bar as a solution for people who want to keep bees but don't want a lot of messing around with honey. So I have decided that I need to give it a try and I want to develop a way of producing a nucleus of bees for sale in the Top Bar format at a premium of course

A Top Bar hive

Dead Queen Never

well just to take a moment to to up date you on what is happening in the hives

1. the queen wasn't dead... the next week we expected to find lots of queens cells but we found a lovely marked queen running around laying eggs in all available spaces. we found 2 good swarm cells and decided to make up a nucleus colony.

2. I started this spring with 3 good colonies and now I have 11.. well you might wonder why I haven posted... I think that is the explanation. so the 2 Apiaries now look like this
Hatton Road 1 Colony so far produced 15kg honey (mainly Oil Seed Rape) and 4 Nucleus colonies one a caste swarm from one of Hattons nucs and 1 caste swarm from Snakey lane (I think caste swarms happen when the emerging queen doesn't kill all the competing queen cells and flies out to mate and when she comes back another queen has hatched so she flies off with half of the bees to try and form a new colony) interestingly I know which colony the the Snakey lane swarm came from but I can't work out which colony the Hatton one came from but the Hatton swarm has built good comb and the queen is laying already 4 days later (this does make me suspicious that it is actually a caste but a small swarm from else where).
Now down at Snakey Lane  the Oil seed Rape has been keeping the bees so busy we are battling to keep on top of it. we have the 2 original colonies plus 4 Nuc boxes  the first Nuc came from the colony which had the suspected queen loss that didn't happen and I think it is doing fine the second nuc came from the lovely (Valium bees) that don't seem to be bothered by having bee-keepers around. and was located on another part of the site by a pond and appeared good and strong of course these were the ones that swarmed. and each colony has produced another nuc making a total of 4.
Ok I must dash we do need to check the bees again today

Oh no the queen is dead?

Bee-keeping throws up strange events so that you have to change plans rapidly. Yesterday  we had an event at Snakey Lane allotments with 2 new bee-keepers where we accidentally killed the queen and it was entirely my fault. One of the hives had an unmarked queen which has always been very illusive so I decided to mark her with a blue spot to make her easy to find.

I captured her in a queen marking cage and painted a blue spot on her thorax and then released her into the hive in this process one of two things happened either the smell of the marking paint made the workers think she was an invader and they attacked her or I injured her on placing the frame back but we noticed a cluster of bees around the queen who looked very ill and could not walk. she then appeared to fall to the bottom of the hive.

The only positive thing is that she had been laying lots of eggs and the colony will create new queen cells. The other benefit is that it was our plan to create more colonies for each of the new bee-keepers (my trainees) on the site and this is the opportunity about a month earlier than planned.

As for the Hatton Road site it is steaming along and looks like this 

what a yummy sticky mess

We really have been blessed with some lovely weather lately. It was such a pleasant morning I thought I had better check the progress of the merger today. I should have done it on Sunday but the local children were playing football at the club next to the allotment (it is probably a good idea to avoid having lots of smoke an flying bees around to alarm mummy while little Jack and Chardonnay are playing sport). So today I checked the new frames in the busy merged colony and they have started to build plenty of honey comb so I could move the queen to the new brood box. I was an relativity simple procedure once you have found the queen she is likely to be in the main brood box and she should be easy to spot because she has a blue spot on her thorax (A blue spot signifies she was born in 2010) as queens usually live no longer than 5 years so a 5 year colour cycle exists, White is years ending in 1 or 6 Yellow is 2 or 7,Red is 3 or 8, Green is 4 or 9, and Blue 5 or 0. So once she was found she was moved to the new chamber and the old brood box has a queen excluder (the queen is much bigger than a worker so an excluder allows the workers through but the queen is trapped) and a hive entrance placed on top then the new box with the queen on top of that so all of the old box can hatch the brood already in place (and there is lots of it) over the next 3 weeks. The exciting part of this event is that I have extracted about 5KG of honey this afternoon, a very fun sticky job.

A Budget Day Merger

Well the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced his budget for growth a nondescript event if I must say so myself, 50p off a tank of diesel is no great shakes.

So I decided to conduct a merger, well the merging of two bee colonies at Hatton Road.

Hatton Road is a very noisy site, as it is located next to Heathrow Airport. The Hive is 775.5 meters from the end of the South Runway, so it is a great spot for plane spotting. Bees don't have ears so it doesn't worry them.

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Well I had 2 Colonies there but (as in my previous post) sadly one colony didn't come through the winter with a surviving Queen (they checked out to be disease free), I confirmed this in another inspection before the merger. So the best thing to do as it is too early to get another Queen is to merge the colonies together. The main method if you have the time (which we have) is to separate the colonies with a sheet of newspaper you take the roof and crown board off the first colony which does have a queen and lay newspaper over the top of the hive and slit the paper in a few places, the old colony goes on top, and the roof and crown board on top of that. The bees eat their way through the paper over the next day or so, slowly becoming accustomed to each other.

This is a pleasant adventure, compared to the chaos method alternative where you have a sloping board running into the hive that you are keeping, you then need to isolate the queen ensuring she is safely in the home hive, while you shake all the bees from both hives on to the board and amid the chaos they all run into the hive with out too much fighting. This is not for the faint hearted  (only to be done if the area is generally public free) but a spectacular sight as it happens very quickly (like a film speeded up).

Spring has sprung for real this time (Warning grusome photo alert)

Oh the joys of seeing sunshine and feeling its gentle warmth against your skin. Over the weekend it was the first real bee-keeping weather and at last a chance to have a good look inside the hives. Both of the hives that were moved on St Patrick's Day were both in fine form with plenty of brood plenty of bees and plenty of food. The colony that over wintered at Snakey lane was also in fine form. The sad news is that the largest colony that overwintered at Hatton Road seem to be in bad shape and seems to not have a laying queen (although I am not convinced there is no queen) there is no brood in any stage but plenty of food still quite a few bees. I will leave it for further inspection next weekend (weather permitting) In the meantime I have taken a sample of bees for analysis so I can look at merging the remaining bees to assist the more successful colony if they don't look like being able to continue. 

There are 2 diseases that  that I have checked for Nosema  which infects the gut of the bee caused by a protozoa (a unicellular parasite from the fungi family) it requires a sample of bees (killed by freezing) mashed into a paste with a little distilled water and sampled under the microscope, I am pleased to say there was none to be found ( this hive was checked last September and was positive  and treated with Fumadil) this is a picture from that September inspection

The other problem is Acarine which is a extremely tiny mite that infests the trachea of the bee you will be interested to note that a bee does not breath through its mouth but a series of spiracles on the side of its body the mite lays her eggs in these airways, seriously affecting the bees breathing, the hatched mites climb out and transfer to other bees via the hair.

The only way of checking for this is to decapitate the dead bee and check the trachea if it creamy coloured it is fine if is marked and dark in places you have a problem ( You need to check a few bees and it is a fiddly job)

Here is a photo of one of the dissections

Well I feel we are all clear and if they are to be merged It will be OK . I will keep you posted

St Patricks Day.... a day to move the bees

I closed the Uxbridge Apiary today the two hives have been relocated at Hatton Rd and Snakey Lane. How does that happen I hear you cry. It started yesterday when I Closed the Hives, I waited until it was a little chilly ( which is standard at the moment) and I placed a block on their entrance ( I designed a one-way system that allowed any returning bees in but the bees inside could not get out.) I strapped the hive with a ratchet strap and I left it over night. This morning I loaded my sack trolley and went to the hives and sealed up the entrances completely with Duct Tape and sealed the edge of the floor to stop any side ways shift. Once they were ready I wheeled them down to the car ( Thank you Citroen your Picasso range is perfect 2 hives fit perfectly with out moving the seats)off down the road with 2 colonies of bees in the back.

I am happy to report that both colonies are securely in place in their new site. They will have to learn a whole new area to forage the Snakey Lane bees will be happy to find a Garden Centre next door. Now it is time to plan the comb changes for all the hives( it is an expensive business)