Goodbye Beechen Bees - Epilogue

Spring is in full swing, the blossom is out, and the bees should be flying by now.  Sadly, mine are not.  I opened the hives last month, and found piles of dead bees, and some nasty mould:

I don't know exactly what killed them - probably some kind of virus, such as chronic bee paralysis virus.  Almost certainly spread within and across the hives by Varroa mites.  But it means - currently - the end of all my bees.  It's a shame, as they were all from the same family tree, right from my first colony that I got back in 2012, headed up by queen Rosalind.

Anyway, before I can get new bees, I needed to clean things up.  The first task was to burn all the frames.  They could still be harbouring the infection that killed my bees, so I can't take the risk of using them again.  The best way to dispose of old frames is to burn them.  They do burn well:

The next task was to scrape off any remaining propolis on the brood and super boxes, and sterilise the remaining hive parts.  This is done with a blowtorch.  The idea is to work fairly quickly, so as to scorch the wood but not burn it.

Then, I put new frames in.  Acting on a tip from fellow Widcombe beekeeper Jessica, I put in 10 new frames of wax foundation, and also a frame of drawn wax from one of my spare super frames:

The idea is that any passing swarm might smell the wax, take a look inside, and find an empty - but fully furnished - beehive all ready for them to move into.  New bee landlord Joel assures me that he usually gets a swarm in either his, or his neighbour's garden, every spring.  So, if I'm lucky, I might find a passing swarm setting up home in one of my hives.  That, at least, is the theory - we'll see how it works out over the next few weeks.

This will be my last blog entry as Beechen Bees.  But - assuming I do get some bees, one way or another, this season - it won't be the last you'll hear of me.  Stay tuned for some news from The Southdown Apiary!

Goodbye Beechen Bees...

A couple of posts back, I talked about moving the nucleus to Joel's garden in Southdown.  This was part of a larger plan to move the whole apiary over to Joel's garden over the winter.  I've been moving various items (slabs, spare boxes of frames etc.) over the last few weeks.  On Saturday, having checked that the weather conditions were suitable (dry, cold, no wind) I decided that it was time to move the hives.  It was a two-person job, and with COVID still keeping us in lockdown, there was really only one option - I roped Mrs Beekeeper into the action.  She was... quite tolerant of being 'volunteered' for the task.

Moving hives is normally straightforward - you close up the entrance, tape up any bits you might be concerned about, and ratchet strap the whole thing together.  The rest is just lifting.  However, my hives use the double-walled 'WBC' design, which meant I first had to remove the outer walls, and strip them down from this:

To this:

Notice the hive roofs are different - I swapped them for national-sized roofs for the journey.  Once that was done, and the straps were on, we could start moving:

Carrying beehives up three flights of steps

Car loaded...

... and unloaded

We need a wheelbarrow!

Let's load it up...

And get moving

Hives in their new location

Need to re-assemble the outer walls of the WBC

Roof back on...

... and we're done!

So, is this the end of Beechen Bees?  Yes, and no.  It's certainly not the end of the bees - I will continue to look after them in their new location on Joel's garden.  But they're no longer next to Beechen Cliff, because the new location is in Southdown.  So, I'll be looking to re-brand this year, and will want a new name for the bees (and this blog).  I'm open to suggestions!

HARVEST!

Each hive has produced one super (ten frames) of surplus honey this year, and I've been waiting for the right time to take them off the hives.  Last weekend was fairly dry, weather-wise, so I figured it was probably my best chance to get harvest done.

This year, I needed to be extra-careful with hygiene arrangements because of COVID-19 so as well the the usual tasks of thoroughly cleaning down the utility room and laundering the aprons and hats, we also wore clean masks throughout to minimise any transmission risk.  I'm also going to quarantine the sealed jars for 14 days, just to be sure that neither of us were infected when we did the extraction.

Mrs Beekeeper was on hand to uncap the combs, while I worked the extractor.  Here's a couple of action shots of us hard at work:

The final haul is 7 jars from Athene's hive and 9 jars from Ottoline's bees.  Not my best year ever, but at least it will be enough for a few stocking fillers at Christmas.  And it's always satisfying to have a little reward at the end of the season.

Bees On The Move

Earlier this year I was speaking with local bee enthusiast Joel, who has a big garden in Southdown.  Joel was keen to have some bees in his garden, and we’ve been discussing the best way to make that happen.  So, a couple of weekends ago I went over to do a site survey.

The garden has a hazel thicket at the north end, which should work well to keep the bees separate from the rest of the garden.  So, to get things started, we’ve agreed to move the nucleus into a small clearing by the hazel so Joel and his family can see how they get on with them.

Last Saturday was moving day. so I waited until dusk (bees need to be moved after sunset), closed up the entrance block, applied liberal quantities of duct tape, and secured the nucleus with a ratchet strap:

Then I carried the nuc to the car, and hit my first snag - if I put it in the boot, there was too much space either side and it was likely to wobble, and probably fall over, once I started moving.  So I ended up wedging it - very carefully - into the passenger footwell, and then set off on the short drive up to Joel's garden.

Joel and his family greeted me at the other end, eager to see the box of bees arriving.  It was dark by this point, but fortunately Joel was better prepared that I was, and had a couple of head torches and a wheelbarrow standing by.  We wheeled the nucleus to the other end of the garden, and placed it in the new spot that I'd prepared.  Then, everybody else stood well back while I opened the entrance block.  The bees were surprisingly well behaved (I always expect them to be in a bit of a mood after a trip in the car).  A couple of guard bees flew out to let me know I wasn't welcome, but the others were happy enough staying inside until morning.

The next day, Joel was feeling brave enough to check out the front of the hive and sent me this photo:

Not much happening there, though he did update me later in the day to let me know that a lot more bees had started flying in and out, and checking out their new surroundings!  So far, they seem to be settling in well, and - apart from maybe feeding them a few pints of sugar syrup - I can pretty much leave them alone until the spring.

As for the hives... well, it's very nearly harvest...

Introducing... Queen Athene!

Every beehive has a single queen bee, and the queen in hive #1 is called Athene. She is named after Professor Dame Athene Donald, who is a physicist, Professor of Experimental Physics at the University of Cambridge, and Master of Churchill College, Cambridge.

Athene read physics at Girton College, Cambridge, gaining her PhD in 1977 for research into electron microscopy of grain boundary embrittled systems.  She then moved to Cornell University working as a postdoctoral associate on research into metals.

In 1981 Athene returned to Cambridge, and took up a post in Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory in 1983.  In 1988 she became Professor of Experimental Physics, and in 2014 became Master of Churchill College.  She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1999.

Athene's area of research specialism is in soft matter physics, and this includes the study of soft matter in living organisms as well as organic substances such as starch and proteins.  This developed from her earlier work on polymers, and includes the study of organic polymers using electron microscopy and X-ray scattering.  Her research has included structural changes to biological polymers when cooked, and amyloid folding of proteins.

Athene has been and continues to be actively involved in the promotion and encouragement of women in science.  She was director of WiSETI, Cambridge University's Women in Science, Engineering and Technology Initiative, from 2006 to 2014, and the University's Gender Equality Champion from 2010 to 2014.  She also chaired the Athena Forum - an organisation committed to the advancement of women in science in UK higher education - from 2009 to 2013.  She has served on the Gender Balance Working Group of the European Research Council, and is a Patron of the Daphne Jackson Trust.

Athene is also an advocate for interdisciplinary research, and was the founding chair of the Institute of Physics Biological Physics Group from 2006 to 2010.  She has served as a member of the Science Museum Advisory Board, and is currently chair of the Interdisciplinary Research Advisory Panel for the 2021 Research Excellence Framework.

Here is a photograph of her namesake, queen Athene:

New Queen!

Two weekends ago, I opened up hive #1, to check on the queen cell.  This is what I saw:

That is excellent - a textbook emerged queen cell.  It still amuses me that, when the queen nibbles the end off the cell, she doesn't remove it completely, but leaves a small 'hinge' on the lid.

Anyway, I didn't see the queen that day, and had to wait another week to see if I could spot her.  Which brings me to Sunday, when I opened the hive again and, after a little bit of peering about, saw this:

Yes, that is indeed the new queen!  If you didn't spot her, I promise she definitely is in the photo.  She's actually the one that is less stripy than all the worker bees.  So, think of it as a game of "Where's Waldo?" - except in this version, everyone is wearing a striped top except Waldo.

She's not laying yet - probably because the weather hasn't been great, so she hasn't had a chance to fully mate yet.  Hopefully that will all change by the weekend, and then I'll be able to mark her and name her.

Hive Swap

For a while now, June's bees in hive #2 have been a bit of a handful.  Even though I'm pretty careful when I handle them, they've been more defensive than hive #1, and they sting me fairly regularly.  Also, they have stung their landlord Nev at least once (and tried several times).  So I decided that something needed to be done.

The best option I could come up with was to swap the colony with Ottoline's bees in the nucleus.  They are very well behaved, calm, and I don't think they've stung me at all.  Normally, this would be straightforward - just pick up each hive and swap them over.  However, I'd have then ended up with the nuc where a hive should be, and it would have messed with the aesthetics of the apiary.  Which are... y'know... the most important thing.

So, I was going to have to do it the hard way.  I suited up, lit my smoker, and got ready to move the colonies frame-by-frame.  In fairness, it went pretty smoothly.  The bees were pretty well behaved throughout, and I only got one sting.

Over in hive #1, I had a look to see if they’d made any queen cells to replace Katherine (RIP).  Indeed they had - all these and more, in fact:

Here are all the cells I cut out from all the combs:

I’ve tried to arrange them in order of age from left to right, so if you look carefully (you’ll need to click on the photo to zoom) you should see the ones on the left look more ‘maggoty’, whereas you can see the ones on the right starting to differentiate into their adult segments.

I left one cell in the hive - pictured below - this will (when she hatches) become the new queen of hive #1:

I’ll take a look this coming weekend to make sure that the new queen is alive and well.