Swarm Season Starts

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that Dorothy's bees were building up quickly, and that I'd need to keep on top of potential swarm preparations.  I was not wrong.

Last Sunday (12th April) I checked Dorothy's hive, and there were the classic signs of swarm preparation.  Firstly, drone brood - both capped and uncapped.  Secondly, a couple of emerged drones.  And thirdly - and most tellingly - a queen cup (the start of a queen cell) with an egg in it.  I had to do something.

With the country currently in lockdown and social distancing in force, the British Beekeepers Association is advising that swarm collection may be a problem if beekeepers can't maintain social distancing when collecting swarms.  The last time I collected a swarm it was a two-person job, and we were definitely less than two metres apart.  That would be a problem this year.  So, the best thing to do is avoid swarming in the first place.

I therefore split the colony, left the laid queen cup in hive #2, and moved Dorothy and five frames of bees to a nucleus.  And then waited a week.

That takes us to Sunday just past, and two tasks - check the nucleus, and check hive #2.

The nucleus is doing well.  The bees are foraging and Dorothy is laying.  There is a decent amount of brood, pollen and stores.  Hopefully they will build up nicely - but not too quickly - I don't want them to start planning to swarm again.

In the hive, the queen cup I saw last week was now a complete and capped queen cell.  There were another three on the same frame, and four more on the frame next to it.  Here's a picture of three of them:

The thing is, eight queen cells are way too many.  If I left more than one, the bees could swarm when the second (and third and fourth) queen(s) emerge.  These are called 'cast swarms' - they tend to be small and have a poor chance of survival.  So it's better just to make sure that cast swarming doesn't happen.  That means assessing the queen cells, picking a winner and removing the rest.

Whenever I do this, I always intend to keep the cell that I saw the previous week.  But when it comes to it, I more often than not change my mind.  Why?  What makes a 'good' queen cell?  I've always gone by a simple principle - bigger is better.  This is because smaller cells can restrict the growth of the queen - particularly her abdomen.  A bigger queen, with a bigger abdomen, means bigger ovaries and therefore better laying capacity.  Since egg-laying is a queen's main task, I want the best layer as this means more workers and therefore a bigger colony, with the best chance of surviving through winter.  It also means more honey, of course!

So, last week's cell looked good.  But two inches to the right was a whopper.  Very long, and already capped.  So, last week's - and the other six - unfortunately had to go.  I cut them out with my hive tool, and left the super-cell attached to the comb.  The larva inside will spend this week pupating, and should hopefully emerge as an adult queen next weekend.  If she does, I shall have to pick a name for her...

Time to Get Outside (if you're a bee)

We humans may all be stuck inside right now, but that's not the case for the bees - we have lovely weather outside this week, and they are busily collecting the early nectar and pollen.  The gage tree in my garden has been getting plenty of visits from my bees, as well as bumbles, hoverflies, butterflies and solitary bees.

Sunday was my first inspection of the season - as is usual, I moved the supers from underneath the brood boxes and placed them on top, with queen excluders between.  Here's me hard at work (thanks to the bees' landlady Gill for the photos!):

So, a quick update on how the hives are doing:

Katherine in Hive #1

The colony has survived winter, though they are a little small.  There had been nothing stored in the super before winter, though they have managed to make do with the stores they collected in the brood box.  Because the super was empty, some spiders (all false widows - I think I counted three) had taken up residence and had been opportunistically feeding on bees that strayed too close.  The spiders were aggressively removed before the super was put back on the hive.  (Regular readers will recall this is not the first time I've encountered a false widow spider while beekeeping).

Despite the small size of the colony, they are bringing in plenty of pollen and Katherine is laying plenty of eggs.  I fact, when I spotted her there was one hanging out of the back of her abdomen, so I guess I must have interrupted her right in the middle of her important task.

Overall, good news and I expect they will start to fill the super soon.

Dorothy in Hive #2

Dorothy's hive is doing really well.  The super is half-full, and there are plenty of stores in the brood box.  Also, there are lots of eggs and a decent amount of capped and uncapped brood.  This colony looks like it is building up quickly - I should get a decent honey crop out of them this year, if I can keep on top of their attempts to swarm.  There are no signs of swarm preparations yet, but once the drones start to emerge in 2-3 weeks I think I will have my work cut out in keeping them from swarming.

I had sufficient confidence in their progress that I put a second super on hive #2 on Tuesday evening.  Hopefully this will keep the bees busy with nectar collection, and distract their collective hive-mind from thoughts of swarming, at least for another few weeks.

So, overall a good start to the season.  Nature seems to have taken advantage of us humans being locked away for a while - everything outside appears to be thriving!

Introducing... Queen Katherine!

Exciting news from the Beechen Bees apiary - I have a new queen!

At the beginning of August, the colony in hive #1 had got large enough that I felt able to do a split.  So, with the help of budding bee buddies Helen and Joel, I moved queen Dorothy - and half of the bees - out of hive #1 and into #2.  A week later, the bees in hive #1 had made a solitary queen cell, and ten days after that I saw the new queen.

But of course, she hadn't yet mated, and the weather in August was somewhat variable, so I didn't want to be too optimistic.  However, a couple of weeks ago I saw the first eggs neatly laid in cells, and then last weekend I was able to find the new queen and mark her (it's a green dot this year).  So - here she is!

As for her name - I figured that, since this year was the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing, I'd include someone who was involved in the Apollo space programme.  The Americans didn't include any female astronauts in the Apollo programme (the first women were selected for astronaut training in 1978, six years after the end of Apollo).  So I decided to pick someone from the mission planning team, and the winner is... Katherine Johnson!

Katherine Johnson is a mathematician who was employed in the 1950s as a 'computer' (in the pre-digital meaning of the word) for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA - the predecessor organisation to NASA).  In 1958 NACA was superseded by NASA, and Katherine moved to NASA to work as an aerospace technologist in the Spacecraft Controls Branch.  She had the job of calculating space flight trajectories, including Alan Shepard's in 1961 and John Glenn's in 1962.

Katherine later became a pioneer with digital computers and helped to develop NASA's confidence with the new technology.  And in 1969 she helped to calculate the trajectory for the 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the Moon.  Katherine wasn't done with Apollo there - when Apollo 13 'had a problem', she worked on the backup procedures and flight path navigation that returned the crew safely to Earth.

You can find out more about Katherine Johnson from her entry in Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Johnson

What's Been Happening in the ZEST Hive?

A couple of months have passed since Dorothy's return, and things have been mostly quiet in the Beechen Bees apiary (although I will have some news shortly...)  So, I thought I'd give you all an update on things in the ZEST hive over in Bathwick.

Firstly - swarm!

This happened on 9th June.  Hive B (the newer one) had started making queen cells after the late May bank holiday, and it was only a matter of time before we missed one and they swarmed.  Fortunately, there are a number of apple trees by the ZEST hives, and the swarm didn't travel much more than 20 metres from the hive.  Even better, they settled on a single thin branch, at shoulder height.  Probably the easiest swarm to collect, which is lucky since it was my first!  Gerry was on hand to help, and we transferred it - via a Flexi-bucket - to a nucleus that I'd brought with me for the purpose of housing the bees temporarily:

Once the roof was on, they seemed pretty content:

In Hive A, the bees had been blowing hot and cold over whether to swarm or not.  We spent July trying to do swarm control - which worked, in that a swarm was avoided.  The bees made a queen cell towards the end of July which we isolated (with bees and stores) into a separate end of the hive by means of a divider board.  Although we haven't seen the emerged queen yet, we were happy to see eggs last weekend:

And, because it's harvest time, I was pleased to be presented yesterday with two jars of ZEST hive honey!

So, that brings things pretty-much up-to-date with the ZEST hive - next time, I should have a little news about my own.

Meet the New Bees - Same as the Old Bees

Who's this...?

Well, it's queen Dorothy!  Regular readers will remember that she was last seen in June last year, heading off to her new home in Southcot burial ground.  The big news is - she's back!  And I have bees again!  Here's how it happened:

Towards the end of April, Jessica (Dorothy's new beekeeper) got in touch to say that she'd been doing a bailey comb change (in which the beekeeper temporarily puts a second brood box on the hive to encourage the bees to draw new comb).  But the bees had started to make queen cells, and Jessica wanted a second opinion before starting any swarm control.

I went down to meet Jessica at her hive - with an empty nuc in hand, just in case we needed it.  When we opened up, the hive was very busy, and there were lots of queen cells.  We decided there were enough bees and queen cells to do a three-way split, so we:

• Found the frame with Dorothy on, and moved it into the nuc, along with two other frames, and added one empty frame to give the bees something to do.
• Moved five frames (including bees and queen cells) into a new hive, with some fresh frames to fill the remaining space.
• Left the rest of the frames (with bees and queen cells) in the original hive, and padded out the space with fresh frames.

Then we waited 2½ weeks to see if new queens had emerged in the hives, and had started laying.  They had!  We checked the nuc - all was well, and I added another empty frame.  And Jessica very generously offered to let me have Dorothy back, so that I could re-start beekeeping.

So, a couple of weekends ago (on 25th May) I arranged to meet Jessica to check on the nuc again.  Both her new queens were still laying, so we marked them each with a dot of paint.  Then we did a final check on the nuc - all well, and Dorothy was still laying happily.  I returned at dusk to collect the nuc and move it back to my apiary.  I put it next to hive #1, to make things nice and easy for moving the bees into the hive.

Three days later, I was ready to move the bees into their new home in hive #1.  Here's a photo of the nuc - with roof removed - and the hive, with an empty space to move the frames into:

Normally, it's a simple matter of moving the frames across and closing up the hive.  However, Jessica had been keeping her bees in a deep brood box, which is three inches deeper than my standard national.  The new frames I'd put in were national (14" x 9") sized, so that was fine.  Two of the three old frames were also national sized, and the bees had simply extended three inches of comb down from the bottom of the frames.  This was easily dealt with - I cut the excess comb off the bottom of the frames and put it aside (to burn later).

But one of the frames was a 14" x 12" frame that Jessica had put in.  There was plenty of brood and I didn't want to lose the frame.  So I decided I'd just have to cut off the bottom three inches.  A sharp pair of secateurs did the job nicely:

And that was it - the last frame put in place, a few new frames to to give the bees something to work on, and my new, old bees are back!

An End, and a Beginning

An End

On Thursday, I went to see what the bees in hive #1 (Laura's hive) were up to.  It was a warm spring day, so they should have been busy.  They weren't.  In fact, there were no bees going into or out of the hive.

A quick look inside confirmed my worst fears:

Another cluster of dead bees, and another dead queen.  They'd died in a very similar way to hive #2.  I'm not sure why - but I'd like to know - so I've kept 30 workers, plus the queen, to be sent away for analysis.  It may be disease - you can see some partially-capped pupae (that should be fully capped) toward the bottom-right of the picture.  Or, it may be that they starved because they couldn't hydrate the hard ivy honey that had crystallised in the cells (you can see a patch of it in the bottom-left of the picture).  But whatever the reason, I currently have no bees.

So, for the second time this year, I had to burn everything:

It's sad to have lost all my bees.  However, their bloodlines live on in Ian's and Jessica's bees and also in the ZEST hive.  So there are still Beechen Bees in Widcombe and Bathwick.  In other words, all is not lost, and I need to view this as more a setback than a disaster.

I'm going to concentrate on the ZEST hive for the next couple of weeks, and then think about what to do next.

A Beginning

Who's this furry friend?

It's Pippie!  Mrs Beekeeper and I drove over to an animal sanctuary in Cheltenham on Good Friday to collect her and bring her to live with us in her new Forever Home!  This is my very first picture of Pippie in our house - she is just leaving the bathroom where she had clearly been checking the facilities (an important task, since that is where we have put one of her litter trays).

No cat could ever replace our dear Patsy.  But it's nice to have the patter of little paws around the house once again.  Anyway, Pippie is already showing herself to have quite a different personality from Pats.  She is somewhat shy, but inquisitive, and when she is awake she is a little bundle of energy.  She has got to know the inside of the house, and has already been on a couple of excursions outside to enjoy the bank holiday weather and sniff all the spring smells in the garden.

Welcome to Widcombe, little Pippie - I think you will be very happy here.

When The Bee Stings - Part 2 - Chemistry

Science warning: this post contains actual science. You have been warned...

In part 1, we looked at the evolution and structure of the bee sting.  We know that the first venomous sting evolved in the common ancestor of all Aculeata around the late Triassic or early Jurassic.  Given 200 million years (give or take) of evolution, it's not surprising that the contents of the venom varies between bees, ants, wasps and hornets.  For example, bee stings are acidic (pH 5.0 - 5.5), whereas wasp stings are almost neutral (pH 6.8 - 6.9).

Anyway, we're not here to talk about wasps - this is a beekeeping blog.  And today's entry is about the chemistry of bee venom.  Those 200 million years of evolution have cooked up quite a cocktail of different substances, which work both in isolation and together to provide a precise pain experience when you get stung.  Let's take a dive straight into the detail - looking at the content of honey bee (Apis mellifera) venom, here are the approximate percentages by dry weight:

Melittin (peptide, 40-50%)

Melittin is a peptide, which means that it is a molecule formed of a short chain of amino acids.  This distinguishes it from a protein, which is a long amino acid chain.  Peptides turn up a lot in biochemistry, as they perform all sorts of useful functions including breaking down proteins; some peptides are hormones that are involved in physiological regulation.

Melittin is composed of 26 amino acids.  It has three principle actions:  firstly, it activates pain receptor cells.  Secondly, it causes holes to appear in cell membranes (which basically damages the cells).  The third action is to destroy red blood cells.  All of these are bad, obviously, which is why melittin is such an effective venom component.

Phospholipase A (enzyme, 10-12%)

Specifically, phospholipase A2.  This is an enzyme which breaks down phospholipids.  In turn, phospholipids are a major component of cell membranes, so phospholipase A2 has the effect of damaging the out walls of cells.  When the phospholipids break down, one of the components that is released is arachidonic acid.  This is then oxygenated by other enzymes, to form eicosanoids.  And eicosanoids signal the body's inflammation response.

Hyaluronidase (enzyme, 1-2%)

Another enzyme.  This one breaks down hyaluronic acid, which is a component of the tissue around the cells.  When this tissue breaks down, it increases the permeability of cells, and allows molecules to disperse more quickly around the cells.  In other words, hyaluronidase helps the other components of the venom to get around and into the cells faster.

Apamin (peptide, 2-3%)

This one is another peptide.  Fun fact - apamin was first isolated from the honey bee (Apis mellifera) - hence the name "apamin".  Another fun fact is that apamin is the smallest known peptide nurotixin - and the only one small enough to pass from the blood into the brain.  It acts on the SK channels, which are calcium-activated sodium channels inside neurons.  The job of these channels is to regulate (i.e. slow down) repetitive firing of the neurons - in other words, their job is to make the pain reduce after the initial sting.  But apamin blocks the SK channels, preventing them from slowing down the feeling of pain.  So apamin has the job of keeping going the pain that is caused by melittin.

Histamine (biogenic amine, 0.5-2%)

Histamine makes you itch.  anybody who has an allergy will be familiar with the action of histamine - if you have hay fever you get an itchy nose, while a cat allergy will cause very itchy skin if a cat scratches you.  It is also involved in the body's inflammatory response - inflammation has a number of effects, including making capillaries more permeable to white blood cells, which would normally be a way of fighting infection at a wound.  The inclusion of histamine is rather clever, as it uses the body's defensive system against itself by increasing inflammation at the site of the sting.

MCD Peptide (peptide, 2-3%)

Mast Cell Degranulating Peptide, to give it its full title.  Mast cells are found in connective tissue (including just under the skin) and contain granules which themselves contain histamine and heparin.  MCD peptide causes these granules to break down, releasing the heparin and histamine.  Heparin is an anticoagulant.  More histamine means even more itching and inflammation (see above).

Noradrenaline (biogenic amine, 0.1-0.5%)

Also known as norepinephrine.  Like adrenaline (which is chemically similar) noradrenaline increases heart rate and blood pressure, increases blood flow to the muscles, releases glucose for energy and can cause feelings of anxiety.  In other words, its use in bee venom is to deliberately stimulate the body's fight-or-flight response - presumably to encourage the victim to run away!

Serotonin (biogenic amine, trace amount)

At first sight it's odd to see serotonin here - it is, after all, one of the brain's "happy" chemicals, associated with good mood and feelings of well-being.  However, a side-effect of serotonin injection is localised pain, and that's what the bee is shooting for here.

Dopamine (biogenic amine, 0.2-1%)

Another chemical that is associated with happiness or pleasure.  This is because of dopamine's effect on the brain's reward-motivation system.  In fact, it's more correct to say that dopamine signals the perceived desirability or aversiveness of an event.  In this case, being stung is something to be averted, and dopamine is there to remind your brain of that.

Alarm Pheremones (trace amounts)

The function of the alarm pheremones is to increase the aggressiveness/defensiveness of other bees that are nearby.  So, if a colony is attacked, the first (and bravest) bee to sting the attacker will cause alarm pheremones to be released when the venom is injected.  This will encourage other bees to threaten, and then sting the attacker.  The longer they hang around, the more they get stung.  The wisest course of action is, of course, to run away!

References

I referred to a couple of useful articles when researching this blog post.

This is a piece of research that breaks down the components of honey bee venom by dry weight:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304012422_Bee_Venom_Production_Composition_Quality

And this is a nice infographic showing the different compositions of venom in the main groups of the Aculeata:
https://www.compoundchem.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/The-Chemical-Composition-of-Insect-Venoms-v2.pdf