Wasp Observations: Harvesting Wood Pulp and Hive Incursions

It's a little early in the year to be talking about wasps.
However in the last few days I've had a couple of reminders that during the summer the wasp colonies are already with us and are growing steadily.


Introduction
In the spring hibernating queen wasps wake from their winter slumbers and set about building tiny wasp starter homes out of sculpted wood pulp with a few cells to lay their eggs in.
These do look quite cute but, actually, they are not cute at all.

Tiny wasp starter homes built in the spring by the queen wasp

Once this initial build has grown to a reasonable size she stops foraging and constructing and leaves those menial tasks to her workers so that she can concentrate on the egg laying.
To build the nests the wasps have to gather wood, pulp it down and stick it together into those familiar papery ball-shaped nests which hang menacingly from trees or appear in your attic seemingly from nowhere.


Wasp Observation #1
Last week, whilst holidaying in the Baltic (oh yes indeed!), we were presented with an excellent example of wasps harvesting wood pulp to use to build their nests.
I spotted three wooden benches on the seafront which had a lot of wasp activity around them even though there was no obvious prey, no sugary drinks and no ice creams anywhere nearby.
I decided to sit down and observe what the wasps were up to. Sure enough, they were landing on the benches, chewing off a thin layer from the surface of the wood and flying off with it.
The pattern of the chewing seemed to be always the same: a straight line about an inch long furrowed into the surface of the wood.

Wooden bench with evidence of wasps harvesting pulp for nest building

The nest grows as the colony grows until by the end of the summer it's a full blown papery nest full of critters and the stripy villains then start to become a problem for picnickers and beekeepers alike.
So, I guess, in about a month's time there's going to be a pretty big wasps' nest in the vicinity of Travemunde seafront.
Incidentally, a few years ago, I observed wasps harvesting pulp from a length of 12mm balsa in my garden and the crunching sound that they made was significantly loud. By the end of the summer they'd managed to bite right the way through it.


The wasps don't usually become a major problem for the hives until the end of the summer when their colony has reached maximum size, the honeydew-secreting larvae have all grown into adults and the flyers need an alternative sugar fix.
If your hives are in the vicinity of bins full of food waste, areas with lots of wood chip or orchards with rotting fruit the wasps will already be attracted to that area.
They will persistently search for weak points to gain access to the hive.
However, if your colonies are weak, you can have problems with wasp incursions much earlier in the season...


Wasp Observation #2
Today we were working on the hives in Apiary Central in the park opposite Spike Acres.
There are two colonies there at the moment: one is strong, the second is weak.
I observed the comings and goings at the entrances for a while and noticed that wasps were trying to gain entry to both hives.
They were constantly repelled from the strong hive but gained access several times to the weaker hive.

Wasp incursion into a weak colony: Apiary Central in the local park

On opening the second hive there was evidence of honey robbing.
It's a free feed for persistent wasps with the weaker colony unable to resist them.
There is a frame feeder in this hive which also is a major attraction for wasps.
We have just re-queened this hive and tomorrow we will be reducing the entrance to 3 holes to give the bees a greater chance of making a defence against further incursions, much like Horatius on the bridge across the Tiber...
We will also set some wasp traps.

It might be a long war of attrition against the wasps for this hive this summer.


If this leaves you thirsting for more wasp information, rest assured, the LandofBees blog will be revisiting the subject of wasps in the near future.

Not All Bees are Created Equal... Honeybee Castes

Today the Land of Bees transports you back a few weeks to early April and it's a return to school at Apiary Central with BeeGuru1.

It's 9*C and looking like rain. The lesson is held outdoors.

LandofSpike is now starting to doubt the wisdom of wearing just a tshirt.

Well, it had been really very warm the day before...

However, he is from the East Coast and therefore dead 'ard. Learning about Bee Castes will keep him warm...
So here we go with a quick introduction to the Caste System of the Honeybee with some bite-size facts which, hopefully, aren't too wide of the mark.

Honeybee Society is highly structured and meticulously organised. It follows a strict Caste System in which there are 3 distinct types of bee:

The Queen

The Worker 

and The Drone

The Queen is a fertile female. She lays eggs.

That's her job. Up to 2000 a day. All the bees in the colony develop from her eggs.

The hive centres around the one Queen. As long as she's still laying. If the Queen weakens or dies the colony can replace her with a newly reared Queen. A part of the Beekeeper's job is to control the changeover of the Queen.

Lifespan: 15 days to emerge from egg. Mature for mating after 20 days. Can live 3-4 years.

The Queen is an Egg-Laying Machine

The Workers are females from a fertilized egg but are themselves infertile. 

They do all the graft and the jobs that the individual Workers undertake within the colony change as they get older.

They forage for pollen and nectar, gather water and propolis, tidy and maintain the hive, regulate the hive's temperature, care for the brood and feed the Queen & the larvae. 

It is the Workers who make the hexagonal honeycomb from wax that they secrete.

They use these cells as chambers in which to rear the brood and as stores for their precious stocks of honey and pollen.

Workers make up 95% of the colony and are all sisters.

Lifespan: 21 days to emerge from egg. Can live for up to 36 days. Over-wintering Workers can live for 6 months.

Out all day foraging then has to come home and look after the kids

The Drones, who are stingless, are fertile males from an unfertilized egg. Their function is to fertilize the new Queens. They do not forage nor do they do any housework. In fact by the end of the summer, once they're no more use and are just lazing around on the sofa watching Sky Sports, the Workers have had enough and boot them out of the hive to die. 

Lifespan: 24 days to emerge from egg. Mature for mating after 37 days. Can live up to 59 days.

The drone has similar life skills to the human male

So, Honeybee Society is pretty nailed down. It works because every bee knows it's place and is hot-wired to carry out its pre-destined task with unerring devotion.

It doesn't take much of a leap of imagination to see the colony as the organism and the individual bees as composite parts of the whole.

It's possible to see it as a bit Orwellian, and Huxley, in a fatalistic mood, would recognise the predetermination of the individuals. 

But bees ain't humans so everything works just fine.

There the lesson ends, but before we leave BeeGuru1 and our alfresco learning zone at Apiary Central there's a short Q&A session with a small prize for the student with the most correct answers.

LandofSpike was hoping the prize might be a jacket.

A Box for the Bees and a Day of Sunshine

Finally, some Sunshine... 

And over at Apiary Central this morning the honeybees are hard at it, foraging for all their worth.

It must be a big relief for them after being cooped up for the entirety of, what is surely, one of the rottenest Aprils on record.

Inside the hive, the last month has panned out something like this...

Worker 1:  "Is it still raining?"

Worker 2:  "I'll go and look."

Worker 2 trawls off to the entrance. A minute later she returns.

Worker 1: "Well?"

Worker 2: "It's still rainin' innit. And it's flippin'  baltic... I hates England."

Worker 1: "Fancy some fondant?"

Worker 2: "OK."

They trudge off to further deplete their stores.

Meanwhile, back at Spike Towers, there's been a bit of shilly-shallying on the choice of hive in which to home the bees.

LandofSpike had always assumed that some version of the vertical hive would be the automatic choice, but an excellently informative session about hive types with BeeGuru1 presented him with a seemingly infinite variety of hives to choose from.
As well as the practicalities of the kit, choice of hive is also guided by philosophy. Oh yes.
Your approach, be it Traditional, Modern or Bio-dynamic, will directly inform which hives will be the best fit for where your head's at.

LandofSpike will cover hive types and philosophies in a later post but for now the best way forward was to keep an open mind and decide what might best suit the particular needs of our first year with bees.

Surprisingly, LandofSpike found himself increasingly favouring a simple, rectangular horizontal hive. 

The Tanzanian Top Bar Hive to be precise.
It's, more or less, the modern day equivalent of a hollow log on legs with bees inside.

A lovely piece of Biodynamic-friendly kit which would look just grand in the grounds of Spike Towers and would, no doubt, give the bees a lot of pleasure.

Despite my initial preconceptions this was starting to look like a real contender.

However, some time later that day and after more consultation, it transpired that the Tanzanian Top Bar Hive isn't sold in the UK.

There are plenty of excellently detailed plans telling you how to build one though.

LandofSpike can certainly build a box but isn't sure that he should be building his own bee-specific box in his novice year.

There are enough unknowns without adding "Good-Intentioned-But-Not-Quite-Right-Hive" to the list.

So it's back to a vertical model and, at the moment, even though those Thermo Hives look tasty, it looks like LandofSpike might go for an EPS Langstroth.

A nice, off the peg, cheerfully budget-conscious Beebox.

It seems to have the seal of approval from BeekeeperJuniors1&2, although they also liked the Thermo Hives and the Top Bar with equal enthusiasm.

And it'll require a lick of paint. 

Just the thing to lure Mrs LandofSpike, the esteemed Colourist and Artist of Note, into the Land of Bees.

Inclement Weather at Apiary Central

LandofSpike checked out the bee activity at Apiary Central this afternoon.
Based on his 5 minutes of HiveWatch it looked like all flights had been cancelled for the day, as it was cloudy, a bit nippy and raining on and off.
Those bees aren't daft. After last week's unseasonally high temperatures of 23C, this little cold snap isn't really the best of weather for hungry workers who want to zip out and get at that springtime pollen.
And according to LandofSpike's collection of weather-predicting seaweeds, it's going to be lashing down with rain and hailing tomorrow.
Lovely. Wrap up warm little honey bees.

The Honey Bee doesn't like it when it hails