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1.Carry
on keeping a look out for signs of swarming. You don’t want to lose your queen
as conditions for mating are not good. Nucs made up with swarm cells are looking
doubtful because of the bad weather. 2.Take all supers off if they have oil seed rape in them. 3.Queen raising should be underway now, if you need any advice or would like to see it in action come to the apiary meeting on 9th June. Come to the meeting at the apiary on 9th June There was a very good meeting last month on the 19th when swarm control was demonstrated (due to a real life swarming situation) and several people benefited by acquiring a queen cell. This month there could be some initiation of deliberate beekeeper inspired queen rearing rather than the spontaneous variety I think we must remember that there are two sides to
the BDI debate. Whilst the financial charges of the various bodies may appear
very onerous as far as the average beekeeper paying his few pounds at the time
of his subscription there are certain advantages from the sums that have to
paid, we even get some of the Insurance Premium Tax back via the National Bee
Unit! The payment to The FSA probably ensures that should there be any financial
irregularities in BDI we beekeepers would have someone to blame and perhaps seek
compensation. The payment to the Provisional Liquidators would probably cover
the situation of an epidemic of foul brood when many colonies had to be destroyed
which could easily exhaust BDI reserve funds and would allow some compensation
to be paid when all existing BDI funds were exhausted.( Remember the Isle of
Wight disease). My view would be three fold, firstly write to your MP,
the member in Monmouth has a marginal seat, with copies to your Assembly &
European equivalents, secondly a formal approach to the FSA and the financial
Ombudsman, perhaps by BBKA & BDI jointly, and thirdly that BDI should seek a
financial partner, NFU Mutual is an obvious choice but there must be others, as
it is a very small fish swimming in a big pool, people like the Pru and RSA,
where size is a significant advantage. I was interested in George's discussion on assembling
hives. Whilst I agree that Cascamite is a very effective glue for woodwork I am
not at all sure that it is suitable for outdoor work such as beehives, where
throughout a season the wood is moving all the time due to expansion from
changes in water content. One only has to look at the film of glue left to
harden in the mixing pot to see that it is very brittle and it only gives
strength to the joint when there is some absorption by the wood and even then
under the constant movement with expansion due to water I feel that the strength
of the joint will deteriorate over one or two seasons. The idea of putting in screws and then pulling them out
and plugging the hole seems very tedious, you cannot leave the steel screws in
because of rusting which also can cause the failure of even the best galvanised
nails. My suggestion and the method I have come to use very
successfully, is to use stainless steel screws, and leave them in place and use
no glue at all. If the joint comes loose over a few years, they can easily be
tightened up. If one side of the box is damaged, eg by woodpeckers, it can be
removed and replaced. 8 5x60mm stainless chipboard screws (Screwfix) for a brood
box cost 80p. Not a lot of difference in assembly time compared with a fiddly
glued & nailed joint, though I admit that the upper part of the joint should
be predrilled. The side bars for a national can be attached in the same manner
with shorter stainless screws. If you are interested in evolution theories, try to get hold of one of
the books by the late Stephan Jay Gould, "Wonderful Life" gives a very
good and readable account together with descriptions of most strange fossil
creatures found in very old rocks called the Burgess shale in Canada. If they
had evolved the earth would have been a very different place Dick Sadler, 24/5/02 13-15TH NOVEMBER IF YOU ARE GOING
TO THE NHS YOU CAN GET REDUCED CAR
PARKING CHARGES, (£12 NOT £25) AND REDUCED ACCOMADATION CHARGES IN KENSINGTON,
£80 DOUBLE ROOM PER NIGHT, £60 SINGLE ENTRY THIS YEAR IS GOING TO BE £10 JILL CHIRNSIDE CAN TAKE BOOKINGS TEL 01873 880625 There are some bees
available. If
you are interested please phone Janet. Tel: 01291 690331 It must be the result
of years doing research that has made me unable to resist trying ideas out for
myself. Some turn out to be totally disastrous—I won’t mention them—but
some are worth the bother. There has been a great deal written lately about how
to extract oil seed rape honey from frames after it has set hard.
Of course the obvious thing to do is to extract it early before this
happens. However it is a lot of bother getting the extractor out for only a
couple of supers and inevitably some of the stuff will have already set. So this
year I prepared my supers so that
some frames had only a strip of foundation at the top and some had ordinary
foundation. I removed all the full ones last week to extract. I cut out the comb
from the foundation free frames, but I scraped the full cells off the foundation
of the others. And all this I mushed up, warmed and filtered and produced
wonderful, unadulterated, natural
etc etc (and already set a week later!) honey. My opinion is that it is less
trouble to scrape the stuff off the wired foundation than to cut out whole comb
which then has to be broken up. The scraped stuff is already mushed and there is
less wax so it drains more easily. Also you save some hard work for the bees. I
do not suggest this method for people with more than a few hives, but for three
supers it was perfectly satisfactory and has produced some very nice honey. I am
hoping that they are now going to collect something a bit more tasty and less
prone to solidifying so that I can do a proper extraction later. On the other
hand there could be some more rape opening in a few weeks. The turn in the weather since last month has at least slowed down the swarming. Unfortunately those colonies that had already swarmed are in trouble if their new queen cannot get mated. They may need a frame of eggs! Bridget Spring
Beekeeping Convention at Stoneleigh
The convention was packed, perhaps
made busier by the restrictions last year due to foot and mouth. Thornes report
that they sold over 15000 frames, they did have some good bargains and a great
many ‘seconds’ and everything went. This must be a good sign of an upturn in
interest in beekeeping, either from new beekeepers or from people wanting to
freshen up their own equipment. Graham reported that it was a wonderful day for
lectures, I think he went to all of them and enjoyed each. There seems to have
been more talk about breeding—we are really going to have to concentrate on
breeding some good tempered locally adapted bees of our own.
(by
Wally Shaw, Anglesey BKA) Read
most British beekeeping books and they tell you that 'bare wood is the best'.
Bare wood 'breathes', so they say, and permits condensation on the inside of the
hive to escape. Some writers concede that you might with advantage treat the
outside of the hive with a wood preservative such as ' Cuprinol' or creosote
‑ the latter to be well aired before use. However, some older beekeeping
books, such as Wedmore's 'A Manual of
Beekeeping', contains detailed instructions for the painting of hives including
a wonderful recipe for hive‑paint that starts with 'take 10lb. of white lead; 51b. of zinc oxide,
etc., etc.'; a rich mixture which most of us might be a little hesitant to use
these days! In other countries hives are routinely painted A Belgium beekeeping
equipment catalogue I looked through the other day had half a page of products
for painting beehives. I will return to consider the various types of wood
treatments later in this article, but first let us consider some basic facts
about wood structure and a little elementary physics. The
wood in a tree serves two purposes; to conduct water and nutrients from the
roots to the leaves and to provide mechanical strength. Softwood (wood from
coniferous trees) consists of needle‑shaped cells (called tracheids)
packed together rather like the cells in honeycomb. Typically these tracheids
are about 2‑5mm in length and staggered in relation to each other. Those
produced in the spring are thin‑walled with numerous holes (called pits)
in their walls. The pits connect with surrounding cells so that water can pass
up the tree (along the grain) by zigzagging from tracheid to tracheid. By
contrast, the ring of summer wood is much denser, with thick‑walled cells
and few pits. This is the mechanical tissue that confers strength to the tree
and is not intended for the passage of water. So
how does wood breathe? Along the grain, reasonably well ‑ but who in their
right mind would make a hive with the grain running from inside to out? Across
the grain, which is the direction that water vapour would have to travel to rid
the hive of condensation, it is another story. The route for an individual
molecule of water to make the journey from inside to outside is long and
tortuous and there is no way that this mechanism could deal with the relatively
large quantities of water involved in condensation. You rarely see beads of
water on bare wood because it has been absorbed into the surface layers. So
the 'breathing wood' theory does not work (I nearly said 'does not hold water')
but when you look at the physics of the situation it gets worse. Dry wood is
quite a good insulator, due mainly to the air trapped in the cells, and this
helps keep the hive warm. However, when the hive wall gets wet, with rain from
the outside and condensation from the inside, the insulating performance of the
wood deteriorates, the hive wall becomes cooler and still more condensation
occurs. Even when the rain has stopped and the sun is shining on the hive there
are still problems! Before the sun can warm the wall it has to evaporate all the
water that has soaked into the wood and that takes a whole lot of energy. Do you
remember something called 'latent heat
of vaporisation'? To evaporate water takes over 6 times the amount
energy required to raise the temperature of the same amount of water from
0‑100oC!
As a result the hive stays cool for longer and bee activity is inhibited. The
problem is not over yet because, as I am sure you all know, wood expands and
contracts as its moisture content changes. This lack of dimensional stability
causes the hive wall to bend and twist and, if these differential movements
cannot be accommodated by the structure, splits will develop. The same movements
can cause 'cupping' of the wood, which gradually loosens nails and can even
spring glued joints. The
above arguments all highlight the importance of keeping the wood in beehives dry
by painting or the application of some other wood treatment. It also seems to me
that it is entirely logical to paint
hives both inside and out, a suggestion that many will regard as the
ultimate beekeeping heresy. You obviously paint the outside to prevent rain or
dew penetrating the wood (and to reduce the de‑naturing effects of
sunlight on bare wood), but why paint them inside, you might ask? Well, I can
think of three good reasons:‑ 1) So that any condensation that forms on the inside
wall does not soak into the wood and cause loss of insulation. 2) If condensation is heavy, droplets of water will
coalesce, run down the wall onto the forward sloping floor of the hive and drain
out. 3) To avoid differential moisture content of the inside
and outside surfaces of the wood ‑ which will cause the wood to bend. Having,
in my time, done my share of outside house decorating, I can understand the
reluctance of people to paint hives with traditional oil‑based gloss
paint. Flaking and blistering paint, that requires to be rubbed down or
burnt‑off every few years, does not bear contemplation. But, come on, get
up to date! Paint technology has made great advances over recent years and
microporous paints and varnishes are now readily available. What does 'microporous' mean? It means that the paint film is permeable to
water vapour but not to liquid water ‑ in other words it is breathable,
rather like modern waterproof fabrics such as ' Gortex' . Old‑fashioned,
oil‑based (non‑porous) paints flaked and blistered because any small
flaw allowed water to get trapped behind the paint film. Then, when the sun
heated the surface, the inevitable happened. Microporous paints let the moisture
escape before it can do any harm. No paint lasts for ever and hives do need
re‑coating after a few years but the only preparation that is required is
a quick rub over with sandpaper and the application of a fresh coat. What
of that old favourite, creosote? Yes, it does do a reasonable job; it preserves
wood, early in its life it does have some waterproofing properties, it is
breathable and it is cheap. However, recent research has shown that creosote is
carcinogenic. Although it may be safe enough in the open‑air on garden
fences, I would not contemplate using it on what, in effect, is a food container
such as a beehive. Throughout its effective life, creosote releases vapour,
albeit small amounts, but I would rather avoid any possible risk of
contamination. Wood preservative treatments like ' Cuprinol‑ and a host of
similar products ‑ do not offer much in the way of waterproofing and are
not particularly cheap. So my vote goes to the microporous varnishes and paints
which all the main paint companies now produce. Some of the most effective
products are water based, no solvent release (environmentally friendly) and
quick to dry. Hartpury Open Day and Auction There will never
be Chinese honey in MY honey. Will there?? The talk given by Dr Ivor Davis (Vice chairman of BBKA) at the Hartpury Auction on the 18 May covered general beekeeping subjects, but one topic arose about the disposal of Chinese honey by the supermarkets and other stores. It has been suggested that this honey would be placed in land fill sites but the BBKA has been quick to contact with these stores explaining the problem of bees ‘recycling’ this honey via the local beekeeper. The supermarkets are reconsidering, and destruction of the honey by incineration is being considered. As you know, this honey contained small traces of streptomycin & chloramphenicol. The limit of the latter in honey is zero. The other source of contamination of your honey is with the person who has bought Chinese honey, and rather than throw it away has ‘put it out in the garden for the bees!’ It was interesting that Ivor talked about placing hives on stands that are arranged in a ‘zig zag‘ pattern to avoid drifting, but showed a slide of his own hives in a straight line. It just goes to show that beekeepers, even eminent beekeepers, do occasionally show signs of imperfection! If you have never been to Hartpury auction, run by the Gloucester BKA then you are missing a treat. Besides being only an hour’s drive from South Wales the talks are good and the auction is entertaining and you could pick up a bargain, but remember the legal phrase caveat emptor or buyer beware. There is a good variety of products available, but even if you are not really looking for anything in particular it is a good day to meet friends old and new. Graham Loveridge June 10th, 7pm ADDING VALUE A Talk and Exhibition (on marketing skills) at Glamorgan Wildlife Trust, Tondu Bill Harding (Packaging for luxury foods to maximise profits) and Pam Gregory (Identifying and Maintaining a quality product) Exhibition
will include: Luxury honey jar range, standards for
honey NIBBLES AND WINE All associations are welcome . |
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