Beekeeper’s Diary

March 25th. I popped round to the hives to administer the second varroa mite treatment. All hives look busy and the signs are good, so while I was there I removed the entrance blocks to enable the workers to come and go more easily. I judge the colonies are strong enough now to protect their entrances from thieves. After briefly examining a couple of frames in each hive I deduced there is a laying queen in all of them. I actually saw the queen in hive two, she looks magnificent but the brood looks very patchy. It isn’t quite warm enough to inspect the brood areas properly yet but I expect everything is alright.

April 5th. I gave the three colonies their third varroa treatment. This finishes the current course of drops so it should be a while before the mite numbers build up again. I noticed that the bees in one hive didn’t seem to have a lot of space for brood rearing as they still had a lot of unused winter stores filling the hive.  It was warm enough to rearrange the combs, creating space for a brood nest. I put the queen excluders over the brood boxes, to stop the queens from laying eggs in the honey supers, which I have just loaded onto the hives. They are all set up for an early nectar flow. Spring is advancing rapidly. The weather is set fair and things look promising.

May 4th. There is oil seed rape half a mile away but with luck the bees are not going that far as there are fruit blossoms, garden flowers and dandelions in profusion much closer to home. This spring we hope for an interesting mixed flower crop for a change.

Being mild, gentle weather today I thought it was time to assess the state of the hives.

The small colony is still small, with lots of space for growth and they have an unnecessary amount of stores left from the winter.  The foraging bees are coming home with such huge loads of mid yellow pollen on their legs, that I hardly recognised some of them as bees. When I checked one brood comb for signs of disease I found healthy looking unsealed brood.  I trickled the varroa drops through the brood area of all hives as a precaution against the mite.

Hive two has a small amount of new season’s honey but a long way to go before they have filled the honey super. Checking the brood area revealed healthy looking brood and some large patches of drone(male) brood. This means that should they choose to, they could swarm before the end of May. There are ways of trying to prevent this, but in the past I have found that when the colonies are robust, they seemed to flourish more when I interfere less and allow the bees swarm. This year I have chosen to take this stance.

We have two strong hives now and a growing one. Bees will occasionally empty the hives right out with successive swarming. This has only ever happened to me once in thirty years so it’s a risk I’m prepared to take. It is natural for bees to swarm and it rarely causes any problems with people in this locality.

Hive one are the feisty bees. They were in an angelic mood. I discovered seven very full honey combs, half sealed already. When the honey is ripe they seal it into the cells. I decided to take those combs out and extract the honey to avoid all the problems of honey setting too hard, that we had last year when they were foraging on rape. Nick said he would do it the next day but it became cold and much too windy, so they still have their new stores in place.

May 8th.  Nick went to put the Porter escapes in hive one, so the bees would not be able to return to the honey comb once they had vacated it. This is a fairly simple job usually. The crown board (ceiling) was stuck to the roof, so perhaps it jolted the bees a little when he lifted the roof off.  Although he had plied them with plenty of smoke the girls were in an absolute fury and buzzed him persistently. They stung his gloves profusely, some stings going through to his hands. A couple of bees, at least, got up inside his elasticated sleeves and stung him. It is really off putting when they get inside your bee suit. Fortunately Nick didn’t react to the stings badly, but there’s no escaping the fact that stings really hurt. If a sting goes in through gloves it’s not so bad because it can’t drive itself all the way home.

 If you ever get stung by a bee, look for the little black sting and get it out by scraping it outward away from your skin with your finger nail as soon as you can.

If you pinch it or take it out with tweezers you will squeeze more venom into yourself. Rub an onion on the spot to neutralise the sting. E 45 anti- itch cream is quite good at reducing the swelling and itching.

May 9th. We went round to the hive together to remove the honey box. There were quite a few bees still on the honey combs so I swept them off each comb with a goose wing and were able to take the honey home without incident. We didn’t have time to extract it today though so we stored it overnight in a warm place.  

Nick has modified his pond and it has a pebbly fringe. He has noticed large numbers of bees are using it as a watering hole. They need a vast amount of water. Annually a colony uses 25 litres of water for diluting the larval feed and air conditioning the hive. They fan their wings to evaporate the  water and cool the brood nest in hot weather.

May 10th. We extracted the honey, only about eight pounds, but rather delicious, with subtle flavours. All the combs came clean and everything was straightforward. We returned the combs to the hive immediately. Job done.

May 19th. My husband assembled another set of honeycomb frames with a starter sheet of wax inserted for to bees to build new honeycomb on.  I want to set the hives up so that they don’t need much attention for the next month. It will be tricky for me to attend to them this June. Fortunately there is a phenomenon known as the June gap, when there aren’t so many natural forage plants for them to use, so all being well everything will be set up for them  to look after  themselves..

                                                        Val Hicken