Seasonal Bee Inspectors for the 2001 season

Name                                       Tel. No.                                                                       District

Pete Haywood                                                 Anglesey, Caernarfon  part of Aberconwy and Colwyn

Jonathan Garratt                     01248 712298 Denbighshire, Flintshire, Wrexham, part of Aberconwy and Colwyn

Phil Jennings              01597 840294 Most of Powys; small part of S Clwyd

Gerard Worthington   01974 261437 Meirionydd, Ceredigion North Carmarthenshire, Western Powys

Paul Key                                  01239 851011            Pembrokeshire, South West Carmarthenshire,  part West Glamorgan                                                                                         

John Holden                01495 311007       Monmouthshire, Newport, Blaunau Gwent, Merthyr and part of the                                                                                            Valleys (East) Pt Southern Powys

John Verran                01656 724249             Bridgend, Vale of Glamorgan, Cardiff, Rhondda Cynon Taff, Torfaen

                                                                                    Caerphilly, Swansea and West Glamorgan, Pt S.  Powys

Pam Gregory               01570 493601            East Carmarthenshire; Pt Southern Powys 

There are eight bees inspectors working in Wales during the active beekeeping season. They are no longer so closely associated with individual counties as in the past. This means less time travelling and more time inspecting.  If you are not sure which SBI will be looking after the bees in your area please contact Pam Gregory for more detailed information.

            Over the time that I have been RBI for Wales I have run many educational and training events with local associations. These have included varroa and brood disease workshops, special field events, beekeeper safaris and beginners and advanced study groups. Associations have a vital educational function and may like to consider their training needs. Call me if I can assist. 

            An increasing number of hardy souls have now made the trek to the Central Science Lab National Bee Unit in York to take part in this course. This course covers all aspects of AFB and EFB including microscopic diagnosis and despite the uninspiring course title everyone who has gone has reported enjoying it very much. A very small number of places allocated for beekeepers in Wales remain to be filled. There is no charge for the course but travel and accommodation are the beekeepers responsibility. Dates are Friday June 15^th, Thurs June 28^th, and Fri July 6^th. Anyone interested in going to ring me on 01570 493601 ASAP – first come first served.

            Varroa is now routinely found through all parts of Wales. No new 10K squares have been reported as having varroa this winter. The Bee Inspectors are still finding that some people are not recognising their bees are now seriously at risk from varroa collapse. This is especially true in Meirionydd, Lleyn, North Gwynedd and Anglesey. Late winter/early spring is peak time for losses from varroa and there is a danger that this is not then recognised but considered to be a ‘natural’ winter loss.

Already the Bee Inspectors have found more AFB and EFB than anyone would like to see by this time of year. It often occurs because beekeepers use old equipment that they would otherwise discard or leave in the shed. After a difficult winter, the quality of bee stocks appears to be very variable with some very weak and other extremely strong colonies. Swarms are already being reported.

The following 10K squares are affected with Foul Brood (reported since April 2001)

AFB     S014    Three Cocks    S013   Painscastle    

EFB     SS88    Pyle

Beekeepers in these areas need to be particularly vigilant.

Happy Beekeeping                    Pam Gregory    May 2001

 at St Benedict's School Cheltenham 19th May 2001

The speaker at the open day was John Home, a local commercial beekeeper running 380 colonies.   The balance of the talk was concerned with labour saving on supering for the oilseed rape crop.   John did tend to drift into other interesting aspects of his experience, but I have concentrated on recording the main theme.

In the early season the rape harvest would normally take up all the available time, if all this crop was to be extracted as it is sealed, to the detriment of other essential work in that period.   His method was to use an extracting super with drawn comb for the first one, to get the bees up, this would be extracted in the conventional way and followed with, what he called ‘cutter’ boxes which would be stored and extracted in the winter, using the ‘easy bees’ method, (controlled melting), or cut out for sale as ‘cut comb honey’.   He felt that there is an improving market for this product.

The key to his system was his own developed method of fitting foundation.    He claimed that a cutter box of frames could be fitted with foundation in less than 5 minutes, without taking a frame out of the box.  Foundation was cut across the depth at an angle to give three wedge shaped starter pieces, which were dropped through the slot in the top of a saw cut top frame, until it touched the single bottom rail.   The projecting portion of the foundation above the top bar was then bent over and down the side of the frame, so giving some positional stability.   There were no slots in the side bars, the slot at both ends was the same, hence the single bottom rail and the whole assembly was stapled together.     Re-use of the frame was achieved by first removing the wax and propolis from the top bar with a circular saw, fixtured for a quick and safe operation.   The frame was then ready to proceed as described.

There had been several changes to get to this stage, for example, the foundation started with Langstroth but he now uses Dadant which give about the hive. As well as labour saving, the honey retrieval by melting produces large quantities of quality wax, around 2 - 2.1/2 cwt. from a ton of honey.   John was unsure about the honey losses due to making but the labour savings made, were worth much more than any honey losses incurred and he had some good customers for bee’s wax in the  pharmaceutical industry.

                                    George Kinman

The host county  this year is Northamptonshire see their website: www.northantsbees.org.uk

The meeting will be at Knuston Hall, Irchester, Wellingborough, which is an elegant 17th century manor house.  The co-ordinator is Brian Hughes tel. 01604 752681 

The speakers are:                                                                                                                                          Michael MacGiolla Coda          Breeder of  dark Galtee Irish queens       “Better Bees by Design”                                                           Ian McLean                               RBI Northern region                               “Beekeeper or Keeper of Bees?”                                                                Adrian Waring                          former General Secretary BBKA            “Things that Work”                            David Kemp                              RBI North East region                              “Let them Fly”                                            Martin Buckle                            Sec. Bucks BKA                                       “Modelling with Wax                                               Claire Waring                            Editor of Bee Craft                                   “Buzzing around Nepal”

Cost of the whole convention is £175.00  —  if you book before 30th June it is £165.00                                           Non-residential but including lunch, tea and coffee is £75.00 ……. etc.  If you are interested  phone Brian Hughes or I can give more details about prices of  part of the programme.                    Bridget

Our last evening talk until after the summer season saw a good crowd turn up to hear Pam.

            Her ten tips:

1.             Save wax, particularly cappings. Collect all the bits into an old nylon stocking and when it is full put it into the solar wax extractor and throw what is left in the stocking on the fire. The wax and the extractor will both be clean.

2.             Use washing soda as a disinfectant diluted 1 kilo in 5 litres water. It is very cheap and is recommended by MAFF. Use it also for cleaning hive tools, washing bee suits (to keep them white), cleaning old frames, smokers etc.

3.             Use rubber gloves. They are cheap. You can wash them.

4.             Other useful household things:       J-cloths make good strainers for wax to go into moulds (which you can then sell for £1 an ounce).  Ice cream containers are food grade plastic, one gallon size holds 10 lbs of honey—and they are free!!    Foil  takeaway meal containers can be used for feeding candy, and all sorts of other things.

5.             Hive a prime swarm on the parent site, the flyers will go to the swarm and make it strong and it might make some honey. Move the parent to one side and it will get weaker and so won’t throw casts. After a week transfer the supers from the parent to the swarm.

6.             Divide a swarm cell producing colony into nucs. If you don’t want to increase your stocks you can sell them, or you can store queens to replace any that are lost.                                                                       The Cooke method  Put 5/6 nuc boxes in a circle about 2 feet from the original site. In each box put 1 frame brood, 1 frame food and spare combs plus a swarm cell—which you may have to cut out. Remove the parent hive completely.

7.              Making a nuc without finding the queen.

          Put a brood box - or a super + eke -, on top of the queen excluder.  Take out a frame of brood, gently brush off all the bees and put it in the top brood box. Cover and go and have a cup of tea. In 1-2 hours the frame will be covered with nurse bees and can be put in the nuc box. You can make a nuc by taking  frames out of 3 different colonies.

8.             Uniting colonies. 

        If you mix bees from 2 colonies they fight. But mixing 3 or more is all right. Do it in the evening when the flying bees are at home and move to a new site if possible.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       Honey

9.             Make cut comb—it’s so easy. Use the second super above the brood so that there is no danger of having  pollen mixed in with the honey. Use unwired frames with a starter of foundation along he top. Keep in a freezer until you want it so that it does not granulate.

10.         Make soft set or creamed honey. Stir the extracted and strained honey as it is setting and then it will not go rock hard.  

Extra tip. Start to look at alternative varroa treatments and alternate them with the standard chemicals.

Editor:  those of you who were at PAM’s talk  may be interested to know that at the last apiary meeting there was a swarming situation in one colony, so it was divided into 5 nuclei, each with a queen cell. We await future developments. Come to the tea party on June 10th and find out what happened.

Montgomery Beekeepers Association have made this interesting suggestion for a topic and it is something that has always intrigued me. Often we do something because ‘that’s the way its done’ instead of checking out the original idea. This is especially true for those beekeepers that are just starting because they are not clear WHY they are doing something. It is fairly easy in beekeeping to follow a typical annual pattern and never vary it. I have heard this described cynically as ‘ he has sixty years experience but it was all the same year’ basically meaning the person has never tried anything new or different. Of course you might say ‘ if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ but there is a clear difference between simply doing something because you have been told to do it this way and doing it knowing exactly why you are doing it this way. This knowledge usually comes with experience but can be hastened with some serious study and sharing ideas and experiences with other beekeepers. Nor should the beekeeper be afraid to experiment even if it leads to failure sometimes – which it undoubtedly will. A thorough understanding of the bees means the beekeeper will be able to predict the result of certain actions or manipulations and be able to use this knowledge to improve his colony management and honey crop.

My interest stems from my job where I am often called in to see all sorts of problems and to suggest ways of making things go right again. So to me it is fascinating to find the limits of what you can and can’t do. We are told for instance that we shouldn’t open a colony of bees during the winter. I had never tried this until a German friend came to visit in January and wanted to look at the bees. I wasn’t at all keen but she insisted. The inspection was sensibly brief but what surprised me was that the bees were so docile because it was too cold for them to fly. The bees suffered no ill effects from being opened and I learned something new. If I’d wanted to give an organic acid winter varroa treatment as they do in Germany it would have been very easy.

Another commonly held idea is that the bees must be moved less than three feet or more than three miles. This is absolutely true – but only in the SUMMER. In the summer the flying bees go back to their original hive position. We use this idea in some swarm control methods. But in WINTER things are entirely different and it is perfectly possible to move bees anywhere you like as long as the weather is cold or wet enough. When the bees come out for their cleansing flights they come out slowly and take a look around them, realise the hive has been moved and easily relocate to their new position.  So if your bees are inconveniently placed in the garden you can move them to a new place during the winter if you wait for a cold or wet period.

Another idea is that queens should be replaced in their second year to reduce swarming. For the commercial beekeeper this mass replacement of older queens is an essential management feature. It just isn’t possible to inspect all colonies regularly for queen cells. Preventative measures are put in place and if these fail then swarm loss is just accepted as part of the package. On the other hand, the hobby beekeeper who keeps bees for pleasure doesn’t need to be driven by commercial demands. Replacement of queens can be done to suit the needs of the bees – sooner if they are awful and later if they are good.  Early culling of queens means that you never find out whether they are a superseding type of queen and you may lose this useful gene. It is a great pity to cull a nice tempered, productive queen and if you are using her for breeding material you will want her to live for as long as possible. I have known breeder queens to be kept for more than 5 years.

Finally, there is the idea that beekeepers should replace a quarter to a third of the comb in each colony regularly every year.

Otherwise, we are warned, the worker bees will get very small and the colonies will be unhealthy. This is not strictly true on either count. The idea that the bees get smaller is based on the idea that each successive generation of brood hatching leaves behind a thin film of cocoon in the brood cells. As this builds up the larvae has less room to develop and produces a smaller worker bee. There is considerable natural variability in the size of workers and it is unlikely to have a serious effect on colony productivity. In all probability, long before this has a chance to affect them either the bees or the beekeeper would have removed the comb to replace it with something more appealing.

In health terms it rather depends on the  problem. To combat nosema, dysentery or EFB, a complete frame change is the best choice. The dramatic EFB shook swarm technique gives the colony an amazing new vigour. Changing a quarter of the combs every year is less effective since the rest remain to continue the infection. Most of the time combs are best changed as they need it. Frames that are broken and combs with a lot of drone brood, holes, mould or chalk brood mummies are prime targets for replacement as part of your spring checks. If a frame of foundation is put as the very last comb the bees are inclined to ignore it. Put it between two drawn combs at the edge of the brood box so they draw the cells out quickly.

I do hope this rather controversial article will provoke some discussion. If you have any examples or ideas that challenge long held beliefs I’d love to hear about them.

                                                            Happy Beekeeping        Pam Gregory March 2001

In Vergil’s Georgics (yes, I’m afraid I now have a copy) mention is made of a thyme which rendered the honey of Attica so famous. This is Thymus capitatus. Does anyone know where I can get some?

Bridget